Controls Books

A good little refresher of the elements of team building, and not just specific to Six Sigma goals. It is a little palm sized book that is easily carried in a brief case for study on the plane or in a waiting room.

This is a must have for all team leaders - very useful in any case (not especially Six Sigma related).

A fantastic Pocket Guide for all members of any kind of Team, not just Six Sigma Teams.

My comments on this pocket guide are the same as those on the other two created by Rath & Strong, except that this pocket guide is probably the one to purchase in bulk quantity so that copies can be distrbuted among everyone directly involved with process improvement initiatives. Thus far, a substantial majority of Six Six programs either failed or fell far short of expectations. Why? Lots of reasons but one of the major ones is dysfunctional teamwork. Hence the special importance of this pocket guide.

Although Rath and Strong do indeed provide a wealth of information about Six Sigma, their "pocket guide" can be of substantial value to all organizations (regardless of size or nature) which need to simplify, thereby improve the process by which they produce whatever they offer for sale. Products, of course, but also professional services (e.g. legal, accounting, management consulting), memberships (e.g. healthcare providers as well as trade and professional associations such as chambers of commerce), and charitable support (e.g. non profit, tax exempt 501 (c) 3 organizations such as college and universities). Chapter One introduces the book's core concept, DMAIC, an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. A chapter is then devoted to each of the five separate but related process components. Rath and Strong explain how this process will guide and inform efforts to increase the ROI of resources to achieve whatever the desired objectives may be. One of this guide's greatest benefits is its ease of use: It can easily be carried within an attaché case, coat pocket, or purse, always available for direct and immediate access whenever needed. Now more than ever before, decision-makers are under great pressure to produce more and better results in less time, and with fewer resources. Hence the importance of improving first pass yield and cycle time, for example. Hence the importance, also, of enabling everyone within a given organization to understand how and why her or his efforts can -- and should -- contribute to the organization's operational excellence. For most executives, Rath and Strong offer a concise, easy-to-access, and well-written source of guidance to effectively defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, and controlling various stages of production of ideas as well as products and services.

Reclaiming the Commons is an excellent read for anyone interested in the natural history of New England, community farming, open space issues, and the value of farms in the landscape. This is a well written, thoughtful book that offers an inspiring vision for a future of locally produced food, protected farmland, and community involvement that farms help to create.

OUTSTANDING!Very impressive! Pointed, engaging, and inspiring from the get-go. And extraordinarily well-written -- my innate and involuntary tendency to mentally edit anything I'm reading was off in another county someplace.

This book,written by a newcomer in the environmental landscape, will become a landmark. It points the way to transform the suburban way of life into one that is sustainable.This it would do by converting suburban open spaces into community sanctuaries for agriculture,husbandry and forestry, administered by suburbanites themselves,especially by their youngsters.The great strength of the proposals is that they have been demonstrated to work by the author and his associates in the upscale Boston suburb of Weston. Another plus is the grace and humor with which the book is blessed.

In Reclaiming the Commons, Brian Donahue has given us a remarkable portrait of a thriving community farm in Weston, Massachusetts called Land's Sake. In 1980 the nonprofit organization Land's Sake was formed in Weston, a suburb of Boston, to work closely with the town's Conservation Commission on managing and using the town's growing public land. Its three founding principles were to care ecologically for Weston's land, to involve the community and especially young people with the land, and to be as self-supporting as possible through the sale of products and services. By thinking of the land as a rural space that could "benefit from our presence, rather than need to be protected from us," they opened the possibility that they could engage suburban youth with the land and produce high-quality natural products for local sale, offering ample educational and recreational activities while striking "a balance between protecting natural ecosystems and making sustainable, productive use of the land."

