Despite how much is written about strategy, and money spent on it, reports of chronic failures persist. Two causes dominate. Strategy is still not fully defined and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned view of the world. Change and innovation, however, are not wholly planned but emerge from the myriad interactions of the players involved some by design, many not. This science of complex adaptive systems must provide the bedrock on which strategy is built.The Emergent Approach to Strategy is the first book to derive the definition, theory, and practice of strategy from adaptive systems. Aimed at corporate business and functional leaders, but broadly applicable, the approach includes an agile method for strategy framework design that replaces familiar stepwise "chevron" methods and presents new tests of strategy called the Five Disqualifiers. This book offers no promise of easy "transformations." Change and innovation are hard, sometimes ugly, with no guarantees. But with the right principles and discipline, organizations can efficiently raise the probability of success.

The ability to make the right decision is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career. Written by Martin Manser, a leading expert on decision making in a business context, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to choose the right path. The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience. So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!

Is Apple conscious?

Could a cyber–human system sense a potential terrorist attack?

Or make diagnosing a rare and little-known disease routine?

Computers are not replacing us: they are enhancing us. Different intelligences are joining together to do things we thought were impossible.

Whether it’s devising innovations to tackle climate change, helping job seekers and employers find one another, or identifying the outbreak of a serious disease, groups of humans and machines are already working together to solve all sorts of problems. And they will do a lot more.

The future will be like another world – a place where we’ll think differently. In many ways, we are already there.

High-value talent management must be relevant to today's workplace Misplaced Talent takes a hard look at the cluttered field of Talent Management, and offers a clear guide to making better people decisions in any organization. Deliberately challenging practitioners to do more, this insightful discussion sorts through the tools and techniques developed over the last century to examine their true relevance to the modern workplace. You'll learn which activities show the greatest potential to improve the lives of employees and the organizations they work for, and identify which of your existing practices don't really add enough value to be worth the expenditure of time, money, and potentially lost talent. The author asks you to make up your own mind about which approaches work best for your own specific talent decisions, but provides the best theory and practice available today as a foundation upon which to formulate a more relevant strategy. In a world of big data, the potential to understand employees and react appropriately has never been greater. So why is Talent Management as an industry relying on outdated theory and practices? This book is a guide to bringing HR up to date, giving you the tools, techniques, and perspective you need to demonstrate more value to your organization. * Adopt the tools and techniques most effective in today's workplace * Identify and discard methods that don't add value to the organization * Implement critical changes that can transform the HR function * Make better people decisions based on psychology and research Fundamentally, not much has changed in what constitutes good people practice. Practitioners must demonstrate the value of Talent Management, but the solutions implemented often fall short of the rigor and discipline they deserve. Misplaced Talent provides the insight you need to refocus attention and engage your organization about the value of better people decisions.

The concept of the business model has become very popular in the strategy and innovation literature's. Recent research has acknowledged its cognitive underpinnings, its status as a mental construct, and has highlighted how managers' cognitive and social sense-making patterns influence business model design and how shared logics enable innovation. Yet, the specific cognitive underpinnings of business models, though often mentioned, are rarely explicitly studied. Business Models and Cognition addresses this gap by focusing directly on intersections between business model studies and cognitive studies. Gathering an international, multidisciplinary team of business model and cognition scholars, this book not only identifies surprising connections between these two existing literature's, but also offers new reflections on future avenues of research for both in order to explore the cognitive foundations of business modelling. For its interdisciplinary scope, scholarly rigor, and novel insights, this fourth volume of the New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition is a must-read for scholars and students of business, strategy and cognition, and it is of keen interest to executives and managers eager to reflect critically on their own understanding of the "business model" as a concept.

