Forecasting is one of the most important activities that form the basis for strategic, tactical, and operational decisions in all business organizations. Recently, neural networks have emerged as an important tool for business forecasting. There are considerable interests and applications in forecasting using neural networks. Neural Networks in Business Forecasting provides for researchers and practitioners some recent advances in applying neural networks to business forecasting. A number of case studies demonstrating the innovative or successful applications of neural networks to many areas of business as well as methods to improve neural network forecasting performance are presented.

A successful Wall Street trader turned neuroscientist reveals how risk taking and stress transform our body chemistry
Before he became a world-class scientist, John Coates ran a derivatives trading desk in New York City. He used the expression "the hour between dog and wolf" to refer to the moment of Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation traders passed through when under pressure. They became cocky and irrationally risk-seeking when on a winning streak, tentative and risk-averse when cowering from losses. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success--one that can cloud men's judgment in high-pressure decision-making. Coates demonstrates how our bodies produce the fabled gut feelings we so often rely on, how stress in the workplace can impair our judgment and even damage our health, and how sports science can help us toughen our bodies against the ravages of stress. Revealing the biology behind bubbles and crashes, "The Hour Between Dog and Wolf "sheds new and surprising light on issues that affect us all.

This is a practical guide to evaluating and addressing the challenges of a distressed business - whether due to being overleveraged, poorly managed, or is underperforming. The authors provide practical advice, based on their involvement collectively in more than 150 financially stressed businesses, on how to maximize the value of a troubled business.

Strategic Alignment Process and Decision Support Systems: Theory and Case Studies presents a visualization of the nature, scope, objectives and difficulties of the overall decision making process. This book focuses on the discussion and solution of strategic decision making processes in a way that gives assistance and insight to readers in this important area of business administration. Covering important topics such as new economy, e-business, project maturity and knowledge data discovery, this book also provides educational material, including many exercises and cases for undergraduate, graduate or MBA students.

While many social, economic, and political changes have occurred recently in internet public procurement and its decision support systems, there is still a lot of opportunity for improvement. Public Sector Transformation Processes and Internet Public Procurement: Decision Support Systems brings together research on different perspectives from academics and practitioners on the methods, theories, and practices involved in the growth and expansion of decision support systems as it relates to the public sector transformation process and internet public procurement.

Managing and Leading others in the workplace today can be a very challenging experience. With everything changing so quickly and dramatically, the ability to make the right decisions at the right time and for the right reasons is critically important. Employees need and want effective, management/leadership.

""There are never any shortcuts to success, but it is possible to follow the paths of those who have blazed a trail in their own fields of endeavor. Jan has created great success in the area of entrepreneurship.

If you wish to become an entrepreneur, you will find much in the pages of Jan's "Go Start Something" that will guide you to success. However, anyone can benefit from these 18 chapters of experience and learn from the examples Jan describes.

I believe the stories of succeeding against great odds, sacrificing personal comfort to put everything into your business, living according to your vision, putting in a full day's work day in and day out, and enjoying your life every moment can provide great inspiration. One of the most powerful forces in the world is the will of men and women who believe in themselves, who dare to hope and aim high, who go confidently after the things they want from life. Jan went after his dream and accomplished it, you can also achieve great success if you follow his Rules for Entrepreneurship. Go Start Something."" PROFESSOR JIM GIBBONS, PHD, Northwood University

Asset management is becoming increasingly important to an organization's strategy, given its effects on cost, production, and quality. No matter the sector, important decisions are made based on techniques and theories that are thought to optimize results; asset management models and techniques could help maximize effectiveness while reducing risk. Optimum Decision Making in Asset Management posits that effective decision making can be augmented by asset management based on mathematical techniques and models. Resolving the problems associated with minimizing uncertainty, this publication outlines a myriad of methodologies, procedures, case studies, and management tools that can help any organization achieve world-class maintenance. This book is ideal for managers, manufacturing engineers, programmers, academics, and advanced management students.

Decision making tools are essential for the successful outcome of any organization. Recent advances in predictive analytics have aided in identifying particular points of leverage where critical decisions can be made. Emerging Methods in Predictive Analytics: Risk Management and Decision Making provides an interdisciplinary approach to predictive analytics; bringing together the fields of business, statistics, and information technology for effective decision making. Managers, business professionals, and decision makers in diverse fields will find the applications and cases presented in this text essential in providing new avenues for risk assessment, management, and predicting the future outcomes of their decisions.

