Optimizing Digital Strategy explores the choices facing organizations in the rapidly changing world of technology-enabled business. From performance marketing through to personalization, on-demand retailing and AI, this book maps out commercial and customer-focused challenges and explains how leaders can get the most out of their digital strategies. Rather than rushing headlong into adopting the latest digital platforms, tools and technologies, the book challenges leaders to step back from the demands for constant investment in new technology and drive better returns from existing assets.

Presenting a sustainable model of e-commerce that is appropriate to any individual organization's needs, Optimizing Digital Strategy addresses the repetitive dilemma between even more investment in technology and the need to improve margins and grow revenue. Illustrated by the authors' own digital work for global brands such as The Economist, Sky, O2, Regus, the Financial Times, Lidl and L.K.Bennett, this book shows how to balance the need to remain competitive, fully deliver customer expectations, and put resources behind investments that will deliver the best return.

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.

Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) is a method used by maintenance and reliability industry professionals as one of the key tools to drive improvement. This book offers a quick guide to the applications involved in performing a successful RCFA by providing a foundational view of maintenance and reliability strategies. It also highlights the practical applications of RCFA and identifies how to achieve a successful RCFA, as well as discussing common equipment failures and how to solve them. Case studies on topics including pump system failure analysis and vibration analysis are included. Suggests examples on how to solve common failure on many types of equipment, including fatigue, pumps, bearings, and mechanical power transmission Highlights practical applications of RCFA Identifies key elements for how to achieve a successful RCFA Presents case studies on topics including pump system failure analysis and vibration analysis The book is a must-read for any reliability engineer, particularly mechanical reliability professionals.

Todays business leaders have much in common with President Kennedy. They face monumental decisions in unpredictable times; their actions have implications far beyond their own organizations; and they are judged mercilessly and incessantly by both their constituents and the media. Professionals, then, would do well to study the leadership traits that made Kennedy one of the most respected, beloved, and influential world leaders in modern history. John F. Kennedy on Leadership analyzes what made Kennedy, both before and during his Presidency, a unique and dominant force who would serve as the standard by which future leaders would be judged. Readers will learn the value of: * Planning and decision making: Consult widely, then act. * Crisis management: Dont let events manage you. * Building a team: Find your own "Bobby." * Independence: Dont follow the crowd. * Mistakes: Learn from them and move on. This timely (and timeless) book will be of interest to anyone involved in leadership.

Data management systems play the most crucial role in building large application s- tems. Since modern applications are no longer single monolithic software blocks but highly flexible and configurable collections of cooperative services, the data mana- ment layer also has to adapt to these new requirements. Therefore, within recent years, data management systems have faced a tremendous shift from the central management of individual records in a transactional way to a platform for data integration, fede- tion, search services, and data analysis. This book addresses these new issues in the area of data management from multiple perspectives, in the form of individual contributions, and it outlines future challenges in the context of data management. These contributions are dedicated to Prof. em. Dr. Dr. -Ing. E. h. Hartmut Wedekind on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and were (co-)authored by some of his academic descendants. Prof. Wedekind is one of the most prominent figures of the database management community in Germany, and he enjoys an excellent international reputation as well. Over the last 35 years he greatly contributed to making relational database technology a success. As far back as the early 1970s, he covered-as the first author in Germany- the state of the art concerning the relational model and related issues in two widely used textbooks "Datenbanksysteme I" and "Datenbanksysteme II". Without him, the idea of modeling complex-structured real-world scenarios in a relational way would be far less developed by now. Among Prof.

Primer on Risk Analysis: Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Second Edition lays out the tasks of risk analysis in a straightforward, conceptual manner, tackling the question, "What is risk analysis?" Distilling the common principles of many risk dialects into serviceable definitions, it provides a foundation for the practice of risk management and decision making under uncertainty for professionals from all disciplines. New in this edition is an expanded risk management emphasis that includes an overview chapter on enterprise risk management and a chapter on decision making under uncertainty designed to help decision makers use the results of risk analysis in practical ways to improve decisions and their outcomes. This book will empower you to enter the world of risk management in your own domain of expertise by providing you with practical, insightful, useful and adaptable knowledge of risk analysis science including risk management, risk assessment, and risk communication. Features: Answers the fundamental question, "What is Risk Analysis?" Presents the tasks of risk management, risk assessment, and risk communication in a straightforward, conceptual manner Responds to the continuing evolution of risk science and addresses the language of risk as it continues to evolve Expands the risk management emphasis with a new chapter to serve private industry and a growing public sector interest in the growing practice of enterprise risk management Includes a new chapter on decision making under uncertainty provides practical guidance and ideas for using risk science to improve decisions and their outcomes Features an expanded set of examples of the risk process that demonstrate the growing applications of risk analysis This book is suitable for executives, professionals and students who seek a fundamental understanding of risk management, risk assessment, and risk communication. A more detailed examination of this topic, suitable for practitioners from any discipline as well as students and professionals who aspire to become experts in the practice of risk analysis science, is found in Principles of Risk Analysis: Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Second Edition, ISBN: 978-1-138-47820-6.

