Books about Outcomes from Amazon.com

More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.

Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool-the "strategy map"-that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible.

Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy-implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation-depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital.

Providing a visual epiphany for executives everywhere who can't figure out why their strategy isn't working, Strategy Maps is a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.

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Price: $4.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations

"Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation."

-Clayton Christensen

For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm--that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually.

In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.

Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives.

With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to:

• Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possible
• Recognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors do
• Identify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer value
• Systematically define breakthrough products and services concepts

Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.

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Price: $14.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This hands-on textbook/workbook teaches readers how to document functional outcomes in a clear, logical progression. Extensive examples and exercises in each chapter highlight the essential points of functional outcomes documentation, designed to help improve client function and reduce disability as well as provide evidence of functional progress for insurance payment and reimbursement.

• Provides both theoretical foundations and a practical approach to functional outcomes documentation.
• Presents a top-down perspective on rehabilitation, based on the Nagi disablement model.
• Numerous examples and exercises in every chapter allow readers to put documentation skills into practice as they learn essential theoretical concepts.
• An overview of key legal issues related to physical therapy documentation is provided.
• Functional outcomes documentation in a variety of settings is covered, including acute care, rehabilitation, outpatient, home care, nursing homes, pediatrics, school settings, and group homes.
• Examples illustrate a range of impairments featuring different client groups that challenge students to consider real-life scenarios.

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Price: $36.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The new edition of this award winning text helps address the increased pressure that the NCLEX and other certification exams are placing on nursing students and faculty. The Nurse Educator s Guide to Assessing Learning Outcomes, 2nd Edition guides classroom educators through the process of developing effective classroom exams and individual test items. The revised and updated edition of this award winning text includes new chapters on: · Creating items to prepare students for the new NCLEX · The Language of Assessment · Developing Instructional Objectives · Assessing Critical Thinking · Instituting Item Banking and Test Development Software! Used increasingly in nursing education tracks at the MSN level, this new text will help new educators and faculty veterans succeed in an environment increasingly focused on assessing learning outcomes!.
Price: $40.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Who can understand the mind of a preschooler? You can! Know that above all else, a preschooler is a learner His amazing powers of reasoning and discrimination are awakened through a world of play and imagination. Through home relationships, he learns about love, trust, comfort, and security; through friends he learns to measure himself against a world of peers; and through unconditional love, a child establishes his own unique selfhood. The growth period between ages three and five years is all about learning, and On Becoming Preschoolwise is all about helping parents create the right opportunities and best environment to optimize their child's learning potential.Now influencing over two million homes worldwide, trusted parenting authors Gary Ezzo and Dr. Robert Bucknam once again bring their collective wisdom, experience, and insight to bear on this critical phase of preschool training. From teaching about the importance of play to learning how to prepare a preschooler for the first day of school, from organizing your child's week to understanding childhood fears and calming parental anxiety, sound advice and practical application await the reader. You will find this resource as practical as it is informative, curative as much as it is encouraging..
Price: $3.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The First Management Classic of the New Millennium!
A bold experiment is taking place these days, as leading-edge companies turn upside down the management paradigm that has dominated corporate thinking for more than one hundred years. Southwest Airlines is perhaps the most visible practitioner, soaring through economic downturns while its competitors slash their budgets and order massive layoffs, but you can find other pioneers of the new approach in almost every industry and market niche. Their secret: a culture of ownership that allows them to tap into the most underutilized resource in business today–namely, the enthusiasm, intelligence, and creativity of working people everywhere.

No one knows more about building a culture of ownership than CEO Jack Stack, who’s been working on one for the past twenty years with his colleagues at SRC Holdings Corporation (formerly Springfield ReManufacturing Corporation). Along the way, they’ve turned their company into what Business Week has called a “management Mecca,” attracting thousands of people representing hundreds of businesses to SRC’s home in Springfield, Missouri. There the visitors learn how to incorporate the ideals and values of SRC’s remarkable corporate culture into their own organizations–and then they go back and do it.

Now, in A Stake in the Outcome, Stack offers a master class on creating a culture of ownership, presenting the hard-won lessons of his own twenty-year journey and explaining what it really takes to build for long-term success. The pioneer of “open-book management” (described in the best-selling classic The Great Game of Business), Stack and twelve other managers began their journey in 1982, when they purchased their factory from its struggling parent company. SRC grew 15 percent a year, while adding almost a thousand new jobs, and the company’s stock price rocketed from 10 cents to $81.60 per share. In the process, Stack discovered that long-term success required constant innovation–and that building a culture of ownership involved much more than paying bonuses, handing out stock options, or setting up an employee stock ownership plan. In a successful ownership culture, every employee had to take the fate of the company as personally as an individual owner would. Achieving that level of commitment was extraordinarily difficult, but Stack realized that the payoff would be enormous: a company that was consistently able to outperform the market.

A Stake in the Outcome isn’t about theory–it’s about practice. Stack draws from his own successes and failures at SRC to show how any company can teach its employees to think and act like owners, including how to implement an effective equity-sharing program, how to promote continuous learning at every level of the organization, how to fire up employees’ competitive juices, how to broaden the concept of leadership and delegate responsibility for the business, and how to build a workforce that is fast on its feet and ready to take advantage of every opportunity. You’ll also learn about other companies that have succeeded in building cultures of ownership–and the lessons they can teach the rest of us.

Written in Jack Stack’s straightforward, witty, no-beating-around-the-bush style, A Stake in the Outcome is like having a one-on-one session with a master entrepreneur and business innovator. It shows managers and executives of companies both large and small how to build a ferociously motivated workforce that is energized and committed to meeting and overcoming the most daunting challenges a company can face.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $9.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this controversial book, psychologists Barry Duncan and Scott Miller, cofounders of the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change, challenge the traditional focus on diagnosis, "silver bullet" techniques, and magic pills, exposing them as empirically bankrupt practices that only diminish the role of clients and hasten therapy's extinction. Instead, they advocate for the long-ignored but most crucial factor in therapeutic success-the innate resources of the client. Based on extensive clinical research and case studies, The Heroic Client not only shows how to harness the client's powers of regeneration to make therapy effective, but also how to enlist the client as a partner to make therapy accountable. The Heroic Client inspires therapists to boldly rewrite the drama of therapy, recast clients in their rightful role as heroes and heroines of the therapeutic stage, and legitimize their services to third-party payers without the compromises of the medical model..
Price: $24.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $42.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]