A guide to the essential skills of project management, enabling you to bring in projects on time and within budget. Juggling all the tasks and resources you need to make a project run smoothly can seem like an onerous task - from engaging with stakeholders and scoping out the full specification of the project, through to keeping a rein on costs and sticking to schedules. Manage Projects Successfully offers calm and practical advice to help you with setting priorities, communicating with others, monitoring progress and dealing with unexpected events. Practical, easy to read and jargon-free, the book contains a quiz to assess strengths and weaknesses, step-by-step guidance and action points, top tips to bear in mind for the future, common mistakes and advice on how to avoid them, and summaries of key points.

Based on a broad range of case studies, Organization and Management Problem Solving is an insightful text designed to improve the application of organization theory and systems thinking in teaching and practice. This book illustrates the five key themes in the nature of organization and management?technical, structural, psychosocial, managerial, and cultural?through the analysis of measured incidents tested by students.

A clear theoretical framework supports the case studies, allowing the text to have practical relevance to contemporary settings and to be recognized as a model for describing, analyzing, and responding to organization and management problems. The model integrates the thinking of many writers on organization and problem solving including Ackoff, Blake, and Mouton; Schein, Kast, and Rosenweign; and Mitroff and Lippitt. The approach eliminates causal conditions and emphasizes responsive problem solving. Theory is applied and expanded as needed to a broader social context, engaging the reader in a thorough understanding of the nature and development of organization theory and problem solving.

This book is relevant to consultants, academics, and professional managers in a number of settings (academic, military, business organizations, and research institutes) and disciplines (including development and change, management, human resources, social psychology, communication, sociology, and psychology).

Do you want to have great ideas? Do you want to break out of the rut of conventional thinking? Would you like to be a genius? Would presenting brilliant ideas help in your job, career and social life? How to be a Brilliant Thinker will help you to achieve all these ideals, by helping you to think in powerful new ways. It shows you how to harness techniques in lateral thinking, analytical thinking, problem analysis, idea generation and other areas so that you become much more creative. You will be able to conceive, evaluate and implement great ideas as well as improve your memory, sell your ideas and win arguments. It is packed with practical methods that you can put to immediate use, backed up by exercises, puzzles, quizzes, graphics and illustrations.

A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller

"Ambitious and readable . . . an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." —The New York Times

"An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." —The Wall Street Journal

"A lively panoramic book . . . Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." —Business Week

"Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." —The Economist

"[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." —Worth

"No one else could have written a book of such central importance with so much charm and excitement." —Robert Heilbroner author, The Worldly Philosophers

"With his wonderful knowledge of the history and current manifestations of risk, Peter Bernstein brings us Against the Gods. Nothing like it will come out of the financial world this year or ever. I speak carefully: no one should miss it." —John Kenneth Galbraith Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today.

"An extremely readable history of risk." —Barron's

"Fascinating . . . this challenging volume will help you understand the uncertainties that every investor must face." —Money

"A singular achievement." —Times Literary Supplement

"There's a growing market for savants who can render the recondite intelligibly—witness Stephen Jay Gould (natural history), Oliver Sacks (disease), Richard Dawkins (heredity), James Gleick (physics), Paul Krugman (economics)—and Bernstein would mingle well in their company." —The Australian

Praise for Risk budgeting

"Professor Pearson has raised the bar for books on market risk. Moving beyond descriptions of VaR calculation and stress testing, he provides careful discussions of both the refinements and the limits of the VaR technique. Even more importantly, this book provides structure to the heretofore vague idea of ‘risk budgeting.’ "
–Charles Smithson, Managing Partner, Rutter Associates

"Pearson has written an excellent resource for risk management practitioners who actually need to compute and use VaR. Numerous concrete examples make a broad range of VaR techniques accessible to the people who actually need to use them. The book also provides tangible applications of risk budgeting, a term often used but rarely made relevant. Pearson has put meat on the bones for plan sponsors who want to actually employ risk budgeting techniques."
–Bennett Golub, Co-head of Risk Management and Analytics,
Founding Partner, BlackRock

