Recent years have seen a radical upheaval in use of IT in the service and financial sectors. The turbulent conditions created by economic deregulation, political re-regulation and privatisation have produced considerable challenges to the effective and efficient management of IT. Managers Divided is concerned with the use and development of IT in commercial organisations. Its particular focus is on the major shifts that are taking place in the management and use of IT in organisations struggling to come to terms with a rapidly changing market and regulatory environments. It examines the deeply political nature of IT management, innovation and change. The authors analyse the shift from a technology-led to a strategic and marketing-led use of IT. They study the use and development of IT through detailed localised studies of management practice that are understood to be influenced by, and have consequences for, broader socio-political, economic, organisational, and technological conditions. Graduates and undergraduates studying corporate and strategic management, management information systems, work and employment gender research, organisation studies and finance will find this book an invaluable asset. Information Systems specialists and practitioners in financial services will find the book a useful source of information.

The definitive guide to running productive meetings Facilitating With Ease! has become the go-to handbook for those who lead meetings, training, and other business gatherings. Packed with information, effective practices, and invaluable advice, this book is the comprehensive handbook for anyone who believes meetings should be productive, relevant, and as short as possible. Dozens of exercises, surveys, and checklists will help transform anyone into a skilled facilitator, and clear, actionable guidance makes implementation a breeze. This new fourth edition includes a new chapter on questioning, plus new material surrounding diversity, globalization, technology, feedback, distance teams, difficult executives, diverse locations, personal growth, meeting management, and much more. With in-depth, expert guidance from planning to closing, this book provides facilitators with an invaluable resource for learning or training. Before you run another meeting, discover the practices, processes, and techniques that turn you from a referee to an effective facilitator. This book provides a wealth of tools and insights that you can put into action today. Run productive meetings that get real results Keep discussions on track and facilitate the exchange of ideas Resolve conflict and deal with difficult individuals Train leaders and others to facilitate effectively Poorly-run meetings are an interruption in the day, and accomplish little other than putting everyone behind in their "real" work. On the other hand, a meeting run by an effective facilitator makes everyone's job easier; decisions get made, strategies are improved, answers are given, and new ideas bubble to the surface. A productive meeting makes everyone happy, and results in real benefits that spread throughout the organization. Facilitating With Ease! is the skill-building guide to running great meetings with confidence and results.

This book is about how models can be developed to represent demand and supply on markets, where the emphasis is on demand models. Its primary focus is on models that can be used by managers to support marketing decisions. Modeling Markets presents a comprehensive overview of the tools and methodologies that managers can use in decision making. It has long been known that even simple models outperform judgments in predicting outcomes in a wide variety of contexts. More complex models potentially provide insights about structural relations not available from casual observations. In this book, the authors present a wealth of insights developed at the forefront of the field, covering all key aspects of specification, estimation, validation and use of models. The most current insights and innovations in quantitative marketing are presented, including in-depth discussion of Bayesian estimation methods. Throughout the book, the authors provide examples and illustrations. This book will be of interest to researchers, analysts, managers and students who want to understand, develop or use models of marketing phenomena.

Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO's impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard?
If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life--explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer--are less useful than they seem.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these "influencers" in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.
Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present--an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Provides the reader with a unique decision--making tool by showing how ethics play an integral part of all business decisions. It offers excellent advice on how to apply ethics in all of your everyday decisions whether they be large or small. Features an illustrative case study of one companya s decision making process and the ethical considerations behind their choices. Contains business suggestions for integrating ethics into everyday management----from establishing a corporate code to implementing an in--house ethics training program.

Cybercrime and Business: Strategies for Global Corporate Security examines the three most prevalent cybercrimes afflicting today's corporate security professionals: piracy, espionage, and computer hacking. By demonstrating how each of these threats evolved separately and then converged to form an ultra-dangerous composite threat, the book discusses the impact the threats pose and how the very technologies that created the problem can help solve it. Cybercrime and Business then offers viable strategies for how different types of businesses-from large multinationals to small start-ups-can respond to these threats to both minimize their losses and gain a competitive advantage. The book concludes by identifying future technological threats and how the models presented in the book can be applied to handling them.

