Artificial Intelligence is a seemingly neutral technology, but it is increasingly used to manage workforces and make decisions to hire and fire employees. Its proliferation in the workplace gives the impression of a fairer, more efficient system of management. A machine can't discriminate, after all. Augmented Exploitation explores the reality of the impact of AI on workers' lives. While the consensus is that AI is a completely new way of managing a workplace, the authors show that, on the contrary, AI is used as most technologies are used under capitalism: as a smokescreen that hides the deep exploitation of workers. Going beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.

Business models are the beating heart of your firm's value proposition.

Great business models drive rapid growth; bad business models can doom the most promising ventures. Brilliant Business Models clearly shows you how to create, test, adapt, and innovate successful and appropriate business models in any business context. Every company has a business model. When the business model works, the company creates value. Brilliant Business Models combines the latest research, straightforward tools and current examples to bring this surprisingly tricky topic to life. Straightforward cases from the author's research and experience highlight key lessons. This book applies a novel, life-cycle based approach to make business models relevant to your company's development stage. Your company changes over time-so should your business model.

- Understand how and why business models matter to your organisations success

- Learn how to evaluate and test business models to identify the most appropriate model

- Use the business model life-cycle approach to keep your business model relevant and successful.

Communicating Effectively: Tools for Educational Leaders, second edition, provides a unique perspective for aspiring and practicing educational leaders to expand their problem-solving and conflict-resolution strategies. Starting with an exploration of listening problems and solutions, this book evolves into an examination of how people perceive reality, what motivates them, and what happens when their needs are not met. The concepts of Process Communication, developed by clinical psychologist Taibi Kahler through his background in transactional analysis, provide the basis for the techniques from which educational leaders might choose. Communicating Effectively suggests new ways to understand the people with whom we interact, first by listening and then by understanding what our perceptions, channels, and motivation. Likewise, Michael Gilbert presents examples of problems and positive suggestions to intervene when communication is not effective.

This volume brings together both political and educational scientists. While educational research literature has so far not systematically addressed the tool of simulations of decision-making, political scientists have hardly used insights from research on assessment or on motivation and interest of students. Almost all political science publications on simulations merely discuss how to implement the tool in class and fall short of providing evidence of the effects on student outcomes such as increased interest and performance. Combining the two disciplines is mutually enriching. Political science benefits from state of the art educational science measuring and testing of the claims made by the proponents of simulations, while educational sciences adds the systematic analysis of simulations of decision-making to their list of empirical objects, which also adds insights to the theories on the affective component of student learning. It is the explicit aim of the volume to address how simulating decision-making environments fosters learning. Implications for research and practice regarding student learning are addressed in all chapters.

The effectiveness of a good strategy well implemented determines a business' future success or failure. Yet history is full of strategic decisions, big and small, that were ill-conceived, poorly organised and consequently disastrous. This updated guide looks at the whole process of strategic decision-making - from vision, forecasting, and resource allocation, through to implementation and innovation. Strategy is about understanding where you are now, where you are heading and how you will get there. There is no room for timidity or confusion. Although the CEO and the board decide a company's overall direction, it is the managers at all levels of the organisation that will determine how the vision can be transformed into action. In short, everyone is involved in strategy. But getting it right involves difficult choices: which customers to target, what products to offer and the best way to keep costs low and service high. And constantly changing business conditions inevitably bring risks. Even after business strategy has been developed, a company must remain nimble and alert to change, and view strategy as an ongoing and evolving process. The message of this guide is simple: strategy matters, and getting it right is fundamental to business success - this book will show you how.

This book examines how to develop the main traits that are necessary to become an "informed intuitant". Case studies and examples of successful "informed intuitants" are a major component of the book. "Intuitant" is someone who has the intuitive awareness to be successful. "Informed intuitant" indicates that the individual/decision maker not only applies his/her intuition but also verifies it through using data-driven approaches (such as data analytics). Some of this work resulted from research examining how well do executives trust their intuition.

This book offers a new understanding of innovation in the built environment. The ways meaning of innovation is constructed has important implications for policymakers, project managers, academics and students. Through a longitudinal research study into innovation in firms and projects, the book addresses some key themes, challenges and concerns that practitioners face when managing innovation in the built environment. It examines the key drivers for innovation in the construction, engineering and infrastructure firms and projects. In particular, the questions of how and why innovation becomes recognised and sustained over time are explored. Different theoretical perspectives are considered to explain different aspects of innovation. This includes sensemaking, organisational and individual identity, storytelling and narration. The book has practical implications for how organisational activities become labelled as 'innovation' and for what purpose. It shares some lived stories of innovation as mobilised by practising managers. The connectivity between the formal narratives of innovation at the policy level and the lived narratives of innovation articulated by practitioners is explored. Combining the theory with practice, this book presents an insightful view on the implications of innovation in the business world today.