"An excellent book. This text provides a bridge from the theoretical to the practical, and clears the fog between the buzzwords of risk budgeting and the realities of a useful new portfolio management tool. Pearson’s writing is well balanced between needed academic foundation and the practicalities of managing portfolios."
–Rob Roy, Director, Cash and Investments, Adventist Health System

"I just wish I could summarize this book as ably as Professor Pearson summarizes the voluminous literature on Value-at-Risk. Unfortunately, I suspect no further compression is possible. To reduce the risk of reading rubbish, your best bet is to read this book."
–Dr. Peter Carr, Senior Consultant, Risk Capital Management

This book covers a large spectrum of cutting-edge game theory applications in management science in which Professor Georges Zaccour has made significant contributions. The book consists of 21 chapters and highlights the latest treatments of game theory in various areas, including marketing, supply chains, energy and environmental management, and cyber defense. With this book, former Ph.D. students and successful research collaborators of Professor Zaccour wish to honor his many scientific achievements.

This book gathers a selection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the International Conference on Operations Research (OR 2019), which was held at Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany, on September 4-6, 2019, and was jointly organized by the German Operations Research Society (GOR) the Austrian Operations Research Society (OEGOR), and the Swiss Operational Research Society (SOR/ASRO). More than 600 scientists, practitioners and students from mathematics, computer science, business/economics and related fields attended the conference and presented more than 400 papers in plenary presentations, parallel topic streams, as well as special award sessions. The respective papers discuss classical mathematical optimization, statistics and simulation techniques. These are complemented by computer science methods, and by tools for processing data, designing and implementing information systems. The book also examines recent advances in information technology, which allow big data volumes to be processed and enable real-time predictive and prescriptive business analytics to drive decisions and actions. Lastly, it includes problems modeled and treated while taking into account uncertainty, risk management, behavioral issues, etc.

Revolutionize meetings! Over 20,000 copies sold - the easy-to-use guide for running democratic meetings of any size The key to promoting true democracy in meetings is clear, easy-to-understand rules of order that support the right of each member to participate fully and equally, and the right of the majority to make decisions while respecting minority rights. An alternative to Robert's Rules of Order and other complicated and unwieldy guides, Democratic Rules of Order is the guide for the rest of us. It lays out clear, concise, easy-to-use rules for governing meetings from clubs and non profits to formal meetings. Benefits include: A complete set of laws for governing meetings Can be read in an hour Plain language, free of complex protocol and jargon to enable equal and efficient participation Tested and honed through thousands of successful meetings Adoptable as the official rules of order for meetings of any size Allows informality, including decisions by consensus, but ensures formality when needed A sample meeting that uses all the rules plus answers to 31 common questions. Now in its tenth edition, and with over 20,000 copies sold, Democratic Rules of Order will produce fair, efficient, and harmonious decisions in meetings of any size or complexity.

Managing Knowledge is an extensive and eminently readable overview of the most important ideas, tools and current applications of knowledge management. The authors rely on an innovative 'building block' approach and provide a detailed description of the most important knowledge processes in organizations.

"We are experiencing a paradigm shift from an industrial age to a service/knowledge age. We are all looking for new answers that will give meaning and purpose to our efforts, and make sense of knowledge processes. This book is an excellent tool: it is easy to read and contains practical examples which help us to deal with the issues. I enjoyed reading it." Heinz Fischer, Vice-President (Personnel), Deutsche Bank

"Knowledge of customer needs, markets, patents, products and processes is a key strategic resource in today's business world. The use of this resource, particularly in larger companies, is becoming a matter of survival in highly competitive and innovation-driven markets. The practical approach to knowledge management offered by Gilbert Probst, Steffen Raub and Kai Romhardt should prove an extremely useful tool." Heinrich v. Pierer, President and CEO, Siemens AG

"In this book Professor Pobst and his colleagues show in a great way how to systematize and work on increasing the efficiency of strategic knowledge management." Leif Edvinsson, Director, Intellectual Capital, Skandia

"Knowledge will dominate our entire 21st century social environment. Organizations will rapidly divide into those that know and those that don't. Leaders of tomorrow must make better use than they have done in the past of what knowledge their employees hold. This book will show you how." Bob Bishop, Chairman, Silicon Graphics World Trade Corporation

