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Books > Business & Economics > Business & management > Management & management techniques > Operational research
There have been two critical leadership approaches. First Generation Leadership (command and control) was the dominant model until the 1940s. Second Generation Leadership (compliance coupled with rewards and punishments) is still dominant today. This approach is being rejected by 'Generation Y ', threatening the longevity of traditional organisations. In Third Generation Leadership and the Locus of Control, Douglas Long acknowledges the need for a leadership approach that elicits engagement, commitment, and enhanced personal, group, and organisational accountability. This is Third Generation Leadership. At its core lies the issue of where we centre our brain's locus of control and how this impacts on our understanding of and approach to leadership. With examples from everyday situations, underpinned by research, this book is about understanding and applying aspects of neuroscience critical for tomorrow's world. It provides a framework for addressing problems through insights into how the way we use our brains affects values, worldviews and behaviours. The author introduces the concept of 'red zone - blue zone' to explain the differences between a brain controlled by its stem-limbic areas (red zone) and the limbic-cortical cortex areas (blue zone). This becomes a short hand for describing and applying knowledge from neuroscience to encourage practitioners in leadership and management roles to achieve desired outcomes through becoming acquainted with different areas of their brain. Anyone grappling with what is required to deal with Generation Y people in a networked and mobile age will welcome this introduction to the world of third generation leadership.
Previous editions of Action Learning in Practice established this authoritative overview of action learning around the world. Over the last decade the move towards action-based organizational learning and development has accelerated, and action learning is now an established part of the education and development mainstream in large and small organizations. Fully revised and updated, this fourth edition covers the origins of action learning with Reg Revans' ideas, and looks at their development and application today. Action learning is self-directed learning through tackling business and work problems with the support of peers and colleagues. A professional and diverse workforce, attracted, influenced and developed in this way is more able to deal effectively with the growing complexity and pressures of working life. As the limits of conventional training and development become more obvious, leaders are increasingly attracted to action-based approaches to learning when seeking better outcomes and returns on investment.
Why do carefully planned projects fail? Projects are affected, for good or ill, by the humans who undertake them. If the plan fails to take account of the psychology of managing people and the psychology of managing change there may be trouble ahead. Sharon De Mascia's Project Psychology uses human behaviour and emerging psychological models to provide an insight into the successful management of people in projects. By selecting the right team, facilitating a common vision and by gaining a psychological understanding of how the team and the project stakeholders interact together, a project manager improves the chance of a successful outcome. Whether you are looking to set up and manage a new project or working to develop the competence and maturity of your organization's project management capability, Project Psychology will provide you with insights and tools for making sense of the people involved and for managing them to best effect.
As manufacturing companies become global, excellence will be key to the survival of Indian manufacturing businesses. Despite India's good performance on the export front in recent years, India is being outperformed by its competitors. Indian manufacturing companies must compete with global companies and become world class organizations to be competitive. Organizational Culture and its Impact on Continuous Improvement in Manufacturing presents detailed insights into recent studies, providing solutions that can be scaled up at a global level. The lack of competitiveness of Indian companies is attributed to culture in the organization as well as an inability to introduce world class manufacturing tools which would allow them to become globally competitive. All the qualities needed to become world class are not currently available, and it is imperative to understand this gap through the detailed research this book presents to ensure India's manufacturing companies can compete.
Decision makers in the Renewable Energy sector face an increasingly complex social, economic, technological, and environmental scenario in their decision process. Different groups of decision-makers become involved in the process, each group bringing along different criteria therefore, policy formulation for fossil fuel substitution by Renewable Energies must be addressed in a multi-criteria context. Multi Criteria Analysis in the Renewable Energy Industry is a direct response to the increasing interest in the Renewable Energy industry which can be seen as an important remedy to many environmental problems that the world faces today. The multiplicity of criteria and the increasingly complex social, economic, technological, and environmental scenario makes multi-criteria analysis a valuable tool in the decision-making process for fossil fuel substitution. The detailed chapters explore the use of the Multi-criteria decision-making methods and how they provide valuable assistance in reaching equitable and acceptable solutions in the selection of renewable energy projects. Common multi-criteria decision-making methods including Analytical Hierarchy Process, PROMETHEE, ELECTRE, TOPSIS and VIKOR are explored in detail with an application case of each method included at the end of each chapter. As such, Multi Criteria Analysis in the Renewable Energy Industry is an ideal resource for those groups of individuals, institutions and administration such as local authorities, academic institutions, environmental groups, and governments that, through their priorities and evaluation systems, have interests at stake and directly or indirectly influence the decision-making process.
