The cost to business of unresolved conflicts is high; tribunals, loss of productivity, resignations and damaged reputations are serious consequences for all concerned. With increased organizational change in the form of changes in leadership, restructuring, downsizing, matrix management, mergers, acquisitions and systems changes comes increased political activity and the potential for either increased learning and growth or tension and unproductive conflict.
Change agents, HR practitioners and managers need to be skilled at empowering others to use or resolve conflict effectively for a more productive working environment and greater employee satisfaction. Change, Conflict and Community takes readers through the essential theory and hands-on practice of working with change and conflict by considering:
* How we can increase our understanding of the tensions that often exist when change is ever present in the organization
* How to work more effectively with the dynamic relationship between change and conflict
* How the idea of "community" can help us to work with the energy of change and human interaction
Barbara Kenton is a freelance consultant and Director of WHooSH Whole Systems Health. She is an experienced consultant, mediator, facilitator, coach and trainer with over 25 years' experience as a manager and development specialist working with individuals, teams and organizations both in the UK and internationally. She has published a number of articles on the role of the internal consultant and challenges facing those in HR. She is a qualified workplace and community mediator.
Suzanne Penn is an independent consultant, facilitator and coach with 20 years'experience in the HR and Organization Development field. She has worked as an internal and an external practitioner across all sectors and industries in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. A previous Assistant Director at Roffey Park Management Institute, she brings to this book particular expertise in leadership development, group facilitation, strategic HR and organizational change and culture.
The HR Series
The HR Series is edited by Julie Beardwell, Principal Lecturer in Human Resource Management at DeMonfort University, and Linda Holbeche, Director of Research and Policy at CIPD, and is designed to plug the gap between theory and implementation. The books draw on live examples of strategic HR in practice and offer practical insights into how to transform individual and functional delivery to improve value-added. Intended for serious HR professionals who aspire to make a real difference within their organization, The HR Series provides resources to inform, empower and inspire the HR leaders of the future.
* Examines how the concept of organizations as communities can impact positively on the energy of change and human interaction
* Covers the challenging topic of dispute resolution through practical case study examples
* Includes all the essential theory and hands-on practice of working with change and conflict

Electronic business plays a central goal in the economy, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services and payments. E-Business Managerial Aspects, Solutions and Case Studies explores the relevance and impact of enterprise competitiveness, its role in the support of new organizational models, and its drivers and barriers to e-business development, as well as the presentation of state-of-the-art enabling technologies. This book book provides researchers, scholars, and professionals with some of the most advanced research developments, solutions and discussions in the e-business discipline.

Much more personal than standard corporate histories, David Packard's The HP Way provides insights into managing and motivating people and inspiration for would-be entrepreneurs. This bestselling classic joins the Collins Business Essentials line-up with a new Note from Steve Jobs. From a one-car-garage company to a multibillion-dollar industry, the rise of Hewlett-Packard is an extraordinary tale of vision, innovation and hard work. Conceived in 1939, Hewlett-Packard earned success not only as a result of its engineering know-how and cutting-edge product ideas, but also because of the unique management style it developed - a way of doing things called 'the HP way'. Decades before today's creative management trends, Hewlett-Packard invented such strategies as 'walk-around management', 'flextime', and 'quality cycles'. Always sensitive to the needs of its customers and responsive to employee input, Hewlett-Packard earned massive steady growth that far outshone its competitors' vacillating fortunes, even with radically different products from those responsible for its initial boom. For entrepreneurs and managers alike, the wisdom found in these pages is invaluable if they want their businesses to gain steady growth and consistent success.

This book is one of the first to explore how Chinese companies are feeling the impulse of emerging business trends and seizing opportunities brought by technology innovation. It consists case studies of 7 Chinese companies: 3DMed, Wechat from Tencent, Shanghai GM, CP Group, Alibaba, AutoNavi, and ICBC. Each Chinese company has its unique perspectives and different ways to make transformation and business model adjustments. The book helps fill the gap between the global interest in "Innovate in China" and the limited availability of cases on innovations in the country. It is a valuable reference resource for readers in China and beyond wishing to address challenges in the context of growing digital technologies and overwhelming business trends.

The lifeblood of any business is sales and marketing. Selling and marketing skills are essential for a business to succeed. A person's ability to market a product or service assists in the development of entrepreneurial flair, a much-needed attribute for people either seeking employment, or currently employed, in the southern African business environment. Fundamentals of sales and marketing - Discuss the development of sales and marketing skills in the southern African business environment; is unique as it presents the theory on both sales and marketing in one concise book; provides southern African examples and case studies; is written in simple, clear language which makes it easy to read an accessible to business; management students and practitioners in the sales and marketing fields.

