Enterprise integration and enterprise engineering has become a focal point of discussions during the past few years with active contribution of many disciplines... The evolution from the concept of CAD/CAM, through CIM to the Integrated Enterprise is based on the assumption that the integrated enterprise can (and should) be engineered just as any complex system can.

Strategy requires an ability to conceive the future, see and create possibilities, and focus to choose a direction. Successful strategy is a mental discipline consisting of broad ranging, flexible, and creative thinking. Choosing the Future will help you achieve this success by studying fundamentals such as effective group thinking, knowing when to delay a decision for more information, balancing contrasting modes of thought, and transforming thought into action.
Using a cycle to show the relationship among different strategic thinking tools, Choosing the Future gives you guidance to respond to these basic questions:
What seems to be happening?
What possibilities do we face?
What are we going to do about it?
Choosing the Future will help you advance your thinking skills. Rather than telling you what to do, it teaches you to use your business knowledge to discover your own ideas and strategic direction.
Stuart Wells is Professor of Organization and Management at San Jose State University, where he serves as Director of the Center for Global Competitiveness and as Director of the Small Business Institute. As founder of the Leading Edge Consulting Group and co-founder of Corporate Wisdom, he has worked on leadership development and strategy issues with such major corporations as Clorox, Dupont, PepsiCo, and Proctor and Gamble. He is the author of several books, including From Sage to Artisan: The Nine Roles of the Value-Driven Leader.
A how-to book that advances thinking skills.
A guaranteed approach to improve the quality of strategic thinking.
Shows how to discover your own ideas and strategic direction.

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.

Knowledgeable decision making not only saves you time, money, and effort, but also leads you to extra opportunities. Business Decision Making in China improves your business acumen by showing you who (in itals) is involved in business decision making, how (in itals) decisions have been made, what (in itals) the characteristics and strategies of Chinese decision making are, and why (in itals) decision making has followed certain patterns in China. Practitioners, consultants, and government officials who are involved in business with China as well as academicians researching or teaching about business in East Asia will find this book to be an invaluable resource. Business Decision Making in China introduces you to such subjects as Chinese organizational structures and relationships, tactics of decision making, and traditional Chinese culture. Other vital topics you learn about include: the pros and cons of joint venture enterprises in China the climate for foreign banks operating in China the importance of saving face the concept of "the golden mean" the unity of opposites (Yin-Yang) the 4 realms of Chinese managers'daily affairs modes of thinking (universality versus individuality, thinking in images, understanding abstract thoughts) the parallels between the 5 elements (metal, wood, water, fire, earth) and the 4 P's (product, price, promotion, place)As a guidebook for Chinese business, Business Decision Making in China addresses the broad and integrative discipline of decision making and helps Western business people (who have an entirely different set of patterns, styles, processes, philosophical thoughts, and tactics of decision making) to adapt to their Chinese business partners'or opponents'decision making. Since this book explains the profound process of Chinese decision making in uncomplicated terms and practical business experiences, readers will be able to apply their new knowledge to their long-range strategic planning, to skillfully solving their daily problems or questions, and to wisely avoiding losses from a multitude of potential pitfalls.

Models and Experiments in Risk and Rationality presents original contributions to the areas of individual choice, experimental economics, operations and analysis, multiple criteria decision making, market uncertainty, game theory and social choice. The papers, which were presented at the FUR VI conference, are arranged to appear in order of increasing complexity of the decision environment or social context in which they situate themselves. The first section Psychological Aspects of Risk-Bearing', considers choice at the purely individual level and for the most part, free of any specific economic or social context. The second section examines individual choice within the classical expected utility approach while the third section works from a perspective that includes non-expected utility preferences over lotteries. Section four, Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Under Uncertainty', considers the more specialized but crucial context of uncertain choice involving tradeoffs between competing criteria -- a field which is becoming of increasing importance in applied decision analysis. The final two sections examine uncertain choice in social or group contexts.

Valuable software, realistic examples, clear writing, and fascinating topics help you master key spreadsheet and business analytics skills with SPREADSHEET MODELING AND DECISION ANALYSIS, 8E. You'll find everything you need to become proficient in today's most widely used business analytics techniques using Microsoft (R) Office Excel (R) 2016. Author Cliff Ragsdale -- respected innovator in business analytics -- guides you through the skills you need, using the latest Excel (R) for Windows. You gain the confidence to apply what you learn to real business situations with step-by-step instructions and annotated screen images that make examples easy to follow. The World of Management Science sections further demonstrates how each topic applies to a real company. Each new edition includes extended trial licenses for Analytic Solver Platform and XLMiner with powerful simulation and optimization tools for descriptive and prescriptive analytics and a full suite of tools for data mining in Excel.

