Performance Studies

Master the hidden social dynamics of everyday life with this lively guide to human behavior and embodied culture. Whether you are commuting through a crowded city, scrolling past online challenges, or sitting at a family dinner, every human action is a stage waiting to be analyzed. Satisfy your...

Melbourne, Australia. As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play. Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone. As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.

There's a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization's strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they're misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, "What problem are we trying to solve?"