The volume editors and their contributors provide readers with an unusually comprehensive reference and easily accessed guide to the way organizational management in Africa is practiced. Offering both background and theory, the book stresses the application of concepts and principles to privatization, strategic planning, human resource planning and training, and to many other skills, such as leading, motivating, performance appraisal, and project design. The first text with a broad continental approach to management as it is understood and practiced in Africa, the book also gives step-by-step guidance on unique procedures used in managing African organizations. Also found here are suggestions on how to empower African employees and managers and thus lessen the authoritarianism so common in African organizations today.

Intended for managers, consultants, and policy makers, the book is rich in disciplinary diversity, topical discourse, and recommendations. Useful as a text as well as a reference, it has much to offer managers and other practitioners in public and nonprofit sectors.

The Performance Advantage provides managers at every level with the ability to understand how to take the right action, at the right time, to increase performance and create a motivational work environment. For years, the myth of traditional thinking was that creating high morale resulted in high performance. Think again Arthors Rick Tate and Dr. Julie White destroy this myth and provide managers practical, applied methods, skills, and concepts that come directly from over 30 years of research in organizational effectiveness, not from some new management avor of the month. With a concise, easy to remember model, managers will be energized to lead more effectively, with fewer resources and within tighter budgets. Imagine what it will be like to take action...the right action, at the right time to get bottom line results impact: - Employee Motivation - Performance Expectations - Employee Ability - Employee Attitude - Confidence - Desire and Motivation - Organizational Issues - Personal Issues - Meaningful Participation - Leadership Action: When the leader's action is aligned with the follower's performance results and attitude (rather than the leader's comfort zone), then performance, retention, and relationships all improve.

This volume problematizes different facets of management education in India---pedagogy, curricula, and disciplinary and institutional practices---from the perspective of the Global South. The essays in this volume bring out the institutional challenges of crafting a relevant academic programme that converses with both national specificities and global realities. Coming from diverse academic specializations, the contributors traverse the interface of their respective disciplines with management education. In doing so, they engage with the ongoing global debate on management education. This volume fills a noticeable gap of serious, scholarly reflection on the state of management education. While there have been sporadic reflections and occasional critiques, a critical stocktaking of the institutional and disciplinary aspects of management education has been long wanting. This volume is of interest to scholars and practitioners of management education across the globe, and is likely to generate debate on its contemporary relevance and future trajectory.

This book provides an overview of predictive methods demonstrated by open source software modeling with Rattle (R') and WEKA. Knowledge management involves application of human knowledge (epistemology) with the technological advances of our current society (computer systems) and big data, both in terms of collecting data and in analyzing it. We see three types of analytic tools. Descriptive analytics focus on reports of what has happened. Predictive analytics extend statistical and/or artificial intelligence to provide forecasting capability. It also includes classification modeling. Prescriptive analytics applies quantitative models to optimize systems, or at least to identify improved systems. Data mining includes descriptive and predictive modeling. Operations research includes all three. This book focuses on prescriptive analytics. The book seeks to provide simple explanations and demonstration of some descriptive tools. This second edition provides more examples of big data impact, updates the content on visualization, clarifies some points, and expands coverage of association rules and cluster analysis. Chapter 1 gives an overview in the context of knowledge management. Chapter 2 discusses some basic data types. Chapter 3 covers fundamentals time series modeling tools, and Chapter 4 provides demonstration of multiple regression modeling. Chapter 5 demonstrates regression tree modeling. Chapter 6 presents autoregressive/integrated/moving average models, as well as GARCH models. Chapter 7 covers the set of data mining tools used in classification, to include special variants support vector machines, random forests, and boosting. Models are demonstrated using business related data. The style of the book is intended to be descriptive, seeking to explain how methods work, with some citations, but without deep scholarly reference. The data sets and software are all selected for widespread availability and access by any reader with computer links.

