How do managers and leaders know what to do when they are caught off guard or taken by surprise? How do they create when they do not know what to do next? These are challenges of an organizational world of existential uncertainty; one where the future does not conform to but challenges our expectations and assumptions. Steven Segal demonstrates that creating in a world of existential uncertainty requires a new understanding of the relationship between management inquiry and the lived experience of organizing. Using existential philosophy he demonstrates how moods of concern serve as a framework to integrate management theory and practice, thereby providing a framework for managers, management educators, and consultants to share a common framework. In a globalized free market characterized by unexpected disruptions management inquiry is not a science conducted from an objective distance. The book advocates an existentially reflexive and participant observer perspective to management inquiry. By participating in managing, a felt sense of being a manager develops. Through existential observation new ways of organizing are made possible. It is inquiry from within rather than from an objective distance. Such inquiry opens new doors and opportunities. Existential hermeneutic phenomenology and the free market phenomenon of creative destruction are linked to each other. The former provides a framework to work through the breakdown in conventions of organizing that occur in creative destruction.

We say that someone has charisma when they can attract, inspire and influence people through their personal qualities. We think that this is a special power some fortunate individuals have that makes them able to affect and influence others at a deep emotional level, to communicate effectively with them and make interpersonal connections. But very few of us really understand what charisma really is. It is not widely-applauded magnetism or shallow charm. Rather it's the deep-rooted powerful charisma that helps people deliver incredible results. This charisma is a learnable skill. It's the result of developing specific behaviours, which are proven to improve not only not only how people feel about you, but which will help others change their own behaviours and achieve success.

The Charismatic Leader will show you how to be a powerful influencer with your peers, your colleagues and your customers. You'll learn why charisma is a vital asset in any organization, understand its essential components, find out how to grow your charismatic presence and discover why you need the companion skills of coaching, problem-solving and empathy. Using charisma effectively helps everyone perform at a high level. This book will show you how.

One thing in life is certain: change is constant. Thanks to the rapid pace of technological innovation in the digital age-and further accelerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic-massive structural change is happening more frequently and on a greater scale than ever before. Faced with unprecedented complexity and uncertainty, most business leaders struggle to see the way forward. Yet company organization, systems, and management are still largely based on what was most effective in the Industrial Age. Disruption Proof offers a new approach that addresses our current needs. Through powerful case studies of Moves the Needle's notable corporate clients like Intuit, General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, and more, Cooper demonstrates how, with the right tools, anyone can weather turmoil and protect future profits. Disruption Proof provides readers with detailed instructions on for progressing through four stages of implementation in order to embrace a new way of working company-wide, including how to: * develop an understanding of customers and colleagues that lead to insights (empathy) * run tests to challenge assumptions (exploration) * leverage data and insights to breakthrough biases (evidence) * balance operational execution with learning (equilibrium) * manage behavior to match corporate values (ethics) By adopting these "5E"s, all employees can ensure their company's ability to navigate moments of crisis and find transformative opportunities. Cooper explains how innovation at every level is the key to organic and sustainable growth, and guides leaders to create lasting value in the world. With Cooper's action-oriented advice and tools, anyone can help steer their company toward durable success.

IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the bestselling "The Art of Innovation," have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.
Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the "creative types." But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

Passion Purpose Profit helps leaders follow their calling without missing their child's soccer games. Leaders can see the knowledge, curiosity, and imagination that goes into successfully coaching executives. They can navigate the executive boardroom and coach with confidence. But how does a leader inspire joy while also being fully present in their children's lives? How does a leader-and a mom-build confidence in her clients and family? In Passion Purpose Profit, Donna Karaba gives leaders the keys to transforming lives and helping others fulfill their potential by modeling an integrated life. She uses her time-tested business blueprint, The Authentic Leadership Business Model (TM), to teach the principles that allow leaders to grow relationships in the workplace and in the home. Leaders discover how to coach executives to self-actualization, manage client relationships, and create real value, among other things. Passion Purpose Profit is the roadmap for anyone who wants to bring in a high net income without sacrificing their family.

It is widely accepted that a large proportion of acquisition strategies fail to deliver the expected value. Globalizing markets characterized by growing uncertainty, together with the advent of new competitors, are further complicating the task of valuing acquisitions. Too often, managers rely on flawed valuation models or their intuition and experience when making risky investment decisions, exposing their companies to potentially costly pitfalls. "Playing at Acquisitions" provides managers with a powerful methodology for designing and executing successful acquisition strategies. The book tackles the myriad executive biases that infect decision making at every stage of the acquisition process, and the inadequacy of current valuation approaches to help mitigate these biases and more realistically represent value in uncertain environments.

