The only pocket guide to the UK building regulations on the market Succinct, portable, reliable guide to UK Building regulations Essential for anyone involved in building works or renovations in the UK

This thorough, comprehensive introduction to international financial management provides an expert guide to the workings of international capital markets, the financing of international business, the complexities of international taxation and the use of financial instruments such as swaps and options. Written by professionals, the book guides the reader through each key topic, targeting the issues underpinning successful financial strategy in the global markets of the 1990s.

This book explores some aspects of the interface between technology, competitiveness and the role of multinational enterprises in the world economy. This group of essays stresses the role of asset creation and usage, rather than reliance on natural factor endowments as a basis for national competitiveness and examines the role of multinational enterprises as vehicles for technological transfer, and the efficient co-ordination of economic activity across national boundaries.

This book looks at how to design complex products that have many components with intricate relationships and requirements. It also discusses how to manage processes involved in their lifecycle, from concept generation to disposal, with the objectives of increasing customer satisfaction, quality, safety, and usability and meeting program timings and budgets. Part I covers systems engineering concepts, issues, and bases in product design. Part II examines quality, human factors, and safety engineering approaches. Part III describes important tools and methods used in these fields, and Part IV includes other relevant integration topics, interesting applications of useful techniques, and observations from a few "landmark" product development case studies.

It is clear that although the human resource management field has been drastically affected by global competition over the last twenty years, most of the research and publications in the field are geared to providing corporations with an understanding of their business environment. This book takes an entirely different approach by looking at the job and career markets from the point of view of individuals who are searching for new strategies to find, develop and manage their careers in a global environment. Not only does it provide the individual with the tools necessary to evaluate various domestic and international career markets, but it also presents strategies to help them package and market their skills and competencies at home and abroad. With the help of this vital guidebook to the global job market, readers will:

Learn how to research national markets to spot new career opportunities

Find information on dynamic regions and companies where careers are flourishing

Find out about professional & skill certifications that help with global employment

Learn how to build and mobilize personal and professional networks

Learn about international oriented business sectors and career opportunities

Identify education and training opportunities at home and abroad

Create practical strategies for developing and managing their career

As global competition forces firms to adjust rapidly to changing market conditions, affecting the structure and content of jobs, careers and career markets around the world, the need for individuals to be proactive is becoming clear. This book offers readers the tools they need to evaluate and manage their career environment and personal career profiles, and ultimately, to have a rewarding career.

Generational Use of New Media examines and contrasts how younger and older people, representing different generations, engage with the new media that they increasingly encounter in everyday life. Exploring the various assumptions about the degrees to which younger and older people are more or less willing to use, or are capable of using, new media, the social circumstances under which they do so and the very design of those media, this book critically examines the gap that is assumed to exist between younger users of new media and older non-users. Thematically organised and offering comparative analyses of the generational use of new media and technology, this timely volume presents the latest research and rich new empirical material gathered in the EU, USA and Hong Kong, to reflect on societal practices and the practical implications of building a more inclusive information society.

Every leader has human resource management and development responsibilities. Using a behavioural science perspective, Developing High Performance Leaders will enable leaders throughout the various business sectors to increase the yield on their organization's human capital and help their team members achieve their goals. In this instructive book, Philip Harris centres his teaching around five key aspects of the leadership process: human behaviour and performance communications cultural influences organizational relations change management A selection of strategies to take forward into practice are offered to the reader and the text is organized with a view to the leader sharing the learning obtained from this volume. For personal or group growth, each chapter is framed in terms of four "I's": Introduction, Input, Interaction and Instrumentation, to provide an ideal framework for any adult education endeavour. Developing High Performance Leaders is for all human resource development professionals, supervisors, managers and executives concerned with the career development of themselves and their team.

Enhancing our understanding of HRM in the Chinese industrial sector, this book explores the emerging role of HRM in China's industrial enterprises. A significant contribution to the theory of HRM, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Business and Management, HRM and Asian Business.

