Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?" Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, "Quiet Leadership" provides a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Rock offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction.

Distribution management is the first of a quintet of books specially written for South African undergraduate marketing students. The other books in the series deal with marketing research, production management, pricing and integrated marketing communications. The objective of the series is to place specific marketing topics in perspective and it is the indigenous flavour of examples and case studies that localise the content and enhance the discussions. Distribution management was written to fulfil the requirements of the modular system that is used by all the South African universities. The text is easy to read and embraces the full spectrum of distribution topics that are covered in undergraduate studies at tertiary level.

In this book we have introduced the basics of the federal budget process, provided an historical background on the foundation and development of the budget process, indicated how defense spending may be measured and how it impacts the economy, described and analyzed how Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBES) operates and should function to produce the annual defense budget proposal to Congress, analyzed the role of Congress in debating and deciding on defense appropriations and the politics of the budgetary process including the use of supplemental appropriations to fund national defense, analyzed budget execution dynamics, identified the principal participants in the defense budget process in the Pentagon and military commands, assessed federal and Department of Defense (DoD) financial management and business process challenges and issues, and described the processes used to resource acquisition of defense war fighting assets, including reforms in acquisition and linkages between PPBES and the defense acquisition process.

This book focuses on 'research on research methodologies' - an area rarely addressed in social entrepreneurship. Methodological debates are integral to the quest for knowledge and to advancing theories and practices in any field, and, as a multi-disciplinary and emerging field, social entrepreneurship cannot avoid such debates. Providing a fresh perspective on social entrepreneurship research, the book includes contributions from diverse disciplinary settings, e.g. sociology, psychology, social work, anthropology, public policy, economics and management, and discusses the 'methodological challenges' of practice as well as social entrepreneurship research. Rather than favouring any particular method or methodological approach, it acknowledges the diversity of methodological approaches needed to reveal the nuances of social entrepreneurship and promote new knowledge and practices in this promising field.

"If you want to learn how to bring the best performances out of the people who surround you, then this straightforward guidebook on human resource development provides you with the tools you need to cause positive change.People new to the field as well as industry veterans will find practical information and guidance, including how to: facilitate dynamic adult learning experiences; help people develop confidence, vigor, and zeal to meet challenges; write the best performance criteria; establish an atmosphere where learning is always promoted.All supervisors must take responsibility in helping their employees meet expectations and become successful professionals. This also applies to ministers, rabbis, imams, and other leaders who encourage people to lead more productive and satisfying lives.Regardless of whether you are a human resource professional, it's imperative that you rise to the challenge and take the necessary steps to help others rise to their potential. Learn how to do it step by step with A Mini Course in Training Design. It provides guidance on how you can become a motivational force. Through human resource development tools, you can develop qualities such as expertise, empathy, and enthusiasm that will help you to develop training methods specialized to your purpose and to your people."

Exiting OZ is an eye-opening book about leadership as it must become for organizations to survive in today's rapidly changing world. It is a must read for leaders interested in building a sustainable organization and populating it with dedicated, high performance people, and for high performance people interested in avoiding the perils and pitfalls of OZ organizations.OZ is a metaphor for Organizational Zeal, the notion that the organization is more important than the people that keep it alive. OZ organizations are full of ineffective leaders and each is exposed in this book through clever comparisons to the characters from L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.Exiting OZ takes you on a fascinating journey through the world of typical organizations and explains in colorful analogies why business-as-usual is a formula for failure as the newer generations move into the workforce majority and reject standard management practices.Giving organizations a ten to twelve year window to get it right, the authors explain, and back their assertions with plenty of data, why organizations of every kind, from corporations to governments, to academic, religious and other institutions must adopt new leadership strategies if they are to survive and thrive.

The ISO/IEC 27000 is a critical series of information security technology standards, and ISO/IEC 27001 is the newest release of this series. Authored by a recognized expert in the field, this authoritative and clear guide explores the ISO/IEC 27000 security standards and their implementation, focusing on the recent ISO/IEC 27001.