The essence of any root cause analysis in our modern quality thinking is to go beyond the actual problem. This means not only do we have to fix the problem at hand but we also have to identify why the failure occurred and what was the opportunity to apply the appropriate knowledge to avoid the problem in the future. Essential Statistical Concepts for the Quality Professional offers a new non-technical statistical approach to quality for effective improvement and productivity by focusing on very specific and fundamental methodologies and tools for the future. Written by an expert with more than 30 years of experience in management, quality training, and consulting, the book examines the fundamentals of statistical understanding, and by doing so demonstrates the importance of using statistics in the decision making process. The author points out pitfalls to keep in mind when undertaking an experiment for improvement and explains how to use statistics in improvement endeavors. He discusses data interpretation, common tests and confidence intervals, and how to plan experiments for improvement. The book expands the notion of experimentation by dealing with mathematical models such as regression to optimize the improvement and understand the relationship between several factors. It emphasizes the need for sampling and introduces specific techniques to make sure accuracy and precision of the data is appropriate and applicable for the study at hand. The author's approach is somewhat new and unique; however, he details tools and methodologies that can be used to evaluate the system for prevention. These tools and methodologies focus on structured, repeatable processes that can be instrumental in finding real, fixable causes of the human errors and equipment failures that lead to quality issues.

Master data analysis, modeling and the effective use of spreadsheets with the popular BUSINESS ANALYTICS: DATA ANALYSIS AND DECISION MAKING, 7E. The quantitative methods approach in this edition helps you maximize your success with a proven teach-by-example presentation, inviting writing style and complete integration of the latest version of Excel. The approach is also compatible with earlier versions of Excel for your convenience. This edition is more data-oriented than ever before with a new chapter on the two main Power BI tools in Excel -- Power Query and Power Pivot -- and a new section of data visualization with Tableau Public. Current problems and cases demonstrate the importance of the concepts you are learning. In addition, a useful Companion Website provides data and solutions files, SolverTable for optimization sensitivity analysis and Palisade DecisionTools Suite. MindTap online resources are also available.

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions. Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We're overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn't. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn't fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better? In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star's ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO's disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions. Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don't overlook precious opportunities to change our course? Decisive is the Heath brothers' most powerful-and important-book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

Strategy is an essential part of business, but strategizing often gets ignored or left behind. In this exciting new work, Eric J. Bolland introduces strategizing as a key component of strategy development and execution, showing strategizing as a way to aid organizations with their futures. To strategize successfully, businesses need a set of well-developed tools to help them perform specific actions continuously. Starting by tracing the origin and evolution of strategy and strategic planning, this exciting new guide puts forward advice on how to put strategy research into strategizing practice. In detailed chapters, Bolland addresses how strategizing works, with twenty real-world cases to show how theory can become reality, citing art, history, literature, science, psychology and philosophy to explore the human impulse to strategize. A valuable accompaniment for business students of strategy, as well as a practical handbook for staff and mid- and upper-level managers, this book is an essential read for anyone seeking guidance about planning the futures of their organizations.

This book offers a fast track route to mastering business decision making. It covers the key areas of decision making, from decision support systems and global templates to contemplation and implementation. It contains examples and lessons from some of the world's most successful businesses, including Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola, The Valio Group, Best Buy, and Scandic Hotels, and ideas from the smartest thinkers, including Mary Altomare, Mike Aristedes, David L. Cooperrider, Andre L. Delbecq, J. D. Eveland, Brian Hsieh, Don Mankin, Paul Nutt, Daniel Power, and Morris Raker. It also includes a glossary of key concepts and a comprehensive resources guide.

