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 examines discourses of knowledge and innovation in post-industrial societies and knowledge-based organizations. The author investigates the value of knowledge and the question of innovation management in a fully commercial environment for a technology company.

In contrast with most of the mainstream approaches to knowledge and innovation management this volume chooses as its starting point a critical examination of these assumptions before proceeding with further suggestions on how to manage knowledge. Using brand new empirical research, the author argues for the significance of addressing the political games and power struggles enacted in managing innovation processes, which result from the opportunity certain groups seek to acquire or extend their control over valuable resources. Again, in contrast to mainstream approaches that reduce power to the ability of individuals to negotiate in order to promote their ideas, the analysis adopts an extended view on power, and seeks to reveal the ambiguities and challenges of innovation management.

This work will be of most interest to researchers and students of knowledge and innovation management, namely postgraduates and second degree students, as well as managers in knowledge-based organisations.

Retaining top talent is a universal concern that is increasingly global. However, the context, meaning, and mechanisms for changing jobs varies around the world. Global Talent Retention: Understanding Employee Turnover Around the World provides the first context-specific global perspective on retaining talent. Although extensive research informs understanding of why employees decide to leave or remain with organizations, the bulk of theory and research adopts a U.S.-centric perspective, problematic because most employees do not work for firms that are U.S.-owned or based. Global Talent Retention addresses the need for turnover theory and research to give more careful consideration to global and cross-cultural perspectives on employee retention, and includes contributions from a global range of scholars in differing cultural contexts in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The chapters represent many of the largest and most dynamic economies in the world, including Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the UK. Each chapter provides a description of the institutional, legal, and cultural context as it relates to employee mobility, a review of context-specific research leading to a description of how the mechanisms of prominent turnover theories may operate differently in particular contexts, and the implications for research and practice related to employee turnover and retention.

Decision makers interested in going beyond their own personal and professional interests and involving themselves in humanising their organization, community and society should read Remaking Ourselves, Enterprise and Society. This book is about adherence to human values at an institutional level, and its starting point is the belief that human beings have basic goodness, which in turn is reflected in the desire to be of help to others and to do good. Professor Rao introduces the Indian concept of 'Spandan' (Heartbeat). Spandan is operationalized through a process of diagnosis, discovery and development enabling organizations to achieve an optimal balance between what are defined as transactional, transformational, and terminal human values. This leads to management and organizations developing sensitivity to the needs of others, which they come to understand. When such sensitivity becomes integral to its work ethic and culture, an organization is able to temper its commitment to task with humanity and it becomes functionally humane. Experience suggests, not surprisingly, that organizations that can achieve this optimal balance between results and relations achieve higher employee commitment and productivity and increased accommodative spirit that better equips them to deal with difficult times. This exciting addition to Gower's Transformation and Innovation Series will enlighten business leaders, governmental and non-governmental policy makers, management educators, organization developers, and researchers.

Commons are self-organized, self-governed, autonomous networks and organizations that function outside the state and the private sector. They are emerging around the world as people recognize that the state and private sector have increasingly closed off access to basic resources and services. People want increased power to determine their political, economic, and social lives. Reimagining Leadership on the Commons includes leadership approaches derived from a complex, adaptive, open, whole systems perspective and a more relational, distributed, and collaborative paradigm that recognizes that rather than being individualist self-maximizers: people prefer to work together to share benefits and found a society based on ethical behavior, equality, and justice. This is essential reading for researchers of commons, leadership practitioners, and non-profits working towards a more ethical, equitable, and just world.