Power Partnering is a brilliant yet refreshingly simple approach that breaks innovative thinking and acting down into four distinct contexts, allowing people to respond to complex situations in highly creative and innovative ways. In the not too distant future, successful companies will be defined by their ability to manage their knowledge assets. Power partnering is one very important strategy for success. It avoids the pitfalls inherent in traditional approaches to running businesses, particularly those that emphasize 'power over and control of' people. This book is concerned with creating environments of interaction where co-workers, customers, suppliers and customers' customers interact in meaningful and creative ways. These environments promote new ways of thinking, insightful perspectives and fresh ideas.

Many, if not most, of one's important decisions are made in the context of one's work. However, because workplace decisions cover such a broad range of issues, it often is difficult to detect underlying commonalities in how they are made, and in how things go wrong when they do go wrong. As a result, there are nearly as many different descriptions of workplace decisions as there are decisions themselves. In this volume, the best features of these diverse descriptions are unified in a new, intuitively compelling view of decision making called "Image Theory." The result is a clear picture of real-life, day-to-day workplace decision making that allows us to think constructively about how such decisions are made and about how to improve them when improvement is necessary.

The US Department of Commerce estimates that nearly 10% of the US's $9 trillion GDP is exposed to weather risk. All over the world providers and end users are recognizing this fact and are turning their attention to ways of protecting against or taking advantage of changes in the weather. This book explores a market that is expected to expand rapidly and is one of the fastest areas of growth in the financial arena.

Turbulence is not new to the business world. In fact, the turbulence is increasing and managers are seeing teams spinning their wheels. But now there is a book that addresses these realities-Problem Solving for Results. Management systems are in a state of crisis and operations are more complex. The old top-down operations mode no longer suffices. Today's businesses demand speed and increased accuracy, forcing everyone to re-evaluate chains of command and tear down the walls between functions. Amid the responsibilities of traditional management lies problem solving. The push is toward moving decision-making authority down the ladder to all levels. Managers are no longer equipped to or capable of making the number and variety of necessary decisions in a vacuum. The current mode is to have employees deal directly with workplace issues and take corrective action without complaint and without management involvement. Coping with this reality and preparation for these improvements in workplace problem solving requires interest and motivation. Problem Solving for Results can facilitate this by demystifying and simplifying the process. This book bridges philosophy and theory and puts together a practical integration of all the tools necessary to get results from your investment of time, energy, and money.

We need a new approach for solving tough problems in a complex world-we need to collaborate smarter. Market volatility. Sustainability demands. Hybrid working. Opportunities and hazards of fast-changing technology and regulations. Companies and nonprofits face more daunting challenges than ever. How can we collaborate in our organizations-and with outside partners-to solve problems, innovate, and succeed? Smarter Collaboration offers groundbreaking solutions. This indispensable new book lays out a pragmatic action plan blending rich stories, new empirical research, and loads of practical advice to help companies thrive by collaborating more effectively. As Harvard professor Heidi K. Gardner and senior executive Ivan A. Matviak show, firms that collaborate smarter consistently generate higher revenues and profits, boost innovation, strengthen client relationships, and attract and retain better talent. In this successor to Gardner's bestselling first book, Smart Collaboration, the authors expand their mandate, illustrating the fundamental dynamics of collaborating well across industries like financial services, health care, biotech/pharma, consumer products, automotive, and technology. Based on their research with thousands of executives from around the world, they share deep insights on how to implement smarter collaboration and avoid the potential pitfalls. They also help leaders troubleshoot thorny challenges like misaligned incentives, collaboration overload, and unintended consequences on diversity and inclusion. Complete with how-tos and cases, the book concludes with inspiring examples of groups harnessing smarter collaboration to tackle society's biggest challenges such as saving the oceans, eradicating diseases, and tackling global warming. Smarter Collaboration is the essential guide for forward-thinking leaders to transform their organizations, reshape the way they work, and increase impact and success.

This book describes an effective decision-making and planning architecture for enhancing the navigation capabilities of automated vehicles in the presence of non-detailed, open-source maps. The system involves dynamically obtaining road corridors from map information and utilizing a camera-based lane detection system to update and enhance the navigable space in order to address the issues of intrinsic uncertainty and low-fidelity. An efficient and human-like local planner then determines, within a probabilistic framework, a safe motion trajectory, ensuring the continuity of the path curvature and limiting longitudinal and lateral accelerations. LiDAR-based perception is then used to identify the driving scenario, and subsequently re-plan the trajectory, leading in some cases to adjustment of the high-level route to reach the given destination. The method has been validated through extensive theoretical and experimental analyses, which are reported here in detail.

