HIPAA has become the latest industry bugaboo……..so many vendors are advertising that “HIPAA requires this or that…” it is very confusing to understand what is for real and what is just vendor hype. This book provides an unbiased assesment of what the regulations are looking for, as well as “best practices” approaches to satisfying them.

The author, a former army colonel currently featured as a military analyst on MSNBC and NBC News, is convinced that corporate America can learn vital lessons from the U.S. military. Business executives, according to Allard (Command, Control and the Common Defense), today function in a chaotic atmosphere dominated by globalization and rapidly changing information technology. He argues that recent corporate scandals such as the collapse of Enron as well as the high salaries of CEOs are symptomatic of the lack of leadership in industry, a loss that seriously impedes business success. Drawing on myriad examples from the military, Allard provides a series of war plans that he believes can change the corporate environment. Included is a recommendation to emulate the training followed at West Point to build idealistic managers, to devise overall military-like strategies rather than marketing plans and to be aware of and responsible for security programs to combat electronic terrorism. While Allard’s proposals to improve business leadership have merit, many of the military analogies are repetitive and forced. Much of his advice is delivered in an off-putting, hectoring tone that sometimes borders on bragging, and his potshots at former president Clinton feel inappropriate for a business manual.

Aerospace giant Rockwell Collins typified the old-fashioned corporate approach to organizational learning: lackluster offerings in bland classroom settings, with little connection to the needs of employees or the goals of the company. Enter Cliff Purington and Chris Butler, who in three years transformed Rockwell into a full-fledged learning organization. With a strategy-based and technology-driven learning approach, a 400 percent increase in offerings, 24/7 access for 17,000 worldwide employees, and cost savings of $23 million, Rockwell is lauded and emulated by organizations all over the world. For this vital book, Purington and Butler have organized their revolutionary approach into 10 clear steps that can similarly transform any company. Readers will learn new ways to build relationships, define core learning objectives, present a solid business case, and implement programs and assess their value. Each step offers detailed processes to follow, and explains what worked (and what didn’t), revealing the secrets behind Rockwell’s stunning transformation.

This definitive resource provides you with a start-to-finish methodology for building and implementing successful virtual teams in any organization. It describes today’s best practical tools in virtual team design, project management, and change management to give you a rich, hands-on understanding of virtual collaboration and the many benefits that build the case for virtual team initiatives. You get expert guidelines for evaluating today’s collaborative technologies and software applications, and selecting those that best meet an organization’s specific needs. The book systematically maps out every step of team implementation, from identifying ideal participants to measuring team performance, and its coverage of key success factors gives you a veritable checklist of critical issues to monitor. Throughout, you find expert guidance to overcome the challenges unique to virtual teams, such as the need for facilitation in the absence of face-to-face encounters. Examples and case studies offer you field-tested perspective that further ensures your effective transition from traditional teams to virtual teams in any setting.

This is the first book to focus on the people side of knowledge management–what it takes to get employees to contribute to a knowledge system. Robert Buckman explains how to orchestrate this culture change, drawing from the lessons learned by Buckman Laboratories–the leader and pioneer in knowledge management–in implementing award-winning knowledge systems. His book is a practical primer on how organizations can move from “hoarding” knowledge to “sharing” it, building a global strategy that allows them to respond faster than the competition to any customer’s need on a global basis. Buckman reveals how to: Combat the biggest problem with implementing knowledge management–creating the culture that supports it Increase the speed of innovation globally across an organization Resolve technical problems quickly Make immediate, informed decisions to help solve customer issues Create new products based on customer input and demand.

“Lewis clearly knows his subject, and you can’t fault the advice he gives. His book.. is well researched, thoroughly prepared, and clearly presented.” — Building

Most experts on branding emphasize how a brand owner spreads his or her message to consumers, but Winsor believes that genuine success can only come from reversing the line of communication as well. His “bottom-up” approach weds branding to customer research, but the resulting mixture is rather thin, continually circling around a handful of talking points concerning the need for a deeper relationship with customers. Companies are urged repeatedly to “find the key voices” in the market and re-center their brands on those customers in order to break through their “brand immune system,” a disdain for being coerced attributed, with what feels like undue emphasis, to rising antiglobalization sentiment. Yet many of the case studies fail to provide real insight into the process, asserting that certain companies have such relationships without offering enough detail on how they established them. And though he touts the Internet as an effective tool for listening to consumers, Winsor offers examples that feel already dated. A closing chapter full of generalizations about “Millennial” youth reinforces the impression that the book reads like a client prospectus, and the “anthrojournalism” he touts as a key research methodology comes off as cool hunting under a new name, despite all protestations.

Today’s organizations face difficult challenges in order to remain competitive—the quickening pace of change, increasing uncertainty, growing ambiguity, and complexity. To meet these challenges, organizations must broaden the scope of leadership responsibility for strategic leadership and engage more people in the process of leadership. In Becoming a Strategic Leader Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) offer executives and managers a handbook for implementing a strategic leadership process that reaches leaders at all levels of organizations. Based on CCL’s  successful Developing the Strategic Leader Program, this book outlines the framework of strategic leadership and contains practical suggestions on how to develop the individual, team, and organizational skills needed for institutions to become more adaptable, flexible, and resilient. The authors also show how individual managers can exercise effective strategic leadership through their distinctive and systemic approach—thinking, acting, and influencing.

Project Management for Telecommunications Managers is a concise reference work covering important aspects of project management. It explains many key concepts, in layman’s terms, for engineering managers, project managers and other professionals working in the telecommunications environment. This presentation is consistent with many of the processes recommended by the certification body for project managers, the Project Management Institute; however, the material expands on the guide by elaborating on the application of the processes in telecommunications projects. The book covers concepts and applications applicable to all telecommunications related areas. Tools for planning, organizing, tracking and managing projects are provided. The author has also included actual examples of various telecommunications projects from wireline and wireless providers, equipment vendors and component manufacturers to illustrate concepts. Important information for working across departmental and functional units and various organizational structures are also included.

This book is highly recommended for project managers and project team members who work on projects in the telecommunications environment.

We have long been taught that emotions should be felt and expressed in carefully controlled ways, and then only in certain environments and at certain times. This is especially true when at work, particularly when managing others. It is considered terribly unprofessional to express emotion while on the job, and many of us believe that our biggest mistakes and regrets are due to our reactions at those times when our emotions get the better of us. David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey believe that this view of emotion is not correct. The emotion centers of the brain, they argue, are not relegated to a secondary place in our thinking and reasoning, but instead are an integral part of what it means to think, reason, and to be intelligent. In The Emotionally Intelligent Manager, they show that emotion is not just important, but absolutely necessary for us to make good decisions, take action to solve problems, cope with change, and succeed. The authors detail a practical four-part hierarchy of emotional skills: identifying emotions, using emotions to facilitate thinking, understanding emotions, and managing emotions—and show how we can measure, learn, and develop each skill and employ them in an integrated way to solve our most difficult work-related problems.