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the similarities and differences of contemporary human resource management systems, processes and practices in the two increasingly important economic great powers in Asia. It covers the full range of human resource management activities, including recruitment, retention, performance management, renumeration, and career development, discusses changing industrial relations systems, and sets the subject in its historical, social and cultural contexts. It examines newly emerging strategies, and asssesses the extent to which human resource management systems in the two countries are coverging or diverging.

One box of chemicals mistaken for another. Ingredients intended to be life-sustaining are instead life-taking. Families in shock, healthcare providers reeling and fingers starting to point. A large healthcare system's reputation hangs in the balance while decisions need to be made, quickly. More questions than answers. People have to be held accountable - does this mean they get fired? Should the media and therefore the public be informed? What are family members and the providers involved feeling? When the dust settles, will remaining patients be more safe or less safe? In this provocative true story of tragedy, the authors recount the journey travelled and what was learned by, at the time, Canada's largest fully integrated health region. They weave this story together with the theory about why things fall apart and how to put them back together again. Building on the writings and wisdom of James Reason and other experts, the book explores new ways of thinking about Just Culture, and what this would mean for patients and family members, in addition to healthcare providers. With afterwords by two of the major players in this story, the authors make a compelling case that Just Culture is as much about fairness and healing as it is about supporting a safety culture.

Regional disparity is one of the current pressing social issues. Many countries lack basic infrastructures of establishing a new business or industrial cluster. The book argues that existing arguments which have mostly focused on macroscopic view of economy of society or industries may be misguided. The book delivers a refreshing insight from microscopic view of enterprise/business management and how businesses can achieve sustainable development at enterprise level. The book includes case studies of concrete examples to illustrate how a successful model can be put in place to effect sustainable development at enterprise level. The implementation of sustainable development is also a closely connected knowledge management. This knowledge management looks at intangible assets such as tacit knowledge, social capital, ecological resources, art and so forth. It is also tightly related to regional issues. This book bridges the relationship between knowledge management and regional issues from the standpoint of sustainable development and illustrates how they can be integrated to overcome the constraints to grow. The clarity and well-founded research of the book makes it a useful reference for students, researchers and businesses.

Effective Document and Data Management illustrates the operational and strategic significance of how documents and data are captured, managed and utilized. Without a coherent and consistent approach the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization may be undermined by less poor management and use of its information. The third edition of the book is restructured to take this broader view and to establish an organizational context in which information is management. Along the way Bob Wiggins clarifies the distinction between information management, data management and knowledge management; helps make sense of the concept of an information life cycle to present and describe the processes and techniques of information and data management, storage and retrieval; uses worked examples to illustrate the coordinated application of data and process analysis; and provides guidance on the application of appropriate project management techniques for document and records management projects. The book will benefit a range of organizations and people, from those senior managers who need to develop coherent and consistent business and IT strategies; to information professionals, such as records managers and librarians who will gain an appreciation of the impact of the technology and of how their particular areas of expertise can best be applied; to system designers, developers and implementers and finally to users. The author can be contacted at [email protected] for further information.

In Participative Transformation, Roger Klev and Morten Levin insist that participative learning and developmental processes are essential in organizational change. They focus on introducing the kind of learning and development that shapes a self-sustaining developmental process that is an integral part of the daily activities of an organisation. This process is essentially one of collective reflection in order to develop alternatives for action, experimentation to achieve desired goals, then collective reflection on the results achieved. Reflection on own practice can contribute to direct improvements of own practice, but may also contribute to new practices, new frameworks of understanding, and to processes involving other participants and fields of interaction. The first part of the book provides an introduction to participative change management and particularly to the concept of co-generative learning inherited from action research, in which change becomes a joint management and employee learning, development, and knowledge creating process. In the second part, the focus of each chapter is on an aspect of the practice of leading change. There is practical guidance for leaders, internal problem owners, external change agents, or action researchers on how employees can be actively engaged in shaping their own work conditions. Readers will learn how experiencing negative results as well as success can form a basis for continued development, even on how to handle an organisational development process when it is in terminal trouble, to ensure there is still learning from it.

