What can you learn from the world's most successful companies? Marvel characters have been shaping pop culture for decades and when comic books were no longer keeping the company afloat, Marvel Studios was born. Marvel Studios is the multibillion-dollar home to iconic franchises. They are known for creating brilliant multilayered worlds and storylines that allow their audiences to escape into a fantasy and inspire the creative side of every viewer. But, behind those visionaries is a well-oiled storytelling machine dedicated to getting the Hulk's smash fists in the hands of every child and a sea of Spiderman costumes deployed every Halloween. The Marvel Studios Story educates you on how one of the largest creative companies in the planetary universe runs their business and keeps their fans and their parent company, Disney, counting the profits. Through the story of Marvel Studios, you'll learn: How to recognize and pursue additional revenue streams. How a company can successfully balance the creative with business to appease investors and fans alike. And how to keep a decades-old superhero franchise new and exciting without losing sight of its roots. The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history's most successful movie studios.

This book introduces e-Roadmapping--a new tool set for executives and entrepreneurs who need to strategize in the new economy. The rapidly changing commercial environment and new focus on innovation and speed of execution means that for many organizations the old models of assessing the competitive landscape and forecasting a long-term strategy are dead. So how are company leaders to plot their future and maintain a sense of direction for their business? "E-Roadmapping" examines ways of dealing with this complexity and provides a tool-kit for formulating strategy with an entrepreneurial spirit. Stefan Bornheim demonstrates models of "mapping" the business landscape, pin-pointing areas of competition, and planning an organization's transformation. Based on extensive in-company research and full of examples of the models in action, "E-Roadmapping" is a stimulating look at the sharp end of the new economy.

The lack of adequate and timely IT involvement in the merger and acquisition process costs companies millions of dollars every year. Current research shows that IT accounts for 20-30% of the post-acquisition benefits in a merger or acquisition, and it is growing. With M&A activity back on an upwards trend, the need to get IT right has never being greater.
- How can a merger be achieved in today's business world with successful use of IT?
- How can companies avoid M&A failure and additional risks in an IT M&A project?
- What should your company be doing about IT when contemplating a merger or acquisition?
This book addresses these topical questions and provides the answers. By presenting new analysis and research, this book appeals to multiple audiences. Whether you are an international group or small company, a practitioner CIO or IT manager, a consultant or senior manager there are plenty of management and technical best practices to give you a practical insight into how to make use of IT in a M&A transaction.

The definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. Find out why Adam Grant says "If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place."

Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, The Friction Project by bestselling authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao teaches readers how to become “friction fixers.”

Sutton and Rao kick off the book by unpacking how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of others’ time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then their help pyramid shows how friction fixers do their work, from reframing friction troubles they can’t fix right now, so they feel less threatening, to designing and repairing organizations. The heart of the book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction troubles: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams.

Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao are here to help. They wrap things up with lessons for leading your own friction project, including linking little things to big things; the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs; and embracing the mess that is an inevitable part of the process (while still trying to clean it up).

The 6th International Asia Conference on Industrial Engineering and Management Innovation is sponsored by the Chinese Industrial Engineering Institution and organized by Tianjin University. The conference aims to share and disseminate information on the most recent and relevant researches, theories and practices in industrial and system engineering to promote their development and application in university and enterprises.

Remarkable is more than just a word. It's a vision. It's the art to create meaningful impact to prospects and customers. Being remarkable is something that I believe every company can achieve. The Remarkable Effect was written to help tech-entrepreneurs-on-a-mission shape the software business they've always aspired to run: Remarkable and Impactful. In The Remarkable Effect Ton Dobbe reveals the ten traits that define a remarkable software company. Stacking them up behind each other will not only help you stand out in your category, but also create clear leverage of value; exponential value, not just incremental - hence 'The Remarkable Effect.' It might be, however, you aren't the CEO (yet!) and are still selling products day to day with prospects, or maybe you are at the strategic helm of your company looking for solutions to uniquely position the value you have to offer, or potentially you are looking for fresh product strategy perspectives to keep you stay one step ahead. If your goal is to further the business you own, run or work for, this book for you. It is not about processes and procedures - the 80% under the water. This book is about the 20% that will separate you from the rest. The ideas and strategies in this book have been proven to be highly effective for start-ups, underdogs, established market leaders (who are often in danger of losing their edge), small companies, large companies and everything in between. There's an art and a science to being remarkable, and it hasn't got anything to do with where you are on your journey. So, are you ready to take the journey to unleash the remarkable effect inside your software business?