Unleash the transformative power of face to face groups

The third edition of this ground-breaking book continues to advance its mission to support groups to do their best thinking. It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole.

This fully updated edition of The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making guides readers through the struggle and the satisfaction of putting participatory values into practice, helping them to fulfill the promise of effective group decision-making. With previous editions already embraced by business and community leaders and consulting professionals around the world, this new book is even more insightful and easy to use.

New for this edition: 60 pages of brand new skills and toolsMany new case examplesMajor expansion and reorganization of the advanced sections of the book.New chapter: Teaching A Group About Group DynamicsDoubled in size: Classic Facilitator Challenges.Substantially improved: Designing Realistic Agendas - now three chapters, with wise, insightful answers to the most vexing questions about meeting design.

This collection of essays deals with the situated management of risk in a wide variety of organizational settings - aviation, mental health, railway project management, energy, toy manufacture, financial services, chemicals regulation, and NGOs. Each chapter connects the analysis of risk studies with critical themes in organization studies more generally based on access to, and observations of, actors in the field. The emphasis in these contributions is upon the variety of ways in which organizational actors, in combination with a range of material technologies and artefacts, such as safety reporting systems, risk maps and key risk indicators, accomplish and make sense of the normal work of managing risk - riskwork. In contrast to a preoccupation with disasters and accidents after the event, the volume as whole is focused on the situationally specific character of routine risk management work. It emerges that this riskwork is highly varied, entangled with material artefacts which represent and construct risks and, importantly, is not confined to formal risk management departments or personnel. Each chapter suggests that the distributed nature of this riskwork lives uneasily with formalized risk management protocols and accountability requirements. In addition, riskwork as an organizational process makes contested issues of identity and values readily visible. These 'back stage/back office' encounters with risk are revealed as being as much emotional as they are rationally calculative. Overall, the collection combines constructivist sensibilities about risk objects with a micro-sociological orientation to the study of organizations.

This book offers a simple introduction to the fundamentals and applications of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) without a pre-requisite for a sophisticated mathematical background. It provides a quick and intuitive understanding of the methodology using spreadsheet examples and explains in a step-by-step fashion how to use Super Decisions, a freely available software developed by the Creative Decisions Foundations. The book is intended to be a resource for decision makers with little or no exposure to the field of Operations Research (OR); however, the book can be used as a very gentle introduction to the AHP methodology and/or as an AHP hands-on supplement for standard OR textbooks. AHP is an intuitive and mathematically simple methodology in the field of multi-criteria decision making. Because of this, most AHP books assume the reader has basic OR mathematical background. However, AHP simplicity suggests that decision makers from all disciplines can take advantage of the methodology without struggling with the mathematics behind it. To fulfill this need, this book delivers a quick and practical understanding of the method that can be useful for corporate executives.

A proven decision management methodology for increased profits and lowered risks

"Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes" describes a simple but comprehensive methodology for decision management projects, which use business rules and predictive analytics to optimize and automate small, high-volume business decisions. It includes Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA), a new method for taking the crucial first step in any IT project to implement decision management: defining a set of business decisions and identifying all the information--business knowledge and data--required to make those decisions.Describes all the stages in automating business processes, from business process modeling down to the implementation of decision servicesAddresses how to use business rules and predictive analytics to optimize and automate small, high-volume business decisionsProposes a simple "top-down" method for defining decision requirements and representing them in a single diagramShows how clear requirements can allow decision management projects to be run with reduced risk and increased profit

Nontechnical and accessible, "Knowledge Automation" reveals how DRA is destined to become a standard technique in the business analysis and project management toolbox.