From cholesterol to cancer, asteroids to AIDS, we face more risks than our grandparents ever dreamed of. But most of us are 200 years behind the curve when it comes to making intelligent risk-based decisions: We refuse to fly, but don't wear seat belts in our far more dangerous cars. We panic about toxic waste dumps, but collectively smoke a billion cigarettes a year. In this entertaining and enlightening look at risk in the modern age, John Ross argues that the burgeoning science of risk assessment has given us powerful new tools to cope in a complex world, if we could only learn how to speak the language. Ross examines the building blocks of this new language, and helps us identify and relinquish long-held, often pre-set, biological and psychological responses to risk. Through vivid stories and compelling science, Ross empowers us to take control of our lives and to exercise our most basic democratic freedom--the power to make our own decisions--both as individuals and as a society.

Simple is rarely easy to implement. However, as a recent Flow trainee puts it, "Flow 'plays nice' with everyone! And, it will enable you to successfully customize and implement whatever solution you choose." Flow is the distillation of over fifty years of successful, hands-on experience that has delivered more than 100 million US dollars in value-add to companies in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Putting Flow into practice, one company increased profit $550,000 in one year on $2.5 million of revenue, and a large Asian telecom turned around a mission critical project from a projected 2-year schedule overrun and 300% budget increase to delivering seven months early and $4 million under the original budget in a 90-day period. Ted and Andrew Kallman unify Traditional management and Agile methodologies enabling successful results, regardless of the existing leadership framework. Simple and easy to understand, Flow helps individuals, teams, and organizations create and sustain high performance.

We've known for years now that demands on leaders are only increasing. Yet we have lacked widely understood, empirically grounded and rigorous ways to support the development of adequate maturity of heart, complexity of mind and skilful practice for leaders to meet these demands. Over the past three decades, a growing number of scholars and practitioners have explored the value of a developmental approach to these issues. In Maturing Leadership, Jonathan Reams brings together a cast of expert contributors to introduce this work to a wider audience. While this approach has previously been on the margins of mainstream leadership development research, Reams brings it to the centre, moving beyond the cliched characterizations of 'inner work' to bring a finer granularity, precision and rigor to the subjective workings of leaders. The chapters explore how applying insights from the field of constructivist cognitive development can be a key driver for supporting improvements in how we approach leadership development. For researchers and students of leadership, this is an essential addition to the leading theories of developmental approaches to leadership. Increasing complexity in the world is not a passing fad, and the need for leaders to grow in the maturity and sophistication of their responses is a long-term need.

Many complex systems in civil and military operations are highly automated with the intention of supporting human performance in difficult cognitive tasks. The complex systems can involve teams or individuals working on real-time supervisory control, command or information management tasks where a number of constraints must be satisfied. Decision Making in Complex Environments addresses the role of the human, the technology and the processes in complex socio-technical and technological systems. The aim of the book is to apply a multi-disciplinary perspective to the examination of the human factors in complex decision making. It contains more than 30 contributions on key subjects such as military human factors, team decision making issues, situation awareness, and technology support. In addition to the major application area of military human factors there are chapters on business, medical, governmental and aeronautical decision making. The book provides a unique blend of expertise from psychology, human factors, industry, commercial environments, the military, computer science, organizational psychology and training that should be valuable to academics and practitioners alike.

Society is now facing challenges for which the traditional management toolbox is increasingly inadequate. Well-grounded theoretical frameworks, such as systems thinking and cybernetics, offer general level interpretation schemes and models that are capable of supporting understanding of complex phenomena and are not impacted by the passage of time. This book serves the knowledge society to address the complexity of decision making and problem solving in the 21st century with contributions from systems and cybernetics. A multi-disciplinary approach has been adopted to support diversity and to develop inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge within the shared thematic of problem solving and decision making in the 21st century. Its conceptual thread is cyber/systemic thinking, and its realisation is supported by a wide network of scientists on the basis of a highly participative agenda. The book provides a platform of knowledge sharing and conceptual frameworks developed with multi-disciplinary perspectives, which are useful to better understand the fast changing scenario and the complexity of problem solving in the present time.

