front cover of The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
Daniel Rich
University of Delaware Press, 2023
This book reviews the history of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration from 1961 to 2021. The focus is on the school’s accomplishments over its first sixty years, how they were achieved, and why they are significant. The analysis describes the challenges and opportunities that shaped the school’s development and its emergence as one of the nation’s leading public affairs schools. What began in 1961 as an experimental program supported by a single external grant emerged six decades later as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive schools of public affairs. That transformation unfolded during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of higher education when the public purpose of universities was expanded. The history of the Biden School is a story of institutional innovation, perseverance, adaptation, and resilience.
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The Burnout Challenge
Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs
Christina Maslach, Michael P. Leiter
Harvard University Press, 2022

A Forbes Best Business Book. “Vital reading for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.” —Arianna Huffington

“Burnout seems to be everyone’s problem, and this book has solutions. As trailblazers in burnout research, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter didn’t just clear the path to study the causes—they’ve also discovered some of the cures.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

“A thoughtful and well researched book about a core issue at the heart of the great resignation.” —Christian Stadler, Forbes

“Provides the path to creating a better world of work where people can flourish rather than get beaten down.” — Marcel Schwantes, Inc.

Burnout is among the most significant on-the-job hazards facing workers today. It is also among the most misunderstood. In particular, we tend to characterize burnout as a personal issue—a problem employees should fix themselves by getting therapy, practicing relaxation techniques, or changing jobs. Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter show why burnout also needs to be managed by the workplace.

Citing a wealth of research data and drawing on illustrative anecdotes, The Burnout Challenge shows how organizations can change to promote sustainable productivity. Maslach and Leiter provide useful tools for identifying the signs of employee burnout and offer practical, evidence-driven guidance for implementing change. The key, they argue, is to begin with less-taxing changes that employees nonetheless find meaningful, seeding the ground for more thorough reforms in the future.

As priorities and policies shift across workplaces, The Burnout Challenge provides pragmatic, creative, and cost-effective solutions to improve employee efficiency, health, and happiness.

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Deeply Responsible Business
A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership
Geoffrey Jones
Harvard University Press, 2023

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.

For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.

He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.

As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.

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EU Pension Law
Hans van Meerten
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
EU pension law is a relatively new and rapidly growing field. The call for a broader practical understanding of EU pension law is growing, as pension markets are increasingly internationalized.The handbook EU Pension Law discusses the most important financial EU legislation (IORP and PEPP) and non-financial legislation (such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union) and its consequences for pensions. The book contains a collection of relevant articles and offers necessary basic knowledge. More importantly, it contains interesting practical cases, creating a unique bridge between theory and practice. Whether you are a student, a committed policymaker, an experienced market practitioner, or someone interested in European pension developments, EU Pension Law is designed for you.
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Foundations of Organizational Strategy
Michael C. Jensen
Harvard University Press, 1998

In this volume, Michael Jensen and his collaborators present the foundations of an integrated theory of organizations. The theory assumes that organizations are equilibrium systems that, like markets, can be influenced, but cannot be told what to do; that human beings are rational and self-interested for the most part; and that information is costly to produce and transfer among agents. The theory also treats business organizations as entities existing in a system of markets (including financial, product, labor, and materials markets) that must be considered in the formulation of organizational strategy.

Jensen argues that the cost of transferring information makes it necessary to decentralize some decision rights in organizations and in the economy. This decentralization in turn requires organizations to solve the control problem that results when self-interested persons do not behave as perfect agents.

Capitalist economies solve these control problems through the institution of alienable decision rights. But because organizations must suppress the alienability of decision rights, they must devise substitute mechanisms that perform its functions. Jensen argues that three critical systems, which he calls the organizational rules of the game, are necessary to substitute for alienability in organizations: (1) a system for allocating decision rights among agents in the firm, (2) a system for measuring and evaluating performance in the firm, and (3) a system for rewarding and punishing individuals for their performance. These concepts offer a major competitive advantage for organizations.

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The Gold in the Rings
The People and Events That Transformed the Olympic Games
Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Once a showcase for amateur athletics, the Olympic Games have become a global entertainment colossus powered by corporate sponsorship and professional participation. Stephen R. Wenn and Robert K. Barney offer the inside story of this transformation by examining the far-sighted leadership and decision-making acumen of four International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents: Avery Brundage, Lord Killanin, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and Jacques Rogge. Blending biography with historical storytelling, the authors explore the evolution of Olympic commercialism from Brundage's uneasy acceptance of television rights fees through the revenue generation strategies that followed the Salt Lake City bid scandal to the present day. Throughout, Wenn and Barney draw on their decades of studying Olympic history to dissect the personalities, conflicts, and controversies behind the Games' embrace of the business of spectacle.

