Intervals of high-activity alternating with long low-activity periods can be found in many areas of daily life, with researchers coining the phenomenon as bursts. As burstiness has become prevalent in many fields, understanding it and knowing how to manage it are crucial in order to be able to get all the benefits associated with it. Burstiness Management for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides innovative insights into burstiness's role in decision-making in business and its function as a predictor of performance. The content within this publication covers topics such as burstiness in business and e-business applications, as well as consumer behavior and sustainable development. It is a vital reference source for business managers, business professionals, academicians, researchers, and graduate-level students interested in understanding how burstiness and its consequences are processed in diverse and dynamic environments.

In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.

Advanced Topics in Global Information Management includes original material concerned with all aspects of global information management in three broad areas: Global Information Systems in Business Fuctions, Information Technology in Specific Regions of the World, Management of Global Information Resources and Applications. Both researchers and practitioners disseminate the evolving knowledge in these broad categories and the book examines a variety of aspects of global information management dealing with development, usage, failure, success, policies, strategies and applications of this valuable organizational resources.

Decision-Making Management: A Tutorial and Applications provides practical guidance for researchers seeking to optimizing business-critical decisions employing Logical Decision Trees thus saving time and money. The book focuses on decision-making and resource allocation across and between the manufacturing, product design and logistical functions. It demonstrates key results for each sector with diverse real-world case studies drawn primarily from EU projects. Theory is accompanied by relevant analysis techniques, with a progressional approach building from simple theory to complex and dynamic decisions with multiple data points, including big data and lot of data. Binary Decision Diagrams are presented as the operating approach for evaluating large Logical Decision Trees, helping readers identify Boolean equations for quantitative analysis of multifaceted problem sets. Computational techniques, dynamic analysis, probabilistic methods, and mathematical optimization techniques are expertly blended to support analysis of multi-criteria decision-making problems with defined constraints and requirements. The final objective is to optimize dynamic decisions with original approaches employing useful tools, including Big Data analysis. Extensive annexes provide useful supplementary information for readers to follow methods contained in the book.

Beyond Knowledge Management provides a balance of conceptual and practical aspects of Knowledge Management, offering the opportunity for students and practitioners to understand and effectively consider knowledge management approaches in their organizations. Everyday examples are used to lead the reader into the development of Knowledge Management, then further into a conceptual perspective, and finally to the practical application of Knowledge Management in organizations.

This work highlights the coming age of management information systems for all types of executives by focusing on executive information systems, or EIS. Serving as a data-intensive system, an EIS offers a snapshot of a company's past and present operations as a way of predicting the future. In this book, Robert Thierauf provides a complete picture of executive information systems, from an introduction of what these systems are all about, to the hardware, software, and applications that form the basis of an EIS environment.

The work is divided into four basic sections. The first provides an overview of executive information systems, discussing the real need for an EIS, the essential characteristics underlying it, and its relationship to prior management information systems. The types of executive decision making typically found in an EIS environment, illustrated with specific examples, are also examined. The second section focuses on the computer hardware and software that is useful within an EIS operating mode, along with on-line databases that assist executives in decision making. The development of executive information systems is covered in section three, which features current approaches for executives and their staffs as well as methods to be followed by the Management Information Systems department. Finally, section four addresses various aspects of working in an EIS environment, including strategic planning, marketing, manufacturing, finance, and personnel. A master case study is presented, and each topic is explored in relation to it. Typical EIS applications are also described for each of the topic areas. With its combination of both EIS theory and practical applications, this work will be a valuable resource for senior executives and MIS professionals as well as for students of management and information systems. Public, academic, and business libraries will also find it to be a useful addition to their collections.

Provocative and controversial, the information found in Empowered Investing reveals powerful tricks of the investment trade. It will give you the education and information to be a confident, informed, and hugely successful investor.

The most successful investors in history, such as Charles Henry Dow, used unique analysis and charting methods. These are the secrets Wall Street doesn't want you to know. Relying on the media and Wall Street research is painful and no longer necessary.

With the advice offered by author Joseph F. LoPresti, you'll learn to chart stocks like Dow, isolate hot sector opportunities, and select the strongest stocks to buy through a series of easy, almost effortless strategies. These exercises will also help you reduce risk and give you a "sell discipline," something desperately needed by most investors. Once you read "Empowered Investing," you'll see how easy it is to implement these startling strategies.

"Empowered Investing" will introduce a different way to make investment decisions that will instantly help you manage your portfolio, build your wealth, and enrich your life.

