Today's MIS manager must understand and apply the latest thinking on the crucial management functions: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. Moreover, not only must managers understand the research-based foundations underlying this thinking, they must also know how to leverage the new MIS technologies and incorporate them into it. Thierauf's new book guides managers through the technology/managerial function interface, explains latest research and its applications, and then provides MIS managers, their external auditors and consultants, with a unique questionnaire to help them assess the performance of their MIS groups and their own managerial effectiveness. With illustrations, checklists, guidelines, and unusual clarity of presentation, not only will Thierauf's book help MIS managers and those they report to understand better their day-to-day tasks, but it will also shed new light on the technologies themselves and their inevitable work impacts.

Comparative Causal Mapping: The CMAP3 Method, by Mauri Laukkanen and Mingde Wang, is an introduction to the conceptual backgrounds of causal (cognitive) mapping and to the typical methods in comparative and composite causal mapping, based on either interview or questionnaire primary data or on secondary documentary data. The discussed CCM research is supported by CMAP3, a freely downloadable (www.uef.fi/cmap3) Windows software platform for CCM studies. The book has three parts. The first discusses the theoretical underpinnings and methodological issues in causal mapping including the target phenomena and different interpretations of causal maps/mapping, the motives for using CCM methods and the criteria of method selection. The second part focuses on the technical aspects of using CMAP3 in typical CCM research. The third part presents three CCM study cases: a classical document-based study; a semi-structured interview-based (SIM) study; and a methodological study comparing SIM with an electronically administered structured hybrid CCM approach. In addition to demonstrating CCM practices, they suggest that different methods produce divergent results and are thus not substitutable. The research task should determine which CCM approach is appropriate. The book will appeal to both academic and professional audiences, in particular to doctoral students and experienced researchers looking for new topics and method approaches, but also to practitioners in fields such as management and organization studies, organizational development, public policy and education, and knowledge management.

This book aims to assess what the changes of the Treaty of Lisbon envisaged and whether these ambitions have materialised since the Treaty entered into force. It offers analyses of the past, as well as what might be the future (because some provisions will only enter into effect in the years to come). To what extent has the current decision-making process been able to address the shortcomings and challenges of the past? What has been the impact of aspects of the Lisbon Treaty that clarified pre-existing norms and structures, in some cases formalizing them, rather than introducing new changes? The authors of this book look at the interaction between formal rules and informal practices, seeking to point to the interaction between the two. They find that informal practices to date typically still dominate formal rules. This book was published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Make Better Decisions, Leverage New Opportunities, and Automate Decisioning at Scale Prescriptive analytics is more directly linked to successful decision-making than any other form of business analytics. It can help you systematically sort through your choices to optimize decisions, respond to new opportunities and risks with precision, and continually reflect new information into your decisioning process. In Prescriptive Analytics, analytics expert Dr. Dursun Delen illuminates the field's state-of-the-art methods, offering holistic insight for both professionals and students. Delen's end-to-end, all-inclusive approach covers optimization, simulation, multi-criteria decision-making methods, inference- and heuristic-based decisioning, and more. Balancing theory and practice, he presents intuitive conceptual illustrations, realistic example problems, and real-world case studies-all designed to deliver knowledge you can use. Discover where prescriptive analytics fits and how it improves decision-making Identify optimal solutions for achieving an objective within real-world constraints Analyze complex systems via Monte-Carlo, discrete, and continuous simulations Apply powerful multi-criteria decision-making and mature expert systems and case-based reasoning Preview emerging techniques based on deep learning and cognitive computing

With over 30 years' experience as a management teacher and consultant, Mike Pidd provides the tools for thinking that will help us to think through the consequences of decisions before we act.

The third edition of Tools for Thinking builds on the successes of the previous two editions. It creates a bridge between the soft and hard (Operations Research) OR schools of thought and provides an empirically based framework in which to place them. Focusing on modelling as an activity, rather than on models and techniques, Mike Pidd shows how models can be employed to explore possible future scenarios and to make sense of managerial vision.

This third edition has been fully revised and updated without changing its focus. It features a new chapter on Decision Analysis and includes up-to-date examples using popular softwares, such as Precision Tree, @Risk and Micro Saint Sharp, to illustrate how these help in developing and using management science models as tools for thinking.