A pilot ?ying to a distant city needs to check his position, ?ight path and weather conditions, and must constantly keep his plane under control to land safely.TheIfosurveydataprovideadvanceinformationonchangingeconomic weather conditions and help keep the economy under control. To be sure, by their very nature they only provide short-term information. But like a plane, the economy will not be able to reach its long-term goals if it strays o? course in the short term. The Ifo survey data provide the most comprehensive and accurate, - to-date database in Europe on the state of the business cycle, and the Ifo climate indicator, sometimes simply called "The Ifo," is the most frequently cited indicator of its kind in Europe. Both the European stock market and theeuroreacttoourindicator.Ifo'smethodologyfordeterminingthebusiness climateindicatorhasbeenexportedtomorethan?ftycountries, mostrecently toTurkeyandChina.TheIfopeoplewereproudtohavebeenaskedtohelpset up polling systems in these countries. It is said that the Chinese government relies more on their "Ifo indicator" than on their o?cial accounting statistics.

Dieser erste von zwei Sammelbanden zur Bestandsaufnahme von betriebswirtschaftlicher Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung bietet einen Einblick in die Prozesse der Geschlechter(re)produktion der Betriebswirtschaftslehre auf theoretischkonzeptioneller Ebene. Die 10 Beitrage dieses Buches zeigen auf, welche Konstruktions- und Produktionprozesse sowie Reproduktions- und Dekonstruktionsprozesse in den betriebswirtschaftlichen Teildisziplinen Geschlechter diskursiv reproduzieren und damit einhergehend Reprasentationen von Geschlechtern fur die betriebswirtschaftliche Disziplin gestalten.

There have been systematic attempts over the last twenty-five years to explore the implications of decision making with incomplete information and to model an 'economic man' as an information-processing organism. These efforts are associated with the work of Roy Radner, who joins other analysts in this collection to offer accessible overviews of the existing literature on topics such as Walrasian equilibrium with incomplete markets, rational expectations equilibrium, learning, Markovian games, dynamic game-theoretic models of organization, and experimental work on mechanism selection. Some essays also take up relatively new themes related to bounded rationality, complexity of decisions, and economic survival. The collection overall introduces models that add to the toolbox of economists, expand the boundaries of economic analysis, and enrich our understanding of the inefficiencies and complexities of organizational design in the presence of uncertainty.

Practical Elements of Safety contains the invited papers presented at the Twelfth annual Safety-critical Systems Symposium, held at Birmingham, UK in February 2004. The papers included in this volume focus on the themes of the identification and analysis of risk - using the UK railway as an industry example; safety-integrity levels; industrial use of formal methods; as well as expanding on the development, assessment and changing face of current safety issues. All the papers are linked within the broad context of safety-critical systems actvities and offer a practical perspective. Papers contain industrial experience, as well as academic research, and are presented under the headings of: Mature and Practical Formality, Managing Risk in the Railway Industry, Safety Integrity Levels, the Human Side of Risk, Assessment and the Derivation of Evidence, and Safety Argument and the Law.

1 AUK ISMAIL-ZADEH ,2, TOM BEER3 1 International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Warshavskoye shosse 79-2, Moscow 113556, Russia; e-mail: [email protected] 2 Geophysikalisches Institut, Universittit Karlsruhe, Hertzstr. 16, Karlsruhe 76187, Germany; e-mail: [email protected] 3 CSIRO Environmental Risk Network, CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Vic. 3195 Australia; e-mail: [email protected] The world faces major threats to the sustainability of our planet. These threats are accompanied by the immediate dangers of natural and man-made disasters. Our vulnerability to them is greatly magnified with each passing year undermining our ability to maintain a sustainable and productive world into the 21st Century and beyond. Both history and common sense teach us that science has a tremendous potential to find ways to cope with these threats. 1 The EUROSCIENCE working group "Science and Urgent Problems of Society" 2 and the IUGG Commission on Geophysical Risk and Sustainability were initiators of the EUROSCIENCE - IUGG Advanced Research Workshop "Science for Reduction of Risk and Sustainable Development of Society" sponsored by the NATO Science Program. The Workshop was held on 15-16 June 2002 in Budapest, Hungary. More than 40 participants from 17 countries took part in the Workshop. Talks and discussions addressed mainly the question of how science can help in reduction of risk and sustainable development of society.

"Trouble on the Inca Trail" presents you with numerous challenging situations that require you to choose from a set of possible actions that offer the best chance for survival. To begin, you embark on the simulated adventure alone, determining your own choices, and then you take the journey as a team member making the decisions by group consensus. Afterward, compare your choices with what the group selects and determine whether the group performs better than any one individual alone. "Trouble on the Inca Trail" tests your knowledge and survival skills. Through this challenging and fun-filled simulated activity, you will learn how to work with others to solve problems and hone your team synergy and action-planning skills.