Factors such as globalisation, restructuring, casualization of employment and the erosion of pension rights have led to massive tensions in contemporary organizations. By exploring the boundaries of the field of Human Resource Development this book asks where is HRD in the middle of all this and presents an innovative and challenging approach to HRD theory and practice. With contributions from a number of leading international scholars, the chapters draw upon a range of epistemologies and adopt a critically reflective perspective on the field. The chapters are divided into four sections moving from a critical perspective on the definition and boundaries of the field of HRD, through a re-thinking of the human-centred nature of HRD, and the organisational context within which HRD takes place, to, finally, perspectives on the future role of HRD in the changing knowledge economy. The book's main conclusion is that HRD remains a contested concept within the more broadly contested field of organisation and management theory. Yet this is neither a drawback nor weakness on the one hand, nor an advantage or strength on the other. Both threats and opportunities present themselves for the future growth of HRD as an academic field, and as an arena of professional practice

This book guides process-industry professionals from the implementation of the basic foundations of Continuous Improvement (CI) through to an organization where CI is a "way of life" and a defining feature of the culture of the organization. The readers of this book are seeking solutions to such pressing issues as: * Eliminating accidents and near misses. * Reducing customer complaints. * Improving customer delivery performance. * Elimination of accidents and near misses. * Reducing customer complaints. * Improving customer delivery performance. * Introducing new products. * Improving staff productivity. * Removing costs to meet the budget. * Dealing with absence and poor morale. * Improving staff retention. This book provides them with guidance on how to address issues in these areas in a way that enables improvements to be realized quickly but not at the expense of a long-term goal of a sustainable Continuous Improvement culture. In addition, this book presents the implementation of CI as a cyclical journey with no endpoint. The stages are ordered in a sequence that enables the reader to get started in their area of the company and build up the elements without the need for an overall organizational strategy at the beginning. Continuous Improvement is a vast subject with many takes on principles, approaches, and tools. This book is about how all the fundamentals of these areas fit together and, as such, covers only some of them. However, within the bibliography, I have signposted the books that have guided me during my career and which go into the principles, approaches, and tools further.

Cultural proximity consists in shared language, codes ,and norms of communication and exchange between actors. It is generally considered important for organizations, enhancing communication and facilitation interaction between actors. In such situation, diversity is often seen as a source of richness and originality. However, high levels of proximity might create some risk, leading to lock-in and inertia, with a negative impact on the innovativeness of the organization. While the role of cultural proximity is subject to much debate within organizations studies, a comprehensive understanding of cultural proximity remains elusive. This book explores the organizational implications of the concept of cultural proximity, delving into the managerial challenges posed by diversities and similarities in culture within a business environment using different levels of analysis. The key messages of the present book, grounded on original empirical evidence, can be summarized as follows: cultural proximity is a key factor for managing innovation in present times; innovation requires a deliberate orchestration of the dichotomy between cultural proximity/cultural diversity; there are specific circumstances where proximity can be beneficial for managers and entrepreneurs. The book will be of value to researchers, academics, managers, and students in the fields of management science, human resource management, innovation studies, and organizational studies.