This edited volume highlights recent research advances in humanitarian relief logistics. The contributed chapters span the spectrum of key issues and activities from preparedness to mitigation operations (response), planning and execution. The volume also presents state-of-the-art methods and systems through current case studies. Significant issues in planning and execution of humanitarian relief logistics discussed in this volume include the following: Approaches that tackle realistic relief distribution networks.
In addition to large-scale computing issues, heuristics may handle
the complexity and particularities of humanitarian supply
chains This volume provides robust evidence that research in
humanitarian logistics may lead to substantial improvements in
effectiveness and efficiency of disaster relief operations. This is
quite encouraging, since the unique characteristics of disaster
scenes provide significant opportunities for researchers to
investigate novel approaches contributing to logistics research
while offering a significant service to society.
Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World will help practitioners in any field of change engage more effectively in transformative innovation. Such innovation addresses the paradigm shift needed to meet the diverse unfolding global challenges facing us today, often summed up as the Anthropocene. Fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings - whether the context is civic or scientific - and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making. Aided by appropriate concepts and methods, this healing will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The outcome is to privilege the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us. The reader in search of new ways of thinking will be introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. The concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. A key personal and team practice is participative repatterning, which is the basis for transformative innovation. This practice is aided by new methods of visual facilitation. The reader is guided through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice.
This book provides an overview of, and practical guidance on, the range of human factors (HF) methods that can be used for the purposes of accident analysis and investigation in complex sociotechnical systems. Human Factors Methods and Accident Analysis begins with an overview of different accident causation models and an introduction to the concepts of accident analysis and investigation. It then presents a discussion focussing on the importance of, and difficulties associated with, collecting appropriate data for accident analysis purposes. Following this, a range of HF-based accident analysis methods are described, as well as step-by-step guidance on how to apply them. To demonstrate how the different methods are applied, and what the outputs are, the book presents a series of case study applications across a range of safety critical domains. It concludes with a chapter focussing on the data challenges faced when collecting, coding and analysing accident data, along with future directions in the area. Human Factors Methods and Accident Analysis is the first book to offer a practical guide for investigators, practitioners and researchers wishing to apply accident analysis methods. It is also unique in presenting a series of novel applications of accident analysis methods, including HF methods not previously used for these purposes (e.g. EAST, critical path analysis), as well as applications of methods in new domains.
This book presents the state-of-the-art in theory and practice regarding similarity and distance measures for intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Quantifying similarity and distances is crucial for many applications, e.g. data mining, machine learning, decision making, and control. The work provides readers with a comprehensive set of theoretical concepts and practical tools for both defining and determining similarity between intuitionistic fuzzy sets. It describes an automatic algorithm for deriving intuitionistic fuzzy sets from data, which can aid in the analysis of information in large databases. The book also discusses other important applications, e.g. the use of similarity measures to evaluate the extent of agreement between experts in the context of decision making.
This book describes the grounded theory approach for organization and management researchers needing to fully understand the possibilities and challenges of this method. It brings together the broadly dispersed discussions of grounded theory's logic and practices, restoring the grounded theory style of qualitative research for students and teachers of organization and management. This book is particularly useful for graduate students involved in quantitative studies of organizational and managerial life, and for academics teaching research methods courses in management and organization studies.
The Emerald Handbook of Group and Team Communication Research considers the current research of group communication scholars, provides an overview of major foci in the discipline, and points toward possible trajectories for future scholarship. It establishes group communication's central role within research on human behaviour and fosters an identity for group communication researchers. This book establishes communication scholarship as essential to group research by exploring the various dimensions of communicating in groups and teams. Communication is fundamental to group research, and the deeper, more nuanced treatment of the subject in this handbook consolidates and expands theory and research in the area.