Land's Sake sends about one-fifth of their fresh organic produce to Boston's homeless shelters and food pantries, as well as sponsoring a Harvest for Hunger every September, thus ensuring that their surplus finds an assured wholesale market (the town pays the price to send the food to the inner city) which benefits the disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the nearby urban areas. Donahue shows that suburbia "is the condition of residing outside the city proper with little functional connection to one's neighbors, aside from the schools, and almost no functional connection to the land," and he shows that community farms on common land offer a vibrant opportunity to keep farmland from being lost to development, and to transform the suburban condition from alienation to connection. This is a surprisingly powerful and exciting book that will show suburban and city readers how to become more connected to their land and to their source of food.

This book write all about reclamation work in changi east reclamation project, Singapore. I think it is like reference for reclamation work. By having this book for reclamation work, other books are not so crucial to have.

The book is an excellent and practical book for the practicing Civil and Geotechnical engineers. It describes the process involved in land reclamation as well as associated ground improvement works. It is a book I would highly recommend to colleagues and students alike.

This book described all the reclamation techniques and also a good refernce for offshore site investigation and geotechnical instrumentation.

Examples on design calculation for settlement and ground improvement are exelllent.

I have been asking my publisher to contact amazon in order to infom speeling mistake in my name in your website for advertisement of both my books.

MY NAME SHOULD BE SPELL AS "Myint-Win BO" as shwon in the inside cover of my books and back cover of my books.

I would like to request you to correct the mistake as soon as possible.

Regards


Dr M W BO (BO Myint-Win)

This book was given to me by a friend who knew I was managing a group involved in improving productivity, and it made me rediscover what improvement meant.

I passed it around to my colleagues to read, so that we could discuss the rationale for implementing specific improvement approaches. Among other things, it made us realize that improving productivity is really all about reducing the number of problems one has to deal with, because fewer problems imply less time wasted in managing crises and more time invested in exploiting valuable opportunities. As trivial as it may sound, this really helped us acquire a new vision of what should be done, and how to go about it.

I now feel better equipped to identify practices that need to be mastered vs. those that are just nice to have. Instead of guessing at approaches that can potentially lead to improvements, my targets are now better defined and my plans more focused.

I have to say that I'm impressed. It is a very well structured book, similar to the CMMI model structure. It has real life problems and solutions, which you can use to imitate or avoid. Tips and practices that you should and should not do are widely depicted throughout the whole book.

If you are on the try to improve the way software is built in your company this book is a good start that will advice you on what should be done.

It's worth the buy, believe me.

This book provides very practical information on what counts most in software process improvement. (This is quite useful if you want to get the biggest bang for your process improvement buck.) There's a lot of wisdom packed into this easy-to-read and entertaining book.

Anecdotes on benefits/consequences of implementing/not improving processes really helped understand why best practices are important, and useful guidance on how to implement them. Easy read that gets to the point. Good explanation of Murphy's Law with details on how to estimate financial losses resulting from risk exposure that can be used in all kinds of situations.

This order was completed just fine. Delivery was prompt and it arrived in good condition. No complaints.

The book is an excellent summary on the topic and more! It provides excellent coverage of state-of-the-art production techniques and the influence of particular procedures and components on device reliability. I suppose that complete newcomers might find it sometimes difficult to understand the background of some contents due to the compact style. However they are rewarded with one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date texts I have ever seen on this subject. Moreover the reader is provided with many references for further in-depth reading. Considering the wealth of information the book provides the author did an excellent job in writing a well readable text.

I would recommend it as a textbook as well as for the experienced scientist/researcher.

This book gives the basic and latest issues in the semiconductor device reliability as well as issues that nails the failure analysts. This book covers all the major issues, including oxide reliability, ESD and electromigration. This book will be and should be considered for the aspring Rel and FA engineers as well as act as a refresher to those hardcore professionals.

I have a filing cabinet full of papers on various aspects of materials reliabilty: solder stress calculations, mechanical behavior, diffusion, corrosion mechanisms, etc. Professor Ohring's book neatly summarizes all of that into one coherent text, covering topics such as electromigration, electrostatic discharge, solder mechanics, corrosion, semiconductor devices and more. But rather than touch on the practical aspects of these failure modes, as do several reliability books I already own, he delves into the underlying fundamental mechanisms involved, providing equations and explanations. This is why I consider Ohring's book a true textbook on the subject. The detailed explanations are valuable to me in that they provide a springboard from which to analyze more complex issues. For anyone involved with reliability of materials in electronics, I highly recommend this book. And one more thing: in some places Prof. Ohring writes with a refreshing informality. For example, he talks about defects and KILLER DEFECTS (his words and capitalization!). I just laughed when I saw that.

