Drawing upon his considerable practical experience in the field and his highly regarded theoretical work, Chacko explores the use of systems science in solving complex problems in a variety of contexts. The author operationally defines the characteristics of problems that require a systems approach, presents his own step-by-step systems approach protocol, and takes the reader through 25 applications of the protocol to actual events. Ranging from global strategy decision-making to corporate sales planning, the case examples clearly demonstrate the ways in which the systems approach can be an effective operational tool for managers and policymakers involved in decision-making hituations characterized by difficulty and uncertainty.

The case examples included fall into two major categories: missions and markets. In the first group, Chacko analyzes problems such as the U.S. response to Soviet threats during the Cuban missile crisis, the decision to attempt to achieve a nuclear force reduction agreement, and the questions of where and how to base the nation's strategic air forces. Among the market applications examined are Texas Instruments' decision to develop, manufacture, and market semiconductor devices; a corporate strategy to increase market share by 30 percent; and the evaluation of electronic alternatives to paper-based communications. Throughout, Chacko pays particular attention to developing a workable approach to problem-solving in an atmosphere of complexity and uncertainty. His work will be especially useful to marketing and R&D professionals as well as to students of systems science and analysis.

Energy Risk Modeling is a primer on statistical methods for managers, students and anybody interested in the field. Illustrated through elementary and more advanced statistical Methods, it is primarily aimed at those individuals who need a gentle introduction in how to go about using statistical methods for modeling energy price risk. Statistical ideas are presented by outlining the necessary concepts and illustrating how these ideas can be implemented. This is the first energy risk book on the market to focus specifically on the role of statistical methods. Its practical approach makes the book a very useful reference and an interesting read.

This book undertakes to marry the concepts of "Concept Mapping" with a "Design Thinking" approach in the context of business analysis. While in the past a lot of attention has been paid to the business process side, this book now focusses information quality and valuation, master data and hierarchy management, business rules automation and business semantics as examples for business innovation opportunities. The book shows how to take "Business Concept Maps" further as information models for new IT paradigms. In a way this books redefines and extends business analysis towards solutions that can be described as business synthesis or business development. Business modellers, analysts and controllers, as well as enterprise information architects, will benefit from the intuitive modelling and designing approach presented in this book.Thepragmatic and agile methodspresented can be directly applied to improve the wayorganizations manage their business concepts and their relationships.

"This book is a great contribution to the information management community. It combines a theoretical foundation with practical methods for dealing with important problems. This is rare and very useful. Conceptual models that communicate business reality effectively require some degree of creative imagination. As such, they combine the results of business analysis with communication design, as is extensively covered in this book."

Dr. Malcolm Chisholm, President at AskGet.com Inc.

Truly understanding business requirements has always been a major stumbling block in business intelligence (BI) projects. In this book, Thomas Frisendal introduces a powerful technique business concept mapping that creates a virtual mind-meld between business users and business analysts. Frisendal does a wonderful explaining and demonstrating how this tool can improve the outcome of BI and other development projects ."

Wayne Eckerson, executive director, BI Leadership Forum

"

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the ranking methods for interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, multi-criteria decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and group decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Including numerous application examples and illustrations with tables and figures and presenting the authors' latest research developments, it is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, information science, management science and decision analysis.

Operational risk is one of the oldest risks in the banking sector, and yet regulatory bodies including the Basle Committee are still working on a regulatory framework. Damage control measures introduced by banks have often proved ineffective. The successful management of operational risk will be a significant competitive advantage for banks in the future. This book is a practical guide to achieving control of operational risk. Using qualitative analysis, the author suggests risk identification procedures and provides tools for the analysis, quantification, and management of risk. He goes on to discuss future developments in both the regulatory and insurance sectors, including the most recent Basle Committee proposals.

Macroeconomic turbulence and volatility in financial markets can fatally affect firm's performance. Very few firms make serious attempts to inform market participants and other outsider stakeholders about the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations--manifested as changes in exchange rates, interest rates, inflation rates and stock market returns-- on performance. These stakeholders, as well as financial analysts, must make their own assessments but they generally lack both the required tools and the information to do so. Worse, top management in most firms do not themselves possess the tools to identify whether a change in performance represents a change in the firm's intrinsic competitiveness or a reflection of macroeconomic conditions outside their influence.
Corporate Decision-Making with Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Performance and Risk Management develops and presents in an easily comprehensible way the essential elements of a corporate strategy for managing uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment. This Macroeconomic Uncertainty Strategy, or MUST, enhances firm value by allowing management and external stakeholders to become better informed about the development of corporate competitiveness in a turbulent macroeconomic environment. The MUST also provides guidelines for how to develop a successful risk management program.
This research based book includes methods to identify the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on cash flows and value, to develop strategies for macroeconomic risk management, to provide informative reports to external stakeholders, to evaluate the relative performance of subsidiaries and business units in multinational companies, and to evaluateperformance for purposes of setting executive compensation and of fulfilling the due diligence requirements in an M & A context. The authors' use of value-based management, various performance measurements, the concept of real options, and risk management from the perspective of shareholder wealth maximization, makes the book rich and compelling. They address researchers and students in the field of international business, finance and corporate governance. On the business side, executives with strategic responsibilities, chief financial officers, and bankers who analyze corporate performance and give advice on risk management will benefit from reading this book.