Commons are self-organized, self-governed, autonomous networks and organizations that function outside the state and the private sector. They are emerging around the world as people recognize that the state and private sector have increasingly closed off access to basic resources and services. People want increased power to determine their political, economic, and social lives. Reimagining Leadership on the Commons includes leadership approaches derived from a complex, adaptive, open, whole systems perspective and a more relational, distributed, and collaborative paradigm that recognizes that rather than being individualist self-maximizers: people prefer to work together to share benefits and found a society based on ethical behavior, equality, and justice. This is essential reading for researchers of commons, leadership practitioners, and non-profits working towards a more ethical, equitable, and just world.

Learning is an essential process for attaining and maintaining sustainability at both the individual and business level. Establishing a learning organization requires a whole-hearted and sustained endeavour. This book facilitates such an endeavour by providing both a coherent framework for analysis and practical models for action. It focuses on the choices organizations make about the design and implementation of specific learning mechanisms.

The authors illustrate this "learning-by-design" approach through six detailed case studies, taken from different industries and national settings and focusing on different aspects of organizational learning. They then present an overall analysis of the cases, capturing the nature of the learning requirements, design dimensions and mechanisms, and looking at how these link to each other and to company strategy, resources, and performance. Various learning paradoxes are discussed, as well as issues that merit further study.Students of management and organizational studies, academics in these fields, and executives will find this a valuable resource for learning, reflection, and practice.

Not all markets are alike: the European entrepreneur requires knowledge on how to avoid pitfalls before believing and focusing on opportunity. European Venture Toolbox features the leadership toolkit future decision makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs need to build a venture in Europe. Many European entrepreneurs are prone to the rhetoric of company building based on fast-growing start-up survivors, abundance of circulating capital, and sub-optimal business models monetizing late. They fall into the trap of thinking a mildly successful company can survive in the European ecosystem even if it does not thrive. This toolbox provides a framework to assess risk and return of choices, iteratively implement business, and avoid being blinded by incorrect principles not grounded in financial reality. European Venture Toolbox: The path for SMEs to grasp and defend opportunities is a compelling book for all small-to-medium enterprises. Written by a theoretician and a practitioner, it captures Europe-specific perspectives, examples, and case studies to provide an alternative insight. The Entrepreneurial Behaviour series is focused on expanding the scope of Entrepreneurial Behaviour theory and analysis and enriching practice by encouraging multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approaches.

When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In "Blind Spots," leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, the downfall of Bernard Madoff, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be.

Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the "Challenger" space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis. The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Distinguishing our "should self" (the person who knows what is correct) from our "want self" (the person who ends up making decisions), the authors point out ethical sinkholes that create questionable actions.

Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, "Blind Spots" shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives.

Why do organisations decline, and what happens when they do? Strategy and Managed Decline: London Transport 1948-87 is a historical case study looking at how London Transport, a world beater in 1948, declined from being an international exemplar to dilapidation in 30 years. Strategy and Managed Decline considers the inheritance left by the founders of London Transport and subjects their legacy to a strategic and political audit. In three sections, the book examines archival data from the Transport for London (TfL) Archive covering the car revolution, strategic political clashes and the performance of the chairmen to challenge existing theory and extant histories. It offers hypotheses situated in management, leadership, politics and strategy which explain the decades of deterioration followed by a dramatic revival in the late 1980s. Examining the turbulent politics of the long conflict between London Transport, municipal and national government in detail, Strategy and Managed Decline: London Transport 1948-87 offers novel interpretations of events by objectively analysing the strategic stories that politics created about London's transport. It concludes by asking whether a shift in managerial strategy away from maximising utility and towards cost minimisation caused, or was just coincident with, resurgence and explores what lessons there are for TfL today.

This book examines discourses of knowledge and innovation in post-industrial societies and knowledge-based organizations. The author investigates the value of knowledge and the question of innovation management in a fully commercial environment for a technology company.

In contrast with most of the mainstream approaches to knowledge and innovation management this volume chooses as its starting point a critical examination of these assumptions before proceeding with further suggestions on how to manage knowledge. Using brand new empirical research, the author argues for the significance of addressing the political games and power struggles enacted in managing innovation processes, which result from the opportunity certain groups seek to acquire or extend their control over valuable resources. Again, in contrast to mainstream approaches that reduce power to the ability of individuals to negotiate in order to promote their ideas, the analysis adopts an extended view on power, and seeks to reveal the ambiguities and challenges of innovation management.

This work will be of most interest to researchers and students of knowledge and innovation management, namely postgraduates and second degree students, as well as managers in knowledge-based organisations.

