Perspective: Management

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

Posted by | Sep 19, 2020 | |

Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.

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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Posted by | Sep 19, 2020 | |

This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain – the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the ‘rational’ side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true?

Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master. As he shows, it is the right side which is the more reliable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic – stripped of depth, colour and value.

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The Management of Projects

The Management of Projects

Posted by | Sep 19, 2020 | |

This book provides a comprehensive survey of the issues involved in initiating, securing and accomplishing any project and will answer key questions, such as: How did the discipline grow? What do we mean by ‘project management’? What lessons have been learned – often painfully? And, how can past experiences be distilled into practical advice for those who wish to create and implement successful projects?”The management of projects” examines in detail, the experience gained, and lessons to be learned, from the management of projects over the past 50 years and will provide you with a record of the seminal events and documents in the development of the modern practice of the management of projects: a detailed picture of how project management is and has been practised in different industries, countries and cultures; a sense of the drama and excitement of the real world of projects; international perspective of the discipline; a model of best practice; and, a vision of how the discipline will evolve over the next decade or so.

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The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently — and Why

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently — and Why

Posted by | Sep 18, 2020 | |

When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment…and the different “seeings” are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think – and even see – the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world.

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The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature

The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature

Posted by | Sep 18, 2020 | |

Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a year was, or asked ourselves when now happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature’s laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless.

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