Over the last decade, the role of the board of directors in deciding on potentially value-creating decisions has gained greater prominence. Following extensive board research into the origins, reasons, effects and consequences of boardroom influence of directors, this book prepares directors for playing a more influential role in shaping such decisions. Boards are only as effective as the relationships their members have with each other. Despite this, many of the published guides on board work do not focus sufficiently on the human dimension of governance, nor has there been a comprehensive understanding of the effect that group membership has on the decision behaviour of the individual director, or vice versa. The author offers the reader actionable strategies to successfully navigate the complex dynamics that are inevitable when a group of powerful individuals with strong individual identities has to work together. Without a realistic understanding of the silent risks that a suboptimal dynamic may pose to the processes of making critical decisions, boards may find their decision outcomes compromised. Despite the best intentions, such dynamics can have a chilling effect on an individual director's contribution, marginalising or diminishing the value of their contribution and their influence on the board. This book will be a valuable resource guide for aspiring and experienced company directors wishing to strengthen their effectiveness in the advisory role and develop a more influential voice in shaping the strategic direction of their companies.

Data analytics is core to business and decision making. The rapid increase in data volume, velocity and variety offers both opportunities and challenges. While open source solutions to store big data, like Hadoop, offer platforms for exploring value and insight from big data, they were not originally developed with data security and governance in mind. Big Data Management discusses numerous policies, strategies and recipes for managing big data. It addresses data security, privacy, controls and life cycle management offering modern principles and open source architectures for successful governance of big data. The author has collected best practices from the world's leading organizations that have successfully implemented big data platforms. The topics discussed cover the entire data management life cycle, data quality, data stewardship, regulatory considerations, data council, architectural and operational models are presented for successful management of big data. The book is a must-read for data scientists, data engineers and corporate leaders who are implementing big data platforms in their organizations.

We are now entering a new phase in the establishment of historical organization studies as a distinctive methodological paradigm within the broad field of organization studies. This book serves both as a landmark in the development of the field and as a key reference tool for researchers and students. For two decades, organization theorists have emphasized the need for more and better research recognizing the importance of the past in shaping the present and future. By historicizing organizational research, the contexts and forces bearing upon organizations will be more fully recognized, and analyses of organizational dynamics improved. But how, precisely, might a traditionally empirically oriented discipline such as history be incorporated into a theoretically oriented discipline such as organization studies? This book evaluates the current state of play, advances it and identifies the possibilities the new emergent field offers for the future. In addition to providing an important work of reference on the subject for researchers, the book can be used to introduce management and organizational history to a student audience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The book is a valuable source for wider reading, providing rich reference material in tutorials across organizational studies, or as recommended or required reading on courses with a connection to business or management history.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in November 2016.The 18 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 186 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge discovery and information retrieval; knowledge engineering and ontology development; and knowledge management and information sharing.

Corporate sustainability, now regarded as a vitally important topic on the agenda for businesses, has in recent years not only become embedded in postgraduate study, but is now also widely taught at the undergraduate level in business schools. Corporate Sustainability Leadership reflects the growing need for an accessible text at all levels of study. The book brings the topic of corporate sustainability fully up to date by incorporating new directions in the areas of corporate responsibility and sustainability. Written by the authors of the highly successful Understanding Business Ethics, this book provides a primary resource for any undergraduate or graduate corporate sustainability class. Unlike other textbooks in corporate sustainability, which are often edited collections from multiple authors, this book develops themes throughout each chapter using a consistent voice to ensure an integrative learning experience for both students and instructors. With ten chapters and ten cases, all of which are supplemented with online test banks, instructor guides, and PowerPoint slides, this textbook provides enough content for a complete class on corporate sustainability. Using stakeholder theory as a foundation, Corporate Sustainability Leadership allows readers to develop a better understanding of how organizations can effectively satisfy the needs of their critical stakeholders. It addresses the issues of corporate sustainability from both a micro and macro perspective. Micro issues related to corporate sustainability include leadership, organizational change, management decision making, human resource organizational strategies, organizational ethics, organizational culture, corporate sustainability reporting, corporate sustainability performance, and corporate compliance. The macro issues addressed include suppliers, corporate sustainability communications, consumers, the natural environment, governments, NGOs, and the developing world. In addition, there are ten unique company cases from organizations that are household names, such as Bayer, Shell, Volkswagen, and Dow Chemical.