Entertaining and expert, The Gold in the Rings maps the Olympics' course from paragon of purity to billion-dollar profits.

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The Inclusion Marathon
On Diversity and Equity in the Workplace
Zoë Papaikonomou
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
In recent years, more and more organisations have realised that diversity and inclusion in the workplace is both crucial and enormously beneficial. But how do you stop this realisation from remaining empty words and flashy statements, and turn awareness into action? In "The Inclusion Marathon", Kauthar Bouchallikht and Zoë Papaikonomou interview 41 practitioners and researchers about their knowledge and experience within the field of diversity, equity and inclusion in the Netherlands. These experts discuss different approaches and the bumps and barriers they come across. The Inclusion Marathon is a revealing book exploring the persistent lack of diversity and equity within many organisations. At the same time, it is a constructive, concrete guide to how organisations may become more diverse, equitable and inclusive. "The Inclusion Marathon" is an extensive English summary of the Dutch book "De inclusiemarathon".
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The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture
Lessons Learned and Lost in America's Wars
Jeannie L. Johnson
Georgetown University Press

The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences. Jeannie L. Johnson takes a sympathetic but critical look at the Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency warfare. Which counterinsurgency lessons have been learned and retained for next time and which have been abandoned to history is a story of battlefield trial and error—but also a story of cultural collisions.

The book begins with a fascinating and penetrating look inside the culture of the Marine Corps through research in primary sources, including Marine oral histories, and interviews with Marines. Johnson explores what makes this branch of the military distinct: their identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens. She then traces the history of the Marines' counterinsurgency experience from the expeditionary missions of the early twentieth century, through the Vietnam War, and finally to the Iraq War. Her findings break new ground in strategic culture by introducing a methodology that was pioneered in the intelligence community to forecast behavior. Johnson shows that even a service as self-aware and dedicated to innovation as the Marine Corps is constrained in the lessons-learned process by its own internal predispositions, by the wider US military culture, and by national preferences. Her findings challenge the conclusions of previous counterinsurgency scholarship that ignores culture. This highly readable book reminds us of Sun Tzu's wisdom that to be successful in war, it is important to know thyself as well as the enemy. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the Marines Corps, counterinsurgency warfare, military innovation, or strategic culture.

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Modern Organization
Victor A. Thompson
University of Alabama Press, 1961
Modern Organization is a classic text of organization development that addresses the complications that occur in power structures within which workers with specialized skills are managed by superiors without those skills. Thompson is interested in exploring and righting the creative tensions between knowledge and power, demonstrating that within hierarchical structures, the wielders of power often lack not only the technical know-how of their employees but charisma and other attributes that would win the loyalty and confidence of those employees.
 
Thompson coins the phrase “bureaupathic” behavior to describe the rise in a perceived need for regulations and rituals that result from the insecurity in these structures. This behavior only confounds working life and efficiency. Technical specialization is rapidly advancing, while cultural definitions of authority are not. Authority must be redefined in order to make allowances for its limitations. What once made a leader, namely charisma, may no longer suffice. 
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The Platform Company
The Art of Resilient Strategy: A Guide for Leaders Inspired by Nature's Competition
Jan-Jacob Koomen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The Platform Company will help you tackle your organization's key strategic challenges with out-of-the box concepts based on solid principles from game theory and ecology. Building blocks are introduced in an easy-to-read story of an executive on safari and translated into practical steps and methods. The book addresses the key challenges confronting any organization, such as branding, sales channels, innovation, supply chain, strategy formation, leadership, and purpose.
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Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom
Partnerships and the Moral Dimensions of Teaching
Robert V. Bullough Jr. and John R. Rosenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Winner of 2019 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award and 2019 Critics Choice Book Award from AESA

In response to growing concern in the 1980s about the quality of public education across the United States, a tremendous amount of energy was expended by organizations such as the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Forum to organize professional development schools (PDS) or “partner schools” for teacher education. On the surface, the concept of partnering is simple; however, the practice is very costly, complex, and difficult. In Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom, Robert V. Bullough, Jr. and John R. Rosenberg examine the concept of partnering through various lenses and they address what they think are the major issues that need to be, but rarely are, discussed by thousands of educators in the U.S. who are involved and invested in university-public school partnerships. Ultimately, they assert that the conversation around partnering needs re-centering (most especially on the purposes of public education), refreshing, and re-theorizing.  
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Transforming a Business School
Entrepreneurial Leadership in an Era of Disruption
Porat, M. Moshe
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Publication cancelled.
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