Project teams are the rule rather than the exception in today's organizations. But thanks to the pressure of performance goals, conflicting agendas, and political jockeying, few teams make superior decisions consistently. Instead, team members communicate poorly or not at all, avoid provocative discussion, occasionally stab each other in the back, or in many other ways forget that their job is to make decisions that lead the company forward. Jana Kemp, an authority on team decision making, saves the day by offering tested methods and tools team members and their leaders can use to ratchet up the performance level. That not only makes team projects more successful--it makes work fun. Kemp argues that the way to make good decisions is to have an expansive group conversation that leads to sound decisions and swift execution. Sounds simple, but in most organizations, making a decision and seeing it through can become an exercise in frustration for managers and employees alike. At one end of the spectrum are "command-and-control" decisions, proclaimed from on-high and implemented through the ranks. Without input or buy-in from those affected by the decision, this approach can lead to resentment and backlash. At the other end are purely collaborative, consensus decisions that often lead to inoffensive, weak choices and sub-par results. As Jana Kemp shows in Moving Out of the Box, there's a time for consensus, and a time for command and control--and a time to integrate both approaches. Her practical tools, honed through application in groups of all types and sizes, ensure that team members have the know-how to make effective decisions that have an impact on an organization's results. Providingexamples of successes and failures, as well as interactive and diagnostic exercises, she identifies five decision-making profiles, and shows how to steer your group into the most effective one. The five profiles: *Anti-survival. The naysayers have control. Surprisingly, sometimes they should be listened to. *Boxed-in. When no one can come up with fresh ideas, it's time to think out of the box. *Neutral. Nobody terribly excited or negative? Don't worry, sometimes this isn't a bad place to be to make a good decision. *Engaged enthusiasm. If you can get the team into this attitude, chances are that a good decision will result and follow-through will occur. *Extreme excitement. Most teams leaders think this is where the team needs to be to make a good decision. It's nice, but not required. Each profile or group dynamic is well defined and includes scenarios, exercises, quizzes, sample questions, and other conversation starters. The book ends with a blueprint for putting decisions into action. All in all, this handbook will help improve group and individual communication, problem solving, decision making, and execution, regardless of the task at hand.

This book provides a conceptual 'Flexibility in Resource Management' framework supported by research/case applications in various related areas. It links and integrates the flexibility aspect with resource management to offer a fresh perspective, since flexibility in different levels of resource management is emerging as a key concern -- a business enterprise needs to have reactive flexibility (as adaptiveness and responsiveness) to cope with the changing and uncertain business environment. It may also endeavor to intentionally create flexibility by way of leadership change, re-engineering, innovation in products and processes, use of information and communication technology, and so on. The selected papers discussing a variety of issues concerning flexibility in resource management, are organized into following four parts: flexibility and innovation; flexibility in organizational management; operations and technology management; and financial and risk management. In addition to addressing the organizational needs of corporate bodies spread across the globe, the book serves as a useful reference resource for a variety of audiences including management students, researchers, business managers, consultants and professional institutes.

In this volume we present some of the papers delivered at FUR-IV - the Fourth International Conference on Founda tions and Applications of Utility, Risk and Decision Theory in Budapest, June 1988. The FUR Conferences have provided an appreciated forum every two years since 1982 within which scientists can report recent issues and prospective applications of decision theory, and exchange ideas about controversial questions of this field. Focal points of the presented papers are: expected utility versus alterna tive utility models, concepts of risk and uncertainty, developments of game theory, and investigations of real decision making behaviour under uncertainty and/or in risky situations. We hope that this sample of papers will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers who are interested in and fami liar with this interesting and exciting issues of decision theory. A wide range of theoretical and practical questions is considered in papers included in this volume, and many of them closely related to economics. In fact, there were two Nobel-Laureates in economics among the participants: I. Herbert A. Simon (1978) and Maurice Allais (1988), who won the prize just after the conference. His paper deals with problems of cardinal utility. After a concise overview of the history and theory of cardinal utility he gives an estimate of the invariant cardinal utility function for its whole domain of variation (i. e."

