Books by "William G. Spady"
6 books found
Spanning more than three centuries, from the colonial era to the present, Van Deburg's overview analyzes the works of American historians, dramatists, novelists, poets, lyricists, and filmmakers -- and exposes, through those artists' often disquieting perceptions, the cultural underpinnings of American current racial attitudes and divisions. Crucial to Van Deburg's analysis is his contrast of black and white attitudes toward the Afro-American slave experience. There has, in fact, been a persistent dichotomy between the two races' literary, historical, and theatrical representations of slavery. If white culture-makers have stressed the "unmanning" of the slaves and encouraged such stereotypes as the Noble Savage and the comic minstrel to justify the blacks' subordination, Afro-Americans have emphasized a counter self-image that celebrates the slaves' creativity, dignity, pride, and assertiveness. ISBN 0-299-09634-3 (pbk.) : $12.50.
Can commando techniques really work in business? If you can inspire and lead your employees to work at peak performance, they will accomplish fantastic feats for you -- just as fighting commandos do in battle situations. The Navy SEALs. The Green Berets. Delta Force. These are a few examples of what are known as "special ops" -- unique fighting forces trained to beat overwhelming odds on every mission. Using principles like speed, purpose, repetition, surprise, and simplicity, elite units such as these have throughout history accomplished extremely challenging tasks against vastly superior forces. Secrets of Special Ops Leadership reveals the essential methods commando leaders employ, using dramatic real-life stories of commando leadership from biblical times all the way up through Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005, and showing how similar techniques are used by present-day business leaders. You'll learn the fourteen core practices of special ops leadership, including how to: Create the Best - If you think you can just call some of your regular employees together and give them a pep talk and an impossible task to do, you're wrong. Your first task as a special ops business leader is to recruit, select, train, and motivate the right people. Build a Commando Team - Using models such as Carlson's Raiders, who fought for the U.S. Marines during World War II, the book explains how to work with different personalities, agendas, priorities, and motivations to create a team that works efficiently and effectively to get the job done. Dare the Impossible - Like the Sayeret Mat'kal, the Israeli Special Ops unit that staged the miraculous raid on Entebbe to free hostages on an Air France plane hijacked by terrorists in 1976, successful business ops must aggressively seek out opportunities and know when to transcend conventional thinking to stage an assault and act. When they've got the right problems to work on, business commandos can do many times the work of normal employees, accomplish more with less, complete projects against looming deadlines, and create innovative new products and strategies. Secrets of Special Ops Leadership gives you the ammunition you need to get a business commando unit up and running and achieve the impossible for your organization.
Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits - controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary."--BOOK JACKET.
In the wake of the Kennedy era, a new kind of ethnic hero emerged within African-American popular culture. Uniquely suited to the times, burgeoning pop icons projected the values and beliefs of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and reflected both the possibility and the actuality of a rapidly changing American landscape. In Black Camelot, William Van Deburg examines the dynamic rise of these new black champions, the social and historical contexts in which they flourished, and their powerful impact on the African-American community. "Van Deburg manages the enviable feat of writing with flair within a standardized academic framework, covering politics, social issues and entertainment with equal aplomb."—Jonathan Pearl, Jazz Times "[A] fascinating, thorough account of how African-American icons of the 1960s and '70s have changed the course of American history. . . . An in-depth, even-tempered analysis. . . . Van Deburg's witty, lively and always grounded style entertains while it instructs."—Publishers Weekly
Learning Communities 2.0 is an insightful, incisive, and paradigm-shifting critique of today's coercive, "inside-the-box," Industrial Age testing and accountability movement, which authors Spady and Schwahn describe as a politically driven, backward-facing juggernaut masquerading as reform. They call the compelling intellectual, functional, and moral alternative described in this book Empowering Learning Communities (ELCs). Drawing on mountains of insightful research and innovative practices from their vast experience and international consulting work in education, they clearly, systematically, and compellingly describe the distinguishing and defining components of ELCs, why ELCs are desperately needed in today's Age of Empowerment, how ELCs differ from "educentric" schools, how ELCs function, the life-performance outcomes that shape ELCs' instructional priorities, and the strategies, frameworks, and transformational technologies that local communities can use to design and implement the key elements of ELCs in a number of creative ways. This is education's inevitable future.
Total Leaders 2.0 is the twenty-first-century's quick guide to leadership and successful change. It places the best thinking of several dozen, cutting-edge leadership and change gurus of the past two decades into an integrated, compelling, easily understood, and practical leadership framework: the Total Leader 2.0 Model. The model's five domains and fifteen performance roles enable leaders in any field of endeavor to systematically address the challenges of organizational change in today's technologically-driven, dramatically changing world-what the book's first two chapters vividly describe as the Age of Empowerment. This new edition of the widely read Total Leaders book: 1) significantly deepens the theoretical grounding and applicability of the original Total Leader Model, and 2) expands its connection to other significant dimensions of leadership, professionalism, personal empowerment, learning, life, and change. This book provides education leaders with a powerful "outside the box" perspective on today's pressing educational issues and a systematic process-called strategic design-for moving their organizations from an Industrial Age grounding to an Age of Empowerment way of educating for the twenty-first century.