Future Trends: A Guide to Decision Making and Leadership in Business is the first and only book to link a decision-making and leadership platform to trends pointing to the future. By identifying sixty global, long-term trends and detailing how businesspeople can leverage them in both the short- and long-term, the book provides readers with a powerful body of knowledge unavailable anywhere else. In Future Trends, consultant and futurist Larry Samuel: *Identifies sixty significant and opportunistic global, long-term trends; *Details how businesspeople can leverage each trend in both the short- and long-term via a decision-making and leadership platform; *Helps readers be recognized as a trusted source and "go-to" person in their respective field by becoming more fluent in the future; *Takes a 360-degree, holistic view of tomorrow by examining cultural, economic, political, social, scientific, and technological trends; *Steers clear from here-today-gone-tomorrow things and experiences that comprise most glimpses into the emerging cultural landscape Future Trends is divided into six sections covering Cultural Trends, Economic Trends, Political Trends, Social Trends, Scientific Trends, and Technological Trends. Each section includes ten trends that indicate where the world is heading. Many futurists focus on technology, forgetting the fact that the ways in which people actually live their lives are shaped by many other factors. Future Trends thus takes a 360-degree, holistic view of tomorrow, offering readers a fuller understanding of life on Earth over the next couple of decades.

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.

A clear, actionable plan to fight frustration at work, make savvier decisions, and avoid costly mistakes when we're short on time, attention, and choices

One of the most frustrating dilemmas for working people today is how to be effective when we feel we don't have time or we're facing non-stop demands. "The Power of Pause" process is a dynamic practice that Nance Guilmartin has taught thousands of people worldwide, equipping them to regain control of thoughts and avoid miscommunications. This tested method helps readers to take a moment to wonder what's called for when we feel we're short on time, attention, temper, or choices. In that instant, we can use a simple method to rewire our overloaded circuits, tap into our "missing-in-action" common sense, and raise our communication intelligence. This process is "not" about slowing down the pace of workday life. It is about enabling anyone who is time-pressed to make savvier choices and avoid costly mistakes.Shows how to exercise leadership skills that save time and strengthen relationshipsOffers a process for learning to engage in productive exchanges rather than attacking or being resigned Enables managers and teams to save time and moneyReveals how to fix problems and achieve goals with less stress

"The" "Power of Pause" methods enable managers and teams across varying industries/any industry to save time and money, fix problems and achieve goals with less stress-even in the face of competition, cultural and language differences, or tight budgets.

Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World is Noreen Hertz's practical, cutting-edge guide to help you cut through the data deluge and make smarter and better choices, based on her highly popular TED talk.

In this eye-opening handbook, the internationally noted speaker, economics expert, and bestselling author of IOU: The Debt Threat and Silent Takeover reveals the extent to which the biggest decisions in our lives are often made on the basis of flawed information, weak assumptions, corrupted data, insufficient scrutiny of others, and a lack of self-knowledge.

To avert such disasters, Hertz persuasively argues, we need to become empowered decision-makers, capable of making high-stakes choices and holding accountable those who advise us.

In Eyes Wide Open, she weaves together scientific research with real-world examples from Hollywood to Harry Potter, NASA to World War Two spies, to construct a path to more astute and empowered decision-making in ten clear steps. With a razor-sharp intellect and an instinct for popular storytelling, she offers counter-intuitive, actionable guidance for making better choices--whether you are a business-person, a professional, a patient, or a parent.

