Daphne Scott, Waking Up a Leader: Five Relationships of Success

Daphne Scott, Waking Up a Leader: Five Relationships of Success (Lioncrest, 2019), 280 pages, $15 paperback. Daphne Scott’s engaging self-help book argues that effective leaders operate from a position of trust rather than fear and offers practical exercises to enhance mindfulness. Scott describes her own ‘awakening’ that radically shifted her perspective, enhanced her quality of life, and strengthened her ability to connect with and inspire others. Drawing largely from her personal experiences, Scott asserts the key to effective leadership is mindfully addressing key relationships with time, money, ourselves, friends, and the unknown. She argues that mindfulness is a core leadership capacity essential for personal well-being and productivity

Carson Sublett, Bosses are Hired…Leadership is Earned

Carson Sublett, Bosses are Hired…Leadership is Earned (Silver Tree Publishing, 2019), 223 pages, $19.95 paperback. This compilation of instructive stories offers helpful lessons about everything from how to handle a crisis, navigate office politics, and diagnose organizational culture. With extensive leadership experience in the textile and pharmaceutical industries to draw from, Carson Sublett uses the storytelling method to share what he has found to be the foundation for effective leadership. Those beliefs are centered around the need for a leader to “walk the talk” and consistently demonstrate integrity, view feedback as a gift, and create an environment that fosters creativity. Sublett tells his stories with humility, describing both his successes and missteps. He also acknowledges the impact of his own mentors in shaping his philosophy

Facing independence: American Revolutionary portraits within the context of British identity

This paper examines the content of eighteenth-century American and British portraits within the ideologically-expanding context of eighteenth-century British identity. It explores the ways in which Britons and Americans negotiated who they were and, consequently, their claims on society, in the era preceding and including the American Revolution. It does so for three reasons: to advance a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of American portraiture; to motivate further dialogue on the relationship between American and British portraits; and to invoke the potential for American portraits as documentary evidence of social history.;Through historical examination of philosophical influences informing the development of British narratives, Part One considers the contexts within which portraits were produced and the implications of those contexts for the interpretation and presentation of identity. Against this ideological backdrop, Part Two deconstructs the content of selected portraits by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Ralph Earl, William Hogarth, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others in order to come to terms with contemporary perceptions of reality and identity vis-a-vis the dominant narrative.;Broadly speaking, American Revolutionary portraits suggest a standard for identity based on principles drawn from conflicting narratives. This standard intimates an effort to conflate the principal ideals of a dominant neo-Country narrative---those of natural progress, potentiality and virtue, for example---with Liberal and Reformed notions of autonomy, self-determination and industry that denied the doctrines of hierarchy, fixity and birth upon which the traditional ideals were said to depend. The results signaled a gap between British ideology and colonial experience visually manifest as conflicting perceptions of reality. Implicated in these conflicting perceptions was an alternative meaning of life whose suppression may have led, in the end, to revolution

An investigation of the simulated plant-record (SPR) balances life analysis model

The simulated plant-record (SPR) model was applied to unaged data extracted from computer generated accounts of aged data with known life characteristics. SPR reflected the property\u27s life characteristics when all property had the same life characteristics. For property with a trend in vintage lives, SPR detected the trend but also exhibited idiosyncrasies. For example, the model indicated high mode curves with low average service lives (ASLs) or curves with mode at the origin and high ASLs. In some accounts, both high mode and origin moded curves were indicated depending upon the test band. SPR did not indicate a unique curve for some test bands. These idiosyncrasies were explained by reference to the underlying algorithm of the model, and the conditions under which these idiosyncrasies occur were defined;When accounts of unaged and aged data with identical life characteristics were examined, the survivor curves indicated by SPR differed from those indicated by the retirement rate (RR) actuarial model unless all property in the account had the same life characteristics. The difference was explained using survivor curves calculated by the multiple original group (MOG) actuarial model;The impact of the difference in survivor curves indicated by the SPR and RR models was investigated by comparing the depreciation calculated using these curves. Neither model\u27s survivor curves produced annual or accumulated depreciation matching that calculated by the straight-line method, vintage group procedure using the property\u27s known life characteristics. The annual accrual comparisons indicate that the SPR model is a more reliable indicator of ASL than of retirement dispersion pattern;Because of the model\u27s biases and differing indications depending upon the test band, the pattern of installations and balances and the maximum age of the account should be considered with selecting test bands. Since the problems associated with finding an average curve for a variable life account can be avoided if depreciation is calculated by vintage, a semiactuarial model, such as computed mortality, that permits the calculation of vintage group depreciation merits investigation

Leadership After a Tornado Strike: Supply Chain Management Triage

An F2 tornado had tracked less than 100 feet from the Caldwin manufacturing plant, the largest producer of an essential engine value train component in the United States. Bob, Materials Manager at the plant and a member of the senior management team, was at home when the evening storm hit. Bob immediately headed to the plant when he received word of the emergency situation. On his way to the factory a rush of questions nearly overwhelmed him. How bad was the situation? How prepared was his team of employees to handle the situation? What should customers and suppliers be told about the situation? How could Bob best provide the leadership needed in this situation? This critical incident is an actual account of an emergency response situation caused by a tornado that struck near a large manufacturing plant. While the information included in this incident is accurate, the identities of the involved parties have been changed without compromising the educational value of the situation. This emergency situation features several Supply Chain Management (SCM) related challenges related to the coordination and response activities to an unexpected natural disaster. As an experiential activity, this critical incident provides students the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of supply chain management concepts by developing a proposed plan of action to deal with the first seventy-two hours following the disaster

Pulte Homes – Reimagining the Homebuilding Industry

In 2016, William J. (Bill) Pulte, founder, and Pulte Homes’ largest shareholder called for the resignation of CEO Richard Dugas. In his letter to the board of directors, Bill stated the value creation strategy first proposed by Dugas in 2005 had been a major failure. Dugas had a bold vision and intriguing rationale for radically reshaping what he termed the “sleepy” homebuilding industry. Drawing from Toyota and Walmart’s strategies, Dugas argued that Pulte Homes could create greater value by scaling purchasing, improving construction processes, and collaborating with suppliers to lower overall costs while simultaneously refashioning and updating Pulte Home’s product line. By reshaping Pulte Homes’ strategy, Dugas re-imagined the homebuilding industry to be a more efficient and integrated competitive space. This case prompts students to evaluate and critique the validity of Dugas’ reasoning by analogy and underlying assumptions. The case also prompts students to identify industry structural and firm-specific factors that could impact the implementation of the business model

Telepresence and Space Station Freedom workstation operations

The Space Station Freedom workstation system is a distributed network of computer based workstations that provides the man-machine interfaces for controlling space station systems. This includes control of external manipulator, robotic and free flyer devices by crewmembers in the space station's pressurized shirt-sleeve environment. These remotely controlled devices help minimize the requirement for costly crew extravehicular activity (EVA) time for such tasks as station assembly and payload support. Direct window views may be used for controlling some of the systems, but many activities will be remote or require levels of detail not possible by direct observation. Since controlling remote devices becomes more difficult when direct views are inadequate or unavailable, many performance enhancing techniques have been considered for representing information about remote activities to the operator. Described here are the telepresence techniques under consideration to support operations and training. This includes video enhancements (e.g., graphic and text overlays and stereo viewing), machine vision systems, remote activity animation, and force reflection representation