Kelly has created a program second to none. In just a couple of days this program helped me to reprogram my subconscious and allow me freedom from nicotine and emotionally driven food. Thank you Kelly for your lifetime of work in order for this change to come about and put me back in the driver seat of my life!

Burris has my full endorsement. I recommend that all of my associates and clients get his book, do the homework and listen to the reprogramming CD. I personally have benefited from his mind fitness techniques as a individual and especially as a teacher. His methods are easy to learn and implement. They empower you from within, not tell you what to do. Burris is original and brilliant! Truly an 'Aha!' sense of this really works, when I've tried EVERYTHING.

Carol Miller
President
Encore Personal Training
Las Vegas, Nevada USA

As the author of this book I can tell you definitively that the quotes Trisha Brudsal put in her review do not exist on the CD. You can read the first two chapters of the book or listen to the first track of the CD by going to KellyBurris.com.

Kelly Burris' Reprogramming The Overweight Mind is at the cutting edge and one of the most valuable assets I have come across. I should know. I tried and was successful on Atkin's. I loved the thought that I could eat food and still lose weight. But, you know after awhile, you get tired of steak, prime rib, etc. and desire a big fat carb overload. And in fact, that is what I did after losing 20 pounds on Atkins. And soon I was back to my old weight plus a few pounds. As a 55+ male, I felt frustrated and was not eager to start the climb back to monitoring my carbs. So there I was stuck. Again.

When I first encountered Kelly's book, I was skeptical. Another gimmick. Another diet. So I did nothing. And yet, something happened along the way.

I encountered a new mind set. It was NOT done consciously. But I started to look at food differently. I made better choices. I made conscious choices. I started to avoid a few of the key ingredients Kelly pointed out as being "bad" for you. I read labels and found High Fructose Corn Syrup was all over the place...even in one famous person's Old Fashion Lemonade. I stopped putting sugar in my coffee. I drank more water. I found if I bought convenient size bottled water, I drank more. All of these changes were made by me as a willing accomplice. My mind set had changed. And I had a new perspective.

After awhile, I noticed that my pants were loose. That I could bend over more easily. But I didn't pay much attention to it. After all, I wasn't dieting so I figured I was imaging it.

At one point, I decided to get on a scale...and to my surprise, I found I had lost 20 pounds. I had gone from 251 pounds to 231 without any effort. And yet, I did not feel like I had deprived myself of anything. In fact, I felt well fed.

And that is the moment I realized what Kelly was talking about. Reprogramming the Mind. Subconsciously. Indeed, I had done just that without the trauma of dieting, deprivation and all the other things that go along with losing weight. And I have no desire to go back to my old habits.

I don't know about you. But if you were like me...overweight, late 50s, less than optimistic...maybe you should consider Reprogramming Your Mind.

Anyone who has ever worked in an organization has witnessed the paralysis that sets in with failure, reprimand, disappointing results or unfulfilled expectations. That recognition is palpable throughout this book. The deepening loss of power that follows seemingly small pitfalls or mediocre human interactions is extremely damaging and spreads to each and every aspect of an organization. Martin does a great job of both carving out the territory of these viral disempowerments, and of showing us how to bring greater authenticity to our work and communication to turn around these conditions. A correction in the psychological or cultural environment can be powerfully segued into an opportunity for more strategic thought and alignment of behavior with an organization's vision. Having seen so many of these cultural viruses do irreparable harm to both people and business results, the book has become a wonderful addition to an arsenal of tools that is never complete. I highly recommend The Responsibility Virus to business-people of any level of authority.