This book focuses on database law (a branch of intellectual property law) and further explores the legal protection currently available for data and data-related products in India. It offers a comparative study of the position of copyright law in protecting databases in the US and EU, while also presenting responses from the Indian database industry and its aspirations regarding the role of copyright law in database protection. India is undoubtedly leading the way as a knowledge economy. Its strengths are its information technology capability and its knowledge society, as well as its booming database industry - aspects that also necessitate the study of the role of law, as well as the protection of data and databases, in India. This book examines the growing importance of copyright law for protecting databases as well as for ensuring access in information societies. The book concludes with a discussion of key principles to be kept in mind in the context of drafting legal regimes for databases in India that will both benefit the database industry and ensure accessibility.

This monograph provides theoretical and practical perspectives on competency management as a key resource for producing competitive products. The authors develop and substantiate a law of dependence between competencies and emergence of new markets, and describe the practical aspects of developing competencies in high-tech companies. Further, they develop economic and mathematical models for managing the competitive advantages of a company based on competencies. Using these models, they present a method for evaluating and ranking core competencies, as well as for multi-criteria ratings of human potential efficiency. The book also discusses the mechanisms of competitiveness management based on a conceptual model of a competence center network.

This book focuses on the applications of optimal control theory to operations strategy and supply chain management. It emphasizes the importance of optimal control theory as a tool to analyze and understand fundamental issues in the respective fields. Delving deeper, the book also elaborates on how optimal control theory provides managerial and economic insights, enabling readers to comprehend the dynamic activities and interactions in operations. Given that optimal control theory is not a dominant approach to studying operations management in the current literature, this book fills that gap by showing its effectiveness as a tool to supplement other methodologies in operations.

The proper use and dissemination of information among stakeholders, organizations, and societies is crucial for the development of productive and prosperous communities. Governance, Communication, and Innovation in a Knowledge Intensive Society gathers current research on knowledge management in governments, organizations, and institutions, and presents a compilation useful to academics, professionals, politicians, and policy makers invested in knowledge-intensive societies. This book investigates the impact of knowledge and information technologies on fields as diverse as education, culture, science and business, in order to provide an effective framework for effectively navigating the nuances of an information-pervasive world.

It's not your imagination: the wealthy "do" get wealthier, while you still struggle from paycheck to paycheck. In this eye-opening money manual, seasoned certified public accountant Joseph Rouse explores why millions of hard-working, middle-class Americans like you have such a hard time making ends meet and then delivers a no-fail plan for taking charge of your financial destiny.

Rouse examines today's social, political, and economic realities that force most people to work long hours and even multiple jobs just to get by. And he tells how and why, if you aren't careful, you will most certainly lose your ability to retire at all.

Rouse's must-have guide to financial freedom delivers the tools and guidance you need to stop feeling helpless and start managing your finances with confidence. With his straightforward, solid, empowering approach, you will learn how to overcome every obstacle placed in your way by politicians, mass media, and your own temptations; destroy debt forever; and get on your way to building an impressive nest egg for yourself and your family.

At last, anyone and everyone can get ahead, achieve financial security, and enjoy a much-deserved, rich retirement

This book presents selected papers on Business Management and Technology, focusing on recent research in Business, Optimization, Technology, and Global Issues. Organized in four broad tracks, papers examine Management Challenges in Today's Industry, especially concerning changes in customer demands; Optimization Challenges in Today's Business, looking at efficiency and effectiveness in providing goods and services at affordable prices; Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism; and Technological Challenges in the Era of Globalization. The book covers both production systems and service systems, including the growing area of Information Technology, and also looks at the quality of work life in various sectors of business. It presents a balanced blend of theoretical and practical papers.

"Accounting for Improvement" offers concrete and constructive demonstrations of the possibilities of designing participative forms of organization. Field experiment cases illustrate how the operational level can assume a new significance in competitiveness and strategic positioning. In this way, the relevance of the accounting function to the improvement of productivity and quality is restored.

Several broadly applicable lessons can be learnt, among them: how companies can strengthen their competitive base by patient improvement; how people with operative jobs can take command of their work situation and improve it in quality as well as efficiency.

New bottom-up, people-orientated, empirically-founded approaches to decentralised participative management demonstrate a place for individuals and teamwork in today's "lost relevance" and "smart machine" environment.