Offering a planned approach for determining cause and effect, DOE Simplified: Practical Tools for Effective Experimentation, Third Edition integrates the authors' decades of combined experience in providing training, consulting, and computational tools to industrial experimenters. Supplying readers with the statistical means to analyze how numerous variables interact, it is ideal for those seeking breakthroughs in product quality and process efficiency via systematic experimentation. Following in the footsteps of its bestselling predecessors, this edition incorporates a lively approach to learning the fundamentals of the design of experiments (DOE). It lightens up the inherently dry complexities with interesting sidebars and amusing anecdotes. The book explains simple methods for collecting and displaying data and presents comparative experiments for testing hypotheses. Discussing how to block the sources of variation from your analysis, it looks at two-level factorial designs and covers analysis of variance. It also details a four-step planning process for designing and executing experiments that takes statistical power into consideration. This edition includes a major revision of the software that accompanies the book (via download) and sets the stage for introducing experiment designs where the randomization of one or more hard-to-change factors can be restricted. Along these lines, it includes a new chapter on split plots and adds coverage of a number of recent developments in the design and analysis of experiments. Readers have access to case studies, problems, practice experiments, a glossary of terms, and a glossary of statistical symbols, as well as a series of dynamic online lectures that cover the first several chapters of the book.

Today's most successful companies are "Intelligent Companies" that use the best available data to inform their decision making. This is called Evidence-Based Management and is one of the fastest growing business trends of our times. "Intelligent Companies" bring together tools such as Business Intelligence, Analytics, Key Performance Indicators, Balanced Scorecards, Management Reporting and Strategic Decision Making to generate real competitive advantages.

As information and data volumes grow at explosive rates, the challenges of managing this information is turning into a losing battle for most companies and they end up drowning in data while thirsting for insights. This is made worse by the severe skills shortage in analytics, data presentation and communication.

This latest book by best-selling management expert Bernard Marr, will equip you with a set of powerful skills that are vital for successful managers now and in the future. Increase your market value by gaining essential skills that are in high demand but in short supply.

Loaded with practical step-by-step guidance, simple tools and real life examples of how leading organizations such as Google, CocaCola, Capital One, Saatchi & Saatchi, Tesco, Yahoo, as well as Government Departments and Agencies have put the principles into practice.

The five steps to more intelligent decision making are: Step 1: More intelligent strategies - by identifying strategic priorities and agreeing your real information needsStep 2: More intelligent data - by creating relevant and meaningful performance indicators and qualitative management information liked back to your strategic information needsStep 3: More intelligent insights - by using good evidence to test and prove ideas and by analysing the data to gain robust and reliable insightsStep 4: More intelligent communication - by creating informative and engaging management information packs and dashboards that provide the essential information, packaged in an easy-to-read wayStep 5: More intelligent decision making - by fostering an evidence-based culture of turning information into actionable knowledge and real decisions

"Bernard Marr did it again This outstanding and practical book will help your company become more intelligent and more successful. Marr takes the fields of business-intelligence, analytics and scorecarding to bring them together into a powerful and easy-to-follow 5-step framework. The Intelligent Company is THE must-read book of our times."
--Bruno Aziza, Co-author of best-selling book "Drive Business Performance" and "Worldwide Strategy Lead, Microsoft Business Intelligence"

"Book after book Bernard Marr is redefining the fundamentals of good business management. 'The Intelligent Company' is a must read in these changing times and a reference you will want on your desk every day "
--Gabriel Bellenger, Accenture Strategy

In a time of unusual stress, with a pandemic raging and economic insecurity and dislocation increasing, we need to rediscover the values that make us human, that give us a sense of meaning in order to increase our potential for productivity and success. What stands in the way, however, is a professional culture where human connectedness is a lost art: the frenzied numbers-obsessed, bottom-line thinking, the "scratch and claw" workplace, and organizations where the boss can literally be an algorithm. Through moving stories and a modern spin on the ancient framework of Socratic dialogue, David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer show how to move forward and build workplaces fit for humans through what uniquely defines us as human beings: our ability to think, talk, and create. By thinking carefully about a challenge, engaging peers in dialogue via open-ended questioning, and building a strategy collaboratively. Think Talk Create enables us to cultivate trust and define collective values, seemingly "soft" attributes that nonetheless markedly increase innovation and, ultimately, financial performance. Think: Step back, slow down, avoid impulsive, short-sighted decision making. Talk: Ask non-judgmental, open ended questions, with your mind as a blank slate, pursuing the problem like an empirical scientist or a judge presiding in court. Create: Bring something new and meaningful into play, a novel solution to a pesky problem that can move the world in surprising, positive directions.