****The Power of Purpose has been officially shortlisted in the 'Thought Leader' category for The Business Book Awards 2018, as announced on 17th January 2018.****

In a world where volatility is the new norm and change is a constant, the individuals and organisations that are flourishing are those with a clear sense of purpose based on authentic ethical values.

Purpose is the secret ingredient - with purpose you have the key to exceptional performance, greater wellbeing and clarity in a VUCA world. But how do you find such purpose and ensure it propels your business forward?

The Power of Purpose shares a simple 6-step framework you too can identify, clarify and shape your business purpose. You’ll gain a competitive advantage and boost your bottom line, but the benefits are not just commercial – you’ll also inspire a new generation of employees, foster innovation, simplify decisions and build customer and brand loyalty.

Based on qualitative interviews with well-established and emerging leaders on how they bring ethical purpose in business to life, as well as sharing the results from a questionnaire with purpose-led businesses you’ll find a step-by-step approach for applying purpose to simplify complexity, harness a purpose-powered workforce and create customer loyalty.

How can purpose provide clarity? How can it accelerate success? How can it build a long term sustainable business?

The Power of Purpose is your secret ingredient.

This book presents a collection of essays written by leading researchers to honor Roman Slowinski's major scholarly interests and contributions. He is well-known for conducting extensive research on methodologies and techniques for intelligent decision support, where he combines operational research and artificial intelligence. The book reconstructs his main contributions, presents cutting-edge research and provides an outlook on the most promising and advanced domains of computer science and multiple criteria decision aiding. The respective chapters cover a wide range of related research areas, including decision sciences, ordinal data mining, preference learning and multiple criteria decision aiding, modeling of uncertainty and imprecision in decision problems, rough set theory, fuzzy set theory, multi-objective optimization, project scheduling and decision support applications. As such, the book will appeal to researchers and scholars in related fields.

Can there be reliable information that is also relevant to decision making? Information for Efficient Decision Making: Big Data, Blockchain and Relevance focuses on the consolidation of information to facilitate making decisions in firms, in order to make their operations efficient to reduce their costs and consequently, increase their profitability. The advent of blockchain has generated great interest as an alternative to centralized organizations, where the data is gathered through a centralized ledger keeping of activities of the firm. The decentralized ledger keeping is one of the main features of blockchain that has given rise to many issues of technology, development, implementation, privacy, acceptance, evaluation and so on. Blockchain concept is a follow-up to big data environment facilitated by enormous progress in computer hardware, storage capacities and technological prowess. This has resulted in the rapid acquiring of data not considered possible earlier. With shrewd modeling analytics and algorithms, the applications have grown to significant levels. This handbook discusses the progress in data collection, pros and cons of collecting information on decentralized publicly available ledgers and several applications.

The corporate university is a whole-organisation endeavour for today, tomorrow and for the future, raising questions about the size and shape of your business and where you aim to reach. This book introduces you to the major areas of corporate university performance and value management, examining the evolution of the corporate university alongside emergent business challenges. It provides the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle for you to assemble using the key disciplines and skills within your organisation. Change is an integral part of business life, and it can seriously affect your company's value. Gaining a good understanding of how all business processes add value to your company is vital. The aim of this book is to help you to access new ways to create a widespread culture of people and organisational development. You will discover effective management practices that will help you and your colleagues to become the leading agents of continuous change and development in all parts of your organisation. With the help of the corporate university model, your company can develop business solutions to resolve the challenges ahead in a changing world.

Engineering Effective Decision Support Technologies: New Models and Applications presents a collection of the latest research in DMSS and applies those theoretical considerations to best practices in the field. This reference includes empirical case studies and an analysis of new models and perspectives in knowledge management, promoting discussion of DMSS strategies among managers, researchers, and students of information science.

Choosing the things you keep in your life and where you focus your energy is doable, and Gail Golden shows you how. Curating your life means selecting those activities that are most important, meaningful, and joyful for you and fiercely focusing your energy on those endeavors. It also means putting a whole bunch of stuff in the back room, to be reconsidered at another time. Curating your life means sorting your activities into three categories: The things you are not going to do, at least not right now The things you will be mediocre at The things you will be great at This is not simple. But the payoff is amazing. Living a well-curated life is doable. You get to succeed at the things that really matter to you, and you still get to enjoy life. Join Gail Golden on a tour of how to curate your life for success, happiness, and fulfillment.

