RESUMOComo uma profissão do tempo dos escribas, o secretariado se desenvolveu significativamente ao longo do tempo, contudo a pesquisa nesse campo parece não ter acompanhado o papel dos praticantes. Atualmente a especialização requerida do profissional de secretariado envolve não somente as habilidades que anteriormente caracterizavam seu trabalho mas também um conjunto de novas habilidades mais relacionadas com a administração da organização. Essas podem incluir mas não se limitam à viabilização de resultados que de forma geral inclui o envolvimento em gestão da mudança, criatividade e empreendedorismo, planos de aumento da produtividade, ações de corte de custos e gerenciamento de projetos. Devido à complexidade que caracteriza o ambiente de negócios e os projetos das empresas, este artigo busca investigar o papel do profissional de secretariado na gestão de projetos complexos. Como uma pesquisa exploratória, três casos foram estudados em empresas globais nas quais projetos complexos fazem parte de sua realidade e o profissional de secretariado existe oficialmente. Os resultados demonstram que o envolvimento desse profissional foi muito positivo para o desempenho do projeto devido à forma como ele forneceu suporte ao gerente do projeto e à equipe do projeto. Tanto as habilidades hard quanto as soft foram muito importantes para o desempenho do projeto, especialmente a comunicação, a negocição e a atitude. O secretariado executivo evoluiu de uma perspectiva operacional para uma estratégica. Para continuar crescendo na profissão o secretário precisa aprimorar seu conhecimento sobre gerenciamento de projetos.Palavras-chave: Profissional de Secretariado; Projetos Complexos; Gestão de Projetos. THE ROLE OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE PROFESSIONAL IN THE MANAGEMENT OF COMPLEX PROJECTS ABSTRACTAs a profession that dates back the scribes' time, the secretariat has significantly evolved over time but research on this field seems not to follow the practitioners' role. Nowadays, the specialization required from the administrative professional involves not only the previously skills that for long time characterized the secretary's job but also a set of new ones that are more related to the organization's management. They may include but are not limited to enabling results in a wide sense as getting involved in change management, creativity and entrepreneurship, productivity increasing plans, cost cutting actions, and project management. Due to the complexity that characterizes the business environment and companies' projects, this article aims at investigating the role of the administrative professional in the management of complex projects. As an exploratory research, three case studies have been conducted with global companies in which complex projects are part of their reality and the administrative professional is officially existent. Findings show that the involvement of this professional has been very positive to project performance due to the way he supported the project manager and the project team. Both secretary's hard an...

PurposeAs value innovation becomes a core top management concern, there is a growing recognition that “design thinking,” or the creative principles long associated with the design function, may now have something very significant to offer when applied more broadly to business management and strategy development. This paper aims to investigate this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyzes the techniques of Roger Martin, one of design thinking's most widely recognized advocates. Martin introduces a set of concepts that are not familiar to most managers: the knowledge funnel, the distinction between reliability and validity, and abductive reasoning.FindingsUsing case examples of leading companies such as Proctor & Gamble, the paper shows how they have developed a capacity for design thinking.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper presents case reports.Practical implicationsThe paper provides a detailed description of how Proctor & Gamble and its CEO A.G.Lafley introduced and implemented design thinking.Originality/valueThis is a unique exploration of value innovation in general and how design thinking can be a key capability for company leaders.

Because of the reaction of cosmic rays with elements in minerals, chlorine-36 accumulates in rocks exposed at the earth's surface. This suggests that the ratio of chlorine-36 to stable chloride can be used as a geochronometer. Reasonable agreement has been obtained between measurements of chlorine-36 in volcanic rocks of known age and calculations of chlorine-36 production based on rock composition and cosmicray flux. The buildup of chlorine-36 should be a useful means for measuring the surface exposure time of young volcanic rocks and geomorphic features in the age range of 10(3) to 10(6) years.

