Bøger af Paul Gibbons

"The best book on change I've ever read..." (Bank CEO)"The best book on change in fifteen years, perhaps longer..." (Organization Development consultant)Leaders need guidance on leading change grounded in the latest science, not 20th-century myths. In this updated 2019 edition of The Science of Organizational Change, Paul takes us on a journey from change mythology, from New Age change ideas, from "reports in drawers", and from pop psychology up to the present. In the first comprehensive treatment of behavioral science in business, you'll learn which cognitive biases caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, Enron, and the Deepwater Horizon. Later in the book, you'll discover how evidence-based management is helping leading businesses including Google.The author's 30-year career, scholarly approach, but without dry academic writing make this book a must-read for all managers interested in change. Few authors incorporate findings from psychology, sociology, medicine, philosophy of science, ethics, public policy, economics, and mathematics into books on change. Fewer still do it in an interesting way.Read case studies from Cisco, Intel, Nokia, BP, Shell, Barclays, British Airways, Comcast, and PwC - all former clients of the author where he advised at C-suite level.

"Since myths can be hard to test and compare, we get an intellectual free for all that allows bullshit to prosper and propagate, for decades, even when subsequent human science research has overturned it."How humans decide what to believe, in their professional and personal lives, is vital. It applies to our interest area, the myths of organizational change, but also critically to life, such as health and medical decisions, fake news, politics, and more.Once a myth takes root, whether true or false, it sticks. Transmitted by the media and reiterated by gurus, it becomes a cultural "truth". Take the idea that people are left-brained or right-brained and that the latter are more creative. Psychologists debunk this claim until they're blue in the face, yet it has mythological stature, including among some change professionals.This idea stickiness is endemic in the organizational change profession. Many of its signature ideas are decades old, yet they have stuck without any re-evaluation as research and knowledge in the human sciences has proved them false.For example, the very first model Paul and Tricia learned as organizational change consultants was the Kübler-Ross "grief model" which was supposed to describe the organizational change experience. Later, they began to wonder how the emotional experience of the dying became a template for business change of all kinds.Similarly, early writers picked up the "unfreeze change refreeze" model, and it became paradigmatic, eventually finding its way into harmful ideas such as creating a "sense of urgency" or "burning platform". The Science of Organizational Change, published in 2015 and revised in 2019, took the first stab at identifying myths in the world of change. Each myth in that book deserved a chapter-length exploration that it did not receive.Change Myths does just that. It takes six of the most popular and well-known change myths and gives them the exploration they deserve, applying a scientific and critical lens to their origins and supporting evidence.Some of those myths debunked are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Learning Styles, resistance to change, and "sense of urgency."Change Mythsbegins a long-overdue conversation: What does it cost businesses to cling to outdated and disproven ideas?Authors Paul Gibbons and Tricia Kennedy do not position themselves as the final arbiters of truth, as if they were a Supreme Court of change ideas, but rather offer critical-thinking tools and research to equip readers to parse their own beliefs.This, more than any dissection of a specific myth, offers an opportunity to transform the world of organizational change toward one more grounded in evidence and critical thinking.Perhaps more than ever, every professional, business leader, worker, citizen, parent, and adult needs better tools to parse and discern the deluge of information they encounter daily to help make decisions where knowledge sources conflict.The tools in Change Myths will help the reader sift through and debunk myths in all walks of life.

"An incredible dive into the intersection of spirituality and business. Gibbons wrote the book that needed to be written for our world-showing us how our spirituality is the key to our humanity in business."-Marshall Goldsmith Is there a spiritual revolution in society and in business?The Spirituality of Work and Leadership is the most comprehensive treatment of workplace spirituality to date written by one of the "movement's" founders, and covers meaning-making, work, workaholism, vocation and purpose, happiness, mindfulness, altruism, motivation, engagement, and leadership. Spirituality, the book maintains, uniquely embraces the inner work of personal development and the outer work of what is needed in the world. Some of the best writing on those human topics comes not from psychology, but from spirituality (and philosophy, evolutionary biology, sociology, and systems thinking). The big questions are: What do we mean by spirituality? How is it different from religion?What is the link between leadership and spirituality?What is the relationship between spirituality and science?What is the historical relationship between spirituality and work?Can we prove workplace spirituality is of value? What is the evidence?Can spiritual experiences at work be cultivated?What insight does spirituality give us into human motivation?What is the purpose of purpose? How do we create purposeful lives and organizations?What would a spiritual consulting firm look like? Is there a spiritual crisis in business?Before the COVID crisis, there was another crisis in business-one of meaning. A Gallup poll found only 13% of workers were engaged at work and fully 24% were "actively disengaged." The problem, says Paul Gibbons, is that you cannot cut a check to buy your workers meaning-you need to provide work that has intrinsic value-a purpose, not just a paycheck. But businesses aren't temples and business leaders aren't priests or spiritual gurus. How do leaders lead meaning-making at work and the more purposeful businesses that 21st-century workers claim they crave? Moreover, the "normal" to which we would like to return was really a crisis. Our world is continually punctuated by ethical scandals: Enron, Wells Fargo, pharma bro, BP, Weinstein, Purdue Pharma, Theranos, Facebook, WeWork, Uber, and Boeing's 737 Max. Can ancient wisdom traditions really provide guidance on 21st-century issues such as AI, human cloning, climate change, inequality, sexual harassment, outsourced jobs, and a surveillance culture? Would spiritual wisdom have made a difference during 2020's COVID crisis?How do we humanize business using ideas from spirituality?Volume I of the Humanizing Business series is a book for business leaders who want fresh ideas on leading 21st-century organizations. It is a book for spiritual people, the faithful and the mystics, who want to bring their whole selves to work. It is a book for humanists and the secularly inclined who have a hunger for meaning that philosophy, science, and spirituality may fulfill. The book is scholarly in approach, a think-good book as well as a feel-good book. It relies on the work of Nietzsche on meaning, Harvard's Steven Pinker and Michael Sandel on altruism, Yuval Harari on evolutionary biology, neuroscientist Richard Davidson on mindfulness, Aristotle on happiness, and theologians from the Abrahamic religions. Rather than just a book with philosophical ideas, Gibbons describes his experience putting these ideas to work over the last two decades at Shell, Microsoft, Zappos, and HSBC Bank. According to investment banking EVP Robert Entenmann, "Gibbons towers above business thinkers in the way that Drucker did in an earlier era. Even Drucker did not bring to business thinking the breadth of scholarship and originality of thought that Gibbons does."