In today's competitive environments enterprises face diminishing market life spans, increasing pressure on profit margins and increasingly complex c- tomer requirements. Thus in their operations, modern organizations have to find a high-level balance between dynamics, complexity and precision in order to best utilize their markets. Organization Theory and Industrial En- neering, the disciplines on hand helping industry to cope with this challenge, soon identified process optimizations as the key to possible solutions. Many efforts have been undertaken to provide sound theoretical models to deal with complexity and dynamics and streamline business processes. These efforts on the one hand helped companies to be more precise in carrying out their actions and even provided solutions to produce customized products at near-mass production prices (Mass-Customization). On the other hand it t- ned out to be one of the most difficult tasks to generalize and transfer ex- riences gained in one process-reengineering project to another and put the theoretical models into practice. Not without reason is it the extremely high failure rate of business-process-reengineering projects that today deters most enterprises from entering such adventures. Right at the same time there emerged a new and highly promising scientific branch, Knowledge Management, that attracted many disciplines - among others again Organization Theory and Industrial Engineering. Knowledge was identified as a major production factor. In industrialized countries, value added is mainly raised by the intellectual abilities of a company's workforce.

The Cold War Era left the major participants, the United States and the former Soviet Union (FSU), with large legacies in terms of both contamination and potential accidents. Facility contamination and environmental degradation, as well as the accident vulnerable facilities and equipment, are a result of weapons development, testing, and production. Although the countries face similar issues from similar activities, important differences in waste management practices make the potential environmental and health risks of more immediate concern in the FSU and Eastern Europe. In the West, most nuclear and chemical waste is stored in known contained locations, while in the East, much of the equivalent material is unconfined, contaminating the environment. In the past decade, the U.S. started to address and remediate these Cold War legacies. Costs have been very high, and the projected cost estimates for total cleanup are still increasing. Currently in Russia, the resources for starting such major activities continue to be unavailable."

Why does regulation vary so dramatically from one area to another? Why are some risks regulated aggressively and others responded to only modestly? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored in The Government of Risk. This book looks at a number of risk regulation regimes, considers the respects in which they differ, and examines how these differences can be justified. Analyzing regulation in terms of 'regimes' allows us to see the rich, multi-dimensional nature of risk regulation. It exposes the thinness of society-wide analyses of risk controls and it offers a perspective that single case studies cannot reach. Regimes analysis breaks down the components of risk regulation systems and shows how they interact. It also shows how different parts of the same regime may be shaped by different factors and have to be explained and understood in quite different ways. The Government of Risk shows how such an approach is of high policy relevance as well as of considerable theoretical importance.

This book gives managers an integrative approach to project, program, and change management. It describes the differences between change in projects versus programs with case studies in both areas and the different life cycles. While the project and change comprise much of the book, it is up to date with its emphasis on agile, scrum, and benefits. The book also describes methods to both initiate and manage a change and what must be done for success and business value.

This graduate-level textbook covers modelling, programming and analysis of stochastic computer simulation experiments, including the mathematical and statistical foundations of simulation and why it works. The book is rigorous and complete, but concise and accessible, providing all necessary background material. Object-oriented programming of simulations is illustrated in Python, while the majority of the book is programming language independent. In addition to covering the foundations of simulation and simulation programming for applications, the text prepares readers to use simulation in their research. A solutions manual for end-of-chapter exercises is available for instructors.

Have you ever wondered why most newspapers are so large? Or why management consultants work such long hours? Or why hotels still insist on having check-in desks? Ask anyone in these industries, and their answer will be the same: "That's the way we've always done it."

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn’t mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. These bad practices are all too common in organizations, and managers and executives can be blind to their pernicious effects. Since they've worked in the past, or have been adopted with success by other firms, their purpose or effectiveness is rarely questioned. As a consequence, these practices spread and persist.

In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Brimming with examples of norm-defying organizations in an eclectic range of industries--including IVF clinics, hotels, newspapers, and a famous London theater--Breaking Bad Habits will make you rethink your long-held beliefs about industry norms while encouraging you to reinvigorate your business by breaking out of the status quo.

In the 1980s and 1990s the world of governance witnessed a far-reaching change from the Weberian model of bureaucracy to the 'new managerialism'-a term used to describe the group of ideas imported from business and mainly brought into government by management consultants. Over the past fifteen years, the British, French, and Canadian governments have spent growing sums of money on consulting services and, as a result, policy-makers inside the state have increasingly been exposed to the business management ideas that consultants bring into the public sector. Nevertheless, there are major differences in the extent to which reformers in the three countries embraced these ideas in the process of bureaucratic reform. Accordingly, this is a book about policy change and variation. It seeks to explain why the changes produced by the new managerialism have been more radical in some countries than in others. Building the New Managerialist State shows that the reception given by states to managerialist ideas depends on the openness of policy-making institutions to outside expert knowledge and on the organization, development, and social recognition of management consultancy.