Add value with every decision using a simple yet powerful framework Few things are as valuable in business, and in life, as the ability to make good decisions. Can you imagine how much more rewarding your life and your business would be if every decision you made were the best it could be? Decision Quality empowers you to make the best possible choice and get more of what you truly want from every decision. Dr. Carl Spetzler is a leader in the field of decision science and has worked with organizations across industries to improve their decision-making capabilities. He and his co-authors, all experienced consultants and educators in this field, show you how to frame a problem or opportunity, create a set of attractive alternatives, identify relevant uncertain information, clarify the values that are important in the decision, apply tools of analysis, and develop buy-in among stakeholders. Their straightforward approach is elegantly simple, yet practical and powerful. It can be applied to all types of decisions. Our business and our personal lives are marked by a stream of decisions. Some are small. Some are large. Some are life-altering or strategic. How well we make those decisions truly matters. This book gives you a framework and thinking tools that will help you to improve the odds of getting more of what you value from every choice. You will learn: * The six requirements for decision quality, and how to apply them * The difference between a good decision and a good outcome * Why a decision can only be as good as the best of the available alternatives * Methods for making both "significant" and strategic decisions * The mental traps that undermine decision quality and how to avoid them * How to deal with uncertainty a factor in every important choice * How to judge the quality of a decision at the time you're making it * How organizations have benefited from building quality into their decisions. Many people are satisfied with 'good enough' when making important decisions. This book provides a method that will take you and your co-workers beyond 'good enough' to true Decision Quality.

Appendices A Rotastore A. l Tabular Results for Different Models A. 2 Tabular Results for Different Algorithms B OptiTrans B. l Input Data B. l. l Input Data Common to all Solution Approaches B. 1. 2 Specific Input Data for the MILP Model and the Column Enumeration Approach B. 1. 3 Specific Input Data for the Heuristic Methods B. 1. 3. 1 Penalty Criteria B. 1. 3. 2 Control Parameters of the OptiTrans Software B. 2 Tabular Results B. 2. 1 Tabular Results for the MILP Model B. 2. 2 Tabular Results for the Heuristic Methods B. 2. 2. 1 Input Data for a Whole Day - Offline Analysis B. 2. 2. 2 Results for CIH and SA References Index Preface This book covers the analysis and development of online algorithms involving exact optimization and heuristic techniques, and their appli- tion to solve two real life problems. The first problem is concerned with a complex technical system: a special carousel based high-speed storage system - Rotastore. It is shown that this logistic problem leads to an NP-hard Batch Presorting Pr- lem (BPSP) which is not easy to solve optimally in offline situations. We consider a polynomial case and develope an exact algorithm for offline situations. Competitive analysis showed that the proposed online - gorithm is 312-competitive. Online algorithms with lookahead improve the online solutions in particular cases. If the capacity constraint on additional storage is neglected the problem has a totally unimodular polyhedron.

The scale and complexity of research and practices of open innovation mandate a correspondingly sophisticated form of decision making. Strategic Planning Decisions brings together a number of tools that ease the decision process in technology companies, providing both conceptual frameworks and practical applications. Innovative approaches are presented such as an ontology-based model where all the relevant aspects of a potential technology are interrelated to provide a comprehensive and logically connected data pool for decision makers. Divided into two sections, Strategic Planning Decisions describe both strategic approaches using the decision tools, and tactical approaches. Some of these tools are expanded while some others are embedded in a model that will lay the ground for practical application. These include: bibliometric analysis, ontology, roadmapping, lead user, six sigma, and multi-actor & multi-objective decision making methods Recent research and relevant theory are balanced with up-to-date practical applications and hands-on techniques making Strategic Planning Decisions ideal for engineers who wish to keep up-to-date with current ideas in the field of TM. It also provides workable methods for practising managers from all levels who wish to apply a more rigorous approach in their work and consultants concerned with technology assessment and its management.

The study of complex systems attracts the attention of many researchers in diverse fields. Complex systems are characterized by a high number of entities and a high degree of interactions. One of the most important features is that they do not involve a central organizing authority, but the various elements that make up the systems are self-organized. Moreover, some complex systems possess an emergency priority: climate change and sustainable development research, studies of public health, ecosystem habitats, epidemiology, and medicine, among others. Unfortunately, a great number of today's overlapping approaches fail to meet the needs of decision makers when managing complex domains. Indeed, the design of complex systems often requires the integration of a number of artificial intelligence tools and techniques. The problem can be viewed in terms of goals, states, and actions, choosing the best action to move the system toward its desired state or behavior. This is why agent-based approaches are used to model complex systems. The main objective of this book is to bring together existing methods for decision support systems creation within a coherent agent-based framework and to provide an interdisciplinary and flexible methodology for modeling complex and systemic domains.

