This work highlights the coming age of management information systems for all types of executives by focusing on executive information systems, or EIS. Serving as a data-intensive system, an EIS offers a snapshot of a company's past and present operations as a way of predicting the future. In this book, Robert Thierauf provides a complete picture of executive information systems, from an introduction of what these systems are all about, to the hardware, software, and applications that form the basis of an EIS environment.

The work is divided into four basic sections. The first provides an overview of executive information systems, discussing the real need for an EIS, the essential characteristics underlying it, and its relationship to prior management information systems. The types of executive decision making typically found in an EIS environment, illustrated with specific examples, are also examined. The second section focuses on the computer hardware and software that is useful within an EIS operating mode, along with on-line databases that assist executives in decision making. The development of executive information systems is covered in section three, which features current approaches for executives and their staffs as well as methods to be followed by the Management Information Systems department. Finally, section four addresses various aspects of working in an EIS environment, including strategic planning, marketing, manufacturing, finance, and personnel. A master case study is presented, and each topic is explored in relation to it. Typical EIS applications are also described for each of the topic areas. With its combination of both EIS theory and practical applications, this work will be a valuable resource for senior executives and MIS professionals as well as for students of management and information systems. Public, academic, and business libraries will also find it to be a useful addition to their collections.

Provocative and controversial, the information found in Empowered Investing reveals powerful tricks of the investment trade. It will give you the education and information to be a confident, informed, and hugely successful investor.

The most successful investors in history, such as Charles Henry Dow, used unique analysis and charting methods. These are the secrets Wall Street doesn't want you to know. Relying on the media and Wall Street research is painful and no longer necessary.

With the advice offered by author Joseph F. LoPresti, you'll learn to chart stocks like Dow, isolate hot sector opportunities, and select the strongest stocks to buy through a series of easy, almost effortless strategies. These exercises will also help you reduce risk and give you a "sell discipline," something desperately needed by most investors. Once you read "Empowered Investing," you'll see how easy it is to implement these startling strategies.

"Empowered Investing" will introduce a different way to make investment decisions that will instantly help you manage your portfolio, build your wealth, and enrich your life.

Responsible behaviors in the realm of business continue to remain a crucial component of organizational development. By exploring core aspects of contemporary corporate strategies, businesses can create more value in social welfare initiatives. CSR 2.0 and the New Era of Corporate Citizenship is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the ways in which corporate entities can implement responsible strategies and create synergistic value for both businesses and society. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as corporate citizenship, stakeholder engagement, and business ethics, this publication is ideally designed for students, academics and researchers seeking current concise and authoritative research on the business case for corporate social responsibility.

This edited book presents the state-of-the-art of applying fuzzy logic to managerial decision-making processes in areas such as fuzzy-based portfolio management, recommender systems, performance assessment and risk analysis, among others. Presenting the latest research, with a strong focus on applications and case studies, it is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, project leaders and managers wanting to apply or improve their fuzzy-based skills.

This book offers a timely snapshot of current soft-computing research and solutions to decision-making and optimization problems, which are ubiquitous in the current social and technological context, addressing fields including logistics, transportation and data analysis. Written by leading international experts from the United States, Brazil and Cuba, as well as the United Kingdom, France, Finland and Spain, it discusses theoretical developments in and practical applications of soft computing in fields where these methods are crucial to obtaining better models, including: intelligent transportation systems, maritime logistics, portfolio selection, decision- making, fuzzy cognitive maps, and fault detection. The book is dedicated to Professor Jose L. Verdegay, a pioneer who has been actively pursuing research in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing since 1982, in honor of his 65th birthday.

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is all about making choices in the presence of multiple conflicting criteria. MCDM has become one of the most important and fastest growing subfields of Operations Research/Management Science. As modern MCDM started to emerge about 50 years ago, it is now a good time to take stock of developments. This book aims to present an informal, nontechnical history of MCDM, supplemented with many pictures. It covers the major developments in MCDM, from early history until now. It also covers fascinating discoveries by Nobel Laureates and other prominent scholars. The book begins with the early history of MCDM, which covers the roots of MCDM through the 1960s. It proceeds to give a decade-by-decade account of major developments in the field starting from the 1970s until now. Written in a simple and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to students, academics, and professionals in the field of decision sciences.

