A tale of mentorship, hard truths, and the path to success. In a fictional account of an entrepreneur's rollercoaster ride to the top, Cap Treeger crafts a series of dynamic, well-drawn lessons for anyone craving a career in the tech startup industry. The hero of the story, Ren, is fired up with ambition and has a strategic dream in place to build his own startup from the ground up, but he has a lot to learn about how this particular sector of the business world works. Fortunately, Ren has the guidance of generous and invested mentors, and their sound recommendations and warnings are chronicled as Ren makes decision after decision. With their advice, as well as his own encounters with trial and error, he discovers that who he chooses to employ and partner with, and how he engages with them, makes all the difference. Ren's journey guides readers through numerous factors necessary for success, including building a solid team with strategic placement of individuals in carefully selected roles appropriate to their skill sets and crafting the all-important business model. Ren navigates the daunting process with grace and hands readers an account loaded with insight-rendering Finding the Way, told in a straightforward and reader-friendly manner, a valuable gem amidst business-building literature.

The author is one of the prominent researchers in the field of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a powerful data analysis tool that can be used in performance evaluation and benchmarking. This book is based upon the author’s years of research and teaching experiences. It is difficult to evaluate an organization’s performance when multiple performance metrics are present. The difficulties are further enhanced when the relationships among the performance metrics are complex and involve unknown tradeoffs. This book introduces Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a multiple-measure performance evaluation and benchmarking tool. The focus of performance evaluation and benchmarking is shifted from characterizing performance in terms of single measures to evaluating performance as a multidimensional systems perspective. Conventional and new DEA approaches are presented and discussed using Excel spreadsheets — one of the most effective ways to analyze and evaluate decision alternatives. The user can easily develop and customize new DEA models based upon these spreadsheets. DEA models and approaches are presented to deal with performance evaluation problems in a variety of contexts. For example, a context-dependent DEA measures the relative attractiveness of similar operations/processes/products. Sensitivity analysis techniques can be easily applied, and used to identify critical performance measures. Two-stage network efficiency models can be utilized to study performance of supply chain. DEA benchmarking models extend DEA’s ability in performance evaluation. Various cross efficiency approaches are presented to provide peer evaluation scores. This book also provides an easy-to-use DEA software — DEAFrontier. This DEAFrontier is an Add-In for Microsoft® Excel and provides a custom menu of DEA approaches. This version of DEAFrontier is for use with Excel 97-2013 under Windows and can solve up to 50 DMUs, subject to the capacity of Excel Solver. It is an extremely powerful tool that can assist decision-makers in benchmarking and analyzing complex operational performance issues in manufacturing organizations as well as evaluating processes in banking, retail, franchising, health care, public services and many other industries.

The increasing penetration of IT in organizations calls for an integrative perspective on enterprises and their supporting information systems. MERODE offers an intuitive and practical approach to enterprise modelling and using these models as core for building enterprise information systems. From a business analyst perspective, benefits of the approach are its simplicity and the possibility to evaluate the consequences of modeling choices through fast prototyping, without requiring any technical experience. The focus on domain modelling ensures the development of a common language for talking about essential business concepts and of a shared understanding of business rules. On the construction side, experienced benefits of the approach are a clear separation between specification and implementation, more generic and future-proof systems, and an improved insight in the cost of changes. A first distinguishing feature is the method’s grounding in process algebra provides clear criteria and practical support for model quality. Second, the use of the concept of business events provides a deep integration between structural and behavioral aspects. The clear and intuitive semantics easily extend to application integration (COTS software and Web Services). Students and practitioners are the book’s main target audience, as both groups will benefit from its practical advice on how to create complete models which combine structural and behavioral views of a system-to-be and which can readily be transformed into code, and on how to evaluate the quality of those models. In addition, researchers in the area of conceptual or enterprise modelling will find a concise overview of the main findings related to the MERODE project. The work is complemented by a wealth of extra material on the author’s web page at KU Leuven, including a free CASE tool with code generator, a collection of cases with solutions, and a set of domain modelling patterns that have been developed on the basis of the method’s use in industry and government.