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didn't take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company--perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven't known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator's method--a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertainty--through cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator's DNA--which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas--this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success. Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator's method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the "how"--how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether you're launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

The notion that management knowledge is universal, culture-neutral, readily transferable to any country or situation, has come under mounting challenge. The Politics of Management Knowledge goes beyond such `broad-brush' assertions to explore in detail the relations between management knowledge, power and practice in a world where globalization highlights, rather than obscures, the locally specific character of many management recipes. The book recognizes the political nature of management knowledge as a discourse produced from, and reproducing, power processes within and between organizations. This theme underpins discussion of the ways in which management ideas and practices `produce' managers of a particular kind - person of enterprise, bureaucrat, heroic leader and so on. Critical examinations of certain current management theories - lean production, excellence, entrepreneurship - illuminate the myriad modes in which relations of power intermingle with relations of knowledge. Eminent authors from a variety of countries address the social and political processes involved in cross-cultural transference of management ideas across the world. They also look to the future, stressing the need for a substantial new understanding that is less attuned to the corporate worlds of today and more appropriate for the increasingly diverse organizations likely to emerge in the twenty-first century.

This book is intended as a text covering the central concepts and techniques of Competitive Markov Decision Processes. It is an attempt to present a rig orous treatment that combines two significant research topics: Stochastic Games and Markov Decision Processes, which have been studied exten sively, and at times quite independently, by mathematicians, operations researchers, engineers, and economists. Since Markov decision processes can be viewed as a special noncompeti tive case of stochastic games, we introduce the new terminology Competi tive Markov Decision Processes that emphasizes the importance of the link between these two topics and of the properties of the underlying Markov processes. The book is designed to be used either in a classroom or for self-study by a mathematically mature reader. In the Introduction (Chapter 1) we outline a number of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for which this book could usefully serve as a text. A characteristic feature of competitive Markov decision processes - and one that inspired our long-standing interest - is that they can serve as an "orchestra" containing the "instruments" of much of modern applied (and at times even pure) mathematics. They constitute a topic where the instruments of linear algebra, applied probability, mathematical program ming, analysis, and even algebraic geometry can be "played" sometimes solo and sometimes in harmony to produce either beautifully simple or equally beautiful, but baroque, melodies, that is, theorems."

In recent years, there has been increasing implementation of group and team decision-making within organizations, much of it managed electronically, between members of what are "virtual" groups or teams. Recent research into effective team implementation emphasizes "trust" as an intermediary process, and trust must be a part of any account of team decision-making. This book provides an integrated framework that represents process in decision-making by interactive groups and teams. This framework furthers both our understanding of process and our capabilities in implementation, based on an account of group decision-making that differentiates the information types contributing to decision quality and relates them to process in interactive groups and teams. Author Steve Silver emphasizes the social structure that is inherent in the interaction of decision-makers as group or team members and effects on the information they exchange.

Why do organisations decline, and what happens when they do? Strategy and Managed Decline: London Transport 1948-87 is a historical case study looking at how London Transport, a world beater in 1948, declined from being an international exemplar to dilapidation in 30 years. Strategy and Managed Decline considers the inheritance left by the founders of London Transport and subjects their legacy to a strategic and political audit. In three sections, the book examines archival data from the Transport for London (TfL) Archive covering the car revolution, strategic political clashes and the performance of the chairmen to challenge existing theory and extant histories. It offers hypotheses situated in management, leadership, politics and strategy which explain the decades of deterioration followed by a dramatic revival in the late 1980s. Examining the turbulent politics of the long conflict between London Transport, municipal and national government in detail, Strategy and Managed Decline: London Transport 1948-87 offers novel interpretations of events by objectively analysing the strategic stories that politics created about London's transport. It concludes by asking whether a shift in managerial strategy away from maximising utility and towards cost minimisation caused, or was just coincident with, resurgence and explores what lessons there are for TfL today.

On the basis of fuzzy sets and some of their relevant generalizations, this book systematically presents the fundamental principles and applications of group decision making under different scenarios of preference relations. By using intuitionistic knowledge as the field of discourse, this work investigates by utilizing innovative research means the fundamental principles and methods of group decision making with various different intuitionistic preferences: Mathematical reasoning is employed to study the consistency of group decision making; Methods of fusing information are applied to look at the aggregation of multiple preferences; Techniques of soft computing and optimization are utilized to search for satisfactory decision alternatives. Each chapter follows the following structurally clear format of presentation: literature review, development of basic theory, verification and reasoning of principles , construction of models and computational schemes, and numerical examples, which cover such areas as technology, enterprise competitiveness, selection of airlines, experts decision making in weather-sensitive enterprises, etc. In terms of theoretical principles, this book can be used as a reference for researchers in the areas of management science, information science, systems engineering, operations research, and other relevant fields. It can also be employed as textbook for upper level undergraduate students and graduate students. In terms of applications, this book will be a good companion for all those decision makers in government, business, and technology areas.