The definitive classic on high-performance teams The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than fifteen languages, the authors' clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Using engaging case studies and testimonials from both successful and failed teams--ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Army to high school sports--the authors explain the dynamics of teams both in great detail and with a broad view. Their conclusions and prescriptions span the familiar to the counterintuitive: * Commitment to performance goals and common purpose is more important to team success than team building. * Opportunities for teams exist in all parts of the organization. * Real teams are the most successful spearheads of change at all levels. * Working in teams naturally integrates performance and learning. * Team "endings" can be as important to manage as team "beginnings." Wisdom lies in recognizing a team's unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits--development of individual members, team accomplishments, and stronger companywide performance. Katzenbach and Smith's comprehensive classic is the essential guide to unlocking the potential of teams in your organization.

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.

This laboratory manual is intended for business analysts who wish to increase their skills in the use of statistical analysis to support business decisions. Most of the case studies use Excel,today's most common analysis tool. They range from the most basic descriptive analytical techniques to more advanced techniques such as linear regression and forecasting. Advanced projects cover inferential statistics for continuous variables (t-Test) and categorical variables (chi-square), as well as A/B testing. The manual ends with techniques to deal with the analysis of text data and tools to manage the analysis of large data sets (Big Data) using Excel. Includes companion files with solution spreadsheets, sample files, data sets, etc. from the book. Features: Teaches the statistical analysis skills needed to support business decisions Provides projects ranging from the most basic descriptive analytical techniques to more advanced techniques such as linear regression, forecasting, inferential statistics, and analyzing big data sets Includes companion files with solution spreadsheets, sample files, data sets, etc. used in the book's case studies

This book, originally published in 1996, develops a model of information gathering for small businesses. Whilst all small business owners gather and process some information, the quality and types of information gathered is limited. Size and resource constraints force small business owners to make difficult decisions related to the research that they conduct. The model developed in this book is tested in part through a study of the information gathering practices of small owners/managers in the landscaping industry in Wisconsin, USA.

This book provides a practice-driven, yet rigorous approach to executive management decision-making that performs well even under unpredictable conditions. It explains how executives can employ prescribed engineering design methods to arrive at robust outcomes even when faced with uncontrollable uncertainty. The book presents the paradigm and its main principles in Part I; in Part II it illustrates how to frame a decision situation and how to design the decision so that it will produce its intended behavior. In turn, Part III discusses in detail in situ case studies on executive management decisions. Lastly, Part IV summarizes the book and formulates the key lessons learned.

This book presents different techniques and methodologies that used to help improve the decision-making process and increase the likelihood of success in sector as follows: agriculture, financial services, logistics, energy services, health and others. This book collects and consolidates innovative and high-quality research contributions regarding the implementation techniques and methodologies applied in different industrial sectors. The scope is to disseminate current trends knowledge in the implementation of artificial intelligence techniques and methodologies in different fields as follows: supply chain, business intelligence, e-commerce, social media and others. The book contents are useful for Ph.D., Ph.D. students, master and undergraduate students, and professional and students in industrial engineering, computer science, information systems, data analytics and others.

When you start a new managerial role, there is an inevitable contrast between what you believed you would find and what you're actually faced with. And Now What? helps you manage this gap between expectation and reality, ensuring that you get off to the best possible start in your new job. This book is structured in two parts, and it begins by offering readers a panoramic perspective of what a 'landing' entails in terms of personal self-leadership and managing people and uncertainty. The first part of the book reviews the process of taking charge in your new role, from preparation through to implementation. The second part presents a range of case studies arranged in order of increasing professional responsibility, allowing the reader to take a trip from the first stages of a professional leader's life to the highest responsibilities of a chairperson's role - experiencing changes, promotions, exits, internationalizations and take-offs along the way. The most important thing for a leader is not to discover how to motivate, but to better understand their reasons for motivating others. In this way, you can think of the leadership journey as both a personal and a professional adventure.