Emerging from the authors' work with companies such as Coca-Cola, Motorola, 3M, General Motors and Unilever, The Delta Project provides a unique model through which to develop strategy in the new economy. Hax and Wilde examine how globalization, deregulation and the emergence of the internet infrastructure have changed the rules for success and identify three distinct strategic positions that can be used to realign the direction of your business. Introducing new models of 'bonding', 'complementors' and 'customer lock-in' this book provides a fundamental shift in the way we think about competitive positioning.

This book provides managers, leaders and practitioners with a dynamic framework that links several variables associated with performance management which can be applied across organizations and industries worldwide. Based on empirical evidence and experiences, this book provides a critical understanding of the interrelationship of organizational culture with performance management process (PMP) planning and implementation. The elements of the framework are approached from a macro-level-view and are balanced with conciseness and realism based on applied success studies, making this book a valuable educational, training and development resource tool for leaders and managers at all levels. The topic of performance in organizations is like the weather-everyone likes to talk about it, but few understand what is truly happening-or understand why? Individuals and organizations are no different when it comes to performance, regardless of performance level of focus: individual, team, unit, or organization-wide. Teams and organizations often miss opportunities to not only improve performance, but also leverage and sustain high performance. Organizational performance, organizational culture and organizational success are interrelated and should reinforce one another. This can be achieved through an effective performance management process (PMP) that lives, functions and thrives at multiple levels within institutions. This book will help organizations and institutions achieve performance management success by identifying comment elements, along with some patterned variation, that are applicable to a successful PMP. Featuring hands-on resource reference tools for immediate use and application, this book is useful for leaders, managers, scholars, students and policy makers in management, leadership, and organizational culture.

This book, written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, explores the transformation of organizations in today's volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. It demonstrates the need to manage organizations in a dynamic way, and to revisit and in some cases reinvent working and leadership styles that seemed appropriate during past decades and centuries. In turn, the book puts forward a model based on three distinct pillars of organization and leadership to suit disruptive times: the concepts of 'Sustainable Purpose', 'Travelling Organization', and 'Connecting Resources'. These pillars challenge many of our traditional organizational patterns and meet the need for effective transformative approaches.

This book addresses the core challenges currently faced by traditional companies. In the age of digitization many industries are now challenged by disruptions of the traditional value chain: new competitors are coming into play, traditional products don't sell any more, and profits are at risk. As such, CEOs need to adopt new business models for these established industries, while many companies have to reinvent themselves by developing new products for new markets. In this book, leading CEOs share their experiences in transforming established companies. They provide insights on transforming industries and demonstrate what it takes to redefine companies from the ground up. Issues such as organizational transformation, new product development, implementing a new organizational spirit, and many more are discussed.

Drawing on the author's recent and ongoing research this book explores how to build the organizational capability to realise the strategic potential of information technology. It tackles the gap between theory and practice and how to gain wider adoption of successful socio-technical and benefits-driven approaches to investments in IT.

For many business owners, navigating a path to success can be compared to walking through a minefield. New business owners - as well as those operating mature businesses - often face unexpected problems at every bend in the road. Confronting these challenges need not be as fraught with worry and confusion as it may appear. Ken Boyar, a business consultant and CPA with more than 25 years of experience will guide you through some of the more common problems entrepreneurs face. Through his examples, you will learn not only how to avoid common mistakes but how to gain the tools you need to fix problems that may have already occurred. This primer on the "do's and don'ts" of business operations will help set you on the path to mastering your own small business.

