This book equips students with a practical set of skills, showing how they can use philosophy's methods to analyze and discuss the philosophical and ethical issues that now form an integral part of courses in business, engineering, teaching, and health, as well as those in the humanities and social sciences. Selected case studies bring both ethical and philosophical issues to life.

"Swans, Swine, and Swindlers" addresses a core, contemporary question: What steps can we take to better anticipate and manage mega-crises, such as Haiti, Katrina, and 9/11?
This book explores the concept of "messes." A mess is a web of complex and dynamically interacting, ill-defined, and/or wicked problems; their solutions; and our conscious and unconscious assumptions, beliefs, emotions, and values. The roots of messes can be classified as "Swans" (the inability to surface and test false assumptions and mistaken beliefs), "Swine" (the inability to confront and manage greed, hubris, arrogance, and narcissism), and "Swindlers" (the inability to confront, detect, and stop unethical and corrupt behavior). Working systematically with this concept and these classifications, authors Can M. Alpaslan and Ian I. Mitroff reveal that all crises are messes; one must learn to understand and manage them as such.
They then provide tools and frameworks that readers can use to more effectively deal with the crises of today and tomorrow. Drawing on ideas from research areas as diverse as human development, philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, and high reliability organizations, this book aims to be the definitive guide for a new era in crisis management. Therefore, it is a must-have for practitioners, scholars, and students who study and deal in real-life crises.

Systems Concepts in Action: A Practitioner's Toolkit explores the application of systems ideas to investigate, evaluate, and intervene in complex and messy situations. The text serves as a field guide, with each chapter representing a method for describing and analyzing; learning about; or changing and managing a challenge or set of problems. The book is the first to cover in detail such a wide range of methods from so many different parts of the systems field. The book's Introduction gives an overview of systems thinking, its origins, and its major subfields. In addition, the introductory text to each of the book's three parts provides background information on the selected methods. Systems Concepts in Action may serve as a workbook, offering a selection of tools that readers can use immediately. The approaches presented can also be investigated more profoundly, using the recommended readings provided. While these methods are not intended to serve as "recipes," they do serve as a menu of options from which to choose. Readers are invited to combine these instruments in a creative manner in order to assemble a mix that is appropriate for their own strategic needs.

Engaging Resistance: How Ordinary People Successfully Champion Change offers an empirically based explanation that expands our understanding about the nature of resistance to organizational change and the effects of champion behavior. The text presents a new model describing how resistance occurs over time and details what change proponents can do throughout three engagement periods to effectively work with hesitant colleagues. The book's findings are illuminated by examples of six different resistance cases, embedded in the transformation sagas of two real-world organizations. A fundamental premise of this work is that resistance should not be something to avoid or squash as people work to change their organizations. In fact, resistance can be viewed as a natural, healthy part of an organic process. When engaged properly, resisters can help to improve change efforts and strengthen an organization's overall transformation.

Engaging Resistance: How Ordinary People Successfully Champion Change offers an empirically based explanation that expands our understanding about the nature of resistance to organizational change and the effects of champion behavior. The text presents a new model describing how resistance occurs over time and details what change proponents can do throughout three engagement periods to effectively work with hesitant colleagues. The book's findings are illuminated by examples of six different resistance cases, embedded in the transformation sagas of two real-world organizations. A fundamental premise of this work is that resistance should not be something to avoid or squash as people work to change their organizations. In fact, resistance can be viewed as a natural, healthy part of an organic process. When engaged properly, resisters can help to improve change efforts and strengthen an organization's overall transformation.

Intuition is something most people would have experienced at one time or another; it's that gut-feeling or 'sixth sense.' It's instinctive by nature, independent of rational analysis or deductive thinking. But can we actively develop our intuition and learn how to better utilise it? Author Dr Cate Howell believes we can, and sets about to empower us to use intuition in everyday life. Intuition is divided into three parts. In the first, she explores the nature of intuition from different perspectives, including philosophy and psychology, religion and spirituality. She also looks at the use of intuition in decision-making in the fields of business, health and teaching. The second part of the book is more practical and considers types of intuition, how to develop your intuition and then use it in everyday life with a practical seven-step plan. Steps explored for developing intuition include meditation, mindfulness, creativity, kindness and service. The final part of the book looks at some issues related to intuition, such as dreams and synchronicity, and how the development of one's intuition often seems to correlate with an increased sense of peace, purpose and joy in life. "Intuition is a vital part of life and practice and now we have a book that will help us to develop this essential skill." - Prof Ian Wilson, Associate Dean, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Wollongong

A surprisingly simple approach to help everyday people become everyday innovators. The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs-small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities. How did a convicted drug dealer launch and scale a massively successful fitness company? What core mindset drove LEGO to become the largest toy company in the world? How did a Pakistani couple challenge the global athletic shoe industry? What simple habits led Lady Gaga, Banksy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda to their remarkable success? Big Little Breakthroughs isn't just for propeller-head inventors, fancy-pants CEOs, or hoodie-donning tech billionaires. Rather, it's a surpassingly simple system to help everyday people become everyday innovators.