This book discusses an emerging area in computer science, IT and management, i.e., decision sciences and management. It includes studies that employ various computing techniques like machine learning to generate insights from huge amounts of available data; and which explore decision-making for cross-platforms that contain heterogeneous data associated with complex assets; leadership; and team coordination. It also reveals the advantages of using decision sciences with management-oriented problems. The book includes a selection of the best papers presented at the International Conference on Decision Science and Management 2018 (ICDSM 2018), held at the Interscience Institute of Management and Technology (IIMT), Bhubaneswar, India.

The future of work is already here. Customers are adopting disruptive technologies faster than your company can adapt. When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your company's performance runs short of what you've promised, customers can seize control of your brand message, spreading their disappointment and frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today's connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. While others work in isolation, they link into rich networks of possibility and expand their influence. Connected companies around the world are aggressively acquiring customers and disrupting the competition. In The Connected Company, we examine what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why it works. And we show you how your company can use the same principles to adapt - and thrive - in today's ever-changing global marketplace.

Flashes of insight-the "Eureka!" moments that produce new and useful ideas in a single thought-are behind some of the world's most creative and practical innovations. This book shows how to cultivate more and better flashes of insight by harnessing the science and practice of the "seventh sense." Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, Asian philosophy, and military strategy, William Duggan illustrates the power of the seventh sense to help readers aspire to and achieve more in their personal and professional lives. His examples include Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Starbucks founder Howard Shultz, and executives and students he has taught in his classes. His book presents specific steps in the form of three practical tools to help prepare the mind, see and seize opportunity, and follow through on one's resolution. Based on Duggan's perennially popular Columbia Business School course, this book teaches the mental skills and discipline that power the seventh sense.

This book outlines the benefits and limitations of simulation, what is involved in setting up a simulation capability in an organization, the steps involved in developing a simulation model and how to ensure that model results are implemented. In addition, detailed example applications are provided to show where the tool is useful and what it can offer the decision maker. In Simulating Business Processes for Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics, Andrew Greasley provides an in-depth discussion of Business process simulation and how it can enable business analytics How business process simulation can provide speed, cost, dependability, quality, and flexibility metrics Industrial case studies including improving service delivery while ensuring an efficient use of staff in public sector organizations such as the police service, testing the capacity of planned production facilities in manufacturing, and ensuring on-time delivery in logistics systems State-of-the-art developments in business process simulation regarding the generation of simulation analytics using process mining and modeling people's behavior Managers and decision makers will learn how simulation provides a faster, cheaper and less risky way of observing the future performance of a real-world system. The book will also benefit personnel already involved in simulation development by providing a business perspective on managing the process of simulation, ensuring simulation results are implemented, and that performance is improved.

This volume highlights recent applications of multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models in the field of finance. Covering a wide range of MCDM approaches, including multiobjective optimization, goal programming, value-based models, outranking techniques, and fuzzy models, it provides researchers and practitioners with a set of MCDM methodologies and empirical results in areas such as portfolio management, investment appraisal, banking, and corporate finance, among others. The book addresses issues related to problem structuring and modeling, solution techniques, comparative analyses, as well as combinations of MCDM models with other analytical methodologies.

Better Governance Across the Board is a practical guide for achieving good corporate governance of organizations regardless of whether they are for profit, listed, state-owned, family owned, or widely held. It delves into the questions boards must ask if they are to fulfill their fiduciary duties, taking account of regulatory issues. Part 1 defines corporate governance, explaining the four reasons why it matters and how it applies to a wide range of organizations. Part 2 explores the "Five P" framework of Purpose, Principles, Power, People, and Processes that helps boards to create sustainable value. Part 3 concludes by showing how the organization's long-term "license to operate" is achieved by boards focusing on the three most important assets of the organization: its reputation; its people, and its processes. This book explores the dilemmas that currently exist in modern approaches to corporate governance and suggests ways of overcoming them. Based on ten years of teaching more than 1,500 directors of publicly listed companies, it integrates key principles of leadership, ethics, branding, and governance into a unique five-factor framework to help directors make good decisions in strategy, risk management, succession planning, internal controls, and stakeholder engagement.