One of the greatest challenges in the ever-changing world of IT is to create and maintain an innovation culture and align innovation activities with company strategy. This book provides a fresh perspective on innovation management activities in an IT environment using examples from both start-ups and established companies such as Cisco, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Lufthansa Systems, Worldline, Amdocs, Telefonica and Enea. This book addresses the following issues: The software development environment offers many possibilities for innovation, yet also places some constraints on the innovation process at the same time. It considers how this can be bypassed to bring success to the company. It is a challenge to create and maintain an innovation culture using an agile process in the area of software development with its short cycles. This book describes how to bring innovation challenges closer to developers and use their experience and vision to create new projects. It also shows how to inspire software engineers using incremental and often small but useful money-saving improvements. The fourth industrial revolution changes companies from the inside and brings changes to common agile product management processes in IT. This book examines the effects on innovation management and what mechanisms are used for success in this new environment.

This book provides a complete framework for contemporary shareholder activism and its implications for US corporate governance, which is based on director primacy theory. Under director primacy theory, shareholders do not wish to be involved in the management of the company; in the rare event that they wish to be involved, it is considered a transfer of power from the board of directors to shareholders, which in turn reduces the efficiency of centralised decision-making in public companies. However, this book demonstrates that shareholders do not use their power to transfer corporate control from the board to themselves, and that some form of shareholder activism is even collaborative, which is a new paradigm for US corporate governance. This book shows that while monitoring remains a key contribution of shareholders, they also bring new informational inputs to corporate decision-making that could not be obtained under the traditional board model. Accordingly, contemporary shareholder activism enhances the board's decision-making and monitoring capacity, without undermining the economic value of the board's authority. Therefore, this book argues that the complete approach of contemporary shareholder activism should be accommodated into US corporate governance. In doing so, this book considers not only legal and regulatory developments in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, but also the governance developments through by-law amendments. Furthermore, the author makes several recommendations to soften the current director primacy model: establishing a level playing field for private ordering, adopting the proxy access default regime, the majority voting rule, the universal proxy rules, and enhancing the disclosure requirements of shareholders. The book will be of interest to academics and students of corporate governance, both in the US and internationally.

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book addresses how organizations can deal with human fallibility in order to create space for excellence at work. Some mistakes in work settings put lives at risk, while others create openings for innovative breakthroughs. In order to deal constructively with fallibility, an organization needs a communication climate where it is normal to voice opinions, admit mistakes, and ask for help in critical situations. The book builds on interviews with practitioners in healthcare, aviation, IT, public governance, and industry. It connects narratives from these fields with theories from organizational psychology and philosophy, as well as from positive organizational scholarship. In the final chapter, an overall ethics of fallibility at work is outlined. Fallibility at Work contributes to research in multiple academic disciplines, but also reaches out to practitioners who are interested in the connections between error and excellence in organizations.

This book gathers extended versions of the best papers presented at the Global Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Its Application Areas (GJCIE), held in Vienna on July 20-21, 2017. They offer a snapshot of the current state of the art in three main related fields of research, namely industrial engineering, engineering and technology management, and healthcare systems engineering management. The book is intended to integrate theory and practice and to merge different perspectives, from the academic to the industrial and governmental one.

Reflecting increasing investment in entrepreneurship in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this new book offers extensive coverage of the factors that enable Emiratis to start and grow a business. Exploring the challenges faced by local start-ups, this book provides insight into the way that entrepreneurship is both perceived and governed in the UAE and how this differs to other countries. The author builds on rich empirical research to propose a model of entrepreneurship which is specific to the UAE, taking into account the role of culture, family and government support. This innovative book underlines the importance of human behaviour in creating successful Emirati start-ups and business opportunities.

Knowledge management metrics are one of the weakest areas of practice in the field. Overwhelmingly, the literature that exists focuses on case studies and incidents of metrics, rather than approaching the concept holistically. Addressing this lack, expert authors Alexeis Garcia-Perez, Farah Gheriss and Denise Bedford come together to supply a fundamental discussion of measurement cultures and philosophy, types of metrics, and how to use metrics to grow an organization. They offer a guide for knowledge management professionals to report on progress against goals and targets in terms that are understandable and comparable to their organizational peers, enabling professionals from across businesses to communicate with metrics and engage in wider discussion about the process of achieving organizational visions. Providing practical guidance for identifying different types of measurements and metrics, as well as methods for defining and collection information about metrics, this is an essential book for knowledge management professionals and researchers on the path to improving metric literacy across their organizations.