Women and Leadership around the World is the third volume in a new series of books (Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice) that will is now being published to inform leadership scholars and practitioners. The purpose of this volume is to explore areas of women's leadership in four regions around the world: the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. Hence, we have included 14 chapters that cover a wide range of important topics relevant to women and leadership within specific contexts around the world. Our goal for this volume is to provide readers with explorations of women's experiences as leaders, including recent research studies, analysis and interpretation of statistics unpacking the status of women in various sectors and countries, stories of influential women leaders with national or local spheres of influence, and including recommendations for positive change to increase women's access to positions of authority. The volume contributors use various theories andconceptualizations to problematize, historicize, and analyze women's limited access to power, and their agency as leaders from the grassroots to the national scene, from education to non-profits and business organizations. Overall, the book contributes interpretations of the status of women in various countries, presenting the stories behind the numbers and statistics and uncovering not only challenges but also opportunities for resiliency and effectiveness as leaders. The authors offer recommendations for change that cross national boundaries, such as structural changes in organizations that would open the door for more women to access positions of authority and be effective as leaders. It is rare to find a book with such a diverse array of topics and countries, making this a timely contribution to the literature on women and leadership. The authors remind us to continue to expand the literature base on women and leadership, drawing from both qualitative and quantitative studies as well as conceptual explorations of women as leaders in different countries, regions, indigenous communities, and across different sectors. The more we know, the better informed will be our efforts to create appropriate leadership development activities and experiences for emerging women leaders and girls around the world. This book contributes significantly to that very effort.

Time and again, the authors have observed how a great program faculty creates unique learning experiences to everybody's satisfaction. They have experienced the pleasure that all involved feel when great learning has taken place, when the program participants leave the sessions with an enhanced skill set and co-created answers to pending and future challenges. They are also aware that creating such moments of truth, involving the value proposition of business schools, corporate universities or other training institutions, has not been mastered everywhere. They have written this book to contribute to the ongoing professionalization of business education and aim to share some of the key lessons learned when creating unique learning experiences entailing learning that sticks. A great means to this end is using cases in executive education. While the variety of what can still be called a case is extremely wide, the authors by no means preach that cases are the only way forward. Like every tool, cases must be applied wisely and with a minimum amount of skill. There is also a bigger toolset available and there are also additional contextual factors to consider. They include teaching and learning traditions in different local settings. They comprise individual's learning preferences. As the authors outline in this book, the case-based method nonetheless offers tremendous potential. The art and science of case writing are still known to too few of those involved in delivering executive education seminars.

Increasingly, organizations allocate a substantial financial budget to the acquisition, implementation, and management of IT solutions. IT solutions are employed strategic partners in supporting business strategic outcome, and the solutions are tools used to support operational activities within an environment. Given the vast amounts being invested in IT solutions and development, there is a need for a better return and outcome for organizations. Empowering Businesses With Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Frameworks is an essential reference source that provides readers with pragmatic, implementable strategies and direction to create IT with collaborative capabilities that can reduce the cost of running IT within an organization. Moreover, the book offers pragmatic roadmaps to adopting disruptive IT solutions effectively and efficiently and towards gaining a better understanding of enterprise architecture as a means to business decision making. Featuring research on topics such as business engineering, cloud computing, and open systems, this book is ideally designed for managers, directors, and other business decision makers; government and industry policymakers; business and enterprise architects; industry professionals; academicians; researchers; and students.

As the world is currently in the midst of financial and economic crises, this collection of expert contributions focuses on strategy formation and implementation at various organizational levels to address the challenges ahead. The latest economic turmoil and its ongoing impact on business performance are compelling top managers to develop effective business strategies and redefine the boundaries of their operational and strategic activities. On one hand, tremendous challenges in the competitive business environment have become a source of global threats for many small entrepreneurs. On the other, investors faced with today's volatile economic conditions demand more gains on their capital investments to counter-balance the growing risk of global threats. This book explores the question as to whether it is possible to efficiently and effectively address these threats and obstacles. Are managers capable of planning and implementing strategic actions? What should the major managerial strategy be in order to overcome fluctuations in a market-oriented society? The strategies and practices recommended here are aimed to design continuous development competencies and contribute to the stability, recovery and sustainability of global business operations under volatile economic conditions. This refreshingly novel book seeks to establish managerial strategies and practices for effectively responding to challenges in the competitive business environment, as global volatility and fluctuations continue to worsen.

Africa is commonly perceived as a global growth region and a continent on the move, with a huge demand for managerial skills to ensure sustainable economic growth. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges to management education development in Africa, it is important to understand the diverse cultures, histories and contexts underlying the 54 member states. With this is mind, this book explores the future of management education, considering the differing scenarios for change and the practical realities of developing management education in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environments. This is the second of two volumes, written with strong support from the EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) and the GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council), aimed at understanding and examining the challenges of developing management education across Africa. The authors, through a fine-tuned, face-to-face interview process, explore the perspectives and interactions between management educators and other business and government stakeholders as they look to the future of management education in Africa.