This book provides students with an in-depth understanding of the concepts, frameworks and processes used to analyze and present visual data for better decision-making. Expert contributors provide guidance in translating complex concepts from large data sets and how this translation drives management practice. The book's first part provides a descriptive consideration of state-of-the-art science in visual design. The second part complements the first with a rich set of cases and visual examples, illustrating development and best practice to provide students with real-world context. Through their presentation of modern scientific principles, the editors inspire structured discussions of audience and design, recognizing differences in need, bias and effective processes across contexts and stakeholders. This cutting-edge resource will be of value to students in business analytics, business communication and management science classes, who will learn to be capable managers through the effective and direct visual communication of data. Researchers and practitioners will also find this an engaging and informative book.

Unfortunately, leadership does not have a one-size-fits-all definition. We all have our own ideas as to what makes a good leader and the types of challenges that will be faced. The author bridges a gap by presenting how modern leadership happens while simultaneously combining a description of leadership and its practical application in today's environments. In this book, Nicholas Harkiolakis integrates the various theoretical perspectives into a unified model that can be understood by both the academic and the practitioner (existing and future leaders). This understanding is necessary to effectively treat and apply leadership to the challenging settings of today's operational environments: virtual, distributed, multicultural and so on. Some of the key topics covered are: leadership through the ages characteristics of leadership modern perspectives an integrated leadership framework the application of leadership the twenty-first-century leadership practices.

Companies of all kinds have fallen into some of the most fundamental of traps when it comes to consumer marketing; in assuming that the motivation that drives their customers is entirely rational. Enrico Trevisan's The Irrational Consumer builds on the ground breaking works on behavioural economics of authors such as Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler in order to explain the fundamental drivers of customer decisions and how to incorporate these into your business strategy. Learn how consumers respond to different offer architectures and discounts; why they sometimes struggle to see the wood for the trees in a world of ever-increasing options; what are the rules of thumb they develop for making sense of value. Behavioural economics offers organizations perspectives for engaging with customers, whose views on what to buy are strongly driven by contextual factors, such as the framework and the dynamics of choices. Enrico Trevisan's The Irrational Consumer is your 'must-have' primer to this world.

Even though the fractal approach to sustainability and organizational change management is not new, no authors so far seem to have truly attempted to use fractals as a mathematical means to map and measure organizational sustainability. Several sustainability maturity models and change management models and frameworks, concepts and computer generated systems came to the fore during the past two decades. They provided a set of useful tools for managers, academics and students to refer to, or on which to base their own actions and plans. However, one issue remains: most of those models and frameworks share a rather similar linear 'skeleton'; the main difference between them is the quantitative variety of steps within each phase, stage, and parameter and how in depth each of these is presented. The authors' work addresses a clear gap in the literature and in applied research, as it emphasizes the relevance of using a complex mathematically-based but user-friendly fractal approach. Readers are able to better understand, implement, map and measure change management processes leading to a sustainability-focused mindset. Subsequent chapters guide you through the steps towards creating committed sustainability-based strategies, attitudes, actions and practices across all levels in the broad organizational context. This text is essential reading for students researching business and management and who are interested in the Fractal Sustainability concept.

Architects and engineers can build models to test their ideas - why not managers? In Game Theory in Management: Modelling Business Decisions and Their Consequences, author Michael Hatfield presents a series of mathematically structured analogies to real-life business and economic interaction scenarios, and then, using modern game theory, he shows how to test common managerial technical approaches for their effectiveness. His results are astonishing: if game theory is correct then many commonly-held and taught management approaches and techniques are not only less effective than thought, they are actually detrimental in many areas where they are held to be beneficial. Game Theory in Management also examines managerial implications from network theory, cartage schemes, risk management theory, management information system epistemology, and other areas where the quantification and testing of business decisions can be employed to identify winning and losing stratagems.