LEADING FROM PURPOSE IS TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP AT THE WORLD'S TOP COMPANIES 'I can't imagine leading Ben & Jerry's without it' Jostein Solheim, CEO of Ben & Jerry's 'Makes lives deeper, organisations stronger and society more cohesive.' Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever 'Purpose has really enhanced my impact as a leader.' Ralph Hamers, CEO of ING Bank 'My purpose has acted as a guiding light to help me centre and ground myself to lead effectively when it's needed most.' Loren Shuster, Chief People Officer at LEGO Drawing on ten years of experience working with more than 10,000 executives from companies around the world, Nick Craig takes you on a revelatory journey to understand your purpose, find clarity and focus and lead with inspiration. When uncovered, purpose becomes our most fundamental guiding principle. Explaining where true purpose lies and demystifying where it doesn't, Craig offers the methods through which anyone can find their purpose. He identifies three pathways that will assess where you are going with your purpose and where you should be going. In Leading from Purpose, Craig shares unique stories to show how top leaders are energized by their purpose, finding in it the confidence they need to properly evaluate high-stakes decisions and take the optimal action. Accessible, methodical and eminently practical, this book offers the comprehensive toolbox with which everyone - whether a c-suite executive or a behind-the-scenes office worker - can live out their purpose and achieve success on their own terms. With a foreword by Daring Greatly author Brene Brown.

In this present internet age, risk analysis and crisis response based on information will make up a digital world full of possibilities and improvements to people's daily life and capabilities. These services will be supported by more intelligent systems and more effective decisionmaking. This book contains all the papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, August 27-29, 2013, Istanbul, Turkey. The theme was intelligent systems and decision making for risk analysis and crisis response. The risk issues in the papers cluster around the following topics: natural disasters, finance risks, food and feed safety, catastrophic accidents, critical infrastructure, global climate change, project management, supply chains, public health, threats to social safety, energy and environment. This volume will be of interest to all professionals and academics in the field of risk analysis, crisis response, intelligent systems and decision-making, as well as related fields of enquiry.

This book mainly introduces some techniques of decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment and expands the applications of hesitant fuzzy sets in solving practical problems. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce some techniques about decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment, (2) to prove these techniques theoretically and (3) to apply the involved techniques to practical problems. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how hesitant fuzzy set could be employed in decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis and motivates researchers to expand more application fields of hesitant fuzzy set.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA. "If...anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer...everyone in management... should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and ... even elegant diagrams." The Economist This is the companion volume to Brain of the Firm and addresses the nature of viable systems, those capable of surviving. It does not use the neurophysiological basis elucidated in brain, but develops the same theory from first principles. This book declares that every enterprise is a system, and in particular must be a viable system. Viability is not just a matter of economic solvency; we need laws that govern the capacity of any enterprise to maintain independent existence. The Heart of Enterprise is full of examples (actual, author-generated examples) taken from management practice. "I consistently find that Stafford Beer provides the most useful analytical framework for understanding and managing an enterprise--public or private. Heart of The Enterprise offers a demanding but rewarding exposition of his approach and applications." Sir Douglas Hague. CBE