Drawing from doctoral level research on how best to teach business education to college students, Discourses on Business Education at the College Level illustrates new and proven ideas for engaging students. Sixteen authors from New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development describe their experiences in upgrading and expanding the quality of the business education experience. Business school instructors can use this edited collection to draw inspiration and learn specific techniques to bring their courses to the cutting edge of curriculum. Topics range from teaching accounting, financial literacy, marketing, and teamwork to gamification, improving international student and intern experience, not-for credit education, and virtual workplace learning.

This book constitutes extended selected papers from the 15th Conference on Advanced Information Technologies for Management, AITM 2017, and the 12th Conference on Information Systems Management, ISM 2017, held as part of the Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS, which took place in Prague, Poland, in September 2017. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: information technology and systems for knowledge management; information technology and systems for business transformation; and implementation and evaluation of information systems.

You receive an e-mail. It contains an offer for a complete personal computer system. It seems like the retailer read your mind since you were exploring computers on their web site just a few hours prior....

As you drive to the store to buy the computer bundle, you get an offer for a discounted coffee from the coffee shop you are getting ready to drive past. It says that since you're in the area, you can get 10% off if you stop by in the next 20 minutes....

As you drink your coffee, you receive an apology from the manufacturer of a product that you complained about yesterday on your Facebook page, as well as on the company's web site....

Finally, once you get back home, you receive notice of a special armor upgrade available for purchase in your favorite online video game. It is just what is needed to get past some spots you've been struggling with....

Sound crazy? Are these things that can only happen in the distant future? No. All of these scenarios are possible today Big data. Advanced analytics. Big data analytics. It seems you can't escape such terms today. Everywhere you turn people are discussing, writing about, and promoting big data and advanced analytics. Well, you can now add this book to the discussion.

What is real and what is hype? Such attention can lead one to the suspicion that perhaps the analysis of big data is something that is more hype than substance. While there has been a lot of hype over the past few years, the reality is that we are in a transformative era in terms of analytic capabilities and the leveraging of massive amounts of data. If you take the time to cut through the sometimes-over-zealous hype present in the media, you'll find something very real and very powerful underneath it. With big data, the hype is driven by genuine excitement and anticipation of the business and consumer benefits that analyzing it will yield over time.

Big data is the next wave of new data sources that will drive the next wave of analytic innovation in business, government, and academia. These innovations have the potential to radically change how organizations view their business. The analysis that big data enables will lead to decisions that are more informed and, in some cases, different from what they are today. It will yield insights that many can only dream about today. As you'll see, there are many consistencies with the requirements to tame big data and what has always been needed to tame new data sources. However, the additional scale of big data necessitates utilizing the newest tools, technologies, methods, and processes. The old way of approaching analysis just won't work. It is time to evolve the world of advanced analytics to the next level. That's what this book is about.

"Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave" isn't just the title of this book, but rather an activity that will determine which businesses win and which lose in the next decade. By preparing and taking the initiative, organizations can ride the big data tidal wave to success rather than being pummeled underneath the crushing surf. What do you need to know and how do you prepare in order to start taming big data and generating exciting new analytics from it? Sit back, get comfortable, and prepare to find out

This book studies accounts of alternative organisations in India and provides critical insights on if and why alternative organisations matter to management theory and practice, how management theory can be applied to the context of alternative organisations, and how, from an alternate organisational perspective, existing debates in management can be enriched. Some other questions examined in this book are: what are spaces of organising outside corporations? How do these alternative organisational forms challenge our assumptions about a globalised, monolithic capitalist order? How do we understand the organisational lives of those marginalised, silenced and oppressed? How can we imagine an alternative organisational reality? It includes cases from different parts of India that explore the functioning of a Special Investigation Team constituted by the Supreme Court of India, Mritshilpis (idol-makers), homeless shelters, panchayats, Shahid Hospital, Budhan Theater, Swaraj University, and organisations that promote social inclusivity.