This book provides an introduction to incorporating preference information in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with a special emphasis in Value Efficiency Analysis. In addition to theoretical considerations, numerous illustrative examples are included. Hence, the book can be used as a teaching text as well. Only a modest mathematical background is needed to understand the main principles. The only prerequisites are a) familiarity with linear algebra, especially matrix calculus; b) knowledge of the simplex method; and c) familiarity with the use of computer software. The book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides motivation and introduces the basic concepts. Chapter 2 provides the basic ideas and models of Data Envelopment Analysis. The efficient frontier and production possibility set concepts play an important role in all considerations. That's why these concepts are considered more closely in Chapter 3. Since the approaches introduced in this study are inspired by Multiple Objective Linear Programming, the basic concepts of this field are reviewed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 also compares and contrasts Data Envelopment Analysis and Multiple Objective Linear Programming, providing some cornerstones for approaches presented later in the book. Chapter 6 discusses the traditional approaches to take into account preference information in DEA. In Chapter 7, Value Efficiency is introduced, and Chapter 8 discusses practical aspects. Some extensions are presented in Chapter 9, and in Chapter 10 Value Efficiency is extended to cover the case when a production possibility set is not convex. Three implemented applications are reviewed in Chapter 11.

Although much has been written about the Korean public administration, the international academic community has little knowledge about it as most of the literature has been written in Korean. This book aims to provide more accessible knowledge internationally by filling that gap, covering both the history and the current status of the Korean public administration. This book is a collaboration of many Korean public administration scholars and would appeal to those interested in the secrets of Korea's rapid development in such a short span of time. Each chapter covers historical contexts, key to understanding its public administration and an important aspect as Korea is a fast changing society. The book takes on a more pragmatic approach rather than to put the Korean experiences into the western theory. Each chapter therefore provides an extensive discussion on the lessons-learned and practical implications.

Multicriteria analysis is one of the most important fields of decision science. This book gives an outline of the formulation of an appropriate model and presents a comprehensive summary of the most popular methods for solving multicriteria decision problems. In addition to the classical approach the book introduces fuzzy and stochastic methodology, models with uncertainty, social choice and conflict resolution. All methods are illustrated with easy to follow simple examples. At the end of each chapter detailed case studies are given in water and environment management including inter-basin water transfer, urban water management, water allocation, groundwater quality management, forest treatment, ranking water resources projects, reservoir planning, water distribution network design and long-term watershed management. The new methodology and the wide variety of case studies are not easily accessible elsewhere.

This book gathers extended versions of the best papers presented at the Global Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Its Application Areas (GJCIE), held on September 2-3, 2019, in Gazimagusa, North Cyprus, Turkey. It covers a wide range of topics, including decision analysis, supply chain management, systems modelling and quality control. Further, special emphasis is placed on the state of the art and the challenges of digital disruption, as well as effective strategies that can be used to change organizational structures and eliminate the barriers that are keeping industries from taking full advantage of today's digital technologies.

Most successful companies have operations management at their heart. It enables strategy and should be part of boardroom discussions. However, Cranfield research has shown that business strategy barely recognises the world of operations management. Recognising that operations management needs to be more strategic, Business Operations Models is a revolutionary new title that looks at the interrelationship of operations management and strategy. In Business Operations Models, Martin Christopher and Alan Braithwaite identify the characteristics of market-leading businesses that have transformed their markets and delivered super performance for their stakeholders. It points to the theory gap between strategic thinking and operations and how many high-performing businesses arrive at their new operating models as much by chance as judgement. Unpacking those observations leads to some clearly defined features of winning competitors, including eliminating waste, leveraging technology, and utilising transformative business models. Business Operations Models offers a framework for achieving super performance and understanding when and how a company may be able to leverage its capabilities to outperform. The book provides detailed international case studies that illustrate how the principles work in practice, including Apple, Dell, Amazon, John Lewis, Southwest airlines, Aldi, Toyota and many others.

In all periods of time, there is a perceived shortage of qualified, credible, and robust leadership skills. At the same time, what is regarded as skilled leadership is contingent on economic, political, institutional, and cultural conditions specific for a period of time or a local setting. Leadership in the era of managerial capitalism was focused on planning and administration, and was seated in large-scale, divisionalized corporations. In the 1970s, this economic model started to wane and leadership was advanced as the solution to a series of economic and social concerns, now being a matter of meaning-making in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. With the expansion of the finance industry and the deregulation of finance markets in the 1990s and in the new millennium, yet another leadership model increasingly prioritized economic value creation. In parallel to the economic, political and institutional changes, the idea of leadership has been strongly informed by new ideas about individualism and masculinity, adding to the understanding of leadership as what is anchored in widespread social beliefs about for example healthy life styles, the virtues of physical exercise, and novel gender relations. Aimed at scholars, researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of Leadership, Management History and Organizational Theory; Leadership Varieties examines predominant ideas about the qualities and virtues of leadership in a historical and cultural perspective.