Globalization has created an increase in the number of business opportunities presented to enterprises. A competitive market places demands on businesses to think differently and follow new approaches to managing their business goals and remaining acceptable to suppliers and service providers. Effective Open Innovation Strategies in Modern Business: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a comprehensive resource that focuses on the importance of interdisciplinary concepts in open innovation projects. Using case illustrations, the book examines concepts such as virtual reality, knowledge harvesting, and business process reengineering in relation to open innovation initiatives. As a publication exploring the areas of management and information technology disciplines, this resource is useful for corporate executives, business managers, entrepreneurs, business professionals, and graduate-level students seeking current research on business innovation techniques and approaches.

This book combines various analyses of strategic priorities in a competitive market environment, focusing on the balanced scorecard technique, but also considering customer expectations, organizational requirements, financial outcomes and technological infrastructures. The first part explores the financial impacts and performance measurement of investments, while the second part examines customer demand in a globalized environment. Part three then addresses organizational quality and internal processes, highlighting participatory elements and synergies. Lastly, part four investigates strategic learning in enterprises as a factor for sustainable economic success in times of change and disruption.

This book explores the luxury industry and how it has undoubtedly been one of the fastest-growing sectors since the 1970s, and one in which Europe has managed to strengthen its competitiveness in the world market. While many aspects of globalization remain abstract and intangible, the luxury industry has created markets where previously there were none, by educating Japanese about the history of French handbags, Chinese about the finest wines, and setting global standards for an elite, inspirational lifestyle. In this edited volume, a wide range of scholars comes together to analyze the history of the business and the innovations in management and marketing that have emerged from it. Invaluable for scholars, industry figures, and dilettantes alike, it will define the field of study for years to come.

This book investigates the EU's regional growth dynamics and, in particular, the reasons why peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged areas have persistently failed to catch up with the rest of the Union. It shows that the capability of the knowledge-based growth model to deliver its expected benefits to these areas crucially depends on tackling a specific set of socio-institutional factors which prevents innovation from being effectively translated into economic growth. The book takes an eclectic approach to the territorial genesis of innovation and regional growth by combining different theoretical strands into one model of empirical analysis covering the whole EU-25. An in-depth comparative analysis with the United States is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of the European process of innovation and its territorial determinants. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of EU development policies.

Towards 2020, a rapid changing landscape will emerge in Asia where the opportunities for Asian companies to benefit from international branding efforts will be larger than ever before. The growing emphasis on shareholder value and brand strategy to drive value will move up the boardroom agenda and become one of the most prominent drivers of value in Asia Pacific.
Asian Brand Strategy offers insights, knowledge and perspectives on Asian brands and branding as a strategic tool and provides a comprehensive framework for understanding Asian branding strategies and Asian brands, including success stories and challenges for future growth and strengths. The book includes theoretical frameworks and models and up-to-date case studies on Asian brands, and it a must-read for Asian and Western business leaders as well as anyone interested in the most exciting region of the world.
The book presents the Asian Brand Leadership model illustrating the paradigm shift Asian brands need to undertake to unleash their potential.
First, mindsets and practices need to change in the Asian boardroom. The book invites a complete shift in the way Asian boardrooms think of branding: from a tactical view to a long-term, strategic perspective, from fragmented marketing activities to totally aligned branding activities, from a vision of branding as the sole responsibility of marketing managers to branding as the most essential function of the firm led by the boardroom.
Second, this new perspective must be steeped into a more acute perspective on the consumer behaviour patterns. Asia is not a homogenous entity. Even more importantly, Asian countries are more and more traversed by cultural flows permeatingthe region: cinema, music and fashion trends that are present extend beyond national borders to capture the imagination of millions. Branding and brands do not operate in vacuum, but are closely linked to developments in society, to people and to cultures.
Third, managers wanting to succeed in Asia need to abandon the idea of an oriental Asia of the past. Asian consumers are all vying for an Asian type of modernity that has nothing to do with colonial imagery.
Fourth, to create iconic brands, Asian managers will have to become trendsetters. The perspective developed in this book is that, in order to be successful, Asian brands need to capture the spirit of the region, but they also need to lead the way by creating that spirit.
Finally, this shift can be achieved only if everybody in the company is convinced by the power of branding and if all strategies and actions are aligned around the brand. This must be led by the Asian boardroom.

