Showing results by narrator "Mark Schectman"

Are you frustrated or disenchanted by the results of your Agile approach? Does Agile sound like a good idea, but you're not sure how to explain it beyond roles, practices, and meetings? Is your team going through the motions, but it's still business as usual? The missing piece is the Agile mindset - the thinking that makes Agile processes work.

In 1946, George Orwell traveled to the house of an acquaintance in Scotland to write his final book. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for a long time, although it’s hard to know how long exactly.

Who polices America's prosecutors? And when they set their sights on an innocent CEO, can he survive a five-year, $25 million legal labyrinth to save the company he built, and himself from prison?

Volcanologists have a flair for understatement. Here is the term for the roiling, spattering 2,000-degree Fahrenheit liquid rock visible in the caldera of Kilauea volcano this afternoon: lava lake.

During the early 19th century, the Supreme Court’s term was so short that the justices would leave their families behind when they came to Washington. Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall arranged for the Supremes to live together, in hopes that shacking up in boarding houses or inns would instill a sense of fraternity among them. It did.

The integrated circuit, better known as the semiconductor chip, has unleashed change comparable to the Industrial Revolution by making the computer revolution and the digital age possible.

Frank DiCara is 90 years old, but he still remembers what it felt like to wake up an enemy in his hometown. It was 1941, and he was a 14-year-old kid in Highlandtown, an Italian-American neighborhood in Baltimore, when news broke that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into war with the Axis Powers of Japan, Germany and Italy.

That’s when the town's former residents voted it out of corporate existence. Only one elderly couple still lived there at the time, according to a report published in The New York Times. Three years previously, the town had been home to 2,242 residents, who were all suddenly evacuated when it was revealed that their dirt roads had all been sprayed down with a mixture containing the toxic chemical dioxin—the main ingredient in Agent Orange.

The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is - a representation of geographic information - and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually.

Federal agencies are starting to embrace scenario planning, a tool developed by the military to plan for thermonuclear war .

The Cyber Risk Handbook is the practitioner's guide to implementing, measuring, and improving the counter-cyber capabilities of the modern enterprise. The first resource of its kind, this book provides authoritative guidance for real-world situations, and cross-functional solutions for enterprise-wide improvement.

In Ancient Egypt, inanimate objects--particularly images created for tombs or temples--were believed to contain latent magical powers.

Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’” read the astonishing headline. In the summer of 1942, a press release from the New York offices of All-American Comics turned up at newspapers, magazines and radio stations all over the United States.

John Anderson’s Liberty Street cigar shop was no different from the dozens of other tobacco emporiums frequented by the newspapermen of New York City. There only reason it was so crowded was Mary Rogers.

It's National Beer Day—the anniversary of the Cullen-Harrison Act of 1933, which—in the second decade of Prohibition in the U.S.—legalized beer and wine with an alcohol content of 3.2 percent or lower in the U.S. It was one of the first important steps in the repeal of Prohibition.

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain the existence of menopause, a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives. Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children with decades still left to live?

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have put an end to World War II, but they weren’t the only destructive weaponry developed during the war.

A letter written by Charles Darwin in 1875 has been returned to the Smithsonian Institution Archives by the FBI after being stolen twice. “We realized sometime in the mid-1970s that it was missing,” says Effie Kapsalis, head of web, new media and outreach for the Smithsonian Institution Archives. “It was noted as missing and likely taken by an intern, from what the FBI is telling us. Word got out that it was missing when someone asked to see the letter for research purposes,” and the intern replaced the letter.

By the mid-1800s, tuberculosis had reached epidemic levels in Europe and the United States. The disease, now known to be highly infectious, attacks the lungs and damages other organs. Before the advent of antibiotics, its victims slowly wasted away, becoming pale and thin before finally dying of what was then known as consumption. The Victorians romanticized the disease and the effects it caused in the gradual build to death.

The path to success is littered with failures, but fortunately someone is following the innovators of the world, picking up their discarded projects and putting them in a museum. That's Samuel West, a psychologist who studies creativity and work. He's curating the new Museum of Failure, which opens this summer in Helsingborg, Sweden.