Political speeches don't just mirror what transpires in the world; they have the potential to change people's minds, move them into action, reinforce existing assumptions, and reshape cultures. They define public participation and are the 'nexus points' of disparate discourses, both nationally and globally. Because of their power to sustain the status quo or effect change, speeches warrant public attention and careful study. To examine them is to understand how they are crafted, what elements they possess, and how these elements come together to affect their audience. This volume analyzes selected speeches delivered by Benigno 'Noynoy' Simeon C. Aquino III, President of the Republic of the Philippines from 2010 to 2016. They are speeches that have been used to shape public perception, gain support, and build identification between Aquino's presidency and his audience. By mobilizing the concepts of presidential image, myth, metaphors, and rhetorical citizenship, readers are guided through a process of examining the rhetorical trajectory of the Philippine presidency, how a president's discourse has attempted to shape Philippine socio-political reality, and how the evolving milieu the president has found himself in shapes his discourse. The essays in this volume will hopefully generate a discussion not only on the place of President Benigno Aquino's rhetoric in Philippine presidential history, but also of how rhetorical practices in an evolving democratic society in Asia can extend and expand theorizations of presidential rhetoric and political communication at large.

This volume examines different aspects of management consulting in an innovative and comprehensive way. The chapters are based on original research and cover a wide range of countries (e.g. Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Germany, Australia, and Norway), consulting firms, and client organizations. They show how the consulting industry managed to reach the importance it has today; how consultancies and management gurus develop new ideas and/or repackage old ones; and how consultants find or retain clients and interact with them in a given project.

Winner of the 'Practical Manager' category at the CMI Management Book of the Year Awards 2015 and now fully revised, updated and with 31 new theories.

101 management theories from the world’s best management thinkers – the fast, focussed and express route to success.

As a busy manager, you need solutions to everyday work problems fast. The Little Book of Big Management Theories gives you access to the very best theories and models that every manager should know and be able to use.

Cutting through the waffle and hype to focus only on the ones that really matter to managers day-to-day, each theory is covered in two pages – what it is, how to use it and the questions you should be asking – so you can immediately apply your new knowledge in the real world.

The Little Book of Big Management Theories will ensure you can:

· Understand a wide range of management theories, their context and how you can apply them

· Discover clear insights into a wide range of practical management issues and how to deal with them.

· Quickly resolve a wide range of management problems

· Better motivate and influence your staff, colleagues and stakeholders

· Be a more effective manager and demonstrate that you are ready for promotion

All you need to know and how to apply it – in a nutshell.

Risk communication: the evolution of attempts Risk communication is at once a very new and a very old field of interest. Risk analysis, as Krimsky and Plough (1988:2) point out, dates back at least to the Babylonians in 3200 BC. Cultures have traditionally utilized a host of mecha nisms for anticipating, responding to, and communicating about hazards - as in food avoidance, taboos, stigma of persons and places, myths, migration, etc. Throughout history, trade between places has necessitated labelling of containers to indicate their contents. Seals at sites of the ninth century BC Harappan civilization of South Asia record the owner and/or contents of the containers (Hadden, 1986:3). The Pure Food and Drug Act, the first labelling law with national scope in the United States, was passed in 1906. Common law covering the workplace in a number of countries has traditionally required that employers notify workers about significant dangers that they encounter on the job, an obligation formally extended to chronic hazards in the OSHA's Hazard Communication regulation of 1983 in the United States. In this sense, risk communication is probably the oldest way of risk manage ment. However, it is only until recently that risk communication has attracted the attention of regulators as an explicit alternative to the by now more common and formal approaches of standard setting, insuring etc. (Baram, 1982)."

This second edition - completely up to date with new exercises - provides a comprehensive and self-contained treatment of the probabilistic theory behind the risk-neutral valuation principle and its application to the pricing and hedging of financial derivatives. On the probabilistic side, both discrete- and continuous-time stochastic processes are treated, with special emphasis on martingale theory, stochastic integration and change-of-measure techniques. Based on firm probabilistic foundations, general properties of discrete- and continuous-time financial market models are discussed.

#1 New York Times Bestseller

The latest groundbreaking tome from Tim Ferriss, the best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek.

From the author: “For the last two years, I’ve interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast,The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview, and the show is on the cusp of passing 100 million downloads.

“This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met.

“What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?

“I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested.

“Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.

“I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

Risk management is a decision-making process which considers political, social, economic and engineering factors with relevant risk assessments relating to a potential hazard in order to develop, analyse and compare options to facilitate the selection of the optimal regulatory response for safety from that hazard. Rapid technological developments, organisational changes and increased demand for efficiency have all influenced the vulnerability of our society. As a result, safety and risk management is becoming an increasingly important field.

Risk Management with Applications from the Offshore Petroleum Industry presents an in-depth discussion of some fundamental principles of risk management, related to the use of expected values, uncertainty handling and risk acceptance criteria. A decision framework for risk management is developed that provides a structure for the classification of risk decision problems and a procedure for the execution of the related decision-making processes. Several examples from the offshore petroleum industry are included to illustrate the use of the framework, but it can also be applied in other areas.

