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.

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.

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 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.

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.

While many nations are still struggling from the global financial crisis and regaining their financial security, investors are considering alternative options for investing their money; and the secure financial sector is China appears as a viable option. International Cross-Listing of Chinese Firms examines the successful techniques and strategies that Chinese companies are using within their financial practices. It highlights the foreign-based multinational enterprise theories related to the major international stock markets. By providing the latest theories and research, this book will be beneficial for business practitioners, researchers, and managers interested in the relationship between cross-listing and firm valuation of Chinese firms.

This book contains an Open Access chapter. Over the past two decades, the field of talent management has established itself as a key area of management practice and research. Emerging from the practitioner literature in the 1990s, the research evidence bases truly materialised in the late 2000s onwards. The launch of the EIASM Workshop on Talent Management in 2012 coincided with this surge in research interest, and we are now in a critical time in the evolution of our understanding of talent management. Talent Management: A Decade of Developments presents valuables insights into the progression in the critical understanding of talent management, building upon a decade of the EIASM Workshops. Bringing together leading voices in talent management research to reflect on recent developments and the current state of research, examining key issues such as talent philosophies, star performers, talent turnover and retention. Aimed at researchers, postgraduate students, and professionals in the field, this collection features the leading experts in their respective areas within talent management. Talent Management: A Decade of Developments charts the evolution of talent management, illustrating the progress, prospects, and challenges that have transpired over the last ten years.

This book explores the methodological frontiers of managerial and organizational cognition (MOC), an exciting and diverse interdisciplinary body of work that began with the publication in 1958 of James G. March and Herbert A. Simon's classic work Organizations. Entering its fourth decade, the field gained significant momentum following the appearance of Anne S. Huff's (1990) book Mapping Strategic Thought, which explored the (then) methodological frontiers of MOC. The world has changed since then and so, too, have the methods available to MOC researchers; it is timely, therefore, to examine the extent to which the methods that were foundational to the development of MOC are still fit for purpose. Taking stock of MOC's many methodological accomplishments, the thought-provoking chapters comprising this second volume of the New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition book series set the agenda for the next phase of the field's development.

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.

Anthony Von Mickle is President of The Investment Forum, a real estate and equity investments group based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Based upon his interests, through formal education and practical research, he has learned that actively pursuing what you want, regardless of your personal background, is a key ingredient to the attainment of accumulated wealth in residential real estate investments. Wealth can be acquired in this field by anyone willing to do the work and formulate this goal. Real Estate for Real People: A Guide to Achieving Profitability in Residential Real Estate Investing is a guide to help long-term investors seeking profit in residential real estate investments. Von Mickle stresses the initial accumulation of preliminary information which helps prevent problems down the line. For example, examine zoning and planning details of the economic development office in the counties in which you wish to invest in property, obtain tax assessment information and detail an exit strategy. Von Mickle provides valuable tools that can help secure profitable residential real estate investments. Learn from an expert who has extensively studied extremely wealthy people and successfully utilized their common traits of passion, timing, fear, and leverage. He shares how anyone can use these traits to their financial advantage.

Including contributions from leading experts in the field, this book covers applications and developments of heuristic search methods for solving complex optimization problems. The book covers various local search strategies including genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search and hybrids thereof. These methods have proved extraordinarily successful by solving some of the most difficult, real-world problems. At the interface between Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research, research in this exciting area is progressing apace spurred on by the needs of industry and commerce. The introductory chapter provides a clear overview of the basic techniques and useful pointers to further reading and to current research. The second section of the book covers some of the most recent and exciting developments of the basic techniques, with suggestions not only for extending and improving these but also for hybridizing and incorporating automatic adaption. The third section contains a number of case studies, surveys and comparative studies which span a wide range of application areas ranging from the classic Steiner tree problem to more practical problems arising in telecommunications and data analysis. The coverage of the latest research and the illustrative case studies will ensure that the book is invaluable for researchers and professionals with an interest in heuristic search methods.

In this timely report, a number of chief executive officers talk frankly about how they've managed to increase profits and improve market shares for their companies without government intervention even in the face of economic hard times and foreign competition. Drawn from companies in both well-established and fast-growing non-traditional industries, these success stories represent a broad range of experience and expertise. In addition, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Alan M. Kantrow offer their own perspectives on corporate success. "How to Compete Beyond the 1980S" clearly shows that, through the increased imagination and efforts of individual corporations and institutions, America's lagging productivity can be revived.

This research study attempts to provide a comprehensive CSR literature review, analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues from the strategic decision-making (SDM) perspective, and investigate the process of managers' CSR- related SDM in China. In particular, it utilizes content analysis to examine selected CSR articles from published studies, in order to evaluate the trends in CSR theory development as well as to identify the variables, constructs, and relationships within CSR theory. The review indicates that CSR should be involved in organizational strategies. Therefore, this study reviews the relevant theoretical and empirical literature in the SDM area. Firstly, it summarizes the broader context of strategic decisions and points out factors in the external environment and organizational characteristics that influence the SDM process of managers. Secondly, it articulates the influences of individual characteristics on the SDM. Thirdly, it examines the process of SDM using the rational and bounded rationality theory of decision making. Finally, on the basis of the SDM model, the author generates a research model which proposes the links between vital and influential factors from an integrated perspective. This book also provides a detailed description of how to choose a proper method for the CSR-related SDM research, the process of survey design, sampling methods, and survey administration. In particular, the author utilized a policy-capturing method to develop a series of scenarios concerning CSR activities and an explanation of this method is provided. It reports research findings of this study and provides an extensive and thorough discussion and compares it with previous empirical studies. The conclusion summarizes the research findings and their theoretical and practical implications.

