Dr Ioanna Iordanou

Venice's Secret Service is the untold and arresting story of the world's earliest centrally-organised state intelligence service. Long before the inception of SIS and the CIA, in the period of the Renaissance, the Republic of Venice had masterminded a remarkable centrally-organised state intelligence organisation that played a pivotal role in the defence of the Venetian empire. Housed in the imposing Doge's Palace and under the direction of the Council of Ten, the notorious governmental committee that acted as Venice's spy chiefs, this 'proto-modern' organisation served prominent intelligence functions including operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography and steganography, cryptanalysis, and even the development of lethal substances. Official informants and amateur spies were shipped across Europe, Anatolia, and Northern Africa, conducting Venice's stealthy intelligence operations. Revealing a plethora of secrets, their keepers, and their seekers, Venice's Secret Service explores the social and managerial processes that enabled their existence and that furnished the foundation for an extraordinary intelligence organisation created by one of the early modern world's most cosmopolitan states.

The world’s challenges are becoming more and more complex and adapting to those challenges will increasingly come from teams of people innovating together.

The Practitioner’s Handbook of Team Coaching provides a dedicated and systematic guide to some of the most fundamental issues concerning the practice of team coaching. It seeks to enhance practice through illustrating and exploring an array of contextual issues and complexities entrenched in it. The aim of the volume is to provide a comprehensive overview of the field and, furthermore, to enhance the understanding and practice of team coaching. To do so, the editorial team presents, synthesizes and integrates relevant theories, research and practices that comprise and undergird team coaching. This book is, therefore, an invaluable specialist tool for team coaches of all levels; from novice to seasoned practitioners. With team coaching assuming an even more prominent place in institutional and organizational contexts nowadays, the book is bound to become an indispensable resource for any coaching training course, as well as a continuing professional development tool.

This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in coaching, in both practice and educational settings. It will be of use not only for professional coaches, but also for leaders, managers, HR professionals, learners and educators, in the business, public, independent and voluntary sectors. -- Provided by publisher.

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding and practice of managing ethics when coaching in digital environments. In contrast to earlier writings, where the focus has been cast on issues such as artificial intelligence, we place emphasis on the relational perspective, to explore ethical issues for managing ethics in these digital online environments. Given the limited research available in this area, the chapter is informed by findings from research conducted with coaches and coach supervisors as part of the work for this chapter. The organisation of our discussion is framed around the following areas: the ethics of preparation, the ethics of process, the ethics of relations, and the ethics of diversity and inclusion in a global context.

While note taking and record keeping are widely established coaching practices, academic and practitioner literature on them is conspicuously absent. In this chapter, borrowing from the literature on psychology, counselling and psychotherapy, the issue of ethics in note taking and record keeping is addressed by discussing some of the most practical ethical considerations for any coach engaging in these practices. These ethical considerations include confidentiality, informed consent, ownership, timing, storage and disposal, and are very much situated in the sphere of process. Expanding reflections beyond the sphere of process, coaches are encouraged to reflect on the relational value of ethical note taking and record keeping, namely, how the value and purpose of these practices enriches and enhances the coaching relationship. The main argument is that conscious reflection on the purpose and value of note taking and record keeping – aside from the practicalities of these practices – can help enhance the development of a respectful and trusting coaching relationship.

Venice was home to one of the earliest centrally organized state intelligence services which was overseen by the Council of Ten. Intelligence was collected both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. From above, the Ten relied on semi-professional informants such as ambassadors and governors, who picked up information through elite networks and social circles. From below, the Council employed a secret army of amateur spies, often with disreputable backgrounds and motives, who worked either for profit or to have criminal convictions overturned. This chapter discusses the meaning and function of a spy in the early modern period, raising questions about the lack of professionalization that placed spies in the shadows of warfare.

This chapter focuses on ‘secret’ knowledge, that is, privileged knowledge or confidential information on political, military, economic, social, and even cultural matters that were of geostrategic significance for the Venetian state and thus ought to be protected and concealed. In fact, secrecy, that is, official state secrecy, had a pervasive aura engulfing the Venetian government’s state security pursuits. For this reason, the Council of Ten institutionalised it, issuing several formal decrees on the necessity and accomplishment of secrecy for the benefit of effective knowledge transfer. Sixteenth-century Venice was renowned for its obsession with secrecy. Cryptography, that is, the art of writing in cipher, provided the basis for written communication between the Council of Ten and their formal representatives within and beyond the territories of the Venetian dominion. In the early modern era there were different channels of knowledge exchange and transfer; secrecy was only one of them. -- Provided by publisher.

This chapter is based on educating UK Undergraduate Business School students with the opportunities afforded by an Open Space Learning (OSL) environment. Our use of the Arts-based Intervention (ABI) of physical performance challenges normative Business School pedagogy that has been claimed to reduce students to becoming “voracious copy machines” (Beghetto and Kauffman 2009, p. 300).