This edited volume looks at whether it is possible to be more transparent about uncertainty in scientific evidence without undermining public understanding and trust. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this book explores the communication of risk and decision-making in an increasingly post-truth world. Drawing on case studies from climate change to genetic testing, the authors argue for better quality evidence synthesis to cut through the noise and highlight the need for more structured public dialogue. For uncertainty in scientific evidence to be communicated effectively, they conclude that trustworthiness is vital: the data and methods underlying statistics must be transparent, valid, and sound, and the numbers need to demonstrate practical utility and add social value to people's lives. Presenting a conceptual framework to help navigate the reader through the key social and scientific challenges of a post-truth era, this book will be of great relevance to students, scholars, and policy makers with an interest in risk analysis and communication.

This title was first published in 2001. This volume brings together the 25-year output of the longest running programme of research into the making of decisions by top management. It describes and explains the processes of arriving at major decisions and how they are affected by the issue under decision, the form of organization and national differences and then, finally, success and failure in implementation. The programme continues with research on routes in successfully managing implementation.

This book presents best practices involving applications of decision sciences, business tactics and behavioral sciences for COVID-19. Addressing concrete problems in these vital fields, it focuses on theoretical and methodological investigations of managerial decisions that drive production and service enterprises' productivity and success. Moreover, it presents optimization techniques and tools that can also be adopted for other applications in various research areas after a thorough analysis of the specific problem. The book is intended for researchers and practitioners seeking optimum solutions to real-life problems in various application areas concerning COVID-19, helping them make scientifically founded decisions.

Rooted in the study of chaos and complexity, Adaptive Action introduces a simple, common sense process that will guide you and your organization into reflective action. This elegant method prompts readers to engage with three deceptively simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The first leads to careful observation. The second invites you to thoughtfully consider options and implications. The third ignites effective action. Together, these questions and the tools that support them produce a dynamic and creative dance with uncertainty. The road-tested steps of adaptive action can be used to devise solutions and improve performance across multiple challenges, and they have proven to be scalable from individuals to work groups, from organizations to communities. In addition to laying out the adaptive action framework and clear protocols to support it, Glenda H. Eoyang and Royce J. Holladay introduce best practices from exemplary professionals who have used adaptive action to meet personal, professional, and political challenges in leadership, consulting, Alzheimer's treatment, evaluation, education reform, political advocacy, and cultural engagement-readying readers to employ this new toolkit to meet their own goals with a sense of ingenuity and flexibility.

The challenges faced by 21st-century businesses, organizations and governments are characterized as being fundamentally different in nature, scope and levels of impact from those of the past. As problems become increasingly complex and wicked, conventional reductive approaches and data-based solutions are limited. The authors argue that practical wisdom is required. This book provides an integral and practical model for incorporating wisdom into management decision making. Based on a cross-disciplinary conceptualization of practical wisdom, the authors distinguish systematically between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom-based decision making. While they suggest that data, analytics, information and knowledge can assist decision-makers to better deal with complex and wicked problems, they argue that data-based systems cannot replace optimized human decision-making capabilities. These capabilities, the authors explain, include a range of qualities and characteristics inherent in philosophical, psychological and organizational conceptions of practical wisdom. Accordingly, in this book, the authors introduce a model that identifies the specific qualities and processes involved in making wise decisions, especially in management. The model is based on the empirical fi ndings of the authors' studies in the areas of wisdom and management. This book is a practical resource for professionals, practitioners, and consultants in both the private and public sectors. The theoretical discussions, critical arguments, and practical guidelines provided in the book will be extremely valuable to students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as upper-level postdoctoral researchers looking at business management strategies.

Businesses often find themselves trapped in a competitive dogfight, scratching and clawing for market share with products consumers view as largely undifferentiated. Conventional wisdom suggests that dogfights are to be expected as marketplaces mature, giving rise to the notion that there are "bad" industries where it is unlikely that any company can succeed. But there are notable exceptions in which enlightened executives have changed the rules to grasp the holy grail of business: long-term profitable growth. Rather than joining the dogfights raging within their industry, companies such as Apple, FedEx, and Starbucks have chosen to become metaphorical cats, continuously renewing their distinctive strategies to compete on their own terms. In If You're in a Dogfight, Become a Cat, Leonard Sherman draws on four decades of experience in management consulting, venture capital, and teaching business strategy at Columbia Business School to share practical advice on two of the most vexing issues facing business executives: why is it so hard to achieve long-term profitable growth, and what can companies do to break away from the pack? Sherman takes the reader on a provocative journey through the building blocks of business strategy by challenging conventional wisdom on a number of questions that will redefine management best practices: * What should be the overarching purpose of your business?* Do you really know what your strategy is?* Is there such a thing as a bad industry?* Where do great ideas come from and how do I find them?* What makes products meaningfully different?* What makes and breaks great brands?* How and when should I disrupt my own company?* What are the imperatives to achieving long-term profitable growth? Filled with dozens of illustrative examples of inspiring successes and dispiriting falls from grace, this book provides deep insights on how to become the cat in a dogfight, whether you are a CEO, mid-level manager, aspiring business school student, or curious observer interested in achieving sustained profitable growth.

