Gino Wickman

René Boer

If your employees brought their "A-Game" to work every day, what would it mean for your company's performance? Studies have repeatedly shown that the majority of employees are disengaged at work. But it doesn't have to be this way. Often, the difference between a group of indifferent employees and a fully engaged team comes down to one simple thing—a great boss. In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and Rene' Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss—and dramatically improve both your organization's performance and your team's excitement about their work. In this book you will discover: How to surround yourself with great people How to make more effective use of your time The difference between leadership and management and why they're equally important The five leadership practices and five management practices of all great bosses How to create accountability How to develop productive, relationships with each of your people How to deal with direct reports that don't meet your expectations How to Be a Great Boss provides practical tools that you can apply immediately with your people, allowing you to focus on improving and growing your organization and truly enjoy what you do.

How to Be a Great Boss

In the foreword of Smooth City, René Boer writes about changes shaping the city center of Amsterdam nowadays: how the streets once known for their roughness, are now characterized by homogenous aesthetics, minimalist shopping windows and shiny Uber taxis. These are typical characteristics of the ‘smooth city’: a city in which the urge for ‘perfection’, efficiency and control is constantly increasing. It is a kind of city which is sterile, clean and layered with new technologies, which makes urban life seemingly ‘perfect’ and frictionless. It can be questioned, however, whether there is still place for divergence from norms, forms of friction or any alternative in the smooth city?  René Boer argues in Smooth City that this new version of urbanity undermines the democratic nature and the emancipatory potential of cities, and hardly leaves any space for experiment, non-normativity and transgression. Although the book states that the desire for a safe, clean and well-functioning urban environment is understandable, it also provides a framework to challenge this obsession with perfection and to instead collectively work towards porosity in the urban realm. Smooth City offers a critical analysis of the origins, characteristics and consequences of the smooth city and brings some very welcome reflections on the urban reality we are currently living in. The book also contains a series of ‘smoothscapes’, collages made by visual artist and graphic designer Kees de Klein, reflecting on this smooth urban reality.

Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives

Smooth City

Marina Otero Verzier

Katía Truijen

The squatting movement in the Netherlands has played a major role in the design of both the urban fabric and domestic interior, and continues to offer alternatives to the dominant, market-oriented housing policies. This book acknowledges squatting as an architectural practice, analysing six locations through drawings, interviews, and archival material to create a record of past and current struggles, spaces, and oral histories, thereby forming the basis for a new governmental acquisition policy. It brings together the expertise of the squatting movement with architects, archivists, scholars, and lawyers in order to discuss approaches to what are often criminalized spatial practices.

On Squatting as Spatial Practice

Architecture of Appropriation

Amy Chester

This volume considers existing contexts as an opportunity to use the potential of place, as well as the creativity of inhabitants and users and the power of the social and urban fabric, to respond to needs and urgent topics. It outlines eleven actions, compelling examples from different places and design practices worldwide, which in turn are related to an array of architects, design professionals, and other specialists working in art, biology, ecology, fashion, pop culture, and philosophy. As such, it generates a broader framework of thought in order to demonstrate how makers with diverse design attitudes are responding to today?s spatial, social, environmental, and aesthetic challenges.

10+1 Actions for an Adaptive Architecture

Rewriting Architecture

If your employees brought their “A-Game” to work every day, what would it mean for your company’s performance? Studies have repeatedly shown that the majority of employees are disengaged at work. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Often, the difference between a group of indifferent employees and a fully engaged team comes down to one simple thing—a great boss. In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and Rene’ Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss—and dramatically improve both your organization’s performance and your team’s excitement about their work. In this book you will discover: How to surround yourself with great people How to make more effective use of your time The difference between leadership and management and why they’re equally important The five leadership practices and five management practices of all great bosses How to create accountability How to develop productive, relationships with each of your people How to deal with direct reports that don’t meet your expectations How to Be a Great Boss provides practical tools that you can apply immediately with your people, allowing you to focus on improving and growing your organization and truly enjoy what you do.

René Boer

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