This book offers an advanced introduction to the models of credit risk valuation. It concentrates on firm-value and reduced-form approaches and their applications in practice. Additionally, the book includes new models for valuing derivative securities with credit risk, focussing on options and forward contracts subject to counterparty default risk, but also treating options on credit-risky bonds and credit derivatives. The text provides detailed descriptions of the state-of-the-art martingale methods and advanced numerical implementations based on multi-variate trees used to price derivative credit risk. Numerical examples illustrate the effects of credit risk on the prices of financial derivatives.

Problem solving tools to solve any business challenge. Using proven, innovative techniques from some major players in the business world, this is the go-to book for every professional who wants to find better answers to their business challenges.

In Computational Organizational Cognition, Davide Secchi presents an innovative definition of organizational cognition using a research tradition that builds on the Embodied/Distributed/Extended Cognition (EDEC) perspectives and it is developed through agent-based computational simulation modelling. After an overview of EDEC perspectives, Computational Organizational Cognition presents four simulations which allow readers to clearly assess the advantages of agent-based computational organizational cognition (AOC) for both theory and practice. The book attempts to demonstrate how AOC is a useful if not essential instrument to explore, understand and analyze the inner complexities of organizational cognition. AOC is a powerful tool and an approach for organizational research enquiry at the service of both organizational scholars and cognitive scientists.

This book mainly introduces some techniques of decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment and expands the applications of hesitant fuzzy sets in solving practical problems. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce some techniques about decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment, (2) to prove these techniques theoretically and (3) to apply the involved techniques to practical problems. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how hesitant fuzzy set could be employed in decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis and motivates researchers to expand more application fields of hesitant fuzzy set.

This book proposes a conception of the corporate strategy making process that recognizes the individual strategy maker as a center-stage corporate actor. This individual-centered view of the stategy making process is needed in order to better understand the interplay between objective factors and the subjective perceptions and values of strategy makers. Using a large sample of executives working in two of the ten largest U.S. commercial banks, Das examines empirically the dynamics of two critical aspects of the role of individual strategy makers: future orientation and perceptions of the strategic planning milieu. He discusses the various implications of his findings for further research into the strategy making process. The author demonstrates the utility of individual future orientation in understanding how strategy makers influence the character of the eventual corporate strategy. The results of Das' study help to explain why long-range planning is really more short-range than anyone cares to admit.

Decision makers interested in going beyond their own personal and professional interests and involving themselves in humanising their organization, community and society should read Remaking Ourselves, Enterprise and Society. This book is about adherence to human values at an institutional level, and its starting point is the belief that human beings have basic goodness, which in turn is reflected in the desire to be of help to others and to do good. Professor Rao introduces the Indian concept of 'Spandan' (Heartbeat). Spandan is operationalized through a process of diagnosis, discovery and development enabling organizations to achieve an optimal balance between what are defined as transactional, transformational, and terminal human values. This leads to management and organizations developing sensitivity to the needs of others, which they come to understand. When such sensitivity becomes integral to its work ethic and culture, an organization is able to temper its commitment to task with humanity and it becomes functionally humane. Experience suggests, not surprisingly, that organizations that can achieve this optimal balance between results and relations achieve higher employee commitment and productivity and increased accommodative spirit that better equips them to deal with difficult times. This exciting addition to Gower's Transformation and Innovation Series will enlighten business leaders, governmental and non-governmental policy makers, management educators, organization developers, and researchers.

The notion that management knowledge is universal, culture-neutral, readily transferable to any country or situation, has come under mounting challenge. The Politics of Management Knowledge goes beyond such `broad-brush' assertions to explore in detail the relations between management knowledge, power and practice in a world where globalization highlights, rather than obscures, the locally specific character of many management recipes. The book recognizes the political nature of management knowledge as a discourse produced from, and reproducing, power processes within and between organizations. This theme underpins discussion of the ways in which management ideas and practices `produce' managers of a particular kind - person of enterprise, bureaucrat, heroic leader and so on. Critical examinations of certain current management theories - lean production, excellence, entrepreneurship - illuminate the myriad modes in which relations of power intermingle with relations of knowledge. Eminent authors from a variety of countries address the social and political processes involved in cross-cultural transference of management ideas across the world. They also look to the future, stressing the need for a substantial new understanding that is less attuned to the corporate worlds of today and more appropriate for the increasingly diverse organizations likely to emerge in the twenty-first century.

In recent years, there has been increasing implementation of group and team decision-making within organizations, much of it managed electronically, between members of what are "virtual" groups or teams. Recent research into effective team implementation emphasizes "trust" as an intermediary process, and trust must be a part of any account of team decision-making. This book provides an integrated framework that represents process in decision-making by interactive groups and teams. This framework furthers both our understanding of process and our capabilities in implementation, based on an account of group decision-making that differentiates the information types contributing to decision quality and relates them to process in interactive groups and teams. Author Steve Silver emphasizes the social structure that is inherent in the interaction of decision-makers as group or team members and effects on the information they exchange.

