Great teams don’t just happen. How often have you sat in team meetings complaining to yourself, “Why does it take forever for this group to make a simple decision? What are we even trying to achieve?” As a team leader, you have the power to improve things. It’s up to you to get people to work well together and produce results. Written by team expert Mary Shapiro, the HBR Guide to …
Our histories of global exploration and encounter in the long eigh-teenth century are often drawn from the scientific voyages of discovery and their richly illustrated books, like John Ross’s A Voyage of Discovery(1819). Ross voyaged in the Enlightenment tradition of Bougainville and Cook, who had returned to Europe in ships laden with knowledge in the form …
What is depression? What is bipolar disorder? How are they diagnosed and how are they treated? Can a small child be diagnosed with depression and treated with antidepressants - and should they be? Covering depression, manic depression, and bipolar disorder, this Very Short Introduction gives a brief account of the history of these concepts, before focussing on the descriptions and understand…
This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to Classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur. We are all Classicists - we come into touch with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the tr…
The Second World War was a new type of war; it was a global, mobile and unpredictable war. It was ‘among the most destructive conflicts in human history’, in which over forty-six million people perished, often in the most frightening and inhuman conditions.1 The latter years of the inter-war period witnessed a modernisation of the mili-tary technologies that had been use…
In recent research, there has been growing emphasis on the collaborative, social, and collective nature of musical behaviour and practices. Among the emerging hypotheses in this connection are the idea that listening to music is always listening together and being with the other; that music making is a matter of intercorporeality, mutuality, and emphatic attunement; and that creative agency in …
Though the guitar as we know it is only about a century and a half old, its roots as a plucked stringed instrument go back deep into history. Many ancient folk instruments have followed the basic strings-stretched-overfretboard-and-played-with-fingers design for thousands of years, and the guitar is in some ways the culmination of that legacy. It seems humans have always had something like the …
An in-depth study of the large mosaic pavement in the East Church at Qasr el-Lebia in Cyrenaica, Libya. Consisting of fifty panels, each panel with a different image, it has frequently been dismissed as random with no overarching scheme. This book argues that the remarkably rich and complex mosaic should be understood as a coherent whole.