Amie Devero, Author of Powered by Principle: Using Core Values to Build World-Class Organizations

Ever notice how offices (maybe even yours) are split between the doers and the idlers? Ever notice the resentment that accrues in workplaces where control freaks do everything and ne'er-do-wells do nothing? Ever wonder how such jaded office environments came to be, and whether they ever could change?

Well, step right up, dear reader, because this book decodes the phenomenon that cruelly saps the morale out of even the most capable of offices. Labelling this task imbalance as the `responsibility virus,' Roger Martin seeks to render a diagnosis and prognosis of this nefarious sickness. Martin, with the assistance of psychological and biological principles, explains how the basic `fight or flight' response leads many to assume too much or too little responsibility in times of stress. This results in a causal chain reaction where the other workers correspondingly take positions on the opposing end of the spectrum to best complement this initial game opening. As Martin ably explains, these positions are never static; over-responsible persons eventually become under-responsible, and vice versa. This is essentially a never-ending dance that may eventually destroy an entire office.

So what to do, you ask? Martin proposes four separate strategies that are designed to purge the workplace body of this virus, all of which may be used on their own or in combination with the others, depending on the state of the virus' evolution and the players' goals. These different methods all have the share the same central goal: maximizing inter-office collaboration and thereby ridding the workplace of the responsibility virus. They are all very easy-to-understand and readily adaptable to many workplaces. Martin's generous use of case examples also provides a context to identifying problems and their respective solutions.

Martin's most intriguing strategy is to redefine the nature of true leadership and, by extension, corresponding `followership.' Martin entreats the reader not to accept the canard of the `man on the horse;' the heroic, all-knowing, all-powerful leader who can jump into the fray at any given moment and single-handedly solve a vexing problem, while his minions listlessly stand by waiting for the hero to save the day. Rather, true leadership fosters collaboration; followers contribute to the best of their abilities and open lines of communication are maintained throughout the various levels of management.

In all, this is a persuasive read that is very ably argued. Although I felt the conclusion was a bit rushed (where Martin makes a u-turn from his central argument that people's actions are dictated by their governing values), readers would be hard-pressed to write the book off as unhelpful. Use it in your business life or even your personal life; the book is a powerful suppressant of the responsibility virus.

This book explains in very simple terms why some people are so driven while others just go on a cruise and the relationship between the two.
If you ever feel overwhelmed at work and often find yourself wondering why others don't pull their own weight - this book is for you.
If you feel like you could do so much more at work if only given a chance but lack the confidence or the knowledge to go for it - read this book.

Roger Martin has lain down business organizations in the therapist chair, but you won't notice it because the author avoids skillfully the psychological labels currently in vogue.

If you often wonder about why you end up working more than others, why some people don't understand what you clearly state or why everybody sees what is wrong in the company and they don't do anything to fix it, this book is for you. It goes to the root of the problem, explains it plainly and offers a step by step program to solve it. The book also provides a better understanding of what's behind the Enron debacle and the government agencies mishandling of security issues before, during and after September 11.

It doesn't matter if the reader is a CEO, a manager, a professional or a secretary, he or she will find familiar faces and situations; people that could be your boss, your vice-president of sales or your managing editor. Why do we have the chance to see ourselves and others in these pages? The book is simply about human nature. It deals with the underlying emotions, culture and language that make many bureaucracies what they are: an incompetent and unfulfilled mass of otherwise intelligent, good and hard working people.

Martin explains that lack of collaboration between leadership and other parties in the organization brings an unbalanced approach to responsibility. The author describes what he calls the "heroic leader", which takes more responsibility that he or she should. Conversely, the other parties react giving up responsibility. Once the leader is unable to meet the goals, he or she sits back and takes the position of the followers. Meanwhile the frustrated followers take responsibility for their part, but because they can not attain the needed broad or bold solutions, parties induce the leader to take again more responsibilities that he or she can handle, and the infectious cycle of dependency starts again.