This book is intended as a text covering the central concepts and techniques of Competitive Markov Decision Processes. It is an attempt to present a rig orous treatment that combines two significant research topics: Stochastic Games and Markov Decision Processes, which have been studied exten sively, and at times quite independently, by mathematicians, operations researchers, engineers, and economists. Since Markov decision processes can be viewed as a special noncompeti tive case of stochastic games, we introduce the new terminology Competi tive Markov Decision Processes that emphasizes the importance of the link between these two topics and of the properties of the underlying Markov processes. The book is designed to be used either in a classroom or for self-study by a mathematically mature reader. In the Introduction (Chapter 1) we outline a number of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for which this book could usefully serve as a text. A characteristic feature of competitive Markov decision processes - and one that inspired our long-standing interest - is that they can serve as an "orchestra" containing the "instruments" of much of modern applied (and at times even pure) mathematics. They constitute a topic where the instruments of linear algebra, applied probability, mathematical program ming, analysis, and even algebraic geometry can be "played" sometimes solo and sometimes in harmony to produce either beautifully simple or equally beautiful, but baroque, melodies, that is, theorems."

In this present internet age, risk analysis and crisis response based on information will make up a digital world full of possibilities and improvements to people's daily life and capabilities. These services will be supported by more intelligent systems and more effective decisionmaking. This book contains all the papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, August 27-29, 2013, Istanbul, Turkey. The theme was intelligent systems and decision making for risk analysis and crisis response. The risk issues in the papers cluster around the following topics: natural disasters, finance risks, food and feed safety, catastrophic accidents, critical infrastructure, global climate change, project management, supply chains, public health, threats to social safety, energy and environment. This volume will be of interest to all professionals and academics in the field of risk analysis, crisis response, intelligent systems and decision-making, as well as related fields of enquiry.

On the basis of fuzzy sets and some of their relevant generalizations, this book systematically presents the fundamental principles and applications of group decision making under different scenarios of preference relations. By using intuitionistic knowledge as the field of discourse, this work investigates by utilizing innovative research means the fundamental principles and methods of group decision making with various different intuitionistic preferences: Mathematical reasoning is employed to study the consistency of group decision making; Methods of fusing information are applied to look at the aggregation of multiple preferences; Techniques of soft computing and optimization are utilized to search for satisfactory decision alternatives. Each chapter follows the following structurally clear format of presentation: literature review, development of basic theory, verification and reasoning of principles , construction of models and computational schemes, and numerical examples, which cover such areas as technology, enterprise competitiveness, selection of airlines, experts decision making in weather-sensitive enterprises, etc. In terms of theoretical principles, this book can be used as a reference for researchers in the areas of management science, information science, systems engineering, operations research, and other relevant fields. It can also be employed as textbook for upper level undergraduate students and graduate students. In terms of applications, this book will be a good companion for all those decision makers in government, business, and technology areas.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA. "If...anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer...everyone in management... should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and ... even elegant diagrams." The Economist This is the companion volume to Brain of the Firm and addresses the nature of viable systems, those capable of surviving. It does not use the neurophysiological basis elucidated in brain, but develops the same theory from first principles. This book declares that every enterprise is a system, and in particular must be a viable system. Viability is not just a matter of economic solvency; we need laws that govern the capacity of any enterprise to maintain independent existence. The Heart of Enterprise is full of examples (actual, author-generated examples) taken from management practice. "I consistently find that Stafford Beer provides the most useful analytical framework for understanding and managing an enterprise--public or private. Heart of The Enterprise offers a demanding but rewarding exposition of his approach and applications." Sir Douglas Hague. CBE

Pertinent to modern industry, administration, finance and society, the most pressing issue for firms today is how to reapproach the way we think and work in business. With topics ranging from improving productivity and coaxing economic growth after periods of market inactivity, Complex Decision-Making in Economy and Finance offers pragmatic solutions for dealing with the critical levels of disorder and chaos that have developed throughout the modern age. This book examines how to design complex products and systems, the benefits of collective intelligence and self-organization, and the best methods for handling risks in problematic environments. It also analyzes crises and how to manage them. This book is of benefit to companies and public bodies with regards to saving assets, reviving fortunes and laying the groundwork for robust, sustainable societal dividends. Examples, case studies, practical hints and guidelines illustrate the topics, particularly in finance.