This volume presents selected contributions by top researchers in the field of operations research, originating from the XVI Congress of APDIO. It provides interesting findings and applications of operations research methods and techniques in a wide variety of problems. The contributions address complex real-world problems, including inventory management with lateral transshipments, sectors and routes in solid-waste collection and production planning for perishable food products. It also discusses the latest techniques, making the volume a valuable tool for researchers, students and practitioners who wish to learn about current trends. Of particular interest are the applications of nonlinear and mixed-integer programming, data envelopment analysis, clustering techniques, hybrid heuristics, supply chain management and lot sizing, as well as job scheduling problems. This biennial conference, organized by APDIO, the Portuguese Association of Operational Research, held in Braganca, Portugal, in June 2013, presented a perfect opportunity to discuss the latest development in this field and to narrow the gap between academic researchers and practitioners.

This open access book clarifies confusions of strategy that have existed for nearly 40 years through the core thoughts of three fundamental elements. Unlike the traditional definition of strategy as "a plan to achieve a long-term goal from overall considerations"in a linear view, this book defines strategy from non-linear viewpoint as it is in the real world. The art of a strategy lies not only in the determination of development goals, but also in the identification of development problems and putting forward overall guiding ideology of solving problems. Rich illustrations as well as numerous business and military cases are presented in helping readers to understand the fundamental elements of strategy.The general scope of the book includes introductions to the three fundamental elements of strategy, three-sub decisions of a complete strategic decision, incomplete strategies, relationship between tactic and strategy, three elements of competitive and corporative strategies. There may be biases in company-level, real strategic decision-making which makes a complete strategy not necessarily a perfect one. The book introduces biases and reasons for the biases, helping industrial strategic decision-makers understand the importance of knowing the nature of the company, the industry and its environment. In addition, this book also presents principles and evaluation approaches of strategic decisions, explores the reasons for the excessive definitions of the strategy concept, and discusses directions of future's research tasks.The book will benefit business managers who are interested in knowing what a complete strategic decision is and how to avoid errors or biases in strategic decision-making. It also benefits students in business schools (especially in MBA/EMBA programs) who are (or will be) on executive positions. Academic researchers may find it is interesting to understand strategy from the view of the three elements. The new view provides a novel insight into strategy and promotes several research directions in the future. The three elements of strategy are also applicable to military strategies and readers who are interested in military and may find its value as well.

Derivatives Algorithms - Volume 1: Bones (Second Edition) is for practicing quants who already have some expertise in risk-neutral pricing and in programming, and want to build a reusable and extensible library. Rather than specific models, this volume provides foundations common to all pricing, such as C++ code structure, interfaces, and several widely used mathematical methods. It also presents a set of protocols, by which models and trades can collaborate to support pricing and hedging tasks, and illustrates their use with several example trade types and models. Readers will learn to deploy the results of their research work with productivity-enhancing methods that are not taught elsewhere, including object serialization, code generation, and separation of concerns for continuous improvement. Of all the books on derivatives pricing, only Derivatives Algorithms shows the internals of a high-quality working library.The new Second Edition is more accessible to readers who are not already familiar with the book's concepts; there is an increased focus on explaining the motivation for each step, and on providing a high-level perspective on design choices. The chapters on Persistence and Protocols have been substantially rewritten, providing motivating examples and additional detail in the code. The treatment of yield curves and funding has been modernized, with the increased sophistication required by today's markets. And a new final chapter, describing the next phase in the evolution of derivatives valuation and risk, has been added.