Bringing together the latest advances in behavioral finance, real option valuation, and game theory, this unique playbook explains how to express acquisition strategies as sets of real options, explicitly introducing uncertainty and future optionality into acquisition strategy design. It shows how to incorporate the competitive dynamics that exist in different acquisition contexts; acknowledge and even embrace uncertainty; identify the value of the real options embedded in targets; and more.

Rooted in economic theory and featuring numerous real-world case studies, "Playing at Acquisitions" will enhance the ability of CEOs and their teams to derive value from their acquisition strategies, and is also an ideal resource for researchers and MBAs.

This book presents techniques for determining uncertainties in numerical solutions with applications in the fields of business administration, civil engineering, and economics, using Excel as a computational tool. Also included are solutions to uncertainty problems involving stochastic methods. The list of topics specially covered in this volume includes linear and nonlinear programming, Lagrange multipliers (for sensitivity), multi objective optimization, and Game Theory, as well as linear algebraic equations, and probability and statistics. The book also provides a selection of numerical methods developed for Excel, in order to enhance readers' understanding. As such, it offers a valuable guide for all graduate and undergraduate students in the fields of economics, business administration, civil engineering, and others that rely on Excel as a research tool.

Health threats pose significant dangers to humankind and form a major source of human suffering and sorrow. Responsible leadership and reasoned decision making can significantly improve the arenas that are affected by health threats, through establishing a better allocation of very scarce resources for building health capabilities and for increasing health preparedness, responsiveness and resilience. This book examines how public health leaders can use the cutting-edge research from Decision Sciences to better manage emerging and re-emerging health threats, with a focus on enhancing health security. While these decisions must be informed by the best available evidence, they must also address competing priorities and key uncertainties and must mitigate critical risks, albeit in a cost-effective manner which seeks to maximize societal value. This is a book about how decisions on health security can be improved, both in terms of the content that is utilized in a health decision analysis and the decision processes that are employed in reaching a decision. This decision-focused perspective can help public health leaders and public health experts to increase the health preparedness of health systems, the task of which involves improving health capabilities, increasing the robustness of health systems against health threats, as well as strengthening health resilience and the responsiveness of these systems against disease outbreaks.

Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO's impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard?
If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life--explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer--are less useful than they seem.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these "influencers" in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.
Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present--an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Exploration and Exploitation is a key text for scholars and business practitioners interested in promoting economic well-being and sustainable growth. March's work promotes the preservation of companies' competitiveness and sustainability in the fluctuating market environment by maintaining a balance between exploration and exploitation processes. He explicates that this balance depends on the interchange between the adaptive capability of the company, predictability and consistency, competition, anticipations, level of risk, learning, socialization dynamics within the organization, and the overall environmental turbulence. These intricacies make March's text invaluable.

Stimulating and developing the creative potential of all members of an organisation is widely seen as contributing to performance and results. This prestigious textbook provides a complete overview of the creative problem-solving process and its relevance to modern managers in the private and public sectors. It introduces ideas, skills and models to help students understand how creative thinking can aid problem solving, and how different techniques may help people who have different thinking and learning styles. This updated fifth edition includes fresh case studies, exercises and suggested reading, alongside extensive diagrams and thought-provoking questions. A new chapter considers the use of heuristics in decision-making situations faced by managers, and examines how aspects of creative problem solving can relate to such situations. It also introduces a complex in-tray exercise, which demonstrates how the conflicting demands on an individual manager can be considered in practice. Supporting PowerPoint slides for lecturers are available for each chapter. Creative Problem Solving for Managers will continue to be an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying problem solving, strategic management, creativity and innovation management, as well as managers looking to develop their decision-making abilities.

The book takes the inventory control perspective to tackle empty container repositioning logistics problems in regional transportation systems by explicitly considering the features such as demand imbalance over space, dynamic operations over time, uncertainty in demand and transport, and container leasing phenomenon. The book has the following unique features. First, it provides a discussion of broad empty equipment logistics including empty freight vehicle redistribution, empty passenger vehicle redistribution, empty bike repositioning, empty container chassis repositioning, and empty container repositioning (ECR) problems. The similarity and unique characteristics of ECR compared to other empty equipment repositioning problems are explained. Second, we adopt the stochastic dynamic programming approach to tackle the ECR problems, which offers an algorithmic strategy to characterize the optimal policy and captures the sequential decision-making phenomenon in anticipation of uncertainties over time and space. Third, we are able to establish closed-form solutions and structural properties of the optimal ECR policies in relatively simple transportation systems. Such properties can then be utilized to construct threshold-type ECR policies for more complicated transportation systems. In fact, the threshold-type ECR policies resemble the well-known (s, S) and (s, Q) policies in inventory control theory. These policies have the advantages of being decentralized, easy to understand, easy to operate, quick response to random events, and minimal on-line computation and communication. Fourth, several sophisticated optimization techniques such as approximate dynamic programming, simulation-based meta-heuristics, stochastic approximation, perturbation analysis, and ordinal optimization methods are introduced to solve the complex stochastic optimization problems. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in logistics, transport, supply chain, and operations research.