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for estimating space-time stochastic properties of local climatic factors reflecting global climate change. Specifically, daily precipitation amount and daily mean temperature are considered and illustrated with application to the state of Nebraska, U. S. A. Furthermore, a drought index with and without global climate change is examined. The magnitude and consequences of regional response to anticipated climatic changes are uncertain (Houghton et al., 1990). Typical questions to be answered are: can time series of hydrological events or 10cal climatic variables such as daily temperature be conditioned in scenarios of future climate change and if so, how can this be utilized ? Can extreme historical drought events be reproduced by a stochastic hydroc1imatological model ? Can such a model be used with General Circu1ation Model (GCM) outputs to evaluate the regional/local effects of climate change scenarios? The approach presented in this paper is an extension of the usual analysis of regional hydrometeorological impacts of climate change: we propose to examine time series of GCM produced daily atmospheric circulation patterns (CP), thought to be relatively accurate GCM output to estimate local climatic factors. The paper is organized as follows. First, daily CPs are classified and analyzed statistically, first for historical and then for GCM produced data. Next, the height of the 500 hPa pressure field is introduced as an additional physically relevant variable influencing local climatic factors within each CP type."

This book offers a timely snapshot of current soft-computing research and solutions to decision-making and optimization problems, which are ubiquitous in the current social and technological context, addressing fields including logistics, transportation and data analysis. Written by leading international experts from the United States, Brazil and Cuba, as well as the United Kingdom, France, Finland and Spain, it discusses theoretical developments in and practical applications of soft computing in fields where these methods are crucial to obtaining better models, including: intelligent transportation systems, maritime logistics, portfolio selection, decision- making, fuzzy cognitive maps, and fault detection. The book is dedicated to Professor Jose L. Verdegay, a pioneer who has been actively pursuing research in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing since 1982, in honor of his 65th birthday.

This book aims to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in Internet of Things (IoT) in Management Science and Operations Research. It starts with basic concept and present cases, applications, theory, and potential future. The contributed chapters to the book cover wide array of topics as space permits. Examples are from smart industry; city; transportation; home and smart devices. They present future applications, trends, and potential future of this new discipline. Specifically, this book provides an interface between the main disciplines of engineering/technology and the organizational, administrative, and planning capabilities of managing IoT. This book deals with the implementation of latest IoT research findings in practice at the global economy level, at networks and organizations, at teams and work groups and, finally, IoT at the level of players in the networked environments. This book is intended for professionals in the field of engineering, information science, mathematics, economics, and researchers who wish to develop new skills in IoT, or who employ the IoT discipline as part of their work. It will improve their understanding of the strategic role of IoT at various levels of the information and knowledge organization. The book is complemented by a second volume of the same editors with practical cases.

This book provides research results and shares experiences in the area of supply chain management. It addresses topics such as risk reduction of lesser marginal profits, disrupted supply chain management, and potential points of business failure. This book explores the "new normal" of the business supply chain. The didactic approach informs global enterprises on how to deal with the most significant issues in the current supply chain management. The book shows an in-depth analysis of post-COVID opportunities and challenges and acts as an initiative for readers to understand the risks, opportunities, and concerns resulting from the pandemic situation and is a key driver for business management among industry professionals and enterprises. Readers will learn new insights and procedures to better manage multitier supply chains, predictability, and estimation of binding capacity. The book details modeling and technology-based customer demand and response management solutions. New techniques, methods, and perspectives dealing with the estimation, acceleration or deceleration, and flexibility of logistics capacity are particularly emphasized throughout the manuscript. Real-world cases dealing with various aspects of the new normal for supply chains are analyzed. The book is useful for industry professionals and enterprise firms in business management to effectively understand risks, opportunities, and concerning the pandemic situation.