Not all markets are alike: the European entrepreneur requires knowledge on how to avoid pitfalls before believing and focusing on opportunity. European Venture Toolbox features the leadership toolkit future decision makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs need to build a venture in Europe. Many European entrepreneurs are prone to the rhetoric of company building based on fast-growing start-up survivors, abundance of circulating capital, and sub-optimal business models monetizing late. They fall into the trap of thinking a mildly successful company can survive in the European ecosystem even if it does not thrive. This toolbox provides a framework to assess risk and return of choices, iteratively implement business, and avoid being blinded by incorrect principles not grounded in financial reality. European Venture Toolbox: The path for SMEs to grasp and defend opportunities is a compelling book for all small-to-medium enterprises. Written by a theoretician and a practitioner, it captures Europe-specific perspectives, examples, and case studies to provide an alternative insight. The Entrepreneurial Behaviour series is focused on expanding the scope of Entrepreneurial Behaviour theory and analysis and enriching practice by encouraging multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approaches.

In Computational Organizational Cognition, Davide Secchi presents an innovative definition of organizational cognition using a research tradition that builds on the Embodied/Distributed/Extended Cognition (EDEC) perspectives and it is developed through agent-based computational simulation modelling. After an overview of EDEC perspectives, Computational Organizational Cognition presents four simulations which allow readers to clearly assess the advantages of agent-based computational organizational cognition (AOC) for both theory and practice. The book attempts to demonstrate how AOC is a useful if not essential instrument to explore, understand and analyze the inner complexities of organizational cognition. AOC is a powerful tool and an approach for organizational research enquiry at the service of both organizational scholars and cognitive scientists.

Making decisions is a critical part of every executive's job. However we know so little about the often subliminal processes that shape the decisions we make. The Secret Life of Decisions exposes the unchallenged myths and distortions that impact our reasoning ability, raising our awareness of the many traps we can fall into. Meena Thuraisingham and her collaborator, Wolfgang Lehmacher, have drawn from decades of work with leaders showing that even the most talented leaders and teams can end up making sub-optimal decisions. This is rarely because they had poor critical thinking faculties but rather because they did not pay enough attention to the often invisible traps hardwired into our thinking processes, letting through only information that conforms with our current beliefs, mental models and expectations. This leaves many leaders and businesses exposed. Rather than being the rational output of our reasoning abilities, the authors show decision making to be a highly imprecise process. As decision makers we come to the table armed with our own perspectives, preferences, filters, heuristics and biases, influenced by a broad range of social influences many operating subliminally. The Secret Life of Decisions is an essential read for developing and seasoned executives who have to work through increasingly complex and high stakes decisions. It treats choosing wisely and the thinking involved as a skill, which as with many other skills, can be improved with the guided practice and supporting tools provided here. The journey however starts with awareness that comes from outing the 'secret' forces that can sabotage the quality of our decisions.

With the influence of operations research and management science, business and administration methods have made significant strides in advancing the effective application methods for decision-making processes. Management Science, Logistics, and Operations Research examines related research in decision, management, and other behavioral sciences in order to exchange and collaborate on information among business, industry, and government. This book presents innovative theories and practices in operations research and is essential for practitioners, educators, and researchers for improving business functions and decision making.

Pertinent to modern industry, administration, finance and society, the most pressing issue for firms today is how to reapproach the way we think and work in business. With topics ranging from improving productivity and coaxing economic growth after periods of market inactivity, Complex Decision-Making in Economy and Finance offers pragmatic solutions for dealing with the critical levels of disorder and chaos that have developed throughout the modern age. This book examines how to design complex products and systems, the benefits of collective intelligence and self-organization, and the best methods for handling risks in problematic environments. It also analyzes crises and how to manage them. This book is of benefit to companies and public bodies with regards to saving assets, reviving fortunes and laying the groundwork for robust, sustainable societal dividends. Examples, case studies, practical hints and guidelines illustrate the topics, particularly in finance.