This book presents recent advancements of research, new methods and techniques, applications and projects in decision making and decision support systems. It explores expert systems and neural networks, knowledge engineering and management, fuzzy sets and systems and computational methods for optimization, data analysis and decision making. It presents applications in Economics, Finance, Management and Engineering. The book undertakes to stimulate scientific exchange, ideas and experiences in the field of decision making in Economy and Management. Researchers and practitioners alike will benefit from this book, when they are dealing with imprecision, vagueness and uncertainty in the context of decision making.

Don Lamberton was one of the first scholars to recognise the need for information to be taken seriously, he has spent much of his career persuading others. Focusing on his contribution, this volume explores the struggle for recognition of a way of thinking which is fundamental to our understanding of the social and economic role of information.

Each of the thirty authors, prominent in information economics and related fields have written a contribution especially for this volume. Vital issues, central to Lamberton's concerns and often ignored in euphoric approaches to information - the plight of the information poor, the poverty of information policy, the future of universal service, quality of employment, organisational and market failure to effect information transactions, the role of information in economic development, problems of codifying, classifying and managing information, the limitations of information systems - are emphasised throughout.

The whole encapsulates the vast progress which has been made, not just in academic thinking about information, but in the part this thinking now plays in corporate strategy and government policy. The volume is both an affectionate account of Don Lamberton's contribution to the understanding of information, and also the most comprehensive and authoritative of collections on the social and economic significance of information.

"The best education in grand strategy available in a single volume . . . a book that should be read by every American leader or would-be leader."-The Wall Street Journal A master class in strategic thinking, distilled from the legendary program the author has co-taught at Yale for decades John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian of the Cold War, has for almost two decades co-taught grand strategy at Yale University with his colleagues Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy. Now, in On Grand Strategy, Gaddis reflects on what he has learned. In chapters extending from the ancient world through World War II, Gaddis assesses grand strategic theory and practice in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Octavian/Augustus, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the American Founding Fathers, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Isaiah Berlin. On Grand Strategy applies the sharp insights and wit readers have come to expect from Gaddis to times, places, and people he's never written about before. For anyone interested in the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, a master class.

Warren Buffett compares stock trading to great athletes: they excel not because of fast neurological responses, but because of their ability to delay as long as possible before reacting. Successful CEOs, fire fighters, and military officers all know how to manage delay to gather as much information as possible to get the results they need. In Wait, Frank Partnoy argues that decisions of all kinds, whether 'snap' or long-term, benefit from being made at the last possible moment. The art of knowing how long you can afford to delay before committing is at the heart of many a great decision, whether in a corporate takeover or a marriage proposal. Apologies are better received if they are not rushed and people who can defer gratification are happier and more successful than those who must have everything now. Partnoy demonstrates that the ability to wait is crucial to getting the right answer and that gut instincts are often wrong.

Eurocorridors are characterized by intensive transport flows and dynamic patterns of establishment and household locations. They are also considered the backbones of powerful spatial and economic forces in the areas that connect urban regions. One of the main difficulties in the spatial planning of eurocorridors has been the need to engage in different types of collective action. Such an approach can be extremely challenging in practice, useful to researchers in the fieldand to professionals as well.

In the light of this, the book s main objectives are:

- To define the problem by analyzing the key features, which include freight and passenger transport policies and issues; the territorial context, with its geographical, social, economic and cultural aspects; the plurality of subjects with different aims and resources and the lack of homogeneous information.

- To illustrate assessment models and evaluation frameworks (MCDA; Discrete Choice Analysis; Collaborative Assessments; Geovisualization Technologies) in theoretical terms and by the use of case studies."