This book develops a general theory of managerial decision making on the basis of a few elementary postulates. It employs logic as the method of reasoning, systems science in general and the systemic YoYo Model in particular, as the intuitive playground. By doing so, the authors take individually background-based guesswork out of processes of decision making. All established conclusions are expected to be generally employable in real-life applications. At the same time, the book is user friendly to a wide range of audience, coincides with people's intuition, and provides applicable results and insights for practical purposes.

Certain consultants argue leaders can quickly, easily, and considerably alter their organization cultures to improve performance. Conversely, field researchers have described situations where leaders could do little to alter the existing organization culture. Between these extreme positions, a spectrum of varying degrees of leader influence exists, and organizations fall at various places along this spectrum. This book presents five field studies dealing with team, service, and sales cultures where both expected and unexpected outcomes arose. In multiple instances, leaders hoped showing some employee appreciation would compensate for offering below market average wages. Several leadership groups were prospering based on cost cuts or increased sales. Those below often had their work intensified and they were experiencing greater stress. Eight paradoxical situations were uncovered and the interpretations of the participants were based in part on their personal work histories and the history of their current organization. In each case, evidence of employee informal organization and managerial operating cultures were documented. Analyzing Organization Cultures uses detailed case studies of five work organizations to offer a comparative approach to analyzing organizational culture. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, management history, human resource management, and organizational theory.

In the current climate attention has refocused on lean production. While books have looked at the principles of lean production and techniques, this book from McKinsey & Company, the world's most influential management consultancy, provides a unique approach, which is holistic in nature and argues that lean must be central to the strategy and mindset of the company or organization. It will be the most comprehensive book on the tangible and intangible aspects of lean transformation with a complete overview of how organizations should embark upon this arising from the cutting edge work done by the authors with leading companies worldwide.

Quadratic programming (QP) is one advanced mathematical technique that allows for the optimization of a quadratic function in several variables in the presence of linear constraints. This book presents recently developed algorithms for solving large QP problems and focuses on algorithms which are, in a sense optimal, i.e., they can solve important classes of problems at a cost proportional to the number of unknowns. For each algorithm presented, the book details its classical predecessor, describes its drawbacks, introduces modifications that improve its performance, and demonstrates these improvements through numerical experiments.

This self-contained monograph can serve as an introductory text on quadratic programming for graduate students and researchers. Additionally, since the solution of many nonlinear problems can be reduced to the solution of a sequence of QP problems, it can also be used as a convenient introduction to nonlinear programming.

Finance and Risk Management for International Logistics and the Supply Chain presents a detailed overview of financial and risk management tools, activity-based costing, and multi-criteria decision-making, providing comprehensive guidance for those researching and working in logistics and supply chain management. The book breaks new ground, combining the expertise of leading authorities to analyze and navigate the funding components for these critical transportation functions. As the international logistics and supply chain transportation fields have recently received heavy investments, this research and the theory behind it provide a timely update on risk management, finance and legal and environmental impacts. Users will find sections that address the wide-ranging issues related to this emerging field that are presented from an international and holistic perspective.

The book presents the proceedings of the 5th EAI International Conference on Management of Manufacturing Systems (MMS 2020), which took place online on October 27-29, 2020. The conference covers the management of manufacturing systems with support for Industry 4.0, logistics and intelligent manufacturing systems and applications, cooperation management, and its effective applications. Topics include RFID applications, economic impacts in logistics, ICT support for Industry 4.0, industrial and smart Logistics, intelligent manufacturing systems and applications, and much more. The topic is of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and academics in manufacturing and communications engineering.

Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems provides current and future researchers, developers and practitioners with the latest thinking on the emerging interdisciplinary field of Transportation Cyber Physical Systems (TCPS). The book focuses on enhancing efficiency, reducing environmental stress, and meeting societal demands across the continually growing air, water and land transportation needs of both people and goods. Users will find a valuable resource that helps accelerate the research and development of transportation and mobility CPS-driven innovation for the security, reliability and stability of society at-large. The book integrates ideas from Transport and CPS experts and visionaries, consolidating the latest thinking on the topic. As cars, traffic lights and the built environment are becoming connected and augmented with embedded intelligence, it is important to understand how smart ecosystems that encompass hardware, software, and physical components can help sense the changing state of the real world.