Digitalization is on everyone's lips as new technology changes business landscapes and conventional companies are outperformed by younger digital and agile contestants. In this volatile environment it seems more relevant than ever before to understand the aspects and business logic behind the elusive phenomenon called "digitalization". Never before have there been such great opportunities to unleash the full potential of technology within organizations to create long-standing competitive advantage. This book explains the strategy and practice of how to lead and control the people side of digital change in a dynamic world of uncertainty and social complexity, and as such the book snares the elusive phenomena of digitalization Digitalization drives behavioral change and calls for a new way of thinking among senior executives. In practice, reaping the benefits of digital technology is not as easy as it first appears to be. This book provides a map to navigate in the volatile business landscape where change occurs continuously because of digital technology. It provides an historical frame of the evolution of digital technology, decodes digitalization's negative influence on the external aspects of customer satisfaction, discusses and explains the strategic and leadership consequences of different forms of digital change, and finally demonstrates how leading digital change can be put into practice. Illustrative case studies and examples are provided throughout as well as models and frameworks. This is a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, organizational change, technology and innovation management, and digitalization.

The Lean Approach to Digital Transformation: From Customer to Code and From Code to Customer is organized into three parts that expose and develop the three capabilities that are essential for a successful digital transformation: 1. Understanding how to co-create digital services with users, whether they are customers or future customers. This ability combines observation, dialogue, and iterative experimentation. The approach proposed in this book is based on the Lean Startup approach, according to an extended vision that combines Design Thinking and Growth Hacking. Companies must become truly "customer-centric", from observation and listening to co-development. The revolution of the digital age of the 21st century is that customer orientation is more imperative -- the era of abundance, usages rate of change, complexity of experiences, and shift of power towards communities -- are easier, using digital tools and digital communities. 2. Developing an information system (IS) that is the backbone of the digital transformation - called "exponential information system" to designate an open IS (in particular on its borders), capable of interfacing and combining with external services, positioned as a player in software ecosystems and built for processing scalable and dynamic data flows. The exponential information system is constantly changing and it continuously absorbs the best of information processing technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. 3. Building software "micro-factories" that produce service platforms, which are called "Lean software factories." This "software factory" concept covers the integration of agile methods, tooling and continuous integration and deployment practices, a customer-oriented product approach, and a platform approach based on modularity, as well as API-based architecture and openness to external stakeholders. This software micro-factory is the foundation that continuously produces and provides constantly evolving services. These three capabilities are not unique or specific to this book, they are linked to other concepts such as agile methods, product development according to lean principles, software production approaches such as CICD (continuous integration and deployment) or DevOps. This book weaves a common frame of reference for all these approaches to derive more value from the digital transformation and to facilitate its implementation. The title of the book refers to the "lean approach to digital transformation" because the two underlying frameworks, Lean Startup and Lean Software Factory, are directly inspired by Lean, in the sense of the Toyota Way. The Lean approach is present from the beginning to the end of this book -- it provides the framework for customer orientation and the love of a job well done, which are the conditions for the success of a digital transformation.

'A must-read for everyone who cares about driving customer engagement' Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup 'The most high bandwidth, high octane, and valuable presentation I have ever seen on this subject' Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy & Mather Nir Eyal reveals how successful companies create products people can't put down - and how you can too Why do some products capture our attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain things out of sheer habit? Is there an underlying pattern to how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) with the Hook Model - a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour. Through consecutive "hook cycles," these products bring people back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal's years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder - not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behaviour. Eyal provides readers with practical insights to create user habits that stick; actionable steps for building products people love; and riveting examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest and the Bible App.

The Handbook of Research on Artificial Intelligence, Innovation and Entrepreneurship focuses on theories, policies, practices, and politics of technology innovation and entrepreneurship based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It examines when, where, how, and why AI triggers, catalyzes, and accelerates the development, exploration, exploitation, and invention feeding into entrepreneurial actions that result in innovation success. Individual chapters explore the factors that shape and drive innovation and entrepreneurship, including modalities (such as the Internet of Things (IoT)), challenges (such as privacy and safety concerns), and opportunities (such as augmenting the efficacy frontier of technological solutions enabled by AI). This Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of AI, technology, and innovation and entrepreneurship for academics, policy makers, practitioners, and students.