Success. It's a goal that many seek to achieve. They see the limos, the fans, the front cover of major magazines as the ultimate prize. But is success really what it's cracked up to be? Sadly enough, it isn't. Successful people around the world are hiding from the glory, dodging greedy relatives, shunning star-struck commuters. Why? Because their peace of mind is under attack. How can they regain their time, their sanity, their normalcy? Failure. This humorous, ground-breaking "how-to" book will help all to see clearer that the simpler things in like are not that bad. And to achieve it one must fail, but fail in style.

As there is a vast amount of information to consider when offering quality services, organisations have developed techniques for identifying risk factors to be taken into consideration when constructing effective business strategies. Developing Business Strategies and Identifying Risk Factors in Modern Organizations presents new methodologies currently being utilised to formulate and solve strategic issues in order to escape the jeopardy of possible business risks. By highlighting a multitude of sciences and their influences on modern organisations; this book is an essential reference for decision makers and researchers in business, industry, government, and academia.

In this indispensable book, a widely experienced business consultant provides a complete set of analytical tools essential to successful trouble-shooting, effective planning, and making better decisions faster, more confidently, and more often.

In clear, readable language, consultant and researcher Kevin Desouza accomplishes an unlikely feat: explaining artificial intelligence to nonspecialists, in a way that experts will recognize and accept as correct and immediately applicable. Workers in knowledge management are relatively isolated from each other, businesspeople are still unconvinced that artificial intelligence has much to offer, and engineers creating the latest algorithm or device seldom consider its value for businesspeople--Desouza seeks to change all that.

He maintains that knowledge will be traded like physical goods, and that businesses must leverage knowledge resources within its organizations to survive in a highly competitive marketplace. Introducing us the concepts and significance of knowledge management, he shows that incorporating artificial intelligence computer-based techniques into business settings can provide truly significant gains in productivity. This book is among the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive one-stop guide to the basics of knowledge management, plus a lucid explanation of A.I., and how to use it in almost all types of organizational settings.

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book's chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

"Using Train Your Brain, in two years, I've gone from zero to a million dollars a year in my business and paid off $30,000 in debt " Sarah Thomas, Basehor, KS

When Dana Wilde began her direct-sales business, she realized that education for entrepreneurs typically consisted of endless "how-to" explanations: how to market, how to pick up the phone, how to manage your time, how to increase bookings or sales. There always seemed to be a new system to learn, a new surefire method or cutting-edge technique for entrepreneurs to master.

In an effort to teach her team members a better and easier way, Dana Wilde created Train Your Brain, a tested and proven system combining elements of both mindset and action ... or as Dana likes to call it, Intentional Action.

What Dana discovered by using Train Your Brain is that mindset can be "taught" and that learning simple mindset strategies not only allows you to understand how the brain works but also shows you how easy it is to change your thinking and, as a result, change your outcomes.

In Train Your Brain, Dana breaks down the Cycle of Perpetual Sameness--the number one reason why most people only experience incremental change in their lives. More importantly, she also provides the much-needed blueprint to help you get off this counterproductive cycle quickly.

Train Your Brain, with its twenty easy-to-implement "Mindware Experiments," gives you all the necessary tools needed to get off ... and stay off ... the Cycle of Perpetual Sameness, so you can transform your life and grow your business in record time

Decisionmaking literature, which has emphasized the act of solving problems, has long neglected the need to identify problems as precisely as possible. This book examines the nature of problems and decisionmaking and their impact on people who direct an organization. It further focuses on how executives respond to take action at the upper levels of their organizations.

The book stresses problem identification, which executives frequently ignore because of their preoccupation with problem solving. It looks at the need to avoid viewing solutions as remedies achieved at predetermined milestones. It examines options other than solutions, such as accommodation and coping, and it looks at the executive environment associated with outcomes along a spectrum ranging from perfection, to progress, to failure. The author argues that executives should abandon the attempt to predetermine objectives over time and adopt a Problem Exchange Ratio (PER) concept. The executive then compares the status of problems over time, creating a ratio. The PER approach considers the problems that solutions themselves trigger. It then allows executives to see where they stand and suggests ways of ameliorating unwanted conditions. The author provides illustrative cases and episodes from both the public and private sectors. Combining theory and practical aspects of executive decisionmaking, this book gives the reader a fuller understanding of the link between decisions and problems.