The book reports on advanced topics in interactive robotics research and practice; in particular, it addresses non-technical obstacles to the broadest uptake of these technologies. It focuses on new technologies that can physically and cognitively interact with humans, including neural interfaces, soft wearable robots, and sensor and actuator technologies; further, it discusses important regulatory challenges, including but not limited to business models, standardization, education and ethical-legal-socioeconomic issues. Gathering the outcomes of the 1st INBOTS Conference (INBOTS2018), held on October 16-20, 2018 in Pisa, Italy, the book addresses the needs of a broad audience of academics and professionals working in government and industry, as well as end users. In addition to providing readers with detailed information and a source of inspiration for new projects and collaborations, it discusses representative case studies highlighting practical challenges in the implementation of interactive robots in a number of fields, as well as solutions to improve communication between different stakeholders. By merging engineering, medical, ethical and political perspectives, the book offers a multidisciplinary, timely snapshot of interactive robotics.

Rarely discussed in courses on ethics is the topic of excuses, but in McDowell's view, excuses offer the most illuminating way to understand the true nature of ethical problems in the professions. He looks at excuses that professionals give when accused of acting unethically, and asks, when are they valid and when not? Problems of professional ethics are really problems of compliance, he argues, not ignorance of expectations. The study of excuses can help us understand what these problems are and offer insights into ways to solve them. Banks maintains too that our ethical expectations may need overhauling, given substantial changes that have occurred in how professionals do their work today. They can be easily persuaded that what they are doing is not unethical; it depends on the excuses they give themselves as well as others. Professionals know what's expected of them, but social and economic pressures make compliance difficult. Professionals in all fields, who struggle to be both successful and ethical, will find the book challenging, provocative, and yet sympathetic and reassuring too. It will also be an important resource for graduate students in courses exploring the relationship between business and ethics.

Excuses may be ways of avoiding professional responsibility, says McDowell, but they may also be the way in which general ethical principles are adapted to particular contexts. They may also indicate that ethical codes need to be reformulated to adapt to changes in how professional services are delivered. Specialization, urbanization and the systematic breakdown in community relationships, the globalization of the economy, system, and market pressures for success--for all these reasons, professionals today face problems much different from those faced by their counterparts earlier in the century. Excuses also raise the problem of whether any system of voluntary compliance, like professional ethics, can function when the decision on whether an excuse is valid or invalid rests with the actor, who can rationalize almost any self-interested action he or she might take. McDowell explores these issues and others in a fresh, readable style, with numerous anecdotal examples, and with evidence from many sources that the crisis is real and demands quick but lasting remedies.

Pension funds are big business. They are important to employers, employees, governments, and society at large. With the increasing concern over dwindling retirement benefits and the effect on public awareness of recent pension fund crises, managing pension plans has never been more critical--and the pressure on those who are responsible for them has only intensified. Destined to become the classic resource on pension plan management, Managing Pension Plans explains everything you need to know for successful management of any pension plan--from how pension plans help sponsors manage their workforces to the latest in investment and risk management. With concise and practical guidance on ways for achieving optimal finance performance, Managing Pensions Plans is an indispensable resource for pension fund trustees, boards of directors, managers, and administrators of both public and private pension plans as well as for the money management firms, consultants, actuaries, and accountants who serve the pension fund industry. Logue and Rader, two of the world's leading experts on the subject, explain all the financial, legal, economic, accounting, and managerial issues that those who make pension fund decisions must juggle--in language that non-financial managers can understand, yet with sufficient depth to be useful to financial managers as well. The authors synthesize the latest in capital market and financial economics research to help those involved in pension management improve their decision-making in all the critical areas, including: choosing the optimal form of pension plan, formulating and implementing the plan's investment strategy, selecting and monitoring pension plan managers, measuring the plan's performance, and managing financial risk. In addition, the book describes in detail the responsibilities of fiduciaries, revealing how to be both a prudent fiduciary and a capable decision maker. Additionally, Managing Pension Plans offers candid advice on how pension managers can improve fund performance by being more effective shareholders. As pension fund management and performance increasingly affect the success of organizations as a whole, this book will be indispensable to anyone--from fund analysts to board members--who influences pension fund decisions.