This book encompasses the study of hybrid switching di usion processes and their applications. The word \hybrid" signi es the coexistence of c- tinuous dynamics and discrete events, which is one of the distinct features of the processes under consideration. Much of the book is concerned with the interactions of the continuous dynamics and the discrete events. Our motivations for studying such processes originate from emerging and - isting applications in wireless communications, signal processing, queueing networks, production planning, biological systems, ecosystems, nancial engineering, and modeling, analysis, and control and optimization of lar- scale systems, under the in uence of random environments. Displaying mixture distributions, switching di usions may be described by the associated operators or by systems of stochastic di erential eq- tions together with the probability transition laws of the switching actions. We either have Markov-modulated switching di usions or processes with continuous state-dependent switching. The latter turns out to be much more challenging to deal with. Viewing the hybrid di usions as a number of di usions joined together by the switching process, they may be se- ingly not much di erent from their di usion counterpart. Nevertheless, the underlying problems become more di cult to handle, especially when the switching processes depend on continuous states. The di culty is due to the interaction of the discrete and continuous processes and the tangled and hybrid information pattern.

One current challenge of conducting research from the leadership-as-practice perspective is a practical one: how to capture and analyse the elusive practice of leadership within the web of mundane organising processes. Although a number of researchers have attempted to address the issue, there is not yet a definitive 'how to' guide to making sense of the empirical manifestations of leadership practices. The book responds directly to this challenge and offers a theoretical framework and practical guidance to capturing, identifying and analysing evidence of leadership practice emergence; and provides implications of this approach for leadership academics and practitioners. The developed framework enables a method for understanding these leadership instances as they are enacted by individuals within and against the evolving activities of their day-to-day work. The framework is underpinned by cultural-historical activity theory and critical realism and it conceptualises leadership practice by placing agents' actions and interactions within the context of their relationships, objectives, experiences, material and non-material artefacts and wider organising processes and organisational structures; work that has not yet been undertaken in the field. It offers a strong theoretical foundation for further development of our understanding of leadership-as-practice, providing a methodological guidance for undertaking leadership-as-practice research, and enables a discussion on the variety of underlying processes and elements as they emerge from empirical observations. It will be of value to researchers, academics, professionals, and students in the fields of business and management with a particular interest in management theory, organisational studies, and leadership research.

Sustainable Self-Governance in Businesses and Society offers a sound introduction to Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) and clarifies its relevance to support organisational sustainability and self-governance. While the VSM has been known since the early 1980s, it hasn't been always easy to understand and to apply. It explains the self-transformation methodology to analyse the way organisations manage (or not) their complexity and govern themselves. The work is supported by multiple examples of application in organisations of all scales - from small to multi-national corporations and from organised social networks to communities and national organisations. It clarifies the relevance of Beer's theory to support systemic learning and change in organisations, and to coach them to self-organise and self-govern. Readers interested in further understanding insights from complex systems and cybernetics theories for designing and transforming organisations will benefit from this book, as it works to offer very detailed insights on how to put the VSM theory into practice. It clarifies how it improves adaptive capabilities, agile and self-regulated structures, more capable of fully implementing corporate sustainability strategies and self-governing themselves. The chapters provide key reading for managers, consultants, practitioners, and post-graduate students working in organisational transformation, governance, and sustainability.

This book gathers selected papers presented at the International Conference on Advances in Applied Probability and Stochastic Processes, held at CMS College, Kerala, India, on 7-10 January 2019. It showcases high-quality research conducted in the field of applied probability and stochastic processes by focusing on techniques for the modelling and analysis of systems evolving with time. Further, it discusses the applications of stochastic modelling in queuing theory, reliability, inventory, financial mathematics, operations research, and more. This book is intended for a broad audience, ranging from researchers interested in applied probability, stochastic modelling with reference to queuing theory, inventory, and reliability, to those working in industries such as communication and computer networks, distributed information systems, next-generation communication systems, intelligent transportation networks, and financial markets.