Together, Big Data, high-performance computing, and complex environments create unprecedented opportunities for organizations to generate game-changing insights that are based on hard data. Business Analytics: An Introduction explains how to use business analytics to sort through an ever-increasing amount of data and improve the decision-making capabilities of an organization. Covering the key areas of business analytics, the book explores the concepts, techniques, applications, and emerging trends that professionals across a wide range of industries need to be aware of. Better detection of fraud through visual analytics or better prediction of the likelihood of someone getting an infection while in the hospital are just a few examples of where analytics can play a positive role. As the field of business analytics continues to emerge rapidly, there is a need for a reliable textbook and reference on the subject. Filling this need, this book is suitable for graduate-level students and undergraduate seniors. It maintains a focus on only the key areas so the material can be covered adequately in a one-semester or one-quarter course. Each chapter includes software-generic exercises, labs, and associated answers to the exercises/labs. Author Jay Liebowitz recently had an article published in The World Financial Review. www.worldfinancialreview.com/?p=1904

A breakthrough in management thinking, "weird ideas" can

help every organization achieve a balance between sustaining performance and fostering new ideas. To succeed, you need to be both conventional "and" weird.

Hire misfits

Pursue the impractical

Find happy people and encourage them to fight

Reward failure but punish inaction

Forget your own successes

These and other counterintuitive strategies will unlock ideas you never knew you had.

Quantitative Methods for Business has been thoroughly revised and updated for this 5th edition, and continues to provide a simple and practical introduction to an area that students can find difficult. The book takes a non-threatening approach to the subject, avoiding excessive mathematics and abstract theory. It shows how to apply quantitative ideas to the real problems faced by managers.

The book includes numerous exercises and examples that help students understand the relevance of quantitative ideas to business. Assuming no previous knowledge, the text provides complete coverage for a first course in quantitative methods.

Decision-making tools are needed to support environmental management in an increasingly global economy. Addressing threats and identifying actions to mitigate those threats necessitates an understanding of the basic risk assessment paradigm and the tools of risk analysis to assess, interpret, and communicate risks. It also requires modification of the risk paradigm itself to incorporate a complex array of quantitative and qualitative information that shapes the unique political and ecological challenges of different countries and regions around the world. This book builds a foundation to characterize and assess a broad range of human and ecological stressors, and risk management approaches to address those stressors, using chemical risk assessment methods and multi-criteria decision analysis tools. Chapters discuss the current state-of-knowledge with regard to emerging stressors and risk management, focusing on the adequacy of available systematic, quantitative tools to guide vulnerability and threat assessments, evaluate the consequences of different events and responses, and support decision-making. This book opens a dialogue on aspects of risk assessment and decision analysis that apply to real-time (immediate) and deliberative (long-term) risk management processes.

This book develops a whole strategy for decision-making, with the full participation of the decision-maker and utilizing continuous feedback. It introduces the use of the very well-known and proven methodology, linear programming, but specially adapted for this purpose. For this, it incorporates a method to include subjective concepts, as well as the possibility of working with many different and even contradictory objectives. The book is liberally populated with diverse case studies to illustrate the concepts. This practical guide will be of interest to anyone undertaking analysis and decision-making, on both simple and complex projects, and who is looking for a strategy to organize, classify, and evaluate the large amount of information required to make an informed decision. The strategy includes methods to analyze the results and extract conclusions from them.

An economy low in carbon and high in life satisfaction will require thousands, if not millions of exceptional leaders. This book is the first to bring together sustainability knowledge with the leadership skills and tools to help you become one of those leaders. In it you will find everything you need to get started straight away, and to grow your effectiveness, even in a world that remains perversely intent on the opposite. Whether you are new to the whole idea of sustainability, or reasonably well informed but not entirely confident about what to do for the best, this guide will help you 'do' sustainability. Free of checklists and policy recommendations, the focus is on you, and on developing your capacity to identify the right thing to do wherever you are and whatever your circumstances. This is essential reading for those in or aspiring to sustainability-literate leadership, and a must for all those teaching leadership and management.