This volume develops and describes an ontology of modern conflict. Modern conflict is a complex adaptive system. As such, it exhibits emergent properties, or properties that are not predictable from simple descriptions of the system. The Modern Conflict Ontology (MCO) creates a structure for collecting and analyzing information regarding both conventional and unconventional conflict in the face of uncertainty. The first three chapters of the book begin the discussion of the MCO. The first chapter introduces the foundational concepts. The second chapter discusses modern conflict in detail. The third chapter provides an overview of ontologies in sufficient detail to make the rest of the book understandable, but without covering the minutia of the subject. The next ten chapters describe the parts of the MCO. Each part is a sub-ontology and is discussed in detail, including connections to the other parts. Instances are used very liberally to ensure that the concepts are made concrete. The final chapter consolidates the descriptions of the ontology into a discussion of "what we can know." It describes the implementation history and changes from the predecessor Unconventional Conflict Ontology (UCO) to the MCO, plus some uses of the ontology and potential future enhancements. Providing an ontology that describes the entire modern conflict domain, this volume is appropriate for military professionals and academics and professionals in political science, computer science, and operations research.

Uncertainty affects us in our everyday lives, and in a wide range of situations but how do individuals and indeed organisations respond to uncertainty and how does it impact their decision-making and actions? Based on the latest developments in academic research, the author offers solid advice on how to manage uncertainty in every-day life, bringing a new perspective to these issues and extrapolating this to offer implications for an organisational and managerial context. The author brings this emerging area of research to a wider audience by: Tying together insights from various fields including psychology, engineering, business and management. Creating a framework for usefully applying the research concepts in every-day life. Extrapolating insights from the psychology of individual decision makers to the organisational context and managerial decision-making. Creating highly applicable and impactful recommendations for how managers, organisations, and every day people can understand and manage uncertainty in their life. The book is divided into two main parts. Part I deals with the behaviour of individuals facing uncertainty and includes accessible explanations and examples of every-day applications, while Part II deals with behaviour in organisations facing uncertainty, where insights from Part I are combined and related to the organisational and work context to explore how, for example, (mis)-perceptions and decision-making biases impact managerial life. This is a must read for both managers and those who are seeking to better understand their own behaviour and management approach.

Robert Cooper, who died in 2013, was the leading theorist of organization working in England over the past few decades. Describing himself as a 'social philosopher,' he was one of the first writers to introduce post-structuralist and post-modern thought into theories of organization but was always reluctant to reduce what he did to being part of 'Management.' Instead, he concentrated on thinking about organizations and organizing, working with ideas about entity and process views of organizations, and also the dualisms of organization/environment, organization/disorganization, and concentrating particularly on ideas of the boundary or seam which divides and conjoins. He wrote about, and was influenced by systems theory and post-structuralist philosophy, particularly Whitehead, Bateson, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Simmel. Cooper has already been the subject of much commentary but much of his work is not well known, and it deserves a wider readership. The purpose of this collection is to gather together a body of essays which are widely dispersed in journals and edited collections. This is a repository of pieces and extracts which stand the test of time, and scholars will benefit from a collection which pulls together some of his most influential work. The collection also contains two essays, one biographical and one intellectual, about Cooper and his work.

First published in 1993. This book is intended for managers and occupational psychologists involved in the selection and assessment of the workforce. It details the history and development of the use of biographical data for both recruitment and promotion of employees. Grounded in relevant research literature, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of biodata in different contexts. It also includes examples of applications and recommendations for use, as well as examples of questionnaires. Written by experts, it represents a wide-ranging review of the contemporary research in the field. This work will be of interest to students of business and psychology.

Assessing Business Excellence presents a strategic framework for business excellence and total quality management and shows how you can be actively involved in continuous improvement by systematically reviewing your business activities and results against holistic business excellence frameworks. For all practitioners who seek to use total quality management to improve their organization's effectiveness, efficiency and responsiveness, this title is the essential route map to business excellence. From two leading expert authors comes a book where the most recognized quality award criteria are used to explore the concepts of business excellence and self-assessment. This book: * Introduces the major business excellence and total quality frameworks including The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award and ISO9000:2000 * Compares the frameworks and identifies their strengths and limitations * Introduces the self-assessment process * Explores the main approaches to self-assessment * Illustrates the practical benefits of self-assessment through case examples