Robert Kiyosaki ― author of the #1 Personal Finance book of all time ― has built a legacy around simplifying complex and often-confusing subjects like money and investing. He continues to challenge conventional wisdom and asks the questions that will help readers sift through today's information overload to uncover ways to assess what's real… and what isn't. And use truth and facts as a foundation for taking control of their financial lives.

In this new book―that will be released, by chapter, online to invite reader feedback and questions that will be included in the print and e-book editions―Robert fights what’s ‘fake’ and helps readers differentiate between what’s real…and what isn’t.

Robert pulls no punches in his assessment of what is passed off as ‘fact’ or conventional wisdom and believes that a strong foundation―for anything we want to build―needs to start with solid, true information. In today’s uncertain times, creating a secure financial future and the peace of mind that comes with it starts with taking action and taking control.

In FAKE: Fake Money, Fake Teachers, Fake Assets, Robert delivers insights and answers that help ordinary people―who probably haven’t had a lot of financial education―determine what’s ‘real’ and relevant to their financial lives.

Every day we are bombarded with news reports and information and opinions…

How do we decipher fact from fiction? How do we differentiate between truth and lies? And determine what’s real… from what isn’t? Kiyosaki believes that it starts with education, financial education designed to make us smarter with our money―and able to fight what’s fake and use what isn’t to secure our financial future.

​This volume includes the full proceedings from the 1984 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference held in Niagara Falls, New York. It provides a variety of quality research in the fields of marketing theory and practice in areas such as consumer behaviour, marketing management, marketing education, and international marketing, among others. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.​

The global economy is entering a new era. Triggered by the crash in EU countries in financial, banking and debt sectors, Europe is turning into a driving force for re-orientation. At the same time, psychology is becoming an increasingly decisive factor in business. In his book, business psychologist and innovation consultant Winfried Neun gives an impressive description of the background to the previous and current global crisis. Based on his experience in consulting, he lists clear examples of why business psychological factors are largely responsible for the development of crises and of what we as entrepreneurs, employers and employees can learn from this. An encouraging and provoking book! “Winfried Neun has succeeded in presenting a plausible and helpful description of how executives and companies can handle economic crises.� Prof. Max Otte, crisis economist, best-selling author and independent fund manager “A profound view of modern-day crises rather than a heavy-handed rant about the crash, Winfried Neun has managed yet again to create added value for managers.� Frank Meyer, n-tv presenter

Although the area of International Manufacturing Network (IMN) and International Operations Network (ION) has received considerable attention in the literature, most of studies appear multifaceted and interdisciplinary, and thereby require thorough investigation from both academic and practical perspectives, in order to deepen our related understanding. The book seeks advanced contributions that will combine theoretical insights and empirical experience by offering a detailed examination of IMN and, further, ION from various perspectives. This book can be used as a reference material for scholar-practitioners, business executives, and university researchers who need to deepen their understanding on the importance and influence of IMN and ION as well as their development. The book is important because there are few reference/resource materials available related to IMN and ION.

This book is designed to help practitioners and academics to assess the added value of HR practices. It provides hands-on recommendations for choosing effective means to manage HR and specific suggestions aimed at facilitating the measurement of HR practices’ impact on value creation. Evidence-based recommendations are made by drawing on thorough empirical research from various research traditions and academic disciplines. It covers a wide variety of tasks faced by the HR function and specifically addresses new challenges such as assessing the added value of work-life balance practices.