With the inclusion of a risk management framework designed to achieve better decisions and therefore more desirable outcomes, Risk Management with Applications from the Offshore Petroleum Industry is a valuable resource for practitioners in the industry, engineering managers and regulatory authorities. Graduate students and researchers in risk management will find this book a comprehensive reference.

Thought leader John Adair provides the techniques and insights you need to find solutions, spark creativity and confidently make the right decisions. This 5th edition now features even more practical exercises, useful templates, and top tips to provide a clear framework that can generate ideas and inspire confidence in your team - so you can spot the solution in every problem, and create ideas to rival even the best strategists. The Creating Success series of books... Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not is the first book to show how and why so much of today's business advice is flawed, and how managers and executives can better evaluate advice given to their firms
Practitioners and scholars agree that businesses in the coming millennium will be managed differently than firms of the 20th century. And getting there from here, according to today's best advice, will require creative change. In this pioneering work, Argyris, one of the world's leading organizational thinkers, reviews a wide array of business advice from the best and brightest thinkers and consultants and concludes that as appealing as their ideas may be, most of them are simply not workable. They are too full of abstract claims, logical gaps, and inconsistencies, to be useful. And ironically, even when their recommendations are implemented correctly, the result is often failure. Why do these gaps in logic exist, and how can they be more effectively discovered? Applying a disciplined critique to numerous representative examples of advice about leadership, learning, change, and employee commitment, Argyris shows readers how to be more critical of the advice they are given, how to learn new approaches for appraising employee performance, and how to generate an internal commitment to values and better strategy.
In our ever expanding global market, innovative business advice is at a premium, and giving this advice has become a lucrative industry in and of itself. This book provides the critical lens necessary to evaluate which advice is best for your organization.

An incredible ability awaits managers who practice Theory of Constraints (TOC) techniques: they can take a problem, look beyond the less important details, and directly identify the source of trouble. They've been known to promptly resolve perplexing matters - while the uninformed remain stuck. So many more managers could gain the benefit of TOC thinking... if they only took the time. Eli Schragenheim now offers an informative and enjoyable self-learning method, proving how TOC can be invaluable at a wide variety of workplaces. Management Dilemmas: The Theory of Constraints Approach to Problem Identification and Solutions conveys TOC methods through "virtual experience"-stories of managers and the situations they need to resolve. Take note of the dilemmas they're facing. Think about how you would respond under those circumstances. Then, compare your reactions with Schragenheim's TOC-influenced analysis. Associated with Dr. Eli Goldratt (the founder of TOC) for seven years, Schragenheim doesn't tell how the stories end. Instead, he encourages the reader to try out TOC techniques-especially the need to arrive at the most precise answer by raising the right questions. The conclusions you reach today could greatly help your on-the-job thinking tomorrow!

Despite intense research on decision-making in action, we still know little about when decision-makers rely on deliberate vs. intuitive decision-making in decision situations under complexity and uncertainty. Building on default-interventionist dual-processing theory, this book studies decision-making modes (deliberate vs. intuitive) in complex task environments contingent on perceived complexity, experience, and decision style preference. We find that relatively inexperienced decision-makers respond to increases in subjective complexity with an increase in deliberation and tend to follow their decision style preference. Experienced decision-makers are less guided by their decision preference and respond to increases in subjective complexity only minimally. This book contributes to a developing stream of research linking decision-making with intra-personal and environmental properties and fosters our understanding of the conditions under which decision-makers rely on intuitive vs. deliberate decision modes. In doing so, we go one step further towards a comprehensive theory of decision-making in action.

Under intense scrutiny for the last few decades, Multiple Objective Decision Making (MODM) has been useful for dealing with the multiple-criteria decisions and planning problems associated with many important applications in fields including management science, engineering design, and transportation. Rough set theory has also proved to be an effective mathematical tool to counter the vague description of objects in fields such as artificial intelligence, expert systems, civil engineering, medical data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, and decision theory. Rough Multiple Objective Decision Making is perhaps the first book to combine state-of-the-art application of rough set theory, rough approximation techniques, and MODM. It illustrates traditional techniques-and some that employ simulation-based intelligent algorithms-to solve a wide range of realistic problems. Application of rough theory can remedy two types of uncertainty (randomness and fuzziness) which present significant drawbacks to existing decision-making methods, so the authors illustrate the use of rough sets to approximate the feasible set, and they explore use of rough intervals to demonstrate relative coefficients and parameters involved in bi-level MODM. The book reviews relevant literature and introduces models for both random and fuzzy rough MODM, applying proposed models and algorithms to problem solutions. Given the broad range of uses for decision making, the authors offer background and guidance for rough approximation to real-world problems, with case studies that focus on engineering applications, including construction site layout planning, water resource allocation, and resource-constrained project scheduling. The text presents a general framework of rough MODM, including basic theory, models, and algorithms, as well as a proposed methodological system and discussion of future research.