Chapter 2 defines leadership and outlines a leadership approach to studying China’s politics and economy, centered on the top-ranked individuals in public-sector organizations. It explains how the autonomy of Chinese public-sector leaders originates from multiple sources: the discretion built into the CCP’s cadre management system, guanxi (关系) with superiors and allies, decentralization of authority in the Chinese bureaucracy, and policy ambiguity and uncertainty. It critically reviews recent studies of China’s politics and economy to uncover the importance and influence of leadership. It concludes by discussing how a leadership approach helps to account for divergence, inaction, and subversion in reform outcomes.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

Recent historians usually see Home Secretary Robert Peel as a committed opponent of real criminal law reforms, content to hang large numbers of people. He did indeed enter office determined to diffuse reform momentum in parliament and succeeded in doing so, but only for a time. In fact, in pursuing the two reforms that William Paley deemed crucial to relinquishing the “Bloody Code” – preventive policing and more deterrent secondary punishments – Peel behaved like someone who believed his concessions might not hold back the tide of urbane public opinion for long. This was also apparent in his alterations to sentencing practices at assizes and his increasingly careful attention to execution levels in London. Even his consolidation measures were of more genuinely humane consequence than is usually recognized. Indeed, so adaptable to urbane opinion did Peel seem to his older, more determinedly conservative colleagues that by 1830 he inspired their distrust.

Chapter 2, “The Killing Years,” explains the two-wave Nazi police genocide against the intelligentsia in 1939–1940, its fallout, and how these initial killing campaigns shaped the Nazi German occupation administration for Poland. German anti-intelligentsia campaigning was bloody but ultimately drove the resistance it attempted to thwart. The first campaign, codenamed Operation Tannenberg, was coordinated with the military campaign in 1939 but delayed in Warsaw because of the siege. Tannenberg went awry and was complicated by the circumstances of the invasion and incoming occupation. After Nazi Germany established a civilian occupation under general governor Hans Frank, Frank revived anti-intelligentsia killing with his new campaign, the Extraordinary Pacification Action (AB-Aktion). This campaign’s violence shocked Poles and provoked the resistance it was intended to achieve. This chapter argues that the two Nazi genocidal campaigns failed but shaped the nature of Nazi occupation administration, and encouraged the first violent Polish resistance in response.

The envoyship of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī generated expectations of succession, culminating in Ibn Rawḥ al-Nawbakhtī’s accession to the role upon his death. Quasi-Imamic mechanisms of designation (naṣṣ) and initiatic inheritance (waṣiyya) were invoked to support this. However, it is argued in Chapter 6 that long-present pressures against a centralizing Imamate now led to the collapse of the envoyship. Ibn Rawḥ fell afoul of the complex machinations of the ʿAbbasid court. He was imprisoned, then was challenged by his aide, Shalmaghānī, who claimed to embody Imamate and divinity. Ibn Rawḥ issued a denunciation of Shalmaghānī, and the caliph al-Rāḍī had him executed as a heretic. However, soon after Ibn Rawḥ’s death, a rescript from the hidden Imam declared the termination of the office of envoy. Thereafter, the diffuse leadership of earlier elites, especially scholars, came to replace the centralizing bureaucratic leadership of the envoys, and the defunct envoyship was canonized as orthodox history.

Chapter 4 argues in favor of seeing medieval justice as penitential justice with the ultimate goal of spiritual reform. Medieval society blurred the lines between sin and crime, penance and punishment. Recognizing this distortion is how one makes sense of peine forte et dure. Pain as an experience is key to the performance of penance. Through physical pain, the disordered soul is righted and the sinner gains entrance to heaven. Fasting, seclusion, denial of luxuries – these are all ascetic practices with a long association with Christian penance. Even pressing with weights appears as a penitential practice in numerous sermon stories from the era. Exposing the uncooperative sinner to an ascetic lifestyle, even if it was against his wishes, was in the best interests of the defendant’s soul. As a coercive measure, it helped to begin the process of purging his sin before he agreed to place himself in the hands of the jury. As such, he displayed to jurors his willingness to reform his ways and reconcile with the Christian community.