This book outlines the benefits and limitations of simulation, what is involved in setting up a simulation capability in an organization, the steps involved in developing a simulation model and how to ensure that model results are implemented. In addition, detailed example applications are provided to show where the tool is useful and what it can offer the decision maker. In Simulating Business Processes for Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics, Andrew Greasley provides an in-depth discussion of Business process simulation and how it can enable business analytics How business process simulation can provide speed, cost, dependability, quality, and flexibility metrics Industrial case studies including improving service delivery while ensuring an efficient use of staff in public sector organizations such as the police service, testing the capacity of planned production facilities in manufacturing, and ensuring on-time delivery in logistics systems State-of-the-art developments in business process simulation regarding the generation of simulation analytics using process mining and modeling people's behavior Managers and decision makers will learn how simulation provides a faster, cheaper and less risky way of observing the future performance of a real-world system. The book will also benefit personnel already involved in simulation development by providing a business perspective on managing the process of simulation, ensuring simulation results are implemented, and that performance is improved.

The scientific advances that underpin economic growth and human health would not be possible without research investments. Yet demonstrating the impact of research programs is a challenge, especially in areas that span disciplines, industrial sectors, and encompass both public and private sector activity. All areas of research are under pressure to demonstrate benefits from federal funding of research. This exciting and innovative study demonstrates new methods and tools to trace the impact of federal research funding on the structure of research, and the subsequent economic activities of funded researchers. The case study is food safety research, which is critical to avoiding outbreaks of disease. The authors make use of an extraordinary new data infrastructure and apply new techniques in text analysis. Focusing on the impact of US federal food safety research, this book develops vital data-intensive methodologies that have a real world application to many other scientific fields.

Implement a headless/decoupled Drupal design to build easily maintainable web applications. This book begins by showing you CMS workflows and best practices to give you the basics you need for working with decoupled Drupal. As part of this process, Decoupling Drupal reveals the advantages of using content management systems and explains that decoupled Drupal is the answer to various problems faced in creating and maintaining enterprise applications. Decoupling Drupal will show you how administering Drupal monolithically to design web applications can be a challenge. You'll see how the maintainability of your application reduces exponentially over the years. In contrast, a decoupled design enables an easy handshake between the front-end and back-end applications, meaning you can implement services in a short amount of time and scale them quickly. The final part of the book covers the impact of decoupling on functional and non-functional requirements and the use of Drupal 8 modules to address the requirements of decoupling. This involves solving the problems that occur at different stages of CMS evolution in an organization. What You Will Learn Discover the principles of headless/decoupled design Implement Drupal in a real-time environment Work with the Drupal modules normally used in a decoupled design Use Drupal to complete back-end tasks Integrate a Pantheon cloud-solution for headless Drupal Acknowledge the use of CMS in your day-to-day IT life Who This Book Is For Web application designers, developers, and Drupal enthusiasts.

The books presents the study undertaken by the ASEAN-India Centre (AIC) at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) on India's cultural links with Southeast Asia, with particular reference to historical and contemporary dimensions. The book traces ancient trade and maritime links, Chola Empire and Southeast Asia, religious exchanges (the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic heritage), language, scripts and folklore, performing arts, painting and sculpture, architecture, role of the Indian Diaspora, contemporary cultural interaction, etc.

This book presents strategic perspectives on quality and flexibility, as well as quantitative tools for assessing their implementation in a range of systems. It introduces readers to the global changes in the relative importance of quality strategies and flexibility strategies over the past 30 to 40 years. In addition, it presents detailed examples of how multi-purpose techniques such as design of experiments, petri nets and quality function deployment can be applied to evaluate quality and flexibility in the design, planning and operation of various systems. Uniquely, the book combines strategies and quantitative research tools in a single volume. It also includes many examples that are accessible to readers from different disciplines, and familiarizes readers with techniques that can facilitate their current and future research - making it a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and advanced students alike.

This book presents a selection of the best papers given at the XXIV International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management. The conference is promoted by ADINGOR (Asociacion para el Desarrollo de la Ingenieria de Organizacion) and organized by the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It took place at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Leganes, Spain) in July 2020. Ensuring Sustainability embodies the latest advances in research and cutting-edge analyses of real case studies in industrial engineering and operations management from diverse international contexts. It also identifies business applications for the latest findings and innovations in operations management and the decision sciences.