Balancing Act

Two mice have fun playing on a teeter-totter, but as more and larger friends join them, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay balanced.

In this leadership memoir, take a step backstage at Cirque du Soleil. Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre shares his experiences leading the awe-inspiring organization, and teaches readers what it takes for anyone, regardless of position or industry, to embrace the value of creative leadership. Without creativity, there is no business. At the core of Cirque du Soleil’s lavish, multi-million-dollar productions is Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre, who has mastered the ability to bring business and creativity together across multiple languages and cultures in a way that has never been seen before. The secrets he shares in Balancing Acts are rooted in tremendous faith in your own creative skills, even if you are convinced you have none, and those of the sharpest minds within your organization. In this book, Daniel shares the untold stories behind Cirques biggest shows, including Beatles Love, Michael Jackson One, the aquatic marvel, O, and many more. Through these tales of triumph and trials, he will teach you: How to shatter the perceived limitations standing in the way of your ability to think creatively and innovatively; When to step up and when to step back so that your team can create a masterpiece that doesn’t break the bank; How in using the methods Daniel has uncovered, modern companies with entrenched bureaucracies can bring creativity and business together to foster innovation; and How to use creative thinking to lead your organization to new heights. Whether you work for one of the most creative organizations on the planet like Cirque du Soleil, in a stuffy corporate job, or somewhere in between—Balancing Acts is filled with principles that can strengthen and accelerate any business on the planet.

Symbolic and statistical approaches to language have historically been at odds--the former viewed as difficult to test and therefore perhaps impossible to define, and the latter as descriptive but possibly inadequate. At the heart of the debate are fundamental questions concerning the nature of language, the role of data in building a model or theory, and the impact of the competence-performance distinction on the field of computational linguistics. Currently, there is an increasing realization in both camps that the two approaches have something to offer in achieving common goals. The eight contributions in this book explore the inevitable "balancing act" that must take place when symbolic and statistical approaches are brought together--including basic choices about what knowledge will be represented symbolically and how it will be obtained, what assumptions underlie the statistical model, what principles motivate the symbolic model, and what the researcher gains by combining approaches. The topics covered include an examination of the relationship between traditional linguistics and statistical methods, qualitative and quantitative methods of speech translation, study and implementation of combined techniques for automatic extraction of terminology, comparative analysis of the contributions of linguistic cues to a statistical word grouping system, automatic construction of a symbolic parser via statistical techniques, combining linguistic with statistical methods in automatic speech understanding, exploring the nature of transformation-based learning, and a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to recovering from parser failures.

"I believe the most important attribute of strong leadership is balance." So states Andrew Temte in this reflective and uniquely candid look at the capabilities managers and aspiring managers need in today’s workplace. The last 10-20 years have led to a tectonic shift in the leadership traits required by businesses as they navigate increased customer demands for transparency and alignment with shared values. Covering a wide range of topics, from promoting lifelong learning to combatting organizational entropy, Balancing Act is the story of a personal journey towards continuous self improvement.

Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success. Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book’s central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.

In this collection of four previously published works, Chloe, winner of the Teen Design Diva contest, embarks on her prize--an internship with a famous fashion designer in New York City.

What do you call a feminist who is a mother? A femimom? A mominist? Or just a confused woman balancing many roles in her life: working professional, mother, wife, daughter... Meet Tara Mistri, stay-at-home mom and frustrated architect"a baker of biscuits and maker of bricks. Inspired by and in total awe of the Salk Institute in California, Tara hankers to replicate its clean lines and perfect symmetry in her own life. But, with two small children to look after, her set squares and scales are used for scraping plasticine out of the carpet and her career looks like it may remain on the backburner forever. Then, one day, she is offered a job and finds herself on the horns of a dilemma. Goaded by her own personal demon"a nagging Yakshi who just won't leave her alone"Tara's struggle to balance life and love, work and playdough will have readers nodding in recognition, wincing in sympathy and laughing along with her.

In today's society, is it indeed possible for riders in any horse sport to put the good of the horse first and foremost?

Everyone has both male and female vibrations regardless of gender. Learn about the spiritual purpose of male and female energies, female and male relationships, and communication. Take charge of your energies and create the space to grow and heal. Balance your energies to fully experience and express your