The mysterious Responsibility Virus is nothing more than the very human fear of failure. According to Chris Argyris, cited in the book, there are "governing values" that guide the way we interpret and deal with the world. They reside so ingrained in human nature that they apply to people across ages, cultures, economic status, and educational levels. Humans-Agyris claim--will always try to win, maintain control, avoid embarrassment and stay rational in any situation. Fear of failure triggers the governing values and they make us either take more responsibility (fight) or abdicate responsibility (flight).

Martin proposes the use of some "tools" to improve collaboration (choice structuring process), eliminate the mistrust and misunderstanding (frame experiment) and to balance capability and responsibility (responsibility ladder) among the parties in the organization. All these tools have the general objective of untying the person from the situation that requires attention and put aside the biased frame of mind from which we see the problem. Once all the parties involved in decision-making have a better perspective of the issue, they are in a position to find a middle ground between capabilities and responsibility.

It is at the end of the book, redefining leadership, when Martin describes the leader as what sociologists or psychologists would call a mature personality. According to the author, a leader should be capable of splitting responsibility through dialogue, apportioning responsibilities in keeping with capabilities, but more importantly, making apportionment discussable and subject performance to public testing. Although he doesn't mention it, you have the sense that it is the leader a significant carrier of the responsibility virus and also accountable for spreading his or her fear of failure throughout the organization.

In these times of leaders finger-pointing at each other and frustrated managers turned into audacious whistle-blowers this book is a timely required reading to understand not only organizations but the world around us.

I have struggled my entire marriage with disabling feelings of shame, guilt regarding sex. In counseling I was able to use this book to pin-point the specific things that were bothering me, and with specific information I was able to approach my husband in a way that he was able to understand that he wasn't to blame and to change his methods to be supportive to my healing. We're both committed to life-long marriage, but this book may have saved our relationship.

Men who are loooking to give their spouces fullfilment in all aspects need to read this. It has helped us in our mariage.

My wife and I have used this book in working with the Penners and were able to transform our sex life from having problems to a fun filled and exciting time that has brought us much closer
together in our total marriage

This book is very thorough and offers great step by step guides to enhancing sexual intimacy among married couples with many biblical references. Great book and unbelievable resource. Still a work in progress.

For the first few million years of life, time was measured by sunrise and sunset. Now we have switched to clocks. But the biological clocks that are within all of us don't know how to read clocks. Breakfast, lunch and dinner occur at standard times. Tooth pain is lowest after lunch; proof reading and sprint swimming are best performed in the evening; labour pains more often begin at night and most natural births occur in the early hours; sudden cardiac death is more likely in the morning (from Chapter 1).

The study of biological clocks has gone on for a long time, but as a science is a fairly recent development. Research in just the last few years has dramatically altered the way scientists view them. This book is a snapshot of the way the science appears right now. The pair who wrote the book are a leading researcher in the field and a professional science writer. This is a good combination that gives good enjoyable writing combined with accurate reporting.

What do the disasters of the _Titanic_, the _Exxon Valdez_, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the Union Carbide plant explosion in Bhopal all have in common? They involved human error, and they all happened when the humans ought, by biological fiat, to have been sleeping. We are ruled by our clocks now, but even in the unnatural world we have made for ourselves, we cannot get away from the natural clocks that our cells expect us to follow. Like almost all living things in the planet, from plants to bacteria to birds, we have "a biological clock that was first set ticking more than three billion years ago." In _Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing_ (Yale University Press), Russell G. Foster, a professor of molecular neuroscience, and Leon Kreitzman, a writer and broadcaster, have examined the investigations of a relatively new science, chronobiology, to show just how much sway natural time has over us and other organisms. It isn't just a tale of sleepy people in control making bad judgments, although cognition and prudence do have their daily cycles. We tend to have babies (natural birthing) in the early mornings, and heart attacks in the later morning, and lovemaking around 10 p.m. Physical coordination, liver metabolism, body temperature, heart rate, kidney function, and much more all are paying attention to the biological clock, and when we jump time zones or do shift work, we do so at our peril.