The book focuses on the next fields of computer science: combinatorial optimization, scheduling theory, decision theory, and computer-aided production management systems. It also offers a quick introduction into the theory of PSC-algorithms, which are a new class of efficient methods for intractable problems of combinatorial optimization. A PSC-algorithm is an algorithm which includes: sufficient conditions of a feasible solution optimality for which their checking can be implemented only at the stage of a feasible solution construction, and this construction is carried out by a polynomial algorithm (the first polynomial component of the PSC-algorithm); an approximation algorithm with polynomial complexity (the second polynomial component of the PSC-algorithm); also, for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, an exact subalgorithm if sufficient conditions were found, fulfilment of which during the algorithm execution turns it into a polynomial complexity algorithm. Practitioners and software developers will find the book useful for implementing advanced methods of production organization in the fields of planning (including operative planning) and decision making. Scientists, graduate and master students, or system engineers who are interested in problems of combinatorial optimization, decision making with poorly formalized overall goals, or a multiple regression construction will benefit from this book.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to decision-making in an MCDM framework. Designed as a tutorial, it presents the main concepts and methods to be applied, together with essential background information. This includes the concept of nondominance, Simon's bounded rationality, Tversky and Kahneman's prospect theory, and the concepts of behavioral vs. mathematical convergence and premature stopping put forward by Korhonen, Moskowitz and Wallenius. The book concludes with a non-technical review of many popular decision algorithms, including the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), VIMDA, and a number of classic interactive man-machine algorithms. In essence, the book is a "one-stop" source on everything you need to know about managerial decision-making in the multiple-criteria setting.

Why aren't we investing more in disaster resilience, despite the rising costs of disaster events? This book argues that decision-makers in governments, businesses, households, and development agencies tend to focus on avoiding losses from disasters, and perceive the return on investment as uncertain - only realised if a somewhat unlikely disaster event actually happens. This book develops a new business case for investment based on the multiple dividends of resilience. This looks beyond only avoided losses (the first dividend) to the wider benefits gained independently of whether or not the disaster event occurs. These include unleashing entrepreneurial activities and productive investments by lowering the looming threat of losses from disasters and enabling businesses, farmers and homeowners to take positive risks (the second dividend); and co-benefits of resilience measures beyond just disaster risk (the third dividend), such as flood embankments in Bangladesh that double as roads, or wetlands in Colombo that reduce urban heat extremes.

The cultural, social, and economic history of mankind is characterized by a succession of needs and problems that have stimulated the invention of operational and conceptual tools to facilitate their solution. The continuous presentation of new needs, an attempt to improve partial solutions to old problems, curiosity, and the disinterested search for knowledge then constituted the fundamental push for scientific, cultural, economic, and social progress. In an increasingly digital society, where software technological tools permeate daily life and, consequently, change the management of reality, mastering of transversal skills is crucial for success. Computational thinking is a set of transversal skills related to the foundations of computer science as a scientific discipline and means a mastering to the process of solving problems. The goal of computational thinking is to acquire interpretative perspectives of reality, which allows one to read the digital experience competently and responsibly. Computational Thinking for Problem Solving and Managerial Mindset Training explores how individuals can be trained into managerial mindsets through computational thinking and computer science. It explores how computer science can be used as a valid guideline to develop skills such as effective soft skills, communication skills, and collaboration. Further, the chapters explore the adoption of computational thinking for individuals to gain managerial mindsets and successfully solve questions and problems in their domain of interest. This will include artificial intelligence applications, strategic thinking, management training, ethics, emergency managerial mindsets, and more. This book is valuable for managers, professionals, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how computational thinking can be applied for the training of managerial mindsets.

Responsible behaviors in the realm of business continue to remain a crucial component of organizational development. By exploring core aspects of contemporary corporate strategies, businesses can create more value in social welfare initiatives. CSR 2.0 and the New Era of Corporate Citizenship is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the ways in which corporate entities can implement responsible strategies and create synergistic value for both businesses and society. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as corporate citizenship, stakeholder engagement, and business ethics, this publication is ideally designed for students, academics and researchers seeking current concise and authoritative research on the business case for corporate social responsibility.

This book presents recently developed intelligent techniques with applications and theory in the area of quality management. The involved applications of intelligence include techniques such as fuzzy sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. The book consists of classical quality management topics dealing with intelligent techniques for solving the complex quality management problems. The book will serve as an excellent reference for quality managers, researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students in this area. The authors of the chapters are well-known researchers in the area of quality management.

The rate of failure of IT projects has remained little changed in survey after survey over the past 15-20 years-over 40-50%. This has happened in spite of new technology, innovative methods and tools, and different management methods. Why does this happen? Why can't the situation be better? One reason is that many think of each IT effort as unique. In reality many IT projects are very similar at a high, strategic level. Where they differ is in the people and exact events-the detail. If you read the literature or have been in information systems or IT for some time, you have seen the same reasons for failure and the same problems and issues recur again and again. In this book IT Management experts Ben Lientz and Lee Larssen show you how to identify and track the recurring issues leading to failure in IT projects and provide a proven, modern method for addressing them. By following the recommendations in this books readers can significantly reduce the risk of IT failures and increase the rate of success. Benefits of using this approach: * Issues are identified earlier-giving more time for solution and action. * Issues are resolved more consistently since the approach tracks on their repetition. * You get an early warning of problems in IT work-before the budget or schedule fall apart. * Management tends to have more realistic expectations with an awareness of issues. * Users and managers have greater confidence in IT due to the improved handling of issues. * Since the number of issues tends to stabilize in an organization, the IT organization and management get better at detecting, preventing, and dealing with issues over time-cumulative improvement. * Giving attention to issues make users more realistic in their requests and acts to deter requirement changes and scope creep.