Outlining the requirements for management success in the Twenty-first century, the author proposes both a senior management career path to achieving top executive responsibilities and how the CEO successfully meets his or her challenges once that apex position is achieved. Over forty years of global management experience, including more than a decade as a Chief executive officer, underscores the dynamics of this book. It is intended for the aspiring individual who currently has some management experience, the ambition and dedicated focus to be a business leader, the self-confidence to be recognized, and to be comfortable with risk taking and to exercise "out of the box" thinking in accomplishing the vision they develop for their organization. It definitely is not for the faint of heart The book covers all the dynamics of these objectives, including the importance of the family, effective time management, discipline in all of its meanings and the real relationships between the business leader, the Board of Directors, the executive team, shareholders, employees, the market, and the increasing influence of government actions and involvement. Simply put, the purpose of this book is to assist you in planning and executing your career path to advance from your current business responsibilities to those of senior executive leadership - to those of a Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director or similar level of responsibilities. Recognizing that times and business environments change, it is designed to meet the challenges of the 21st Century; challenges you will face as an executive. This book is based on the author's personal business experiences covering 40 plus years. His senior management background included that of a CEO and President of a global heavy manufacturing, engineering and construction, and systems corporation. His business, military service and academic background proved to be of considerable value during the ups and downs of personal, corporate, and family life. It also provided him the basis for steadfast standards and values, affording an ethical barrier against the increasing prevaricating, cheating, obfuscating, thievery, and fraudulent global business and government events of the last 30 years or so. Unlike the questionable ethics and opportunistic management practices so evidenced by the Enrons, WorldComs, Tyco Internationals, MCIs, AIGs and, more recently, the Madoffs, Stanfords and Rothsteins of the world; the standards underwrote the strategic soundness of "being smart rather than clever" and trust implied in such policies as "Your Word is your Bond." This book is about the value and benefits of hard work, smartly done. It is about strengthening your self-confidence, flexibility and agility, and of realizing that you'll never fully achieve your potential, but you'll always - throughout your life - be striving for that goal. You are the person who never quits. You will find the premises of this book of considerable value. It is for the individual who "wants to make a difference," and who realizes that risks always are present in striving to achieve worthwhile goals.

This book explores clustering operations in the context of social networks and consensus-reaching paths that take into account non-cooperative behaviors. This book focuses on the two key issues in large-scale group decision-making: clustering and consensus building. Clustering aims to reduce the dimension of a large group. Consensus reaching requires that the divergent individual opinions of the decision makers converge to the group opinion. This book emphasizes the similarity of opinions and social relationships as important measurement attributes of clustering, which makes it different from traditional clustering methods with single attribute to divide the original large group without requiring a combination of the above two attributes. The proposed consensus models focus on the treatment of non-cooperative behaviors in the consensus-reaching process and explores the influence of trust loss on the consensus-reaching process.The logic behind is as follows: firstly, a clustering algorithm is adopted to reduce the dimension of decision-makers, and then, based on the clusters' opinions obtained, a consensus-reaching process is carried out to obtain a decision result acceptable to the majority of decision-makers. Graduates and researchers in the fields of management science, computer science, information management, engineering technology, etc., who are interested in large-scale group decision-making and consensus building are potential audience of this book. It helps readers to have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of clustering analysis and consensus building in large-scale group decision-making.

Soft computing techniques are innovative tools that use nature-inspired algorithms to run predictive analysis of industries from business to software measurement. These tools have gained momentum in recent years for their practicality and flexibility. The Handbook of Research on Fuzzy and Rough Set Theory in Organizational Decision Making collects both empirical and applied research in the field of fuzzy set theory, and bridges the gap between the application of soft computational approaches and the organizational decision making process. This publication is a pivotal reference for business professionals, IT specialists, software engineers, and advanced students of business and information technology.

Managing environmental contamination requires decision makers to weigh eXlstmg risks against the potential effects of implementing environmental policies - considering both the benefits and disruptions that may result from different actions. The NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Lisbon was an important step in the development and application of cost efficient methods of risk assessment especiaIly within the constraints of a budget. The goal of the workshop was to evaluate the potential for risk assessment to serve as a unified and unifying technique in addressing a wide range of environmental problems. Papers presented in this book discuss issues ranging from specific and local studies (specific site, ecosystem, pollutant) to global decision and management frameworks (watersheds, regions, integration of multiple poIlutants and stressors); they develop a range of approaches starting from specific methods to widely applied public policies (Figure 1). The papers show that the use of risk assessment can provide the scientific basis for environmentaIly sound and cost-efficient policies, strategies, and solutions to our environmental chaIlenges. The organization of the Proceedings reflects sessions and discussions during the workshop. The papers in the introductory Chapter summarize the positions of Drs. Glenn Suter (EPA) and Jim Wilson (Resources for the Future) regarding whether the use of often-expensive risk assessments in developing countries can be justified, given evolving regulatory institutions and limited resources.