A groundbreaking and revolutionary book that will transform how lean is understood, practiced, and used within organizations A lean strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form, lean has been radically effective, but its true powers have yet to be harnessed. Lean Strategy harnesses that power and delivers a new way of creating value from lean. Leading lean experts address popular misconceptions about the basics of lean/TPS, showing the true purpose of tools, methods, and attitudes that leverage the intelligence of every employee doing the work. You'll learn how to think-and then act-differently, tapping the power of every person in your organization in a disciplined manner that generates unparalleled, sustainable success that is responsive to today's most pressing challenges

This book offers an in-depth and systematic introduction to improved failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) methods for proactive healthcare risk analysis. Healthcare risk management has become an increasingly important issue for hospitals and managers. As a prospective reliability analysis technique, FMEA has been widely used for identifying and eliminating known and potential failures in systems, designs, products or services. However, the traditional FMEA has a number of weaknesses when applied to healthcare risk management. This book provides valuable insights into useful FMEA methods and practical examples that can be considered when applying FMEA to enhance the reliability and safety of the healthcare system. This book is very interesting for practitioners and academics working in the fields of healthcare risk management, quality management, operational research, and management science and engineerin. It can be considered as the guiding document for how a healthcare organization proactively identifies, manages and mitigates the risk of patient harm. This book also serves as a valuable reference for postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.

Health threats pose significant dangers to humankind and form a major source of human suffering and sorrow. Responsible leadership and reasoned decision making can significantly improve the arenas that are affected by health threats, through establishing a better allocation of very scarce resources for building health capabilities and for increasing health preparedness, responsiveness and resilience. This book examines how public health leaders can use the cutting-edge research from Decision Sciences to better manage emerging and re-emerging health threats, with a focus on enhancing health security. While these decisions must be informed by the best available evidence, they must also address competing priorities and key uncertainties and must mitigate critical risks, albeit in a cost-effective manner which seeks to maximize societal value. This is a book about how decisions on health security can be improved, both in terms of the content that is utilized in a health decision analysis and the decision processes that are employed in reaching a decision. This decision-focused perspective can help public health leaders and public health experts to increase the health preparedness of health systems, the task of which involves improving health capabilities, increasing the robustness of health systems against health threats, as well as strengthening health resilience and the responsiveness of these systems against disease outbreaks.

Transforming Climate Finance and Green Investment with Blockchains establishes and analyzes the connection between this revolutionary technology and global efforts to combat climate change. The benefits of blockchain come through various profound alterations, such as the adoption of smart contracts that are set to redefine governance and regulatory structures and transaction systems in coming decades. Each chapter contains a problem statement that describes the challenges blockchain technology can address. The book brings together original visions and insights from global members of the Blockchain Climate Institute, comprising thought leaders, financial professionals, international development practitioners, technology entrepreneurs, and more. This book will help readers understand blockchain technology and how it can facilitate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and accelerate the global transition to a green economy.

This book presents a panorama about the recent progress of industrial mathematics from the point of view of both industrials and researchers. The chapters correspond to a selection of the contributions presented in the "Industry Day" and in the Minisymposium "EU - MATHS - IN: Success Stories of Applications of Mathematics to Industry" organized in the framework of the International Conference ICIAM 2019 held in Valencia (Spain) on July 15-19, 2019. In the Industry Day, included for the first time in this series of Conferences, representatives of companies from different countries and several sectors presented their view about the benefits regarding the usage of mathematical tools and/or collaboration with mathematicians. The contributions of this special session were addressed to industry people. Minisymposium contributions detailed some collaborations between mathematicians and industrials that led to real benefits in several European companies. All the speakers were affiliated in some of the European National Networks that constitute the European Service Network of Mathematics for Industry and Innovation (EU-MATHS-IN).