This book is based upon the operating system of the company, Added Value, founded by the author, and now one of the world's largest marketing and branding consultancies. With the use of many examples and case studies the author shows how the five I's process--Insight, Ideas, Innovation, Impact, and Investment Return--can be used to create top-line demand-led growth and the tools and techniques available to achieve this. This is a unique approach with proven success.

This book provides a general overview of the challenges of economic development for the five billion people living in developing countries. While they constitute over 80 percent of the world's population, they account for only 40% of the world's output, and are home to 2.6 billion people living on less than $2.00 per day. Thinking on economic development has shifted over time. Early theories that stressed capital formation and a heavy reliance on the public sector proved inadequate. Gradually, economists began to see that development was a complex, multifaceted problem that combined economic issues with problems of poverty and income distribution, insititution building and governance. While there have been many failures, there have also been many successes. Countries such as China, Chile, Ghana, and Korea demonstrate that good policies and strong institutions can result in remarkable progress. However, many poor countries, particularly those in Africa continue to lag behind. Closing this gap remains a major challenge for the world, particularly as the growing population and output of developing countries accelerate tensions in such areas as trade, immigration and financial flows.

This book brings together original research on the role of networks in regional economic development and innovation. It presents a comprehensive framework synthesizing extant theories, a palette of real-world cases in the aerospace, automotive, life science, biotechnology and health care industries, and fundamental agent-based computer models elucidating the relation between regional development and network dynamics. The book is primarily intended for researchers in the fields of innovation economics and evolutionary economic geography, and particularly those interested in using agent-based models and empirical case studies. However, it also targets (regional) innovation policy makers who are not only interested in policy recommendations, but also want to understand the state-of-the-art agent-based modeling methods used to experimentally arrive at said recommendations.

The diversity of the workforce and the implications for management continue to be the focus of a great deal of interest. This is partly because of the importance and urgency of the issues that diversity entails and also because of a growing recognition that many of the dilemmas of diversity management are not proving amenable to easy solutions. Indeed, recent research demonstrates that Britain and the US are, in many ways, becoming more, rather than less unequal societies. This book suggests that metaphor and dialectic play a powerful role in shaping our understandings of ourselves and each other. It draws on original research in organizations and in management education to explore how we can become more aware of these processes within ourselves and challenge those assumptions and stereotypes that contribute to maintaining people in disadvantaged positions.

Innovation is critical for securing competitive advantage and achieving business success. Yet, for many organizations it remains elusive. This book shows how to build innovative teams who will deliver innovations capable of transforming performance. It includes the strategy of building innovative teams and the practical tools that will form part of this process.

ICT-D refers to the trend in development thinking and practice that considers deployment of new technologies like computers, mobile phones and Internet, which are important for spurring economic growth, enabling good governance and facilitating human development. In this context, telecentres have emerged as an immensely popular strategy for providing shared and mediated access to ICTs. The rapid proliferation of telecentres in rural India during the last decade was driven by multiple agencies, each with their own purpose, priorities and pre-designed set of services. This volume juxtaposes the global discourse on ICT-D and telecentres with in-depth empirical case studies on the pattern of access and use of telecenters in rural India to draw implications for policy and practice.
It suggest that access and use of telecentres and their services are mediated by the multiple contexts in which they are embedded. While they provide opportunities for people to interact with new technologies, their impact has been mainly in terms of convenience provided by some of the services vis-a-vis existing alternate channels. Particular telecentre models have brought about some change, but this is only when there was a match between the services provided and the local demand for particular information and services. The delivery structure services in terms of user fee, need for reading and computing skills, and linkages with existing institutional context have further shaped access and use.
The efficacy of telecentres in generating new jobs in rural areas, increasing efficiency and reach of e-Governance and other basic services, enhancing livelihoods and the well-being of the people, and overcoming the rural-urban divide has been limited.