Böcker av Rod Collins

Congratulations! You have secured a position as a manager...so now what? With your job description folded securely in your pocket, you set out for your first day on the job. Do you really know what to do when you get there? As you navigate your journey ahead, this straightforward guide will help you with the decision-making, identifying key people, and taking effective action.If there were a manager's Hippocratic Oath, it would begin, as this book does with First Do No Harm.Let this book be your guide. You'll learn how to: - Create a positive work environment.- Define and understand the culture of your organization- Understand the effectiveness of "management by wandering around."- Find your leaders and set them free.- Negotiate from principles, issues, and values.- Practice leadership.- Encourage the best in people.- Manage the inevitable.- Bring your compassion to the workplace.- Unleash human spirit and creativity.- Be brave. Here's help for the road ahead.

Someone is helping themselves to funds at the Land and Cattleman's Bank, and senior teller Susan McDowell knows who. But shy report this to the police when weaving her web if simple extortion will yield a better return? Elsewhere, an unrelated suspicious death leads to a manhunt and the capture of confessed killer Bill Casey. When Oregon Lake County Sheriff Bud Blair reads the autopsy report, he begins to suspect that someone other than Casey is the actual killer. Set in a sparsely settled, high-desert landscape of fault scarps, hot springs, big lakes, and timbered mountains, Spider Silk is also a love story. Burned badly by divorce, Bud steers shy of women, but his work makes it almost impossible to avoid contact with Nancy Sixkiller, the beautiful Yakama Native American who managed the emergency Service Center for Lake County, Oregon. When a chase and gunfight injure Bud, and Nancy takes on the role of caregiver, feelings begin to become mutual.

What is the connection between a dead sailor in Washington State and the Lake County, Oregon, murder of an identified John Doe? The more information that turns up, the worse things seem. Is the Navy trying to hide something? Does a drug-running ring in Christmas Valley have connections to the Middle East? What's up with Crazy Charlie? And is the bottle-and-cans man who drifted into town really who he seems to be? When the dust settles, Sheriff Bud Blair is left with a new homicide to solve, a suspicion that a mole is hiding in the NCIS, and an unpaid debt to a man who doesn't officially exist--the mysterious Stone Fly.

The Reverend Thomas Jefferson Wildish leads back to a high-ranking jihadist in Portland, Oregon. It also leads to a confrontation between Sheriff Blair and fifty bikers bent on freeing their friends, "or we'll tear your town apart." In Portland, FBI Special Agents Wilcox and Brandt investigate a tip about a cargo ship container sitting on Portland's Pier 6 dock. As they unravel the mystery behind the container, the web expands to include jihadists, bikers, and a rogue FBI agent. When unsubstantiated rumors are leaked of a terrorist plot to kill thousands of people in Portland, the ensuing chaos tests the city's disaster plans and the patience of first responders.

Hunted by the terrorist assassins working for the elusive Bloodstone, Lake County Sheriff Bud Blair uses the ego and arrogance of a former U. S. congressman to set a trap for a Colombian drug lord. NCIS, the FBI, and the U.S. Coast Guard wait for the trap to be sprung while Bud battles the paid assassins in the Oregon High Desert. At risk are Bud's life, his career, and his planned marriage to a beautiful Yakima Indian woman, Nancy Sixkiller. But when Bud is injured in a gun battle, he and Nancy face a difficult and painful decision.

Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody questions the conventional thinking that prescribes how we organize work. For well over one hundred years, the centralized top-down hierarchy has served as the prototypical model for managing the work of large numbers of people Despite its longstanding presence in everyday social life, the centralized top-down hierarchy is an idea whose time has passed. The notion that the most effective way to organize the work of large numbers of people is to leverage the intelligence of an elite few by giving them command-and-control authority is no longer a sustainable proposition. That's because, in our new Digital Age, the world is changing much faster than any single person or any elite group of like-minded individuals can absorb.The book highlights the sudden unprecedented challenges of a radically different business world, describes why conventional management models are ill-equipped to meet these challenges, and acquaints readers with a new organizational paradigm-the self-managed peer-to-peer network-where leadership and decision-making are exercised by teams rather than individuals. The book spotlights three organizations that have decades of experience in using collective intelligence and shared power to assure their longevity as they navigate business environments continually transformed by increasing change and escalating complexity.Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody is for leaders who are open to learning about the extraordinary advantages that self-managed networks provide through better and faster problem solving, more effective and efficient work processes, and consistent customer satisfaction and profitability. You will become proficient with practical steps you can take to build organizations that can change as fast as the world around you.

In the years following the Civil War, former Union soldier John Bitter and his wife, Morgan, have overcome the relentless hardships of traveling to Oregon from Missouri along the Oregon Trail and have settled into a peaceful and contented life in Abiqua with their two sons. When Anna Franklin, the impetuous daughter of State Representative Peter Franklin, runs away with her unscrupulous fiancé to get married-or so she believes-the congressman asks John Bitter, now a Pinkerton agent, to find her and bring her back.Accompanied by his Native friend, Owl, John's journey takes the reader to the wilds of Eastern Oregon during a time of unrest among the native tribes, and Canyon City's gold fields. Along the way a vow of revenge from outlaws results in life-threatening injuries for John. With Owl's help, John's recovery and continued search for Anna become a mission for justice as well.This is also a tale of a state that votes anti-slavery and still passes the Exclusion Act which prohibits black freedmen and former slaves from living in the state of Oregon, a sad display of prejudice that lures John Bitter into state politics.Following Rod Collins' Bitter's Run, Abiqua is ¿lled with colorful characters-real and imagined, law abiding and lawless-in a galloping adventure of courage, loyalty, and the pioneering spirit.

John Bitter scanned the hilltops with his field glasses, blaming unfamiliar territory for his uneasy feelings, but past experience taught him not to ignore his hunches. Something's brewing, he thought. Following Lee's surrender of the Northern Army of Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox, Captain John Bitter of Abiqua Creek, Oregon musters out of the 40th Missouri. A loner, Bitter plans a quick ride home over the Oregon Trail. The good Lord, however, has other plans for him. After a month on the Trail, two gun battles, a bruising fistfight to settle a blood feud, a new wife, and two adopted sons, Bitter tells Rockford, his big, mean, black horse, "This sure complicates the business of getting back to Oregon." Bitter now finds himself the leader of a mixed entourage going west: a black pioneer family earlier wagon trains shunned; an Irish rebel turned galvanized Yankee; a dispossessed Cherokee turned Cheyenne medicine man; the rescued sister of a Bannock chief; a white boy adopted by the Cheyenne; and a scout for the Union Army who is also one of the richest men in Oregon. Bitter's Run is a spirited and adventurous tale. Told in three parts, it portrays the realities and uncertainties of life on the Oregon Trail, of war-weary men seeking or returning to a homestead in Oregon, and of the courageous women who rode with them.