This book combines two distinctive topics: data science/image analysis and materials science. The purpose of this book is to show what type of nano material problems can be better solved by which set of data science methods. The majority of material science research is thus far carried out by domain-specific experts in material engineering, chemistry/chemical engineering, and mechanical & aerospace engineering. The book could benefit materials scientists and manufacturing engineers who were not exposed to systematic data science training while in schools, or data scientists in computer science or statistics disciplines who want to work on material image problems or contribute to materials discovery and optimization. This book provides in-depth discussions of how data science and operations research methods can help and improve nano image analysis, automating the otherwise manual and time-consuming operations for material engineering and enhancing decision making for nano material exploration. A broad set of data science methods are covered, including the representations of images, shape analysis, image pattern analysis, and analysis of streaming images, change points detection, graphical methods, and real-time dynamic modeling and object tracking. The data science methods are described in the context of nano image applications, with specific material science case studies.

Evaluation examines policies and programs across every arena of human endeavor, from efforts to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS to programs that drive national science policy. Relying on a vast array of methods, from qualitative interviewing to econometrics, it is a "transdiscipline," as opposed to a formal area of academic study. Accounting for these challenges, Evaluation Foundations Revisited offers an introduction for those seeking to better understand evaluation as a professional field. While the acquisition of methods and methodologies to meet the needs of certain projects is important, the foundation of evaluative practice rests on understanding complex issues to balance. Evaluation Foundations Revisited is an invitation to examine the intellectual, practical, and philosophical nexus that lies at the heart of evaluation. Thomas A. Schwandt shows how to critically engage with the assumptions that underlie how evaluators define and position their work, as well as how they argue for the usefulness of evaluation in society. He looks at issues such as the role of theory, how notions of value and valuing are understood, how evidence is used, how evaluation is related to politics, and what comprises scientific integrity. By coming to better understand the foundations of evaluation, readers will develop what Schwandt terms "a life of the mind of practice," which enables evaluators to draw on a more holistic view to develop reasoned arguments and well fitted techniques.

"Dr Marcelo Cruz is rightfully acknowledged as a world expert in the quantification of operational risk. He has set out to produce a book that is comprehensive yet also comprehensible to non-mathematicians - and is to be congratulated for succeeding in this aim. This book should be regarded as essential reading for all professional risk managers, irrespective of their particular lens of perception." Brendan Young, Chairman, Operational Risk Research Forum

"As a technically trained analyst, Marcelo Cruz summarizes a wide range of mathematical techniques. As an experienced capital markets trader and risk manager, he provides real world examples of their relevance for operational risk. This will be a common reference work in the field for years to come." David M. Rowe, Ph.D., Group Executive Vice President for Risk Management Sun Gard Trading and Risk Systems

Operational risk is an important, yet little explored, area within risk management. The need to model and measure the risks arising from operational errors and to allocate capital against them will be soon become a regulatory requirement for financial institutions. In this book, Marcelo Cruz provides a quantitative look at the subject, presenting several mathematical models that can be used and adapted to measure, manage and hedge operational risk.

Based on the author's extensive experience, the book maps out state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical techniques that can be used to model operational risk. In addition, the book describes a variety of appropriate models that can be applied to specific structures or areas, including operational risk database modeling, stochastic models, statistical distributions for frequency and severity, extreme value theory, operational VaR models, artificial intelligence models, dynamic multifactor models, Bayesian analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, stress test/ scenario analysis, real options, state-space models and the Kalman filter, Markovian stochastic models and others. These models have been tested with real data in real operational events. Based on this experience, numerous examples are sited throughout.

Modeling, Measuring and Hedging Operational Risk provides a complete quantitative reference for all those involved in modeling and managing operational risk as well as for those involved with developing hedging products for operational risk within insurance companies and derivatives houses.