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 consistently superior decisions. In "Moving Out of the Box: Tools for Team Decision Making" author Jana M. Kemp, an authority on team decision making, saves the day by offering tested methods and tools that teams and leaders can use to ratchet up their performance level.
The book argues that making good decisions involves expansive group conversation that leads to sound conclusions and swift execution. This sounds simple, but in many 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-driven decisions that often lead to inoffensive, weak choices and sub-par results.
"Moving Out of the Box" shows that there is a time for consensus, a time for command-and-control, and a time to integrate both approaches. Providing examples of successes and failures, the text identifies five decision-making profiles--antisurvival, boxed-in, neutral, engaged enthusiasm, extreme excitement--to help you position yourself in relation to your teammates, facilitate discussion, and steer your group toward the most effective end point. The text includes scenarios, exercises, quizzes, sample questions, and other conversation starters. And, the book ends with a blueprint for putting decisions into action.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2007, held in Poznan, Poland in April 2007. Among the issues addressed in the 49 revised full papers presented together with one keynote lecture are business process management, Web services, ontologies, information retrieval, system design, agents and mobile applications, decision support, social issues, specific MIS issues.

Games, or contexts of strategic interaction, pervade and suffuse our lives and the lives of all organisms. How are we to make sense of and cope with such situations? How should an agent play? When will and when won't cooperation arise and be maintained? Using examples and a careful digestion of the literature, Agents, Games, and Evolution: Strategies at Work and Play addresses these encompassing themes throughout, and is organized into four parts: Part I introduces classical game theory and strategy selection. It compares ideally rational and the "naturalist" approach used by this book, which focuses on how actual agents chose their strategies, and the effects of these strategies on model systems. Part II explores a number of basic games, using models in which agents have fixed strategies. This section draws heavily on the substantial literature associated with the relevant application areas in the social sciences. Part III reviews core results and applications of agent-based models in which strategic interaction is present and for which design issues have genuine practical import. This section draws heavily on the substantial literature associated with the application area to hand. Part IV addresses miscellaneous topics in strategic interaction, including lying in negotiations, reasoning by backward induction, and evolutionary models. Modeled after the authors' Agents, Games, and Evolution course at the University of Pennsylvania, this book keeps mathematics to a minimum, focusing on computational strategies and useful methods for dealing with a variety of situations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of UNISCON 2008 held in Klagenfurt, Austria, during April 22-25, 2008.

UNISCON combines the ECOMO workshop series and the ISTA conference series. The 19 papers dealing with conceptual modeling, model-driven software development and information systems applications represent a 30% selection from the original set of submissions.

They are completed by two keynote lectures and 35 papers from internationally renowned researchers, invited in honor of Heinrich C. Mayr, whose 60th birthday is also celebrated at this event, that he originally created.

We make decisions, and these decisions make us and our organisations. And in theory, decision-making should be easy: a problem is identified, the decision-makers generate solutions, and choose the optimal one - and powerful mathematical tools are available to facilitate the task. Yet if it is all so simple why do organisations, both private and public sector, keep making mistakes - the results of which are borne by shareholders, employees, taxpayers and ultimately society at large? This guide to decision making. by leading decision science academic Helga Drummond, aims to improve decision-making in organisations. It explores how and why decisions go awry in the first place - and offers practical advice on what decision-makers can do to counter the psychological, social and other forces that can undermine individual judgment and pull organisations off course. Full of examples of good and bad decision-making from around the world, it will make readers think more clearly about decisions big and small.

BIS 2008 was the 11th in a series of international conferences on Business - formation Systems. The conference took place in Innsbruck which means that after Klagenfurt it was the second Austrian BIS edition. The BIS conference series from its veryroots has been recognized by professionalsas a forum for the exchangeand disseminationof topicalresearchin the development,implemen- tion, application and improvement of computer systems for business processes. The theme of this conference was"Business Processes and Social Contexts- Reaching Beyond the Enterprise."The material collected in this volume covers research trends as well as current achievements and cutting-edge developments in the area of modern business information systems. A set of 41 papers were - lectedforthepresentationduringthemaineventandgroupedaroundconference topics: Business Process Management, Service Discovery and Composition, - tologies, Information Retrieval, Interoperability, Mobility and Contexts, Ent- prise Resource Planning, Wikis and Folksonomies, Rules and Semantic Queries. The Program Committee consisted of more than 80 members that carefully evaluated all the submitted papers. This year they were supported by an Easy- Chair review system, and again, we observed an increase in the quality of the reviews. This not only raised the quality of the conference but also positively a?ected the work of the authors. The regular program was complemented by the outstanding keynote spe- ers. We are proud that BIS 2008 hosted Alistair Barros (SAP, Australia), Hans Ulrich Buhl (University of Augsburg, Germany), Fabio Ciravegna (University of She?eld, UK), John Davies (BT, UK), and Frank Leymann (University of Stuttgart, Germany).