The proliferation of computers in business requires increased managerial expertise in decision support systems and expert systems. Managers, executives, and scholars will find this in-depth examination of the latest tools and technologies available for decision support invaluable. The book provides a clear and complete discussion of the foundations and management applications of decision support, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and other management support systems. Practical examples are provided throughout, giving the business professional a useful tool for evaluating and utilizing the variety of decision support and information technologies available. In addition, Bidgoli explores the growing field of applicable artificial intelligence, including expert systems, fuzzy logic, and neural networks. This book enhances expertise in a succinct, practical, and readable way.

BUSINESS ETHICS, 10th Edition, is a comprehensive and practical guide designed to assist students with real life ethical issues that arise in the business world.

This text helps students develop critical thinking and analytical skills needed to navigate the unique set of problems that emerge when ethics and commerce collide. The authors focus on key ethical concepts and emphasize the importance of critical topics such as the nature of morality, major theories of ethics and economic justice and competing views of capitalism and corporate responsibility.

This text is thorough, flexible and pedagogically proven to bolster student involvement and comprehension of the material.

This book introduces a new paradigm called 'Optimization in Changeable Spaces' (OCS) as a useful tool for decision making and problem solving. It illustrates how OCS incorporates, searches, and constructively restructures the parameters, tangible and intangible, involved in the process of decision making. The book elaborates on OCS problems that can be modeled and solved effectively by using the concepts of competence set analysis, Habitual Domain (HD) and the mental operators called the 7-8-9 principles of deep knowledge of HD. In addition, new concepts of covering and discovering processes are proposed and formulated as mathematical tools to solve OCS problems. The book also includes reformulations of a number of illustrative real-life challenging problems that cannot be solved by traditional optimization techniques into OCS problems, and details how they can be addressed. Beyond that, it also includes perspectives related to innovation dynamics, management, artificial intelligence, artificial and e-economics, scientific discovery and knowledge extraction. This book will be of interest to managers of businesses and institutions, policy makers, and educators and students of decision making and behavior in DBA and/or MBA.

There are many people who are refugees of the corporate world.

Global Solutions for Teams is a strategy-packed resource essential for multinational organizations or any company that is considering going global. The book's cultural guidelines and case examples of leading multinational corporations demonstrate how cross-cultural teams can overcome a disjointed state of cultural collision...and progress to the more productive stages of coexistence and finally, collaboration. As workplace borders expand and the mobility of the workforce increases, new techniques are needed to manage transnational teams. Global Solutions for Teams shares these concepts, as well as the approaches that can position a company more competitively now - and well into the 21st century.

Volume 12, Advances in Business and Management Forecasting, is a blind refereed serial publication. It presents state-of-the-art studies in the application of forecasting methodologies to such areas as supply chain, health care, prospecting for donations from university alumni, and the use of clustering and regression in forecasting. The orientation of this volume is for business applications for both the researcher and the practitioner of forecasting. Volume 12 is divided into three sections: Forecasting Applications, Predictive Analytics and Time Series. An interdisciplinary group of experts explore wide-ranging topics including multi-criteria scoring models, detecting rare events, the assessment of control charts for intermittent data, and fuzzy time series models.

With intensified global competition, institutional changes and reduced communication costs the propensity of firms to reconfigure their global value chain and separate their activities across national boundaries has increased markedly. It enables firms to combine the benefits arising from specialization and increased flexibility with location advantages. Consequently, large parts of manufacturing and other more standardized activities have been offshored to emerging countries. However, recent developments are challenging this traditional separation between advanced and emerging economies as host of knowledge- and production-intensive activities, respectively. Recent research has emphasized the role of intra-organizational relationships and links among the different parts of the value chain. Innovative and productive activities are affected by strong interdependencies and complementarities, and for some companies the co-location of R&D and manufacturing is critical for development and innovation. This volume will interest scholars in International Business, Economic Geography, Operations and Supply Chain Management, International Economics, and Political Science.

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers' understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as complex adaptive systems, the impacts of psychological and emotional factors upon value co-creation exchanges, and ICT enablers of service network performance and service exchange fulfillment. Thanks to the chosen perspectives, all of which are based on different systems research streams, the book will support more consistent and robust decisions, leading to sustainable, wise, and viable systems dynamics. It will aid managers, practitioners, and consultants in their decision-making processes and will also be of interest for academics and scholars in management, systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing.

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.

This book provides essential insights into a range of newly developed numerical optimization techniques with a view to solving real-world problems. Many of these problems can be modeled as nonlinear optimization problems, but due to their complex nature, it is not always possible to solve them using conventional optimization theory. Accordingly, the book discusses the design and applications of non-conventional numerical optimization techniques, including the design of benchmark functions and the implementation of these techniques to solve real-world optimization problems. The book's twenty chapters examine various interesting research topics in this area, including: Pi fraction-based optimization of the Pantoja-Bretones-Martin (PBM) antenna benchmarks; benchmark function generators for single-objective robust optimization algorithms; convergence of gravitational search algorithms on linear and quadratic functions; and an algorithm for the multi-variant evolutionary synthesis of nonlinear models with real-valued chromosomes. Delivering on its promise to explore real-world scenarios, the book also addresses the seismic analysis of a multi-story building with optimized damper properties; the application of constrained spider monkey optimization to solve portfolio optimization problems; the effect of upper body motion on a bipedal robot's stability; an ant colony algorithm for routing alternate-fuel vehicles in multi-depot vehicle routing problems; enhanced fractal dimension-based feature extraction for thermal face recognition; and an artificial bee colony-based hyper-heuristic for the single machine order acceptance and scheduling problem. The book will benefit not only researchers, but also organizations active in such varied fields as Aerospace, Automotive, Biotechnology, Consumer Packaged Goods, Electronics, Finance, Business & Banking, Oil, Gas & Geosciences, and Pharma, to name a few.