This book examines practically useful management and people skills, and looks at competencies from the micro, meso, and macro- lens. At the micro- level, the book examines a range of competencies needed for managing oneself and others in a project environment, such as personality style, cognitive skills, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. The book will also includes discussion on strategies for managing emotions of self and others effectively. At the meso- level, the book discusses basic structure, characteristics, and importance of different types of teams such as virtual teams, project teams, domain specific teams, and heavy-weight teams in organizations to enhance productivity and delegate accountability. It also explores team processes, including structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive systems, and their impact on team productivity. In addition, the book includes a discourse on skills to manage a multi-generational workforce (a combination of baby boomers, X and Y generation), a challenge faced by project managers in current scenario. Finally, at the macro- level, the book captures the role of culture in a project context; emerging leadership styles in projects, maintaining relationship with internal and external stakeholders; role of power, politics and influence in relationship building (social networks and social capital); and managing conflicts and negotiations. The book presents ethical considerations in managing projects; relationship between projects and sustainability; societal responsibilities of projects; advantages and disadvantages of forms of control in projects (behaviour and outcome control). It is positioned primarily for practitioners although it is a relevant and useful resource and reference for academics and students of project management and management studies courses.

This book presents healthcare logistics solutions that have been successfully implemented at a variety of healthcare facilities. In each case, a major challenge is presented, along with the solution approach and implementation steps, followed by the impact on hospital operations. Problems encountered when implementing the results in practice are also discussed. Much of the work presented is drawn from the experiences of members of the Center for Healthcare Operations Improvement and Research (CHOIR) at Twente, along with the CHOIR spin-off company, Rhythm.

Quadratic programming is a mathematical technique that allows for the optimization of a quadratic function in several variables. QP is a subset of Operations Research and is the next higher lever of sophistication than Linear Programming. It is a key mathematical tool in Portfolio Optimization and structural plasticity. This is useful in Civil Engineering as well as Statistics.

"Definite" is a decision support software package that improves the quality of environmental decision making since it: structures the decision process; makes full use of available information; provides a rational, responsible and justifiable decision that is open for external review; and allows the exploration of all the options by the use of 'what if?' scenarios. "Definite" is, in fact, a whole toolkit of methods that can be used on a wide variety of problems. If there is a problem to be solved and alternative solutions can be identified, then "Definite" can weigh up the alternatives and assess the most reasonable option. The system contains a number of methods for supporting problem definition as well as graphical and other methods to support representation. In the assessment of the problem, "Definite" can support priority allocation in a number of ways. "Definite" can deal with all types of alternatives, thanks to the inclusion of five different multicriteria methods, as well as cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. Related procedures such as weight assessment, standardization, discounting, and a wide variety of methods for sensitivity analysis are also available. "Definite" - allowing for fifty alternatives and fifty effects - supports the whole decision process, from problem definition to report generation. The structured approach adopted ensures that the decisions arrived at are systematic and consistent. The full version of "Definite" comprises: the book, "Multiobjective Decision Support for Environmental Management"; "The Definite User Manual"; the Definite software package; and a helpdesk for user support.

This book features a selection of contributions that were presented at the Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications Conference (MOPTA) held at Lehigh University in B ethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA between August 16-18, 2017. The conference brought together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners working on both theoretical and practical aspects of continuous and discrete optimization. Topics covered include algorithms for solving convex, network, mixed-integer, nonlinear, and global optimization problems, and address the application of deterministic andstochastic optimization techniques in energy, finance, logistics, analytics, health, and other important fields. The selected contributions in this book illustrate the broad diversity of ideas discussed at the meeting.

Operations Research (OR) emerged in an effort to improve the effectiveness of newly inducted weapons and equipment during World War II. While rapid growth ofOR led to its becoming an important aid to decision making in all sectors including defense, its contribution in defense remained largely confined to classified reports. Very few books dealing with applications of quantitative decision making techniques in military have been published presumably due to limited availability ofrelevant information. The situation changed rapidly during the last few years. The recognition of the subject of Military Operations Research (MOR) gave tremendous boost to its development. Books and journals on MOR started appearing. The number of sessions on MOR at national and international conferences also registered an increase. The volume of teaching, training and research activities in the field of MOR at military schools and non-military schools enhanced considerably. Military executives and commanders started taking increasing interest in getting scientific answers to questions pertaining to weapon acquisition, threat perception and quantification, assessment of damage or casualties, evaluation of chance of winning a battle, force mix, deployment and targeting of weapons against enemy targets, war games and scenario evaluation. Most of these problems were being tackled on the basis of intuition, judgment and experience or analysis under very simple assumptions. In an increasingly sophisticated and complex defense scenario resulting in advances in equipment and communications, the need for supplementing these practices by scientific research in MOR became imperative.