Systems Thinking With Flowers

Download or read book Service Design for Business written by Ben Reason and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical approach to better customer experience through service design Service Design for Business helps you transform your customer's experience and keep them engaged through the art of intentional service design. Written by the experts at Livework, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers' needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You'll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward. Highly visual and organized for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organizational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers' eyes. Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organizations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers. Approach customer experience from a design perspective See your organization through the lens of the customer Make customer experience an organization-wide responsibility Analyze the market factors that dovetail with customer experience design The Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product—the organizations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers' wants. Service Design for Business gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organization.

Download or read book Thinking in Systems written by Donella Meadows and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Download or read book Lightning Flowers written by Katherine E. Standefer and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

Download or read book Sidewalk Flowers written by JonArno Lawson and published by Groundwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Illustrated Book A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year In this wordless picture book, a little girl collects wildflowers while her distracted father pays her little attention. Each flower becomes a gift, and whether the gift is noticed or ignored, both giver and recipient are transformed by their encounter. “Written” by award-winning poet JonArno Lawson and brought to life by illustrator Sydney Smith, Sidewalk Flowers is an ode to the importance of small things, small people and small gestures. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.7 Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.

Download or read book Technology Meets Flowers written by Eric van Heck and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do the Dutch continue to play a central role in the global production, sales, and distribution of flowers? What are the origin and history of the bulb and flower industry in the Netherlands? How are Artificial Intelligence (AI), complex algorithms, and modern distribution systems ensuring that fresh flowers reach their destination on time? This very entertaining and informative book introduces readers to the global flower business, and highlights the surprising factors that helped the Dutch become global leaders on the flower markets. The book reveals the complexity of the flower markets in terms of their ability to produce, transport, and deliver fresh flowers on a global scale. In addition, it explores how information advantage is created by blending business with technology, from robotized glasshouses to the use of AI-driven algorithms for flower production and distribution. In closing, the book presents lessons learned regarding the circular and digital transformation of the high-speed flower business and markets in order to deliver sustainable value for customers. Combining the light beauty of flowers with the harsh language of the digital universe is a masterfully executed task in this book, organized as a bouquet of algorithms, data science, and digital platforms. Mandatory reading for all those interested in the flower business as well as for those who want to know more about the perfume emanating from digital systems. Eduardo Diniz Professor and Head of the Technology and Data Science Department, Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo, Fundação Getulio Vargas, São Paulo, Brazil This unique book leads you through the bulb fields and auctions of the Netherlands, through history, logistics, auction design, and Internet technology, to draw lessons in business management from the study of flowers. With beautiful illustrations. A tour de force. John Kay Economist, Author of Radical Uncertainty and Greed is Dead, and Fellow, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom If you want to understand the impact of information and technology on a fascinat- ing industry, this book is a must-read. The author explains in a highly intriguing way how innovations propelled the flower industry from the sixteenth century till today. Whether you are working in the flower industry, a business student, academic, or just intrigued by the business behind flowers, you will enjoy this book! Martin Mocker Professor of Information Systems, ESB Business School, Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany. Research Affiliate, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, Cambridge, USA

Download or read book The Naming Book written by Brad Flowers and published by Entrepreneur Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAME YOUR BUSINESS. TELL YOUR STORY. Advertising and marketing masters from Ogilvy to Godin have proven the value of words when it comes to building a brand, attracting an audience, and making a sale. In our increasingly crowded and noisy world, a name is the foundation of every product, brand, or business—and it needs to stand out. In The Naming Book, Bullhorn Creative founder and partner Brad Flowers presents a clear framework for crafting and choosing the name that sticks. With a five-step blueprint that takes you from brainstorming to trademarking, this book is the ultimate guidebook to naming anything. You’ll learn how to: Set clear goals for your name and brand before you start Craft a brainstorming list based on your business mission Build a brand unique to you by creating your own word Find the balance between “cool” and clear Narrow down your list of names with five easy tests

Download or read book Strange Bright Blooms written by Randy Malamud and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginia Woolf famously began one of her greatest novels: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. “We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them,” writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the “nature” in these displays is tamed and conscribed. Randy Malamud seeks to understand the transplanted nature of cut flowers—of our relationship with them and the careful curation of their very existence. It is a picaresque, unpredictable ramble through the world of flowers, but also the world itself, exploring painting, murals, fashion, public art, glass flowers, pressed flowers, flowery church hats, weaponized flowers, deconstructed flowers, flower power, and much more.