T oday, CEOs are under constant pressure to find new sources of growth in an increasingly demanding and competitive business environment. To meet this challenge, CEOs must learn to inspire their organizations to new levels of inventiveness in everything that they do, not just in marketing or new product development. Much can be done by most organizations to boost their overall innovation. It starts with learning to tap into the creative potential of all the employees and their knowledge about customers, competitors, and processes, and the key is to establish the right organizational climate. Beyond this, many organizations also need to learn how to make themselves more attractive to more diverse and unconventional talent. Traditionally business organizations have not been the most hospitable to the unusual person with a different view of the world. In seeking to make their organizations become more driven by new ideas and new approaches, however, CEOs should not be tempted to regard innovation and creativity effort as a free-for-all. Turning ideas into commercial reality requires persistence and discipline, and overall effectiveness ultimately depends on top management being able to find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency. Generating the right organization climate Few organizations today come near to mining the full innovative potential already at their disposal. They can learn a lot from an example like Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is particularly good at harnessing the ingenuity of its people and leveraging it to drive growth and competitiveness. Every store is treated as a mini-laboratory, where every day countless small experiments are taking place with pricing, product selection and merchandising displays, as employees are encouraged to look for new ideas to increase throughput. The most promising are quickly taken up and replicated across the Wal-Mart network using the company's state-of-the-art satellite communications system so that their impact is fully amplified throughout the operation. Even in an industry like mass-retailing, not known particularly known for innovation, the power of ideas can be used to drive significant growth by companies that know how leverage it. Today, as the lure of mergers and acquisitions is fading, many companies like P&G and Glaxo, are returning to innovation as the primary strategy for driving new growth and doing it '' Turning ideas into commercial reality requires persistence and discipline, and overall effectiveness ultimately depends on top management being able to find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency. ''

In contrast to traditional projects, which are assumed to be fully specified and then executed with little learning anticipated, complex projects cannot be fully specified at the outset and require continuous learning over their life cycles. Nevertheless, the key role of knowledge formation and learning in managing complex projects is under-developed for expanding project capability boundaries to include knowledge uncertainty and indeterminacy.Drawing inspiration from Karl Weick's enactivist ideas and an empirical study of two organizations that developed project capability for complex projects, the paper develops an integrated view of projects and project management that is grounded in problem solving learning and organizing.More specifically, a project is reconceptualised as 'a mode of organizing to accomplish a temporary undertaking' with intrinsic learning. This perspective views complex projects under knowledge uncertainty as learning organizations, with implications for project management theory and practice.

This article begins by looking at how the concept of learning has informed our understanding of competitiveness. It then goes on to examine the fresh perspective that the notion of learning opens up on the traditional concerns of corporate strategy, diversification and vertical integration, and on the link between strategy and structure. Next, the association between learning and innovation is discussed. The final part of the review concentrates on the promise that the concept of learning appears to hold as a model for the strategy process itself and the advantages that it offers over more traditional planning and decision making approaches. The article concludes on a cautionary note, warning against the tendency to see learning as inherently virtuous and apolitical, and critically assessing the issues, challenges and implications that still face us in working with the concept in the strategy field, despite its early impact and current promise.

Abstract-Software development is a complex socio-technical activity, with the result that software development organisations need to establish and maintain robust software development processes. While much debate exists regarding the effectiveness of various software development approaches, no single approach is perfectly suited to all settings and no setting is unchanging. The capability to adapt the software process is therefore essential to sustaining an optimal software process. We designed an exploratory study to concurrently examine software process adaptive capability and organisational performance in 15 software development organisations, finding that companies with greater software process adaptive capability are shown to also experience greater business success. While our exploratory study of the complex relationship between these phenomena is limited in some respects, the findings indicate that software process adaptive capability may be worthy of further integration into software process engineering techniques. Software process adaptive capability may be an important organisational strength when deriving competitive advantage, and those responsible for the creation and evolution of software process models and methodologies may want to focus some of their future efforts in this area.

The research literature informs us that a software development process should be appropriate to its software development context but there is an absence of explicit guidance on how to achieve the harmonization of a development process with the corresponding situational context. Whilst this notion of harmonization may be intuitively appealing, in this paper we argue that interaction between a software development process and its situational context is an instance of a complex system. In Complexity Theory, complex systems consist of multiple agents that interact in a multitude of diverse ways, with system outcomes being non-deterministic. Complex systems are therefore noted to be difficult to control, such as is the case with many software development endeavors. If the interaction of software processes with situational contexts is representative of a complex system, then we should not be surprised that the task of software development has proven so resistant to attempts to produce generalized software processes. We should also seek to ameliorate the software development challenge through the adoption of techniques recommended for use in managing complex systems, not as a replacement for the many software process approaches presently in use, but as complement that can aid the task of process definition and evolution. CCS Concepts• Software and its engineering ➝ Software creation and management ➝ Software development process management ➝ Software development methods.