Originally published in 1981. Risk is a problem which all business decision makers have to cope with. The problem is not insurmountable, however, as there now exist well-established techniques for minimising risk and for calculating which of various available options is the optimal one to pursue. This book outlines and discusses these techniques and the theories behind them. Unlike many economic theories which only rarely have any practical applications, the techniques put forward in this book can be used by real businessmen to solve real business problems. The book concentrates on decision-making in two main areas: the allocation of a firm's resources and the selection of new investments; and the techniques and theories discussed fall into three broad groups: linear programming, decision theory and capital market theory. Intended as an advanced undergraduate textbook for students taking business economics or managerial economics courses, this valuable book will interest specialists and students involved in management studies, microeconomics, strategic planning, operational research, accounting and MBA programmes.

This book, originally published in 1975, is an attempt to bridge the gap between economic theory and business practice by relating the tools of economic analysis to the decision making process itself. It is written from a decision making systems analysis viewpoint. This approach enables the reader to perceive the integrative nature of the subject matter in relation to the functioning of the business enterprise. Although the unifying theme of 'decision making' is at the heart of the book, where necessary some of the theoretical underpinnings of traditional neo-classical theory of the firm are covered.

Complexity has met its match! Today, every leader and organisation grapples with unprecedented complexity. Some thrive in these situations while the vast majority do not. Now updated for a post-Covid world, David Benjamin and David Komlos share their cutting-edge, highly-engaging step-by-step formula for rapidly cracking incredibly knotty and important challenges, by involving and mobilizing all the right people-no matter where they are-to co-create solutions. Filled with compelling stories and advice distilled from years of experience applying the Complexity Formula across a broad range of sectors, Benjamin and Komlos have delivered the defining handbook for current and future leaders. Fully updated to include highly successful and proven virtual methods and practices that have been used to solve real problems. This book serves up the mindset, steps and skills that you and your team will need to crack complexity, wherever you are in the world, so that you can find clarity and build momentum even in the most uncertain of times.

This book is about meetings and providing a new perspective from behavioural economics called nudging to make meetings more productive and enjoyable. Nudging hacks into the fast, automatic, subconscious system in human reasoning to breed success in every get-together. Once you know the foundations of focus, orientation, involvement, and commitment, the advantages of nudging are evident. The authors provide an explanation of nudge theory and 6 principles of how nudging affects our behavior. Examples from the actions and choices of the Dalai Lama, Ray Dalio, and Barack Obama demonstrate how nudging can make a difference. Based on theory, the book also gives 100 very practical nudges to improve meeting productivity that can be used by any meeting leader or participant.

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions. Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We're overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn't. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn't fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better? In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star's ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO's disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions. Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don't overlook precious opportunities to change our course? Decisive is the Heath brothers' most powerful-and important-book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

This book provides students with an in-depth understanding of the concepts, frameworks and processes used to analyze and present visual data for better decision-making. Expert contributors provide guidance in translating complex concepts from large data sets and how this translation drives management practice. The book's first part provides a descriptive consideration of state-of-the-art science in visual design. The second part complements the first with a rich set of cases and visual examples, illustrating development and best practice to provide students with real-world context. Through their presentation of modern scientific principles, the editors inspire structured discussions of audience and design, recognizing differences in need, bias and effective processes across contexts and stakeholders. This cutting-edge resource will be of value to students in business analytics, business communication and management science classes, who will learn to be capable managers through the effective and direct visual communication of data. Researchers and practitioners will also find this an engaging and informative book.

In a time of unusual stress, with a pandemic raging and economic insecurity and dislocation increasing, we need to rediscover the values that make us human, that give us a sense of meaning in order to increase our potential for productivity and success. What stands in the way, however, is a professional culture where human connectedness is a lost art: the frenzied numbers-obsessed, bottom-line thinking, the "scratch and claw" workplace, and organizations where the boss can literally be an algorithm. Through moving stories and a modern spin on the ancient framework of Socratic dialogue, David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer show how to move forward and build workplaces fit for humans through what uniquely defines us as human beings: our ability to think, talk, and create. By thinking carefully about a challenge, engaging peers in dialogue via open-ended questioning, and building a strategy collaboratively. Think Talk Create enables us to cultivate trust and define collective values, seemingly "soft" attributes that nonetheless markedly increase innovation and, ultimately, financial performance. Think: Step back, slow down, avoid impulsive, short-sighted decision making. Talk: Ask non-judgmental, open ended questions, with your mind as a blank slate, pursuing the problem like an empirical scientist or a judge presiding in court. Create: Bring something new and meaningful into play, a novel solution to a pesky problem that can move the world in surprising, positive directions.