Bring your company into the digital era without compromising your core business In The Digital Transformer's Dilemma: How to Energize Your Core Business While Building Disruptive Products and Services, the authors show companies how to go digital while also advancing their core business. The book emphasizes how to strike a difficult balance between establishing a new (digital) business and re-vitalizing - and digitizing - the legacy business. The core of the book is focused on the actual implementation of the digital transformation across both businesses, providing concrete tips, tricks, tools and action plans across six key dimensions: Crafting a flexible organization Using technology as a driver Designing the necessary processes Building transformational leaders "Right-skilling" the workforce of the future Galvanizing cultural change The Digital Transformer's Dilemma is a very visual book, filled with dozens of engaging illustrations that bring the contained concepts to life on the page. Based on 100+ interviews with senior executives at leading companies (such as Nestle, Novartis, Volkswagen, BNP Paribas, BASF and Michelin) and smaller hidden champions, numerous illuminating case studies, and the authors' own experience from working in international management consulting and years of academic experience, the book highlights the fundamental principles required for executives and businesspeople to transform legacy organizations into digitally empowered companies.

This textbook is an introduction to game theory, which is the systematic analysis of decision-making in interactive settings. Game theory can be of great value to business managers. The ability to correctly anticipate countermove by rival firms in competitive and cooperative settings enables managers to make more effective marketing, advertising, pricing, and other business decisions to optimally achieve the firm's objectives. Game theory does not always accurately predict how rivals will act in strategic situations, but does identify a decision maker's best response to situations involving move and countermove. As Nobel Prize winner Thomas Shelling noted: "We may wish to understand how participants actually do conduct themselves in conflict situations; an understanding of the 'correct' play may give us a bench mark for the study of actual behavior." The concise and axiomatic approach to the material presented in this textbook is easily accessible to students with a background in the principles of microeconomics and college mathematics. The selection and organizations of topics makes the textbook appropriate for use in a wide range of curricula by students with different backgrounds.

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has been one of the fastest growing problem areas in many disciplines. The central problem is how to evaluate a set of alternatives in terms of a number of criteria. Although this problem is very relevant in practice, there are few methods available and their quality is hard to determine. Thus, the question Which is the best method for a given problem?' has become one of the most important and challenging ones. This is exactly what this book has as its focus and why it is important. The author extensively compares, both theoretically and empirically, real-life MCDM issues and makes the reader aware of quite a number of surprising abnormalities' with some of these methods. What makes this book so valuable and different is that even though the analyses are rigorous, the results can be understood even by the non-specialist. Audience: Researchers, practitioners, and students; it can be used as a textbook for senior undergraduate or graduate courses in business and engineering.

Written primarily for information systems managers, systems analysts, and end users who interface with them, this volume explores the group approach to decision support systems. As Thierauf points out, group decision making enhances the effectiveness of overall organizational decision making by eliminating some of the shortcomings--particularly the potential for uncorrected error--of individual decision making. When the collective expertise of the group is combined with the objective findings from a computerized mode of operation designed to help the decision making process, group decision support systems are the result. Thierauf explains the principles of group decision support systems, demonstrates their practical applications, and describes methods that can be used to design effective group decision support systems.

The book begins by presenting the underlying framework for group decision support systems and examining the characteristics of decision making in the group environment. There follows two chapters which offer a comprehensive treatment of the hardware and software necessary and one devoted to work redesign and the development of group decision support systems. The final section addresses the applications of group decision support systems to strategic planning, marketing, manufacturing, accounting, and personnel. Numerous figures illustrate points made in the text. An important contribution to the MIS literature, this book both delineates the need for more widespread use of group decision support systems and clearly explains how to implement such systems in every area of business operations.

Knowledge management metrics are one of the weakest areas of practice in the field. Overwhelmingly, the literature that exists focuses on case studies and incidents of metrics, rather than approaching the concept holistically. Addressing this lack, expert authors Alexeis Garcia-Perez, Farah Gheriss and Denise Bedford come together to supply a fundamental discussion of measurement cultures and philosophy, types of metrics, and how to use metrics to grow an organization. They offer a guide for knowledge management professionals to report on progress against goals and targets in terms that are understandable and comparable to their organizational peers, enabling professionals from across businesses to communicate with metrics and engage in wider discussion about the process of achieving organizational visions. Providing practical guidance for identifying different types of measurements and metrics, as well as methods for defining and collection information about metrics, this is an essential book for knowledge management professionals and researchers on the path to improving metric literacy across their organizations.

