Identifying and developing executive skills

This study aimed to identify those skills which, individually or in combination, contribute to a high standard of management practice by Chief Executive Officers in Australia. Based on an extensive review of the literature, a skill taxonomy was developed to reflect current research findings. Verification of this taxonomy was sought through field questionnaires and depth interviews with male and female CEOs drawn from large and small organisations in both the public and private sectors. This led to a revised skill taxonomy, with 17 skills reflecting three significant categories; understanding and interpreting the external environment understanding and mobilising the internal environment and understanding and mobilising personal resources’ Eight of the skills were identified as key differentiating skills. They are situational, contingent and interdependent They reflect the broad context in which they are applied and their interrelationships in the wider environment. The research then sought to determine how these skills were acquired or developed. The motivation and capacity for continual learning was a key factor. The most effective learning took place in a randomised, unstructured, incremental and integrative fashion. Experiences associated with breadth, diversity, challenge and with reassessing perspectives and personal paradigms were of particular significance. It was found that an ordered, structured and purposive learning approach — as implied by most existing learning models — does not necessarily enhance the acquisition of the key skills; it may well impede their development. This led to the theoretical conclusion that there are three modes of learning relevant to senior executives; instrumental learning (‘learning to do’), systemic learning (‘learning to be’) and meta-learning (‘learning to learn’). The implications are drawn out, with particular reference to the experiences and facilitative organisational environments needed for the development of systemic and meta-learning; the modes considered of most importance if senior executives are to be able to effectively respond to the organisational and environmental challenges they face

Building Paradise on the Hill of Hell in Assisi: Mountain as Reliquary

The town of Assisi in Umbria, Italy, located on a sloping and precipitous mountain ridge halfway up the dome-shaped, wood-covered sides of Mount Subasio, has long been known as the birthplace of Franciscanism. Today the Basilica that houses the human remains of St. Francis (c.1181/82-1226), the founder and leader of the Friars Minor, draws pilgrims and visitors alike, either to worship or admire the beauty of the architecture and fresco schemes. This influx of people makes Assisi one of Italy’s prime tourist attractions. It wasn’t always so. The journey to its transformation is also an exploration of the creation of a sacred and religious landscape via one man, St. Francis of Assisi, one of a handful of historical figures associated with a town and a mountain. This chapter thus investigates a unique human conversation with a mountain and how mountainous land that a community considered wild and barbaric can be changed by what they buried in it. It also explores what is believed about human remains that are buried, and how burials in such terrain affect a people’s activities around the mountain and thus change the dynamics between human and mountain. It centres around the events that occurred following the death of St. Francis and the desire by the Franciscan brothers to create a lasting monument to his memory via his human remains. St. Francis was considered to be a phenomenon of his time and his life was full of paradox. A small, dark, nuggety man, born to a wealthy cloth merchant, he was educated as a youth and dreamed of being a knight, yet in adulthood he lived a life of poverty, dressed only in tunic, rope belt, and sandals. Although actively engaged with towns, St. Francis sought inner peace in a hermitage at the Eremo delle Carceri four kilometres from Assisi, built on a rocky outcrop in a steep forest gorge 791 metres above sea level, and higher up the steep slopes of Mount Subasio. His other sanctuary was at La Verna, on Mount Penna, an isolated mountain of 1,283 metres situated 113 kilometres north-west of Assisi in the centre of the Tuscan Apennines above the valley of the Casentino in central Italy. He traversed a wide section of the Apennines and the places that he made his retreats created what Tim Ingold would call ‘a node in a matrix of trails.’ Living through the century that saw the rise of universities, he rejected scholarship and books. As economic wealth increased and the first ducats, florins, and gold crowns were minted, he had a deep loathing for money and the greed and avarice that it carried. He found inspiration in the natural world and he actively encouraged peace in a time full of turbulence and strife. He was instrumental in changing one of the major courses of philosophical religious thinking. In death, his final resting place—the extreme western flank of the town of Assisi, Italy—positioned the location as a pilgrimage site. As a result of this man and the afterlife of his body, a multitude of people drawn to his way of thinking, have engaged in differing conversations with this mountainous location. This chapter considers those ‘conversations’ through the themes of bodies, burials, and bones, and how mountain landscapes shape and are shaped by people who live amongst them and whose stories become mythically entwined with place and landscape

Citizenship and Learning Disabled People: The Mental Health Charity MIND’s 1970s Campaign in Historical Context