This book covers the elements involved in achieving sustainability in textiles and clothing sector. The chapters covered in three volumes of this series title cover all the distinctive areas earmarked for achieving sustainable development in textiles and clothing industry. This third volume highlights the areas pertaining to the regulatory aspects and sustainability standards applicable to textiles and clothing supply chain. There are various standards earmarked for measuring the environmental impacts and sustainability of textile products. There are also plenty of certification schemes available along with the index systems applicable to textile sector. Brands and manufactures are also venturing into new developments to achieve sustainable development in textile sector. This third volume addresses all these important aspects.

This volume collects selected papers of the 3rd CESA Automotive Electronics Congress, Paris, 2014. CESA is the most important automotive electronics conference in France. The topical focus lies on state-of-the-art automotive electronics with respect to energy consumption and autonomous driving. The target audience primarily comprises industry leaders and research experts in the automotive industry. 

This exciting new WMU book series' volume features the first attempt to include detailed experiences of women in the maritime sector at a global level. It highlights the achievement of women in the maritime sector, in particular, women’s leadership and service to the sustainable development of the maritime industry. The volume contains contemporary studies on maritime women and follows an inter-disciplinary approach. It offers an overview of women's integration into the maritime sector since the late 1980s as well as benchmarking its impact on various levels, such as policy, employment, education, leadership and sustainability. Even 20 years after the Beijing Declaration, gender-related challenges at work still remain in the maritime sector, for example, lack of gender policy,  difficulty in work-life balance, access to education, and leadership opportunities. The book addresses a series of recommendations that may further help the integration of women into the maritime sector.

This book describes recent theoretical findings relevant to bilevel programming in general, and in mixed-integer bilevel programming in particular. It describes recent applications in energy problems, such as the stochastic bilevel optimization approaches used in the natural gas industry. New algorithms for solving linear and mixed-integer bilevel programming problems are presented and explained.

This volume includes the full proceedings from the 2009 World Marketing Congress held in Oslo, Norway with the theme Marketing in Transition: Scarcity, Globalism, & Sustainability. The focus of the conference and the enclosed papers is on marketing thought and practices throughout the world. This volume resents papers on various topics including marketing management, marketing strategy and consumer behavior. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complimenting the Academy’s flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

This book focuses on supply chain management in emerging markets. The authors present issues relating to supply chain development covering countries such as Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Turkey, Egypt and South Africa and focuses on the challenges faced when the supply chain is designed and maintained. Such challenges derive from issues to do with risk, security, quality management and infrastructure among others. Case studies and survey results are presented in chapters which explore practical solutions to these issues. The latter will be of interest not only to local and international managers, but also to students who are interested in emerging economies. The book covers manufacturing, retail and food chains at the local and international levels.

This book provides an evidence-based actionable framework and measure of servant leadership to help management practitioners build effective and ethical workplaces. It explains the reasons why the best workplaces such as Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton and ServiceMaster apply servant leadership. Servant leadership is an intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying theory of leadership with relevance and application to the workplace settings.   Based on multiple rigorous studies in the Western and Eastern contexts, the book outlines the six dimensions of servant leadership and the impacts they have on key outcomes such as citizenship behaviors, job satisfaction, team creativity and innovation, and organizational performance. The book outlines a measurement instrument that can be used for leadership assessment, selection and training purposes and to develop strategies to leverage the six behavioral dimensions of servant leadership at the personal, team and organizational level.

Presenting an innovative concept and approach for organization management, this book serves to document an organization’s journey towards the ultimate goal of learning organization. This book also shares the experience on how a OL framework built on established learning theories, could be used effectively, overcoming many of the barriers in a real industrial setting. Utilizing a ready-to-use tool called Project Action Learning (PAL) to analyze real life case studies, the authors introduce a framework that allows teams of people to work and learn over the course of business projects. Equal emphasis is placed on the achievement of pre-set project outcomes and the learning objectives of the participants. In addition, a long term organizational learning strategy is put forward and the necessary supporting infrastructure, in the form of four ‘PAL Pillars’, is described. The concepts and development of the PAL driven Organizational Learning model are inspired by and grounded in, Western and Eastern business philosophies and case studies which offer important insights into the management of organizations who are keen to develop sustainable business practices.