This book provides a contemporary and thought-provoking exploration of the concept of practical wisdom--what it is and how it can be incorporated into evaluation practice. It defines what practical wisdom is, explores its roots, where it stands today, what constitutes the ""wise"" evaluator, and how we can develop sound judgment in an unpredictable and chaotic time. It brings together evaluation thought leaders and practitioners to examine the concept of practical wisdom. The authors' enlightening essays are interwoven with reflective strands comprised of commentaries, examples, and new ideas added by Hurteau and her colleagues that offer a recursive and intricate pattern of reflection on the topic of practical wisdom. This is a rare book because it moves beyond evaluation methodology to explore how practical wisdom can help us develop new and better solutions for difficult evaluation situations. It will become a standard reference for practitioners, trainers. and teachers of evaluation because it considers the history, ethics, and competencies that underpin practical wisdom, and examines the ways that this untaught skill can be applied, to do, as House says, "the right thing in the special circumstances of performing the job.

Get to better, more effective strategy.

In nearly every business segment and corner of the world economy, the most successful companies dramatically outperform their rivals. What is their secret? In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee shows how these companies achieve more by doing less. At a time when rapid technological change and global competition conspire to upend traditional ways of doing business, these companies pursue radically simplified strategies. At a time when many managers struggle not to drown in vast seas of projects and initiatives, these businesses follow simple rules that help them select the few ideas that truly make a difference.

Better, Simpler Strategy provides readers with a simple tool, the value stick, which every organization can use to make its strategy more effective and easier to execute. Based on proven financial mechanics, the value stick helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen the competitive advantage of their business.

How does the value stick work? It provides a way of measuring the two fundamental forces that lead to value creation and increased financial success—the customer's willingness-to-pay and the employee's willingness-to-sell their services to the business. Companies that win, Oberholzer-Gee shows, create value for customers by raising their willingness-to-pay, and they provide value for talent by lowering their willingness-to-sell. The approach, proven in practice, is entirely data driven and uniquely suited to be cascaded throughout the organization.

With many useful visuals and examples across industries and geographies, Better, Simpler Strategy explains how these two key measures enable firms to gauge and improve their strategies and operations. Based on the author's sought-after strategy course, this book is your must-have guide for making better strategic decisions.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM's comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

< p=""> The book covers the domain of multi-criteria decision making, a topic which has gained significant attention of researchers and practitioners spanning a variety of disciplines for enhancing their decision making in real life situation. The topics in this volume help readers understand the techniques in the model building and analysis stage. The chapters cover a variety of techniques and their applications for interesting problems. This book will be of interest to readers in diverse disciplines such as engineering, business, management, humanities, psychology and law. ^

Computers, telecommunications equipment, semiconductorsthe products and technologies of the information and communications industry (IC)have transformed our world. Most of these products were initially developed in Western countries, but by the early 1990s some of the world's largest companies in the field were Japanese. This book explains the resurgence of Japan's IC giants, their global status, and their strengths and weaknesses.Empirical scrutiny of their evolution is complemented by the author's own theory of the most appropriate mehtod for studying the dynamics of industrial change. The author argues that in order to understand the evolution of IC companies and industries, it is necessary to create a theory of the firm capable of encompassing the development of real firms in the real world in real time. This approach stresses the importance of the beliefs that are constructed in the firm under conditions of 'interpretive ambiguity', which guide the firm's decisions and its reactions to new technologies. Lengthy analyses of NEC and NTT (by far the world's largest company in terms of market value; its future currently under government scrutiny), and of the computing, switching, and optical fibre industries, illustrate these concepts. Based on over 600 interviews over eight years with Japanese leaders, this book provides important new material on the past, present, and future of Japanese industry.