The book takes the inventory control perspective to tackle empty container repositioning logistics problems in regional transportation systems by explicitly considering the features such as demand imbalance over space, dynamic operations over time, uncertainty in demand and transport, and container leasing phenomenon. The book has the following unique features. First, it provides a discussion of broad empty equipment logistics including empty freight vehicle redistribution, empty passenger vehicle redistribution, empty bike repositioning, empty container chassis repositioning, and empty container repositioning (ECR) problems. The similarity and unique characteristics of ECR compared to other empty equipment repositioning problems are explained. Second, we adopt the stochastic dynamic programming approach to tackle the ECR problems, which offers an algorithmic strategy to characterize the optimal policy and captures the sequential decision-making phenomenon in anticipation of uncertainties over time and space. Third, we are able to establish closed-form solutions and structural properties of the optimal ECR policies in relatively simple transportation systems. Such properties can then be utilized to construct threshold-type ECR policies for more complicated transportation systems. In fact, the threshold-type ECR policies resemble the well-known (s, S) and (s, Q) policies in inventory control theory. These policies have the advantages of being decentralized, easy to understand, easy to operate, quick response to random events, and minimal on-line computation and communication. Fourth, several sophisticated optimization techniques such as approximate dynamic programming, simulation-based meta-heuristics, stochastic approximation, perturbation analysis, and ordinal optimization methods are introduced to solve the complex stochastic optimization problems. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in logistics, transport, supply chain, and operations research.

Risk-Based Environmental Decision: Methods and Culture presents the principles of human health risk analysis as they are applied in environmental decisions. It balances the discussion of scientific theory and methods, philosophical analysis, and applications in regulatory decisions. The material is directed towards risk analysts who must apply their skills in a policy setting, and towards policy analysts who must use risk estimates. The presentation is suited ideally as an introductory text on the methods of risk analysis and on the cultural issues that underlie these methodologies. An important feature of Risk-Based Environmental Decision: Methods and Culture is that it is designed around a series of detailed case studies of environmental risk analysis which walk the reader from the historical nature of the problem, to the formulation as a risk-based problem, to the conduct of risk analysis, and on to the application, debate, and defense of the risk analysis.

Is there a way for people on both sides of a dispute to come out ahead? Yes, says Stuart Nagel, and he calls his method super-optimizing decision making. Instead of expecting both sides to come out ahead of their worst initial expectations, Nagel's super-optimum solutions approach (SOS) allows both to come out ahead of their "best" initial expectations, and to do so simultaneously. Nagel offers readers in all fields of the public sector, with diverse interests and experiences, a clear, well-illustrated introduction to the basic concepts and principles of super-optimized decision making. Emphasizing rule-making and broader policy controversies rather than individual cases of adjudication, and with less reliance on mathematics and statistics than other books on decision-making techniques, Nagel's approach is basically commonsensical and easily grasped. Decision makers in the public sector will find the book fascinating and of special importance in their daily activities. Private-sector executives will find that its approaches can indeed be adapted to their own special concerns.

Uncover repeatable processes and timeless fundamentals that can be tailored to any situation with this inspiring guidebook that encourages individual and organizational innovation.

With the challenges of cultural constraints and variable conditions, there is no exact blueprint to drive innovation. Even so, there are ways to make it more possible. Regardless of your situation, the basic "what" and "how" of innovation has not changed.

Get advice from innovators in a variety of fields who provide the substance you need to build a solid innovation program. These practical messages deliver guidance to help you become a better innovator yourself and to create the team dynamics to boost organizational performance.

Writers of innovation essays include Eric Garvin, Global Hawk manager at Northrop Grumman Corporation; Paul Byron Pattak, political and business strategist; Chris Haddock, head football coach at Centreville High School in Centreville, Virginia; and many more

Become a pragmatic visionary who not only sees where an organization needs to go but who knows how to inspire people to achieve goals. Get a foundation of solid skills to start Hitting the Innovation Jackpot.

This book shifts the debate on knowledge transfers within multinational corporations (MNCs) back to its core: How can we increase the effectiveness of cross-border transfers of knowledge? Several perspectives on international knowledge flows, from control issues to cultural barriers, are integrated into a comprehensive framework. Based on a sample of leading MNCs, empirical results show which managerial mechanisms have to be implemented to increase the benefit from knowledge transfers in headquarters and subsidiaries.