Sexuality is arguably the most under-researched of all diversity areas in work organizations. This book brings together and relates stories of minority sexual identity from six organizations drawn from three different industry sectors: the Emergency Services, the Civil Service and the Banking sector. Here sexual minorities freely recount stories of their own workplace experiences. Three main themes emerge from the data: silence, disclosure and response. Issues of voice and silence are particularly pertinent for those who are not part of the dominant heterosexual discourse; issues of disclosure are highly important for sexual minorities for whom coming out is a major defining moment; and, highly unusually, in this book readers get an insight into how people respond to sexual minorities, as other employees' reactions to stories are related too. This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding discursive construction of identity in the workplace, as experienced by sexual minorities and provides a snapshot of minority working lives at the beginning of the 21st century. This is an extremely well written, highly innovative, timely and engaging book which as well as human resources management, it will also be of interest to scholars in other areas such as sociology and general business and management.

Global corporations initiate, join and maintain socio-technological change and hence, alter the ways in which we organize our lives. Demanding significant investment of resources and time, the development and implementation of new technologies on different levels must take into consideration these subtle processes. As such, it is particularly important that we have a greater insight into the practices of hi-tech corporations, in view of the often inflated promises of and concerns about the destiny of technological breakthroughs, especially those promising sizeable economic outcomes and societal transformation. Elena Simakova undertook a lengthy ethnographic study, working alongside marketing managers in a global IT corporation in their Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in the UK. Using the experience gained through a close participation in their everyday corporate rituals and routines, her account challenges common perceptions of how corporations make the world think and act with regard to technologies in particular ways. The book contains an interesting case study on the launch of a radio frequency identification (RFID) based solution. Unravelling the construction of expectations, inclusions and exclusions around emerging technologies, this reflexive account also tackles uneasy practical and methodological questions pertinent to corporate ethnography. This book is an essential read for scholars in science and technology studies, economic sociology, anthropology, as well as management and organizational studies and research policy.

System, Actor and Process: Keywords in Organization Studies is intended as an epistemological 'compass' to navigate through the multifaceted key concepts typically used in organizational practice and research. The book illustrates thirty-four keywords using a tripartite structure: each keyword is briefly discussed from three points of view, namely the system-centered, actor-centered and process-centered conception of organization, which reflects the options emerging from contemporary epistemological debate in organizational studies and, more generally, in social sciences, namely objectivism, subjectivism, and the Weberian "third way". Primarily addressed to researchers and academics in organization studies, this book is also a useful resource for undergraduate or postgraduate students, for whom it may represent a thorough introduction to organizational concepts. It will also be a valuable tool for managers to apply in their everyday practice.

The supply chain is at the heart of every successful business organization's decision-making process. This textbook explains how to create a winning supply chain management strategy by spotlighting how senior executives in European and US companies have turned their supply chains into strategic weapons designed to convert threats, risks and outside pressures into competitive advantages. Strategic Supply Chain Management contains twenty real-world cases, all of which have been field researched by a top author team and tested out in the classroom. Each case adopts an executive leadership perspective to illuminate the real dilemmas faced by managers. The authors draw on their extensive classroom and industry experience to ensure that the writing style is geared towards an executive education readership. This elite case package will provide a complete teaching resource and authentic learning experience for MBA and executive education classes in Supply Chain Management throughout the world.

In a postmodern age we all need a room of our own. A room or space where we can explore and reflect on how the rapidly changing world affects us. A room where it is possible to get a feeling of who we are, and wish to be, in the middle of the buzz of our everyday lives. Where it is possible to explore our challenges and possibilities and thus become a more robust human being. Where we can think of our relationships and interactions. Where we can have a break and some relief and where we can summon the energy to act or not to act in our lives.Coaching is way of providing the space for such thoughts, reflections, and insights into our possibilities. Most of the different coaching methods do not adhere to a specific psychological theory. However, in this book you will meet a coaching method that is based on a specific theory psychodynamics. The main idea is to work with the coached person s past, present, and future in order to open up for a more integrated and fulfilling life."