Increasingly India, with its expertise in communication technology, is becoming the "global back office" to international supply chains. Many international companies (and examples are legion, but a few examples are IBM, Sony, Exxon/Mobil, etc.) have employed Indian resources to help them with their data, their computerized decision support and their knowledge management. With large corporations opening the path to India, it has allowed a substantial communications and decision-support infrastructure to develop in a number of Indian cities. Therefore, opportunities have emerged for both large and small enterprises in the global market place to utilize these developing Indian resources.

DECISION SUPPORT FOR GLOBAL ENTERPRISES is a volume of a mixture of peer-reviewed and invited papers. The volume will have two primary goals: (1) Stimulate creative and thoughtful discussion between academic research leaders and the practitioner information systems community that will improve both the research and practice in the area. (2) Increase the awareness of the problems and challenges faced by global enterprises that can be met with innovative computerized decision support systems. In addition to the positive aspects, the limitations of these systems and technologies are also explored. Emphasized in the book will be research on the following topics: (1) the emerging enterprise decision making processes and technologies; (2) decision making in uncertain, rapidly changing conditions; (3) the changing infrastructure in organizations and society; (4) the expanding role of web technologies; and (5) emerging theories and practices for managing knowledge and in making decisions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management, PAKM 2006, held in Vienna, Austria in November/December 2006.

The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 123 submissions. All aspects of knowledge management and their role in next-generation business solutions are addressed in perspective to business and organisation sciences, cognitive science, and computer science.

Optimizing Digital Strategy explores the choices facing organizations in the rapidly changing world of technology-enabled business. From performance marketing through to personalization, on-demand retailing and AI, this book maps out commercial and customer-focused challenges and explains how leaders can get the most out of their digital strategies. Rather than rushing headlong into adopting the latest digital platforms, tools and technologies, the book challenges leaders to step back from the demands for constant investment in new technology and drive better returns from existing assets.

Presenting a sustainable model of e-commerce that is appropriate to any individual organization's needs, Optimizing Digital Strategy addresses the repetitive dilemma between even more investment in technology and the need to improve margins and grow revenue. Illustrated by the authors' own digital work for global brands such as The Economist, Sky, O2, Regus, the Financial Times, Lidl and L.K.Bennett, this book shows how to balance the need to remain competitive, fully deliver customer expectations, and put resources behind investments that will deliver the best return.

Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) is a method used by maintenance and reliability industry professionals as one of the key tools to drive improvement. This book offers a quick guide to the applications involved in performing a successful RCFA by providing a foundational view of maintenance and reliability strategies. It also highlights the practical applications of RCFA and identifies how to achieve a successful RCFA, as well as discussing common equipment failures and how to solve them. Case studies on topics including pump system failure analysis and vibration analysis are included. Suggests examples on how to solve common failure on many types of equipment, including fatigue, pumps, bearings, and mechanical power transmission Highlights practical applications of RCFA Identifies key elements for how to achieve a successful RCFA Presents case studies on topics including pump system failure analysis and vibration analysis The book is a must-read for any reliability engineer, particularly mechanical reliability professionals.

Have you ever wondered why most newspapers are so large? Or why management consultants work such long hours? Or why hotels still insist on having check-in desks? Ask anyone in these industries, and their answer will be the same: "That's the way we've always done it."

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn’t mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. These bad practices are all too common in organizations, and managers and executives can be blind to their pernicious effects. Since they've worked in the past, or have been adopted with success by other firms, their purpose or effectiveness is rarely questioned. As a consequence, these practices spread and persist.

In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Brimming with examples of norm-defying organizations in an eclectic range of industries--including IVF clinics, hotels, newspapers, and a famous London theater--Breaking Bad Habits will make you rethink your long-held beliefs about industry norms while encouraging you to reinvigorate your business by breaking out of the status quo.