Foreword by Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson From a top mental conditioning coach-"the world's best brain trainer" (Sports Illustrated)-who has transformed the lives and careers of elite athletes, business leaders, and military personnel, battle-tested strategies that will give you tools to manage and overcome negativity and achieve any goal. He knows how to win. More, he knows the many ways-subtle, brutal, often self-inflicted-we lose. As the most trusted mental coach in the world of sports, Trevor Moawad has worked with many of the most dominant athletes and the savviest coaches. From Nick Saban and Kirby Smart to Russell Wilson, they all look to Moawad for help finding or keeping or regaining their com petitive edge. (As do countless business leaders and members of special forces.) Now, at last, Moawad shares his unique philosophy with the general public. He lays out lessons he's derived from his greatest career successes as well as personal setbacks, the game-changing wisdom he's earned as the go-to whisperer for elite performers on fields of play and among men and women headed to the battlefield. Moawad's motivational approach is elegant but refreshingly simple: He replaces hardwired negativity, the kind of defeatist mindset that's nearly everybody's default, with what he calls "neutral thinking." His own special innovation, it's a nonjudg mental, nonreactive way of coolly assessing problems and analyzing crises, a mode of attack that offers luminous clarity and su preme calm in the critical moments before taking decisive action. Not only can neutral thinking raise your performance level-it can transform your overall life. And it all starts, Moawad says, with letting go. Past failures, past losses-let them go. "The past isn't predic tive. If you can absorb and embrace that belief, everything changes. You'll instantly feel more calm. And the athlete-or employee or parent or spouse-who's more calm is also more aware, and more times than not ... will win."

The Decision Maker's Playbook is an easy-to-use, “how-to” toolkit to improve managers' decision making, using visualisations, relevant examples and actionable checklists that cater to its main target group: analytically interested, busy managers and entrepreneurs.

The Decision Maker's Playbook will help readers navigate a complex world. Along the five chapters of the books, it will help you in:

1. Overcoming Blindness (How to See What's Hidden)

2. Connecting the Dots (How to Understand Causes and Effects)

3. Sharpening Projections (How to Think About Tomorrow)

4. Improving Decisions (How to Enhance Judgment)

5. Shaping the Future (How to Act Smartly)

The Decision Maker's Playbook is your personal toolbox to help you make better decisions. It offers practical advice to help you understand, analyse and shape your world. As simplified representations of reality, the 33 models portrayed in this book allow us to see patterns, identify relationships, and view the world from different vantage points. They help us understand and break up complex phenomena into tractable pieces.

Customer and Business Analytics: Applied Data Mining for Business Decision Making Using R explains and demonstrates, via the accompanying open-source software, how advanced analytical tools can address various business problems. It also gives insight into some of the challenges faced when deploying these tools. Extensively classroom-tested, the text is ideal for students in customer and business analytics or applied data mining as well as professionals in small- to medium-sized organizations. The book offers an intuitive understanding of how different analytics algorithms work. Where necessary, the authors explain the underlying mathematics in an accessible manner. Each technique presented includes a detailed tutorial that enables hands-on experience with real data. The authors also discuss issues often encountered in applied data mining projects and present the CRISP-DM process model as a practical framework for organizing these projects. Showing how data mining can improve the performance of organizations, this book and its R-based software provide the skills and tools needed to successfully develop advanced analytics capabilities.

Drawing on the experiences of six expatriate leaders who, collectively, had more than 78 years of experience managing United States Agency for International Development (USAID) international development projects in 26 countries around the world, this book provides a scholarly analysis of their stories, identifies factors expatriate leaders experienced managing projects, then integrates the factors into a theory that explains and helps define the success, or lack thereof, they achieved, and provides recommendations on how to deal with and overcome the issues. For decades, international development projects have played a crucial role in the delivery of U.S. foreign aid and yet, while considerable attention has been given to policymakers' foreign aid decisions concerning which countries receive U.S. foreign aid and how much each country receives, scant attention has been given to understanding the challenges encountered by the expatriate leaders recruited to manage the implementation of these international development projects, which unfold within a confluence of diverse multi-organizational contexts and culturally complex developing country environments. Even less is known about what factors these expatriate leaders experience that could explain, and help define, the success, or lack thereof, they achieve managing the implementation of these projects. This book is essential reading for international development leaders, practitioners, and scholars, as well as foreign aid policymakers, as they seek to improve international development.