The contributions of this volume stem from the “Fifth International Conference on the Dynamics of Information Systems� held in Gainesville, FL in February 2013, and discuss state-of the-art techniques in handling problems and solutions in the broad field of information systems. Dynamics of Information Systems: Computational and Mathematical Challenges presents diverse aspects of modern information systems with an emphasis on interconnected network systems and related topics, such as signal and message reconstruction, network connectivity, stochastic network analysis, cyber and computer security, community and cohesive structures in complex networks. Information systems are a vital part of modern societies. They are essential to our daily actions, including social networking, business and bank transactions, as well as sensor communications. The rapid increase in these capabilities has enabled us with more powerful systems, readily available to sense, control, disperse, and analyze information.

As the number of universities offering entrepreneurial programs continues to increase, there is a growing need for a suitable framework for the teaching of entrepreneurship beyond the operational side of the business and the preparation of a business plan. This book offers a fresh approach to entrepreneurship by teaching readers how to discover and create a new firm, or grow an existing one, starting from a firm's or team's capabilities. The core methodology is based on the 'entrepreneurial arch' which provides a more holistic view of entrepreneurship by dividing the business development process into six distinct segments. An important feature of this model is the inclusion of learning units focusing on opportunity identification, business design and risk reduction before the business planning stage is attempted. Illustrated with various real-world examples, this structured and concise book will appeal to students, as well as to practitioners looking to develop their entrepreneurial skills.

Traditionally, the study of entrepreneurial behavior focuses on such factors as (i) the personality characteristics that distinguish the entrepreneur from non-entrepreneur and (ii) demographic characteristics such gender, age, familiar antecedents and education. With particular respect to investigating the development, acquisition, and dissemination of entrepreneurial skills and behaviors, the authors focus on the university environment, as a locus of research and innovation, where students are exposed to a wide variety of influences that are enhanced by a high degree of connectivity. The underlying theme of this volume is to develop our understanding of the sociology of student entrepreneurial behavior and in doing so attempt to synthesize literature investigating individual talent with the literature on concurrent knowledge sourcing in the pursuit of entrepreneurial activities. Specifically, the authors investigate the degree to which access to diverse knowledge (in addition to such psychological characteristics and tolerance of ambiguity and risk taking) influences the nature and probability of entrepreneurial success. Moreover, they explore the role of social media and social networking in facilitating access to distributed and disparate information and knowledge.   Their research addresses such timely questions as: Where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from? How can higher education best stimulate the creation of firms emanating from young and smart minds in colleges and universities? What is the value of MOOCs for frequent, early, and “thick� communication among the various specialties needed to accomplish entrepreneurial projects? How do we know whether social media affect students’ responses to new knowledge and new ideas? To what extent do educational practices affect racial and ethnic differences in student entrepreneurship? What is the role of the indigenous minority student entrepreneur in establishing high-technology firms? The result is a multi-dimensional approach that sheds light on the dynamics of education, knowledge creation, social networking, innovation and new business development.

This book explores the development, trends and research of library and information sciences (LIS) in the digital age. Inside, readers will find research and case studies written by LIS experts, educators and theorists, most of whom have visited China, delivered presentations there and drafted their articles based on feedback they received. As a result, readers will discover the LIS issues and concerns that China and the international community have in common. The book first introduces the opportunities and challenges faced by the library and information literacy profession and discusses the key role of librarians in the future of information literacy education. Next, it covers trends in LIS education by examining the vision of the iSchool movement and detailing its practice in Syracuse University. The book then covers issues in information seeking and retrieval by showing how visual data mining technology can be used to detect the relationship and pattern between terms on the Q&A of a social media site. It also includes a case study regarding tracing information seeking behavior and usage on a multimedia website. Next, the book stresses the importance of building an academic accreditation framework for scientific datasets, explores the relationship between bibliometrics and university rankings, and details the birth and development of East Asian Libraries in North America. Overall, the book offers readers insight into the changing nature of LIS, including the electronic dissemination of information, the impact of the Internet on libraries, the changing responsibilities of library professionals, the new paradigm for evaluating information, and characteristics and functions of today's library personnel.