Seeking to define a new approach to data management at the enterprise level, this work takes the reader beyond information management to information control, where the methods of data capture and manipulation supersede data quantity. Using the metadata approach ensures long-term, universal control of all data characteristics and improves the effectiveness of IT as a corporate function by minimizing the potential for errors, and improving communication and understanding between IT and other disciplines. By describing how to establish metadata management within an organization, this volume provides examples of data structure architectures, and reviews issues associated with metadata management in relation to the Internet and data warehousing. It offers to help the reader to control the factors that make data useable throughout an organization and manage data so that it becomes a valuable corporate asset. The book examines real-world business departments that can benefit from this approach and ways in which sets of metadata can be both autonomous and overlapping.

The Missing Link to Toyota-Style Success--LEAN LEADERSHIP

Winner of the 2012 Shingo Research and Professional Publications Award

"This great book reveals the secret ingredient to lean success: lean leadership. Not only is it a pleasure to read, but it is also deep and enlightening. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in lean: it's both an eye opener and a game changer."
--Michael Balle, Ph.D., coauthor of "The Gold Mine" and "The Lean Manager"

"This will immediately be recognized as the most important book ever published to understand and guide 'True North Lean' and the goal of perpetual business excellence."
--Ross E. Robson, President and CEO, DnR Lean, LLC, and the original Director of The Shingo Prize

"An excellent book that will shape leadership development for decades to come."
--Karen Martin, Principal, Karen Martin & Associates, and author of "The Kaizen Event Planner"

About the Book:

TOYOTA. The name signifies greatness-- world-class cars and game-changing business thinking. One key to the Toyota Motor Company's unprecedented success is its famous production system and its lesser-known product development program. These strategies consider the end user at every turn and have become the model for the global lean business movement.

All too often, organizations adopting lean miss the most critical ingredient--lean leadership. Toyota makes enormous investments in carefully selecting and intensively developing leaders who fit its unique philosophy and culture. Thanks to the company's lean leadership approach, explains "Toyota Way" author Jeffrey Liker and former Toyota executive Gary Convis, the celebrated carmaker has set into motion a drive for continuous improvement at all levels of its business. This has allowed for: Constant growth: Toyota increased profitability for 58 consecutive years--slowing down only in the face of 2008's worldwide financial difficulties, the recall crisis, and the worst Japanese earthquake of the century. Unstoppable inventiveness: Toyota's approach to innovative thinking and problem solving has resulted in top industry ratings and incredible customer satisfaction, while allowing the company to weather these three crises in rapid succession and to come out stronger. Strong branding and respect: Toyota's reputation was instrumental in the company's ability to withstand the recalls-driven media storm of 2010.

But what looked to some to be a sinking ship is once again running under a full head of steam. Perhaps the Toyota culture had weakened, but lean leadership was the beacon that showed the way back.

In fact, writes Liker, the company is "as good and perhaps a better model for lean leadership than it ever has been." of innovation and growth. Yet, "Industry Week" reports that just 2 percent of companies using lean processes can likewise claim to have had long-term success. What the other 98 percent lack is unified leadership with a common method and philosophy.

If you want to get lean, you have to take it to the leadership level. "The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership" shows you how.

This edited book presents the state-of-the-art of applying fuzzy logic to managerial decision-making processes in areas such as fuzzy-based portfolio management, recommender systems, performance assessment and risk analysis, among others. Presenting the latest research, with a strong focus on applications and case studies, it is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, project leaders and managers wanting to apply or improve their fuzzy-based skills.

The main objective of this reference book is to provide valuable insight of today's important changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shock in terms of defining, characterizing, presenting and understanding the meaning, challenges and implications of responsible and sustainable business. Important questions tend to appear once focusing on the broad topic represented by the idea of responsible and sustainable business, while addressing the important changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shock. This book provides an updated view of the newest trends, novel practices and latest tendencies concerning the manner of addressing and creating responsible and sustainable business, while striving to understand those important changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic shock. The target audience is represented by academics, scientists, researchers, students, PhD scholars, and post-doctoral students. Also, this reference book presents important features concerning sustainable development goals, challenges and practices, while emphasizing the key determinants in achieving performance and excellence, which proves to be extremely valuable for specialists, practitioners, governmental institutions, and policy makers' worldwide. Nevertheless, this scientific book represents a well-documented and well-developed work for business leaders, entrepreneurs and managers, as well as highly prominent individuals involved in decision making processes.