Current policy and practice directed towards people with learning disabilities originates in the deinstitutionalisation processes, civil rights concerns and integrationist philosophies of the 1970s and 1980s. However, historians know little about the specific contexts within which these were mobilised. Although it is rarely acknowledged in the secondary literature, MIND was prominent in campaigning for rights-based services for learning disabled people during this time. This article sets MIND’s campaign within the wider historical context of the organisation’s origins as a main institution of the inter-war mental hygiene movement. The article begins by outlining the mental hygiene movement’s original conceptualisation of ‘mental deficiency’ as the antithesis of the self-sustaining and responsible individuals that it considered the basis of citizenship and mental health. It then traces how this equation became unravelled, in part by the altered conditions under the post-war Welfare State, in part by the mental hygiene movement’s own theorising. The final section describes the reconceptualisation of citizenship that eventually emerged with the collapse of the mental hygiene movement and the emergence of MIND. It shows that representations of MIND’s rights-based campaigning (which have, in any case, focused on mental illness) as individualist, and fundamentally opposed to medicine and psychiatry, are inaccurate. In fact, MIND sought a comprehensive community-based service, integrated with the general health and welfare services and oriented around a reconstruction of learning disabled people’s citizenship rights

Editorial—Culture and Cosmos : The Marriage of Astronomy and Culture, Volume 21

This volume of Culture and Cosmos draws together a selection of papers delivered at the 24th annual conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC). The conference, titled \u27The Marriage of Astronomy and Culture: Theory and Method in the Study of Cultural Astronomy\u27, occurred between the 12th and the 16th September 2016 and was held at The Bath Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI), which has been hosting research endeavours since it foundation in 1824. SEAC 2016 combined history with the latest in twenty-first century developments and, for the very first time, was webcast to SEAC members who could not attend, in addition to students of the MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the Sophia Centre University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The papers in this volume are organized around archaeology, ethnography, and images. These are available to download at http://www.cultureandcosmos.org/issues/vol21.php. Other papers from this conference appear in issue 3.2 (2017) of the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology

Increased multiaxial lumbar motion responses during multiple-impulse mechanical force manually assisted spinal manipulation

BACKGROUND: Spinal manipulation has been found to create demonstrable segmental and intersegmental spinal motions thought to be biomechanically related to its mechanisms. In the case of impulsive-type instrument device comparisons, significant differences in the force-time characteristics and concomitant motion responses of spinal manipulative instruments have been reported, but studies investigating the response to multiple thrusts (multiple impulse trains) have not been conducted. The purpose of this study was to determine multi-axial segmental and intersegmental motion responses of ovine lumbar vertebrae to single impulse and multiple impulse spinal manipulative thrusts (SMTs). METHODS: Fifteen adolescent Merino sheep were examined. Tri-axial accelerometers were attached to intraosseous pins rigidly fixed to the L1 and L2 lumbar spinous processes under fluoroscopic guidance while the animals were anesthetized. A hand-held electromechanical chiropractic adjusting instrument (Impulse) was used to apply single and repeated force impulses (13 total over a 2.5 second time interval) at three different force settings (low, medium, and high) along the posteroanterior axis of the T12 spinous process. Axial (AX), posteroanterior (PA), and medial-lateral (ML) acceleration responses in adjacent segments (L1, L2) were recorded at a rate of 5000 samples per second. Peak-peak segmental accelerations (L1, L2) and intersegmental acceleration transfer (L1–L2) for each axis and each force setting were computed from the acceleration-time recordings. The initial acceleration response for a single thrust and the maximum acceleration response observed during the 12 multiple impulse trains were compared using a paired observations t-test (POTT, alpha = .05). RESULTS: Segmental and intersegmental acceleration responses mirrored the peak force magnitude produced by the Impulse Adjusting Instrument. Accelerations were greatest for AX and PA measurement axes. Compared to the initial impulse acceleration response, subsequent multiple SMT impulses were found to produce significantly greater (3% to 25%, P < 0.005) AX, PA and ML segmental and intersegmental acceleration responses. Increases in segmental motion responses were greatest for the low force setting (18%–26%), followed by the medium (5%–26%) and high (3%–26%) settings. Adjacent segment (L1) motion responses were maximized following the application of several multiple SMT impulses. CONCLUSION: Knowledge of the vertebral motion responses produced by impulse-type, instrument-based adjusting instruments provide biomechanical benchmarks that support the clinical rationale for patient treatment. Our results indicate that impulse-type adjusting instruments that deliver multiple impulse SMTs significantly increase multi-axial spinal motion