When no samples are available to estimate a probability distribution, we have to invite some domain experts to evaluate the belief degree that each event will happen. Perhaps some people think that the belief degree should be modeled by subjective probability or fuzzy set theory. However, it is usually inappropriate because both of them may lead to counterintuitive results in this case. In order to rationally deal with belief degrees, uncertainty theory was founded in 2007 and subsequently studied by many researchers. Nowadays, uncertainty theory has become a branch of axiomatic mathematics for modeling belief degrees. This is an introductory textbook on uncertainty theory, uncertain programming, uncertain statistics, uncertain risk analysis, uncertain reliability analysis, uncertain set, uncertain logic, uncertain inference, uncertain process, uncertain calculus, and uncertain differential equation. This textbook also shows applications of uncertainty theory to scheduling, logistics, networks, data mining, control, and finance.

This book provides a broad overview of a number of game-changing paradigms that are anticipated to reshape 21st century product development. Topics including cloud computing-based design, cloud manufacturing, crowd-sourcing and mass collaboration, open source and social product development will be discussed in the context of advanced distributed and collaborative product creation. The purpose of the book is threefold: (1) to provide decision makers in industry with a solid base for strategic design and manufacturing-related process re-organization; (2) to provide researchers and scientist with the state-of-the-art from an academic perspective as well as a research agenda aimed at advancing the theoretical foundations of the field and (3) to serve as supplementary reading in design and manufacturing-related courses at universities and technical colleges.

​What will business software look like in the future? And how will it be developed? This book covers the proceedings of the first international conference on Future Business Software – a new think tank discussing the trends in enterprise software with speakers from Europe’s most successful software companies and the leading research institutions. The articles focus on two of the most prominent trends in the field: emergent software and agile development processes. “Emergent Software� is a new paradigm of software development that addresses the highly complex requirements of tomorrow’s business software and aims at dynamically and flexibly combining a business software solution’s different components in order to fulfill customers’ needs with a minimum of effort. Agile development processes are the response of software technology to the implementation of diverse and rapidly changing software requirements. A major focus is on the minimization of project risks, e.g. through short, iterative development cycles, test-driven development and an intensive culture of communication.

This book evaluates the history, the present and the future of water markets on 5 continents, beginning with the institutional underpinnings of water markets and factors influencing transaction costs. The book examines markets in seven countries and three different U.S. states, ranging from village-level water markets in Oman to basin wide formal water markets in Australia's Murray-Darling River basin. Introductory chapters on the background of water markets and on transaction costs and policy design are followed by chapter length discussion of water markets as an adaptive response to climate change and of supply reliability in a changing climate. Case studies describe a variety of facets of the design and function of markets around the world: California, Chile, Spain, Oman, Australia, Canada, India and China. In analyzing these real-world examples of markets, the contributors explore water rights and trading of rights between agricultural and urban sectors and the principles and function of option markets. They discuss different sized approaches, from large scale, ministry-level administration of markets to informal arrangements among farmers in the same village, or groups of villages which allocate water without large investment in management and infrastructure. Discussion includes questions of why water market practices have not expanded more rapidly in arid places. The book discusses mechanisms for resolving conflicts between water rights holders as well as between water right holders and third parties impacted by water trades and whether or not public ownership of water rights or use rights should trump private ownership and under what condition. Also covered are new and expanding categories of water use, beyond human consumption, agriculture and industry to new technologies ranging from extracting natural gas from shale to producing biofuels. The book concludes with suggestions for future water markets and offers a realistic picture of how they might change water use and distribution practices going forward.