This chapter examines the ECtHR’s supranational authority in detail analyzing the Court’s classical function of providing judicial review, its remedial practice as well as the new advisory jurisdiction as introduced by Protocol 16. Acknowledging that the ECHR system cannot be connected to a larger autonomous political unit, the claim is put forward is that the ECtHR nonetheless provides for a complementary layer of public authority which directly operates on individuals alongside that of domestic legal systems. The ECtHR enjoys a broad measure of autonomy over states and may circumvent the state veil by placing individuals under international protection or responsibilizing domestic authorities. The direct interaction with domestic actors not only represents part of the Court’s supranational authority but informs, at the same time, its legitimacy as the Convention community feeds on domestic actors, individuals especially, directly submitting their arguments to the Court.

Carrying out the innovation creation and delivery plan that was created in the first execution stage is the aim of this final level of The Innovation Pyramid. Launching new innovations has challenges beyond those of a typical internal-company project in that they generally involve collaborators and adopters outside the innovation-creating organization. This means that multiple environments and multiple points-of-view, in addition to the innovation-creator's internal environment and point-of-view, must be appraised. A modification of Drucker's core management-by-objective framework is introduced to assure alignment of all the people and activities associated with the plan's successful implementation.

The remainder of the chapter focuses on performing a post-execution variance evaluation of the plan's implementation. Such a review allows the implementation team to hone in on the learnings attained from carrying out the developed plan. All four aspects of the plan are reviewed: Operations, Delivery, Resources and Risks. A poor plan execution does not automatically mean the implementation team underperformed. The issue may lie with people or environments well beyond the core team.

The Innovation Pyramid is an inverted triangular pyramid. The methodology for creating impactful solutions to real problems separates the innovation's design from its execution. It further bifurcates design into identifying the real problem before crafting a solution to it. Execution is similarly bifurcated into execution planning and implementation. The four stacked levels of The Innovation Pyramid, from top to bottom, represent Problem Identification, Solution Formulation, Planning and Implementation; two design stages followed by two execution stages. The Pyramid has three faces. These three pyramid sections address three different aspects of designing and executing impactful solutions:

What: What is the desired outcome at that level?

How: How will this be accomplished or enabled?

Who: Who will lead the activities and/or is impacted by the outcome of this level?

This structure streamlines innovation creation as well as providing a structural means for diagnosing the cause of the variance between the actual and forecasted impact of the innovation. This diagnostic aspect is especially important when we may be traversing The Innovation Pyramid structure multiple times, once for say, prototype development, and a second time for the final product launch.

In Chapter 22, the authors describe the beliefs and practices of writing teachers. They employed interviews to identify the principles and practices that teachers consider to be crucial features of good writing teachers.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.

Not all captured Australians survived the tumult of battle. After the 7th Brigade’s failed attack on the Windmill at Pozières on 28 July 1916, a German officer approached an Australian Lewis gunner nursing a bullet wound to his leg. ‘You are the Machine Gunner?’ asked the officer. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man replied. Without hesitation, the officer drew his automatic pistol and shot the man through the heart and the head, killing him instantly. ‘That’s the way to deal with English swine.’

This chapter provides the background on the institutional and legal setting of the book by reviewing the operation of the Tribunale del Torrone, the court that produced the majority of the book's documentary evidence.

This chapter discusses the Easter Rising of 1916 and its aftermath. The rebellion had a largely Catholic cast, which has produced a belief that Catholicism and republicanism are connected. This chapter traces the experiences of those Protestants, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, who rebelled in 1916. It also discusses those Protestant nationalists who did not take part but who observed the rebellion. This chapter discusses religious conversion and the Rising, and shows that the majority of Protestant rebels did not convert to Catholicism. Many Protestant rebels first realised the increasingly Catholic nature of their movement while held in internment camps in Britain. The final section assesses the occasionally negative reactions of Protestant republicans to this realisation.