When a venture seems to be faltering, do you persist and hope that things will get better or do you cut your losses? This may be one of the most important decisions business or project owners may ever have to make. Persistence involves the risk of throwing good money (or resources) after bad, but owners may feel they have too much invested to quit now. Escalation in Decision-Making reveals why social scientists believe that owners may not respond rationally to such predicaments. Instead of exiting when the odds are clearly stacked against them, they re-invest and end up compounding their losses - a phenomenon known as escalation of commitment. The authors, Helga Drummond and Julia Hodgson, also introduce the concept of entrapment, a variation whereby decision-makers passively drift towards insolvency as the cost of changing direction becomes too high. So: A* what drives escalation? A* why do some owners quit whilst others persist until the bailiffs arrive? A* what can we learn from owners' mistakes? A* what makes newcomers believe they can succeed where others are conspicuously failing? These questions of behavioural economics are answered using a narrative that analyses decisions made by market traders facing economic extinction. Many highly successful entrepreneurs started their careers in markets - it was once an almost guaranteed route to prosperity - now market traders are struggling to survive. Although the market traders featured are small entrepreneurs, the ubiquitous phenomenon of escalation at the heart of these stories is widely relevant to practitioners such as project managers in large organizations and to those responsible for managing risk in many situations. Rich in case studies involving real business decisions and dilemmas, Escalation in Decision-Making provides an accessible introduction to the application of theory against a background of growing interest in behavioural economics, now being researched and taught in univ
This book presents some of the most important papers published in Palgrave's Journal of Operational Research relating to the use of System Dynamics (SD) in the context of Operational Research (OR). Giving the reader an in-depth understanding of significant features of the research area which have grown over the last 20 years: applications in the management field; methodologies; policies at industry level; and healthcare, this book is an invaluable read for those who do not have any prior expertise in the field. Split into four parts, the collection covers the broad use of SD in the field of management, focuses on the use of modelling in supply chains and at industry level, and presents an analysis of the use of SD in its most promising area, healthcare. Not only does this work provide a detailed overview of the field of SD, but it will also offer vital insights into potential research avenues for the future considering the use of SD as a soft OR and hard OR method.
The book shows readers exactly how to use Lean tools to design healthcare work that is smooth, efficient, error free and focused on patients and patient outcomes. It includes in-depth discussions of every important Lean tool, including value stream maps, takt time, spaghetti diagrams, workcell design, 5S, SMED, A3, Kanban, Kaizen and many more, all presented in the context of healthcare. For example, the book explains the importance of quick operating room or exam room changeovers and shows the reader specific methods for drastically reducing changeover time. Readers will learn to create healthcare value streams where workflows are based on the pull of customer/patient demand. The book also presents a variety of ways to continue improving after initial Lean successes. Methods for finding the root causes of problems and implementing effective solutions are described and demonstrated. The approach taught here is based on the Toyota Production System, which has been adopted worldwide by healthcare organizations for use in clinical, non-clinical and administrative areas.
Following careers in the military and in industry, Robert Grattan has devoted himself to the subject of strategy and its related theory through his research into the strategy implementation employed by business, governments and the military. Strategy process is widely studied and taught but, argues Robert Grattan, comprehensive prescriptive theories have yet to be developed. This book is based on analysis of the strategic defence review (SDR) conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence, the methodology for which has been employed in other countries. The study focuses on how the review was managed through the twin lenses of strategic business management theory and the 'Essence of Decision' theory of governmental decision-making closely associated with the John F. Kennedy School of Government in the USA. The author has been fortunate in being granted interviews with the leading figures in Government, the Civil Service and the Military who participated in the SDR process and in having gained access to information in Ministry of Defence files under Freedom of Information legislation. The result is Strategic Review, a book that provides vivid insights into what happened in a large complex organisation during a major strategic review and highlights the problems likely to be encountered during the process of formulating strategy in business, in government, in sport and any other human endeavour. It will appeal to many in business intrigued by the similarities between the issues facing business and military strategists; to those involved in public policy-making; to the defence community; and to academics and higher level students with an interest in this rich field of study.
The 'MisLeadership' of this book's title is a description of the phenomenon the authors have uncovered through their analysis of the validity, or otherwise, of current leadership styles and achievements, in the light of the challenges leaders face, and particularly of the urgent global issues with which business leaders are now confronted. John Rayment and Jonathan Smith examine existing approaches to leadership with a focus on their shortcomings, categorized according to the four main types of misLeadership the authors have identified - Missing, Misguided, Misinformed and Machiavellian leadership. Each of these forms of misleadership has a corollary in one of the four elements of the kind of holistic leadership that the authors advocate - the capacity for effective decision making, the adoption of a global perspective, the move to a new business paradigm to replace the current economic and social one, and commitment to a contemporary mission. From Rayment and Smith's passionately argued, but well reasoned perspective, leaders, the led and those responsible for leadership development will gain an insight into the prevalence and causes of misleadership and into ways in which it can be identified and overcome. A range of examples and case studies is provided to enable the concepts presented here to be related to practice. As well as illustrating instances of 'misleadership' these also demonstrate that the emphasis in relation to the decision making models currently available to leaders may not be the most important stages of the processes involved. The global perspective emphasized by the authors is not just about globality in the geographical sense. An important part of the way forward suggested here involves considering all aspects of humanity - the physical, mental and spiritual strength, stamina and fitness of individuals, groups and societies, in the context of a 'Global Fitness Framework'. All this is presented in a practical and approachable style that enables these authors to introduce a new approach to a key element of management thinking, in a way that will encourage and empower individuals to think on a different scale, challenge assumptions and exercise effective leadership.