This book presents recently developed intelligent techniques with applications and theory in the area of quality management. The involved applications of intelligence include techniques such as fuzzy sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. The book consists of classical quality management topics dealing with intelligent techniques for solving the complex quality management problems. The book will serve as an excellent reference for quality managers, researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students in this area. The authors of the chapters are well-known researchers in the area of quality management.

< p=""> The book covers the domain of multi-criteria decision making, a topic which has gained significant attention of researchers and practitioners spanning a variety of disciplines for enhancing their decision making in real life situation. The topics in this volume help readers understand the techniques in the model building and analysis stage. The chapters cover a variety of techniques and their applications for interesting problems. This book will be of interest to readers in diverse disciplines such as engineering, business, management, humanities, psychology and law. ^

Seeking to define a new approach to data management at the enterprise level, this work takes the reader beyond information management to information control, where the methods of data capture and manipulation supersede data quantity. Using the metadata approach ensures long-term, universal control of all data characteristics and improves the effectiveness of IT as a corporate function by minimizing the potential for errors, and improving communication and understanding between IT and other disciplines. By describing how to establish metadata management within an organization, this volume provides examples of data structure architectures, and reviews issues associated with metadata management in relation to the Internet and data warehousing. It offers to help the reader to control the factors that make data useable throughout an organization and manage data so that it becomes a valuable corporate asset. The book examines real-world business departments that can benefit from this approach and ways in which sets of metadata can be both autonomous and overlapping.

The rate of failure of IT projects has remained little changed in survey after survey over the past 15-20 years-over 40-50%. This has happened in spite of new technology, innovative methods and tools, and different management methods. Why does this happen? Why can't the situation be better? One reason is that many think of each IT effort as unique. In reality many IT projects are very similar at a high, strategic level. Where they differ is in the people and exact events-the detail. If you read the literature or have been in information systems or IT for some time, you have seen the same reasons for failure and the same problems and issues recur again and again. In this book IT Management experts Ben Lientz and Lee Larssen show you how to identify and track the recurring issues leading to failure in IT projects and provide a proven, modern method for addressing them. By following the recommendations in this books readers can significantly reduce the risk of IT failures and increase the rate of success. Benefits of using this approach: * Issues are identified earlier-giving more time for solution and action. * Issues are resolved more consistently since the approach tracks on their repetition. * You get an early warning of problems in IT work-before the budget or schedule fall apart. * Management tends to have more realistic expectations with an awareness of issues. * Users and managers have greater confidence in IT due to the improved handling of issues. * Since the number of issues tends to stabilize in an organization, the IT organization and management get better at detecting, preventing, and dealing with issues over time-cumulative improvement. * Giving attention to issues make users more realistic in their requests and acts to deter requirement changes and scope creep.

The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous plant require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by regulatory bodies and industrial organizations to reliability data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also needed to assess availability of plant and services and to improve quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning and production availability. The need for an educational effort in the field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the framework of EuReDatA, an association of organizations operating reliability data banks. This association aims to promote data exchange and pooling of data between organizations and to encourage the adoption of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be essential in order to improve quality. To cover issues directly linked to the above areas, space is devoted to the definition of failure events, comon cause and human error data, feedback of operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, life-time distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions, Bayesian inference methods, mutivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and possibility theory.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM's comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

This Handbook brings together experts in the field of leadership to provide insights into methods for leadership research. It serves to motivate them to use new research methods to further our knowledge of the leadership field. Illustrating novel approaches to research with sample questions and applications to the field of leadership, this comprehensive and accessible Handbook covers key methodologies in leadership research today, as well as introducing methods that will be invaluable in the future. With chapters written by established leadership scholars, the Handbook of Methods in Leadership Research is arranged to cover three core areas of research: measurement and design, quantitative analytic approaches, and qualitative analytic approaches. The book provides an accessible overview and starting point to discover new methods. All chapters are well researched and provide references for those who want to delve deeper into the topics covered. The volume ends with a summary of tips for each method presented. This book will be an indispensable resource for leadership students, scholars, and practitioners alike, to inspire their future research but also to support their understanding of the quality of research carried out by others. Contributors: C.-H. Chang, S.H. Chong, A.R. Cook, A.J. Dixon, E. Djurdjevic, R.J. Foti, V. Gochmann, J. Gooty, R.J. Hall, R. Ilies, R.E. Johnson, M. Jokisaari, R.B. Kline, M. Lewis, W.-D. Li, R.G. Lord, M.E. McCusker, B. Meyer, P. Neves, S. Ohly, M. Pina e Cunha, A. Rego, E.F. Rietzschel, D. Rus, J. Schilling, B. Schyns, W.K. Smith, S. Trichas, W. Wang, J.M. Webb, B. Wisse, F.J. Yammarino

