Simplifying Complexity: Life is Uncertain, Unfair and Unequal PDF Download

Author: Bruce J. West
Publisher: Bentham Science Publishers
ISBN: 1681082179
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In life, we often face unavoidable complexities in terms of our ability to understand or influence outcomes. Some questions which arise due to these complexities are: Why can’t the future be made certain? Why do the some people or events always end up at the center of controversy? Why do only a select few get ahead of their peers? Each question pertains to three central elements of complexities and these elements are: uncertainty, inequality and unfairness. Simplifying Complexity explains the scientific study of complex cognitive networks, as well as the methods scientists use to parse difficult problems into manageable pieces. Readers are introduced to scientific methodology and thought processes, followed by a discourse on perspectives on the three elements of complexity through concepts such as normal and non-normal statistics, scaling and complexity management. Simplifying Complexity combines basic cognitive science and scientific philosophy for both advanced students (in the fields of sociology, cognitive science, complex networks and change management) and for general readers looking for a more scientific guide to understanding and managing the nature of change in a complex world.

Author: George E. Yoos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110450615
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Simplifying complexity explores how to eliminate ignorance, which in the view of the author, is the purpose of the sciences and technologies and their consequent developments. More specifically, the book deals with the plurality of the sciences and technologies. It is about the way in which each of them develops around the prosthetics of printed languages and the models used as visual aids to help us create new modes of communication to understand and solve human problems. Consequently, the task is to simplify the complexity that we find in different sciences, both social and physical. In his collection of essays, George E. Yoos surveys a number of different models that have evolved from the innate, biological forms of grammar, logic, and modes of orientation. He investigates the evolution of socially constructed systems of numeracy and measurement that have evolved and developed in different languages for the use in scientific and technological communication. He identifies methods derived from three distinct personal experiences: the use of types of prosthetic, mnemonic, and attention controlling devices, in order to yield simpler perspectives of complex states of affairs. George E. Yoos, emeritus professor, is a legend in the field of rhetoric. Founder and editor of the Rhetoric Society Quarterly [1972-1985], author of Reframing Rhetoric [2007], Politics and Rhetoric [2009], and fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America.

Author: Jim Champy
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 0131375261
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
This Element is an excerpt from Inspire!: Why Customers Come Back (ISBN: 9780131361881) by Jim Champy. Available in print and digital formats. Give your customers what they really want (and will pay for): simplicity! Bob Parsons is a true believer in making things simple for his customers--even if it means managing extraordinary complexity behind the scenes. At Go Daddy, Parsons’ business model relies on the basics: Give customers feature-rich products, low pricing, and great support from real people located on-site and rigorously trained...

Author: Jim Champy
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 0137015224
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description
This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version. If your engagement proposition is based on good service, good just isn'

Author: Jesse W. Newton
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
ISBN: 1642790834
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In urgent response to the epidemic of crippling complexity affecting organizations around the world, Simplify Work reveals the common sources of this virus and outlines practical steps that can be taken to liberate innovation, productivity, and engagement. Complexity is like a vine that gradually grows and expands, wreaking havoc in organizations and individual lives. Growing complexity has traditionally been met with added structures, processes, committees and systems. Consequently, organizations often become a complicated mess, clouding strategic focus, slowing innovation and breeding complacency. It is no wonder that large organizations around the world are failing at an increasing rate and employee engagement levels have never been so low. Simplify Work reveals the typical drivers of complexity and provides a practical method for simplifying work. Inside, global management consultant Jesse Newton delivers a newfound clarity on the case for simplification and the steps organizations and individuals need to take to unleash its potential. He reveals the common drivers of debilitating complexity and provides a recipe for reducing and removing those things getting in the way of peak performance. Based on the research and experiences of a recognized organization effectiveness expert, Simplify Work leaves readers inspired and equipped to create a new liberating reality in both their organization and their life.

Author: Alain Berthoz
Publisher: Odile Jacob
ISBN: 2738147453
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
“Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.” A. B. As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible. And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us? Alain Berthoz is professor at the Collège de France where he is co-director of the Laboratoire de physiologie de la perception et de l’action. [Laboratory for the physiology of perception and action]. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Le Sens du mouvement [The Brain's Sense of Movement] and La Décision [Emotion and Reason].

Author: Yves Morieux
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN: 1422190560
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
New tools for managing complexity Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone. According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness—that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems—has increased by a whopping factor of thirty-five. In their attempt to respond to the increasingly complex performance requirements they face, company leaders have created an organizational labyrinth that makes it more and more difficult to improve productivity and to pursue innovation. It also disengages and demotivates the workforce. Clearly it’s time for leaders to stop trying to manage complexity with their traditional tools and instead better leverage employees' intelligence. This book shows you how and explains the implications for designing and leading organizations. The way to manage complexity, the authors argue, is neither with the hard solutions of another era nor with the soft solutions—such as team building and feel-good “people initiatives”—that often follow in their wake. Based on social sciences (notably economics, game theory, and organizational sociology) and The Boston Consulting Group’s work with more than five hundred companies in more than forty countries and in various industries, authors Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman recommend six simple rules to manage complexity without getting complicated. Showing why the rules work and how to put them into practice, Morieux and Tollman give managers a much-needed tool to reinvigorate people in the face of seemingly endless complexity. Included are detailed examples from companies that have achieved a multiplicative effect on performance by using them. It’s time to manage complexity better. Employ these six simple rules to foster autonomy and cooperation and to effectively handle business complexity. As a result, you will improve productivity, innovate more, reengage your workforce, and seize opportunities to create competitive advantage.

Author: Richard Koch
Publisher: Piatkus
ISBN: 0349411859
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
For the past forty years, Richard Koch has worked to uncover simple and elegant principles which govern business success. To qualify, a principle must be so overwhelmingly powerful that anyone can reliably apply it to generate extraordinary results. Working with venture capitalist Greg Lockwood and supported by specially commissioned research from OC&C Strategy Consultants, Koch has now found one elemental principle that unites extraordinarily valuable companies: simplifying. Some firms simplify on price - consider budget flights stripped of all extras that still take you from A to B - creating new, huge mass markets for their wares. Others, such as Apple, simplify their proposition, bringing a beautifully easy-to-use product or service to a large premium market. How can your business become a simplifier? With case studies of some of the most famous firms of the last hundred years, from finance to fast food, this enlightening book shows how to analyse any company's potential to simplify, and enrich the world.

Author: Jim Champy
Publisher: FT Press
ISBN: 0137015151
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.Companies sometimes need to fine an ingenious way to simplify complexity. See.

Author: Kirsten Hastrup
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134749457
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade and this is related to a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. At the same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized, the people studied by anthropologists are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities within global fields of relations. So far, much of the analysis of the role of place in culture has been carried out at a level of theoretical debate. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance of place in the global space of relations which mould the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture.