Board Talk

An accessible guide to the business of being a board director, through the lens of 18 crucial conversations. How do you understand what is really going on in an organisation, so you can exercise the oversight that is required from you? How do you overcome the information asymmetry problem, where the executive directors know more about the operation than you do? How will you collaborate as a board to set the right strategic direction in a context that changes constantly? How will you see the organisation through the eyes of your advisors, your employees and your key stakeholders? How can you manage the risks you know about as well as the ones you don’t? Your best tool for all of this is conversation – about the right topics, with the right people, at the right time. This book shows you what these conversations need to cover and how to make them count. Whether you are a new director of a PLC, a long-standing Trustee of a charity, or a governor of an educational institution, this book will help you and your colleagues become the board your organisation needs. Kathryn Bishop and Gillian Camm each have many decades operating at board level in listed and private companies, charities, government boards, professional services firms and educational establishments. They have blended this with their experience of selecting, developing, and teaching non-executives, and underpinned it with a carefully curated selection of the most relevant and usable board research together with their own research insights.

BoardTalk had its humble beginnings as a SMT expert Q&A session with Phil Zarrow and Jim Hall at an SMTAI conference. Ten years and over 200 episodes later, the "Assembly Brothers - Pick and Place" have transcribed their informative discussions from CircuitInsight.com, where BoardTalk is streamed all over the world.

"With Kanban, every minute you spend on a software project can add value for customers. One book can help you achieve this goal: Agile Project Management with Kanban. Author Eric Brechner pioneered Kanban within the Xbox engineering team at Microsoft. Now he shows you exactly how to make it work for your team. Think of this book as {28}Kanban in a box.

Babies talk in all kinds of ways - and the people who love them talk back! This unique board book has been specially created for parents and older children to share with new babies, helping to lay the foundations for secure attachment and early language skills. This edition features bilingual Nepali-English text. Please note, these special editions have a reduced trim size.

A Global CEO study by Accenture and the UN Global Compact has shown that 94% of CEOs think that their board should discuss sustainability. And yet there is a real danger that boards are not living up to expectations on sustainability, paying lip-service to the concept rather than fully embedding social and environmental issues into their strategies and operations. Talking Sustainability in the Boardroom sets out why this is the case, identifies the obstacles, and then explains the opportunities for the long-term performance of the organisation that can arise through focusing on social and environmental issues. Written by two leading specialists in sustainability who have significant experience of working directly with boards, this book presents a very practical framework for embedding sustainability into board conversations and strategies. Steps include identifying and prioritising the social and environmental issues that are most pertinent to the organisation and will have the biggest impact on business, presenting the competences and skills to enable this, guidance on how to structure board meetings to ensure that these conversations truly take place, and the development of action plans and tools for measurement.

By pressing the buttons and matching the sounds to the pictures again and again, children will quickly and easily learn simple first words and develop their speech. Now with even clearer audio

Targeting the practical needs of clinical teachers who do not have extensive time to undergo additional training, this book provides an accessible, on-the-spot resource to bolster teaching skills and optimize the education of trainees. A massive transformation takes place every summer in the United States: thousands of trainees in graduate medical education are appointed as attending physicians responsible for effectively teaching the next generation of medical students and residents. This handbook includes only the most relevant topics for new clinical teachers, and covers the basics of clinical teaching, teaching in specific situations, teaching different audiences, and best practices for handling challenging situations. The format is conducive to “just in time” learning, perfect for quick reference before meeting with learners or engaging in specific teaching situations, such as in an ambulatory clinic or at the bedside. Key points are emphasized with frequent use of tables and boxed practical content. Applicable to all teaching attendings regardless of specialty, the Handbook of Clinical Teaching is a valuable aid for individuals who wish to improve their teaching, and serves as a practical guide for faculty development in clinical teaching.

"Don't talk to strangers" is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with "a citizenship of political friendship." Returning to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow "citizen" Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. These tools of political friendship, Allen contends, can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us. Sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, according to Allen. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working—and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices. Trenchant, incisive, and ultimately hopeful, Talking to Strangers is nothing less than a manifesto for a revitalized democratic citizenry.