While many nations are still struggling from the global financial crisis and regaining their financial security, investors are considering alternative options for investing their money; and the secure financial sector is China appears as a viable option. International Cross-Listing of Chinese Firms examines the successful techniques and strategies that Chinese companies are using within their financial practices. It highlights the foreign-based multinational enterprise theories related to the major international stock markets. By providing the latest theories and research, this book will be beneficial for business practitioners, researchers, and managers interested in the relationship between cross-listing and firm valuation of Chinese firms.

This research study attempts to provide a comprehensive CSR literature review, analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues from the strategic decision-making (SDM) perspective, and investigate the process of managers' CSR- related SDM in China. In particular, it utilizes content analysis to examine selected CSR articles from published studies, in order to evaluate the trends in CSR theory development as well as to identify the variables, constructs, and relationships within CSR theory. The review indicates that CSR should be involved in organizational strategies. Therefore, this study reviews the relevant theoretical and empirical literature in the SDM area. Firstly, it summarizes the broader context of strategic decisions and points out factors in the external environment and organizational characteristics that influence the SDM process of managers. Secondly, it articulates the influences of individual characteristics on the SDM. Thirdly, it examines the process of SDM using the rational and bounded rationality theory of decision making. Finally, on the basis of the SDM model, the author generates a research model which proposes the links between vital and influential factors from an integrated perspective. This book also provides a detailed description of how to choose a proper method for the CSR-related SDM research, the process of survey design, sampling methods, and survey administration. In particular, the author utilized a policy-capturing method to develop a series of scenarios concerning CSR activities and an explanation of this method is provided. It reports research findings of this study and provides an extensive and thorough discussion and compares it with previous empirical studies. The conclusion summarizes the research findings and their theoretical and practical implications.

Have you ever wondered why you make bad decisions? Or why it's so hard to make a decision in the first place? Through pioneering research into behavioural science, decisions expert Dr Sheheryar Banuri has designed an entirely novel decision-making framework which can be adopted into everyday life to help us better our decision-making skills by understanding and streamlining the process. The result? Simple, effective and efficient techniques to combat indecision. The Decisive Mind will draw on examples from evolutionary psychology, examine our ability (or inability) to prioritise and highlight the scenarios that force decision-making errors, and help us understand our own minds. By unpicking a lifetime's worth of misconceptions about our own decision-making patterns and habits, this book will guide you on your first steps towards optimising your own brain space.

In this timely report, a number of chief executive officers talk frankly about how they've managed to increase profits and improve market shares for their companies without government intervention even in the face of economic hard times and foreign competition. Drawn from companies in both well-established and fast-growing non-traditional industries, these success stories represent a broad range of experience and expertise. In addition, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Alan M. Kantrow offer their own perspectives on corporate success. "How to Compete Beyond the 1980S" clearly shows that, through the increased imagination and efforts of individual corporations and institutions, America's lagging productivity can be revived.

Anthony Von Mickle is President of The Investment Forum, a real estate and equity investments group based in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Based upon his interests, through formal education and practical research, he has learned that actively pursuing what you want, regardless of your personal background, is a key ingredient to the attainment of accumulated wealth in residential real estate investments. Wealth can be acquired in this field by anyone willing to do the work and formulate this goal. Real Estate for Real People: A Guide to Achieving Profitability in Residential Real Estate Investing is a guide to help long-term investors seeking profit in residential real estate investments. Von Mickle stresses the initial accumulation of preliminary information which helps prevent problems down the line. For example, examine zoning and planning details of the economic development office in the counties in which you wish to invest in property, obtain tax assessment information and detail an exit strategy. Von Mickle provides valuable tools that can help secure profitable residential real estate investments. Learn from an expert who has extensively studied extremely wealthy people and successfully utilized their common traits of passion, timing, fear, and leverage. He shares how anyone can use these traits to their financial advantage.