Many of these cycles are specifically examined here, along with the historical hunt for the biological roots of the rhythmicity. A couple of the chapters dealing with the dance of molecules will be daunting for those uninitiated into the basics of cellular biology, but they do well to show the intricacies of the molecular mechanisms and the depth of work that has been done in this field. There are not just daily rhythms, but annual ones. Migratory birds the whole world over know when to start their travels north or south; they do so not by counting the days or paying attention to when the weather changes, but by regulation from the annual changes of lengths of day and night. Plants cannot migrate, but they are regulated by day length, too; wheat flowers, for instance, when the days get long enough, and barley does so when the days start to shorten. The almost universal attention that species pay to daily or annual changes indicates that success comes from being able to predict when winter, or summer, or nightfall, or other events, are coming, and from timing leaf drop, coitus, or swimming upstream to meet the optimum times and conditions. Evolution has selected the species that are best able to predict the future.

In the famous experiments where humans lived in caves or other light-deprived environments, with no capacity to tell time, they eventually locked into their own cycles of a little more than 24 hours. Like most creatures, we have an internal daily rhythm which is not exact, but only approximate; the day night cycle (or for us, such cues as an alarm clock) "entrain" the internal cycle and keep it synchronous with the rest of the creatures on Earth. There are mutant rats and flies who have cycles that are too long or too short, and researchers have productively transplanted brain parts to find out where the actual clocks are. Chronobiologists (a term that even some chronobiologists think of as pompous) are not just doing ivory tower investigations. There are many practical implications of this sort of work. Breast cancers, for example, have an annual pattern of increased and decreased growths, and so searching for the cancer would be more productive at certain times of the year. Chemotherapy for cancers involves poisoning the cancer cells with drugs that are also poisons for regular cells, but cancer cells, with their out-of-control growth, lose their rhythm of growth and division that normal cells retain. Thus it is possible that administering anti-cancer drugs at the time of day when they will interfere the least with the normal cells could reduce the worrisome side effects of the drugs. Asthma is most prevalent at night; medicine for it would be best taken in higher doses at nighttime, rather than every eight hours. The timing of doses in some cases may be as important as what the doses contain. The authors have given a detailed but readable introduction into a new science that will have increasing importance for human health as more is learned.

A comprehensive and fascinating book about the last few decades of chronobiological research. Are you a "early bird" or a "night owl"? Do you want to know how to deal with jet lag and winter blues? Are you interested in biological rhythms from a scientific or professional point of view? The you have to read this book immediately. It contains nearly everything you always wanted to know about rhythms but were afraid to ask. It's a must-read for medical professionals, psychologists, teachers, trainers and consultants of all kind.

A comprehensive and fascinating book about the last few decades of chronobiological research. Are you an "early bird" or a "night owl"? Do you want to know how to deal with jet lag and winter blues? Are you interested in biological rhythms from a scientific or professional point of view? The you have to read this book immediately. It contains nearly everything you always wanted to know about rhythms but were afraid to ask. It's a must-read for medical professionals, psychologists, teachers, trainers and consultants of all kind.

Excellent book with wonderful advice and recipes. I really am seeing results following this way of eating. :)

I started the Rice Diet Solution on 2/16/2007. Today 9/20/2007 and I have lost 93 pounds and am still going strong. I highly recommend this diet to anyone who has tried every diet and failed!!

This really is a very worthwhile book to read, and I feel it is a very healty way to shed some pounds. I could only give it three starts because the serving portion examples were SO limited. You really have to read the author's previous book "Heal Your Heart" to get the full spectrum of food choices for this program. The Q&A section was lacking, and only a few questions were raised and answered. I didn't get a sense of what it's really like to follow a program that is so different from the mainstream diets. Protein is extremely limited, for example. All that aside, I still would recommend buying this book if you are really serious about losing weight and gaining health.

This diet really works for me. I love pasta and rice. I lost 20 pounds in one and a half months and I didn't feel deprived. I have since slipped a few times but it is very easy to get back on the right track.