Astute leaders know that upskilling, culture change, and mindset are critical ingredients for successful digital change - but do not know how to change those quickly enough to keep up with pace of technological change. That is because our 20th-century change models are not up to the challenge of 21st century digital transformation and the future of work - and that explains McKinsey's finding that only 25% of digital transformations succeed.In Impact, globally recognized culture change expert, Paul Gibbons gives leaders 21st-century change tools and models that are based on up-to-the-minute research in behavioral sciences, complexity theory, agile methods, information science, and more.Gibbons shows leaders that "the more technologically-enabled workplaces become (AI and robotics), paradoxically, the more important the "human" becomes - community, purpose, connection, empathy, relationships, and trust." He continues, "… central to the whole picture of changing how we change, of humanizing business, and of upskilling workforces, is leadership. In a world where advancing human capability is critical, leaders need to lead learning." Then, using that idea of leader as learner, Gibbons illustrates and how learning can happen faster and more efficiently through understanding the latest research and making appropriate use of 21st-century learning technology.Impact is about leading change, and about those "upgrades" to the human side of organizations, leading, learning, communicating, changing, collaborating, deciding, and engaging. As computers do more of our thinking for us, taking over many of our cognitive tasks, our "competitive advantage" is in the social domain. Crudely, we can outsource some of our thinking, but not much of our collaboration. The upside is liberation from cognitive drudgery; the challenge is to raise our game and to become better at what makes us distinctively human - the social, the collaborative, the creative, the visionary.Leaders will learn through case studies from leading business (such as Google and Microsoft) and insights from the latest "human sciences" which will show them that - "shared purpose is more important than traditional incentives; empathy, trust, and psychological safety beat old school methods of behavior change; behavioral science sometimes produces major results through small tweaks to the environment; constant engagement works better than town halls, workshops, and focus groups; and technology-enabled dialog with stakeholders works better than surveys do."

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the practical management of freedom of information compliance, including interpretation of the Act as well as the Environmental Information Regulations.

Java developers have already adapted to a world in which everything is an object, resources are reclaimed by a garbage collector, and multiple inheritance is replaced by interfaces. This makes them well equipped to thrive in Microsoft s new .NET environment using C#. Still, although there are many similarities between Java and C#, as always, the devil is in the details. .NET Development for Java Programmers shows just what those devilish details are. But it provides more than just language details: Developing enterprise applications requires mastering the libraries that allow you to build applications that communicate with databases and include network components, Web pages, and many other features. Java developers rely on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) to provide these libraries; C# developers rely on the .NET Framework. At first glance there might not seem to be much similarity between the two, but Paul Gibbons shows you there is much the Java developer has learned from using J2EE that translates easily when using the .NET Framework. Early chapters highlight C#s differences from Java and discuss how the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) differs from the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Subsequent chapters cover various technology areas demonstrating where knowledge gained from developing with J2EE translates into enterprise development in .NET. These chapters also provide sufficient additional information on the .NET technologies to allow Java developers to start using them immediately. Mainstream technologies such as database access are covered first, with more esoteric areas such as message-oriented middleware and directory services left until later. The final chapter examines migrating existing Java applications to C# and the tools and techniques that are available. By the end of .NET Development for Java Programmers, a professional Java developer should be capable of tackling a real software project in .NET using C#. About the AuthorPaul Gibbons works as a consultant for Volt Technical Resources. He has used many languages in more than 25 years of software development, but his current favorite is C#. Originally from Yorkshire, England, he now lives in Washington State with his wife and three children. In his spare time he enjoys gardening and bird watching.