The Road To Excellence

Author: K. Anders Ericsson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317779053
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Book Description
Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance. This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues. EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.

The Road to Academic Excellence

Author: Philip G. Altbach
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821388061
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
This book examines the experience of 11 universities in nine countries around the world that have grappled with the challenge of building successful research institutions in difficult circumstances and outlines key lessons of from this experience.

Teaching Sport and Physical Activity

Author: Paul G. Schempp
Publisher: Human Kinetics
ISBN: 9780736033879
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
The book reveals the key techniques and strategies that all successful teachers and coaches use to help their students and athletes achieve success. It covers how to create stimulating learning environments, how to form effective relationships with students, how to teach motor skills, how to manage the lesson time and resources to aid students' learning, how to maintain a dynamic pace of instruction, and how to master other indispensable skills that apply no matter what sport is being taught.

The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence

Author: Al Stubblefield
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118046099
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
An insider's look at corporate culture at one of Fortune’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in America A business can purchase, imitate, or replicate most of its elements, but when a business places its competitive advantage with its people, it can become the market leader. The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence illustrates how Baptist Health Care went from a customer satisfaction rating of less than 20 percent to being consistently ranked in the 99 percent range. Written by the man who made it happen, this book sets benchmarks and best practices for organizations to measure themselves against by creating a service-centered culture that cares first and foremost about customer satisfaction. "This crystal-clear book offers to any who will listen invaluable, detailed guidance on how and why to move toward a true culture of excellence in hospital care. It isn't easy, but, as their results show, it's a journey well worth taking." —Donald M. Berwick, MD, president and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence presents tested principles and best practices to help improve your corporate culture and customer satisfaction, which will lead to loyalty, stability, sustained productivity, and profitability in your own organization. Order your copy today!

Development of Professional Expertise

Author: K. Anders Ericsson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Book Description
Professionals such as medical doctors, aeroplane pilots, lawyers, and technical specialists find that some of their peers have reached high levels of achievement that are difficult to measure objectively. In order to understand to what extent it is possible to learn from these expert performers for the purpose of helping others improve their performance, we first need to reproduce and measure this performance. This book is designed to provide the first comprehensive overview of research on the acquisition and training of professional performance as measured by objective methods rather than by subjective ratings by supervisors. In this collection of articles, the world's foremost experts discuss methods for assessing the experts' knowledge and review our knowledge on how we can measure professional performance and design training environments that permit beginning and experienced professionals to develop and maintain their high levels of performance, using examples from a wide range of professional domains.

Toward a General Theory of Expertise

Author: K. Anders Ericsson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521406123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
During the last twenty years our understanding of expertise has dramatically increased. Laboratory analysis of chess masters, experts in physics and medicine, musicians, athletics, writers, and performance artists have included careful examination of the cognitive processes mediating outstanding performance in very diverse areas of expertise. These analyses have shown that expert performance is primarily a reflection of acquired skill resulting from the accumulation of domain-specific knowledge and methods during many years of training practice. The importance of domain-specific knowledge has led researchers on expertise to focus on characteristics of expertise in specific domains. In Toward a General Theory of Expertise many of the world's foremost scientists review the state-of-the-art knowledge about expertise in different domains, with the goal of identifying characteristics of expert performance that are generalizable across many different areas of expertise. These essays provide a comprehensive summary of general methods for studying expertise and of current knowledge about expertise in chess, physics, medicine, sports and performance arts, music, writing, and decision making. Most important, the essays reveal the existence of many general characteristics of expertise.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

Author: K. Anders Ericsson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456466
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 31

Book Description
This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.

Public No More

Author: Andrew J. Policano
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804782199
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
Public No More examines the quickly changing environment within higher education, including the permanent decline in state support for public universities. This book raises the question of how research universities can survive with reduced subsidies and increased competition from both non-profit and growing for-profit institutions. Authors Gary C. Fethke and Andrew J. Policano, both longtime university administrators, offer a strategic framework for determining how tuition and access should be set and how universities should decide on quality and program scope. Throughout the text, real-world examples illustrate successful and unsuccessful adoptions of the authors' proposals. Leadership within public higher education, policymakers, and researchers alike will find Public No More to be a sober and well-grounded guide to what lies ahead for universities across the nation.

Excellence Wins

Author: Horst Schulze
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 031035210X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Horst Schulze knows what it takes to win. In Excellence Wins, the cofounder and former president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company lays out a blueprint for becoming the very best in a world of compromise. In his characteristic no-nonsense approach, Schulze shares the visionary and disruptive principles that have led to immense global success over the course of his still-prolific fifty-year career in the hospitality industry. For over twenty years, Schulze fearlessly led the company to unprecedented multibillion dollar growth, setting the business vision and people-focused standards that made the Ritz-Carlton brand world renowned. In Excellence Wins, Schulze shares his approach to everything from providing the best customer service to creating a culture of excellence within your organization. With his tried-and-true methods and inspiring, hard-earned wisdom, Schulze teaches you everything you need to know about: Why leading well is an acquired skill Serving your customers Engaging your employees Creating a culture of customer service Why vision statements make a difference What it really means to practice servant leadership Schulze's principles are designed to be versatile and practical no matter where you are in your career. He'll remind you that you don't need a powerful title or dozens of direct reports to benefit from the advice he shares in Excellence Wins--you have everything you need to apply it to your life and career right now. Let Schulze's incredible story help you unleash the disruptive power of your true potential, beat the competition, own your career trajectory, and experience the game-changing power of what happens when Excellence Wins.

Scaling Up Excellence

Author: Robert I. Sutton
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0385347030
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Wall Street Journal Bestseller "The pick of 2014's management books." –Andrew Hill, Financial Times "One of the top business books of the year." –Harvey Schacter, The Globe and Mail Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows. Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries-- including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare-- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people-- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.