"Optimal Design of Complex Mechanical Systems" presents the foundations and practical application of multi-objective optimization methods to Vehicle Design Problems with an extensive overview of examples. The first part provides an introduction and a general theoretical information about the optimization of complex mechanical systems and multi-objective optimization methods. Several presented applications such as the global approximation approach are brand new in literature and extensively exposed the first time in this book. The second Part of the book shows some examples of the application of the proposed methods to the solution of real vehicle design problems.
Society heavily depends on infrastructure systems, such as road-traffic networks, water networks, electricity networks, etc. Infrastructure systems are hereby considered to be large-scale, networked systems, that almost everybody uses on a daily basis, and that are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defense or economic security and functioning of society. The operation and control of existing infrastructures such as road-traffic networks, water networks, electricity networks, etc. are failing: too often we are confronted with capacity problems, unsafety, unreliability and inefficiency. This book concentrates on a wide range of problems concerning the way infrastructures are functioning today and discuss novel advanced, intelligent, methods and tools for the operation and control of existing and future infrastructures.
Over the last three decades the world economy has grown strongly on the back of 'globalization' supported by the policies of free-trade, open markets and privatisation. Support has also grown for the concept of 'sustainability', meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. But as the Earth's systems come under increasing strain, the inherent conflict between sustainability and globalization has been exposed. Green Outcomes in a Real World examines the shift in thinking required to reconcile these two important areas of policy. In this ground breaking book, Peter McManners has coined the term 'Proximization' to define a new policy framework. The principles of Proximization are: 'sustainability', 'subsidiarity', 'primacy of the state' and 'market economics' and the application of these familiar concepts towards a sustainable globalised world is novel and different. The author argues that adherence to the principles of proximization will return world society to a stable natural order, and will mean changes. Global commodity flows will reduce and barriers to migration will increase. National governments will demand more control over their finances leading to restrictions on capital flows. Indeed, Peter believes that an element of 'selfish determination' is needed. The new world order will be sustainable by design. Global organisations such as the UN, national governments and global corporations will have to understand and apply a different paradigm. The arguments in this book do not reflect the idealism or even naivety of some of the green movement. This book is about hard-edged reality presented by an author with huge experience and a deep understanding of the business perspective. It will appeal to a wide range of professionals involved in setting policy and future direction for businesses, governments, and non-governmental bodies, as well as to those with an academic interest in business, economics, social and environmental issues, and public policy.
The aim of this book is to bring students of economics and finance who have only an introductory background in mathematics up to a quite advanced level in the subject, thus preparing them for the core mathematical demands of econometrics, economic theory, quantitative finance and mathematical economics, which they are likely to encounter in their final-year courses and beyond. The level of the book will also be useful for those embarking on the first year of their graduate studies in Business, Economics or Finance. The book also serves as an introduction to quantitative economics and finance for mathematics students at undergraduate level and above. In recent years, mathematics graduates have been increasingly expected to have skills in practical subjects such as economics and finance, just as economics graduates have been expected to have an increasingly strong grounding in mathematics. The authors avoid the pitfalls of many texts that become too theoretical. The use of mathematical methods in the real world is never lost sight of and quantitative analysis is brought to bear on a variety of topics including foreign exchange rates and other macro level issues.
Volume 29 of Research in Organizational Change and Development includes ten contributions from colleagues around the globe with powerful insights and potentially relevant impact for researching and practicing organization change and development during and post the pandemic. The emerging people analytics subfield and organization development perspectives are brought together to present an integrated framework that can guide future theoretical development and practice. Bourdieu's concept of social position in the form of "habitus oriented approach" expands our understanding of human behavior. Lewin's original view of political labs is advanced to examine the emerging phenomenon of labs as mechanisms for organization change and development. The alignment challenges of strategy and digital technology in government organizations is examined via the use of collaborative inquiry. The essence and context of collaboration in teams is investigated in the emerging new workplace. The current state of organizational DEI practice is examined and a new framework for diagnosing and addressing small-scale diversity-related challenges is introduced. Digital transformation suggests the need for a new STS platform with new guiding design principles. The establishment of a collaborative community generated insights into the challenges faced by healthcare organizations. Action research supported new cooperation and partnership between universities and external organizations. In the new "Reflection" feature, the author compares organization development (OD) and change management (CM) across eight concepts that are relevant to both OD and CM.
Biomarker discovery is an important area of biomedical research that may lead to significant breakthroughs in disease analysis and targeted therapy. Biomarkers are biological entities whose alterations are measurable and are characteristic of a particular biological condition. Discovering, managing, and interpreting knowledge of new biomarkers are challenging and attractive problems in the emerging field of biomedical informatics. This volume is a collection of state-of-the-art research into the application of data mining to the discovery and analysis of new biomarkers. Presenting new results, models and algorithms, the included contributions focus on biomarker data integration, information retrieval methods, and statistical machine learning techniques. This volume is intended for students, and researchers in bioinformatics, proteomics, and genomics, as well engineers and applied scientists interested in the interdisciplinary application of data mining techniques.
No matter how many resources we consume we never seem to have enough. The Economics of Abundance is a balanced book in which Wolfgang Hoeschele challenges why this is so. He claims that our current capitalist economy can exist only on the basis of manufactured scarcity created by 'scarcity-generating institutions', and these institutions manipulate both demand and supply of commodities. Therefore demand consistently exceeds supply, and profits and economic growth can continue - at the cost of individual freedom, social equity, and ecological sustainability. The fact that continual increases in demand are so vital to our economy leads to an impasse: many people see no alternative to the generation of ever more demand, but at the same time recognize that it is clearly unsustainable ecologically and socially. So, can demand only be reduced by curtailing freedom and is this acceptable? This book argues that, by analyzing how scarcity-generating institutions work and then reforming or dismantling them, we can enhance individual freedom and support entrepreneurial initiative, and at the same time make progress toward social justice and environmental sustainability by reducing demands on vital resources. This vision would enable activists in many fields (social justice, civil liberties, and environmental protection), as well as many entrepreneurs and other members of civil society to work together much more effectively, make it more difficult to portray all these groups as contradictory special interests, and thereby help generate momentum for positive change. Meanwhile, for academics in many fields of study, the concept of the creation of scarcity or abundance may be a highly useful analytical tool.
Spatial planning is about dealing with our 'everyday' environment. In A Planner's Encounter with Complexity we present various understandings of complexity and how the environment is considered accordingly. One of these considerations is the environment as subject to processes of continuous change, being either progressive or destructive, evolving non-linearly and alternating between stable and dynamic periods. If the environment that is subject to change is adaptive, self-organizing, robust and flexible in relation to this change, a process of evolution and co-evolution can be expected. This understanding of an evolving environment is not mainstream to every planner. However, in A Planner's Encounter with Complexity, we argue that environments confronted with discontinuous, non-linear evolving processes might be more real than the idea that an environment is simply a planner's creation. Above all, we argue that recognizing the 'complexity' of our environment offers an entirely new perspective on our world and our environment, on planning theory and practice, and on the raison d'Atre of the planners that we are. A Planner's Encounter with Complexity is organized into 17 chapters. It begins with the interplay of planning and complexity from the perspective of contemporary planning theory. It continues by critically assessing planning theory and practice in the light of the interdisciplinary debate regarding complexity thinking. As the book progresses, it positions itself ever closer to the perspective of complexity thinking, looking at the planning discipline 'from the outside in', clarifying the facets of complexity and its importance in planning. Finally, conceptual and theoretical developments towards more applied examples are identified in order to see the interplay of planning and complexity in practice. This book emphasizes the importance of complexity in planning, clarifies many of the concepts and theories, presents examples on planning and complexity, and proposes new ideas and methods for planning.
This book mainly introduces some techniques of decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment and expands the applications of hesitant fuzzy sets in solving practical problems. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce some techniques about decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment, (2) to prove these techniques theoretically and (3) to apply the involved techniques to practical problems. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how hesitant fuzzy set could be employed in decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis and motivates researchers to expand more application fields of hesitant fuzzy set. |
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