How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified. "Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement. The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.

This book covers the main issues on the study of competencies and talent management in modern and competitive organizations. The chapters show how organizations around the world are facing (global) talent management challenges and give the reader information on the latest research activity related to that. Innovative theories and strategies are reported in this book, which provides an interdisciplinary exchange of information, ideas and opinions about the workplace challenges.

First ever, all-in-one, practical resource for evacuating people of all ages and health conditions from all kinds of workplaces, including small offices, skyscrapers, business and college campuses, industrial plants, stores, hospitals, and schools. Based on the Business Continuity Institute's proven 6-Phase Business Continuity Lifecycle Model that encompasses development, delivery, and maintenance of organization-wide plans -- to ensure that your methodology aligns with best practices, relevant regulations, sound governance, and corporate responsibility. Comprehensive package of 600+ pages of book and downloads containing tools, templates, case studies, sample plans, forms, checklists, articles, and practical tips. Authored by an internationally acclaimed consultant in Business Continuity Management, with 35+ years' experience in 24 countries and recipient of the Business Continuity Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. Thought-provoking discussion questions requiring application of principles to solve problems, numerous real-life case studies and examples, comprehensive index and detailed glossary facilitate both college and professional instruction. This comprehensive package of 600+ pages of book and downloads offers the first ever, all-in-one resource -- packed with globally researched, innovative, and field-tested plans, tips, and tools for workplace evacuation, including: - Comprehensive approach covering all kinds of personal conditions and facilities. Provides full details on how to deliver an effective evacuation solution for people of varying ages, health conditions, and special needs, including how to develop Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) for employees who need them. Shows how to develop plans for evacuating a variety of facilities ranging from small offices, skyscrapers, business campuses and industrial plants to stores, hospitals, schools and colleges. - Practical and compassionate insights for dealing with emotional reactions and physical difficulties, both pre- and post-event. Includes planning for and managing both the immediate reactions and, very importantly, any long term care for employees that may be required in the wake of major trauma. - Tools, templates, case studies, sample plans, forms, checklists, articles, and practical tips that will spare you pitfalls and costly mistakes in designing your own evacuation plan. Burtles has literally "been there, done that" over many years, so take advantage of his hard-won expertise and field-tested tools to enhance the plan you have or create one from scratch. You are responsible for your people's safety. Put emergency evacuation on the top of your priority list. Use Burtles as a guide to practice (and practice and practice and practice) realistic evacuation drills and procedures, create strong policies, and get management buy-in with clearly understood and agreed-upon methods to increase the chance of survival for those at risk. With this book and accompanying EEP Toolkit, you now have the tools to develop and implement a comprehensive Emergency Evacuation Plan. "You MUST have a plan. You MUST practice it, "says Burtles. "But most importantly, at that critical moment, your people MUST be able to get out "

The work presented here is generally intended for engineers, educators at all levels, industrialists, managers, researchers and political representatives. Offering a snapshot of various types of research conducted within the field of TRIZ in France, it represents a unique resource. It has been two decades since the TRIZ theory originating in Russia spread across the world. Every continent adopted it in a different manner - sometimes by glorifying its potential and its perspectives (the American way); sometimes by viewing it with mistrust and suspicion (the European way); and sometimes by adopting it as-is, without questioning it further (the Asian way). However, none of these models of adoption truly succeeded. Today, an assessment of TRIZ practices in education, industry and research is necessary. TRIZ has expanded to many different scientific disciplines and has allowed young researchers to reexamine the state of research in their field. To this end, a call was sent out to all known francophone research laboratories producing regular research about TRIZ. Eleven of them agreed to send one or more of their postdoctoral researchers to present their work during a seminar, regardless of the maturity or completeness of their efforts. It was followed by this book project, presenting one chapter for every current thesis in order to reveal the breadth, the richness and the perspectives that research about the TRIZ theory could offer our society. The topics dealt with e.g. the development of new methods inspired by TRIZ, educational practices, and measuring team impact.