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Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate
Serious Play is about serious work: how the world's leading companies model, prototype, and simulate to innovate Increasingly, prototypes are the key platforms and models are the core media for managing risk and creating value. They allow for cost-effective creativity, encourage profitable improvisation, and inspire organizations to collaborate in unexpected ways. Serious Play is a crisply written handbook for product, process and project leaders who are determined to manage their innovation initiatives successfully. As digital technologies for modeling and simulation offer more value for less money, they provoke fundamental challenges to organizational culture and design. MIT research associate Michael Schrage asserts that conventional wisdom surrounding innovation gets turned inside out: What innovative companies choose not to model often proves more important than what they do. Contrary to the popular assumption that innovative teams generate innovative prototypes, in fact innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. How innovators play with their models and simulations invariably matters far more than what they actually plan. In fact, Schrage shows why innovative firms cannot seriously plan unless they seriously play. Drawing upon a range of companies as diverse as Walt Disney, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler and American Airlines, Schrage identifies the common patterns and practices that distinguish productive prototyping cultures from pathological ones. He explores the intimate connection between how leading innovators model reality and how they actually manage it. He examines prototyping failures as rigorously as he explains prototyping successes. The essential message of Serious Play is that tomorrow's innovations will increasingly be the byproduct of how companies and their customers behave-and misbehave-around this new generation of models, prototypes, and simulations. The distinction between serious play and serious work dissolves as technology gives innovators ever-increasing opportunities to simulate and prototype their ideas. As the media for modeling radically change, so will the organizations that use them. With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage argues that the future of prototyping is the future of innovation. A User's Guide included in the book helps readers quickly take away the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation, Serious Play will lay serious claim to the hearts and minds of forward-looking business managers..
Price: $14.49
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Churchill Plays: 2: Softcops, Top Girls, Fen, and Serious Money (Methuen World Dramatists Ser)
Caryl Churchill is "a dramatist who must surely be rated among the half-dozen best now writing "-New Statesman Softcops: "Pure fresh air. One wishes the master (Foucault) and his acolytes had her gift for the drama of ideas."-Times Literary Supplement Top Girls: "Builds to a superb emotion-draining climax that sent me out of the theatre convinced that this is the best British play ever from a woman dramatist."-Guardian Fen: "A striking, panoramic portrait of superstitious, religion-soaked, and even doom-laden countryside ... a powerful, gritty, ultimately political piece."-Guardian Serious Money: "The real thing, theatre of language, movement, energy, purpose, and wit."-Observer .
Price: $12.08
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Playful Approaches to Serious Problems: Narrative Therapy With Children and Their Families (Norton Professional Books)
The narrative therapy approach involves the whole family and especially children by respecting their unique language, problem-solving resources, and views of the world. The authors begin by elucidating a basic theory of collaborative narrative play that allows new choices and stories of hope and change to emerge. They encourage appreciation for ways of communicating that appeal to children, whether in the sandtray or with puppet "co-therapists," and respect for special and unusual abilities, such the ability to "read hearts" or connect with imaginary friends. Compelling case examples draw the reader into the book from the first pages. Children who might have been labeled belligerent, hyperactive, anxious, or out of touch with reality are found to be capable of taming their tempers, controlling frustration, facing fears, and using their imaginations to the fullest. Realistic, heartening, pragmatic, and just plain fun, narrative therapy encourages children and their families to use resources that have been overlooked to turn the tables on the problems they face. Therapists, parents, teachers, or anyone helping children and families will find that this book turns their thinking around, too - in the most unexpected and illuminating ways..
Price: $22.18
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Stone Cold Dead Serious: And Other Plays
Recent plays from "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (David Cote, Time Out New York)Adam Rapp's plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America's heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his latest works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves, the play prompted Bruce Weber to rave in The New York Times: "Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving. It is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice . . . Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing." .
Price: $8.49
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Ready-to-go Scripture Skits ... That Teach Serious Stuff: The Sequel
Lights! Scriptures! Action!Ready-to-Go Scripture Skits engages young people in an active form of learning that is hard to beat. It achieves MLP (maximum learning potential) through FLP (full laugh potential). And the skits are so off-the-wall that involving everybody in a group is easy. Each of ten sessions uses an intentional three-act process to help young people explore the Scriptures and apply them to their lives today: grabbing young people's attention through an outrageous and spontaneous Scripture skit, leading them to deeper insight through the historical context and meaning of the story's key elements, and helping them apply the story's meaning to their lives. The sessions are perfect for religious education classes, youth groups, campus ministry events, retreats, lock-ins, and intergenerational and family programs. Ready-to-Go Scripture Skits are just that: ready to go, using few props and lines that can be read in a moment's notice..
Price: $19.95
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Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life
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Playing Like a Team: A Collection of Team Building Acitivities that Promote Serious Play and Lead to Serious Results
Some of the most profound learning for teams comes from exploring the everyday challenges they face using team games as metaphors for those challenges These team building activities give your team the opportunity to suspend the real world and, as you play together in ways that simulate your real world experiences, look at the team from the outside in. If you are like the team leaders we work with in business, ministry, government, education, or the non-profit sectors - leaders who want to utilize more team building activities but uncertain of which ones work best - this team leader handbook was written with you in mind! In these pages you will find a collection of twenty-five of our favorite experiential team builiding activities in an easy-to-reference format peppered with helpful facilitation tips. Through our years of consulting with teams, these are the team challenges we return to time and again because they work!.
Price: $10.99
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