The Measure Of Our Success

A beautiful gift edition of the number one New York Times bestseller—from the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund.

Highly respected pastor and mentor challenges pastors to remember their calling, redefine success, and avoid the pitfalls of self-focused ministry.

In the spring of 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply his wisdom to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life, which led to this now-classic article. Although Christensen’s thinking is rooted in his deep religious faith, these are strategies anyone can use. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosper Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory. Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.

A 260-page, full-color book that will help you: STOP REACTING TO NOISE. START RESPONDING TO SIGNALS. Measures of Success shows business leaders how. A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR HOW TO MANAGE YOUR METRICS Organizations depend on metrics for their business. Question is, are they helping people do the right things? Or, encouraging them to overreact to every uptick, downturn, and change? In other words, reacting to noise. Noise is present in every metric. But, it's our reaction to noise that causes waste and stress. Too often, people don't recognize this. Like feeling stuck on a rollercoaster you no longer enjoy. We do and explain things that don't help us improve. At the cost of doing things that do. No need to be jittery about every change in a metric. Not by a long shot. Measures of Success shows a better way to chart and manage your metrics, in any organization or setting. For your business processes and activities, you need to know what's working, what's not, and what to change. And why. Then, you can determine what to stop doing, what to start doing, what to keep doing. So you can... Jump off the metrics rollercoaster, by responding to signals. Systematically. Sustainably. Learn how to identify meaningful signals in a metric. To respond just right. Or perhaps, not at all. You'll learn how with methods easy to understand, making it obvious what activities to do next. Loads of vivid stories and clear examples from healthcare, software companies, and more. With compelling case studies from the news and personal lives, too. "What gets measured gets managed." We've all heard that. But did you ever learn how to manage a metric? This ain't about gaming the system or fudging the numbers. This is about delivering real value, understood by everyone, and proven with data. Learn a better way to manage your measures. WHO IS MEASURES OF SUCCESS FOR? EXECUTIVES AND LEADERS...in healthcare, manufacturing, and services. Who know what to measure, and are now ready to learn how to manage those measurements. And... WILLING TO... Challenge and change the way things are done today Motivate workers to think and do them better tomorrow Coach people, versus telling them what to do Be responsible for results, not hold others accountable Encourage people to collaborate, not compete Help people sleep better at night because they're improving their work during the day TO BE CLEAR Measures of Success is not for leaders who'd rather give orders. Then, blame others when things go south. That whole hit the target or else thing... won't create real change, nor real value. But that ain't you, right? AFTER READING MEASURES OF SUCCESS ...you'll be able to answer three critical questions for your business. Are we achieving our target? And, how often? Occasionally? Consistently? Are we improving? And, can we predict our future performance? How do we improve? And, when do we react? When do we ignore? When do we improve? ...AND HOW CAN WE PROVE WE'RE IMPROVING? How would you feel if you could answer these questions for your business? Measures of Success shows you how. PROCESS BEHAVIOR CHARTS This book teaches you a proven method for filtering out noise, so we can identify signals. This means we waste less time chasing our tail and more time responding to signals that really matter, heading off small problems before they become big, or showing that we've boosted performance in significant and sustainable ways.

I am grateful beyond words for the example of the lanterns shared in this memoir whose lives I hope will illuminate my children's, your children's, and the paths of countless others coming behind.--Marian Wright Edelman, from the Preface Marian Wright Edelman, "the most influential children's advocate in the country" (The Washington Post), shares stories from her life at the center of this century's most dramatic civil rights struggles. She pays tribute to the extraordinary personal mentors who helped light her way: Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, William Sloane Coffin, Ella Baker, Mae Bertha Carter, and many others. She celebrates the lives of the great Black women of Bennettsville, South Carolina-Miz Tee, Miz Lucy, Miz Kate-who along with her parents formed a formidable and loving network of community support for the young Marian Wright as a Black girl growing up in the segregated South. We follow the author to Spelman College in the late 1950s, when the school was a hotbed of civil rights activism, and where, through excerpts from her honest and passionate college journal, we witness a national leader in the making and meet the people who inspired and empowered her, including Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Zinn, and Charles E. Merrill, Jr. Lanterns takes us to Mississippi in the 1960s, where Edelman was the first and only Black woman lawyer. Her account of those years is a riveting first-hand addition to the literature of civil rights: "The only person I recognized in the menacing crowd as I walked towards the front courthouse steps was [a] veteran New York Times reporter. He neither acknowledged me nor met my eyes. I knew then what it was like to be a poor Black person in Mississippi: alone." And we follow Edelman as she leads Bobby Kennedy on his fateful trip to see Mississippi poverty and hunger for himself, a powerful personal experience for the young RFK that helped awaken a nation's conscience to child hunger and poverty. Lanterns is illustrated with thirty of the author's personal photographs and includes "A Parent's Pledge" and "Twenty-five More Lessons for Life," an inspiration to all of us-parents, grandparents, teachers, religious and civic leaders-to guide, protect, and love our children every day so that they will become, in Marian Wright Edelman's moving vision, the healing agents for national transformation.

Taking the position that assessment is useful only as it is aligned with curriculum, Fran Claggett considers how to frame assignments and how to assess them.

Carolyn and Nora-a single business owner and a stay at home mom-tackle the stereotypes and one-size-fits-all thinking that have left women struggling to understand how to balance roles in the home and work place for generations.