The availability of today's online information systems rapidly increases the relevance of dynamic decision making within a large number of operational contexts. Whenever a sequence of interdependent decisions occurs, making a single decision raises the need for anticipation of its future impact on the entire decision process. Anticipatory support is needed for a broad variety of dynamic and stochastic decision problems from different operational contexts such as finance, energy management, manufacturing and transportation. Example problems include asset allocation, feed-in of electricity produced by wind power as well as scheduling and routing. All these problems entail a sequence of decisions contributing to an overall goal and taking place in the course of a certain period of time. Each of the decisions is derived by solution of an optimization problem. As a consequence a stochastic and dynamic decision problem resolves into a series of optimization problems to be formulated and solved by anticipation of the remaining decision process.

However, actually solving a dynamic decision problem by means of approximate dynamic programming still is a major scientific challenge. Most of the work done so far is devoted to problems allowing for formulation of the underlying optimization problems as linear programs. Problem domains like scheduling and routing, where linear programming typically does not produce a significant benefit for problem solving, have not been considered so far. Therefore, the industry demand for dynamic scheduling and routing is still predominantly satisfied by purely heuristic approaches to anticipatory decision making. Although this may work well for certain dynamic decision problems, these approaches lack transferability of findings to other, related problems.

This book has serves two major purposes:

It provides a comprehensive and unique view of anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making. It fully integrates Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, data mining and optimization and introduces a new perspective on approximate dynamic programming. Moreover, the book identifies different degrees of anticipation, enabling an assessment of specific approaches to dynamic decision making.

It shows for the first time how to successfully solve a dynamic vehicle routing problem by approximate dynamic programming. It elaborates on every building block required for this kind of approach to dynamic vehicle routing. Thereby the book has a pioneering character and is intended to provide a footing for the dynamic vehicle routing community."

"Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, "provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide. "

In this book, one of the most highly recognized entrepreneurship scholars shares in a personal and readable way his rich experience and ideas on how entrepreneurship can be researched. Entrepreneurship is a phenomenon of tremendous societal importance. It is also an elusive phenomenon, which makes researching it fun, fascinating-and frustrating at times. In this fully updated edition, numerous real examples accompany the treatment of problems and solutions concerning design, sampling, operationalization and analysis. Researching Entrepreneurship is targeted primarily at research students and academics who are relatively new to research or to entrepreneurship research. This said, basic knowledge of research methods is assumed, and when foundational issues are discussed they are typically approach from a non-standard angle and/or with an eye to illuminate entrepreneurship-specific problems and solutions. This makes large parts of the contents potentially valuable for entrepreneurship scholars at any level of research proficiency. The book is also of interest to sophisticated, non-academic users with a professional interest in collecting and analyzing data from emerging and young ventures, and to those who make use of published entrepreneurship research. For example, analysts in marketing research or consultancy firms, business associations, statistical agencies and other government offices may find this book to be a valuable tool. Moreover, while the examples are derived from entrepreneurship research, the book provides a unique "experienced empirical researcher" (rather than "textbook method expert") treatment of issues that are of equal relevance across the social sciences. This goes for topics like the role of theory; research design; validity assessment; statistical inference, and replication. Entrepreneurship research has developed rapidly in the decade that has passed since the first edition. Therefore, all chapters have been comprehensively updated and many have been extended; sometimes to twice the original length. Two of the original chapters have been excluded to make room for entirely new chapters on "the Dependent Variable" and "The Entrepreneurship Nexus." While retaining a unique, personal tone, the author uses examples and references that build on contributions from a large number of top entrepreneurship researchers.

As time and distance become conquerable in a global economy, understanding the future of supply chain management is the process of understanding how the world interacts. Innovations in Logistics and Supply Chain Management Technologies for Dynamic Economies disseminates supply chain management and applied logistic theories, technology development, innovation, and transformation in various economic sectors upon current, advancing technological opportunities and market imperatives. In a world where efficiency is crucial, applied research and developments in logistics and supply chain management included in this volume is paramount.

The papers presented in this open access book address diverse challenges in decarbonizing energy systems, ranging from operational to investment planning problems, from market economics to technical and environmental considerations, from distribution grids to transmission grids, and from theoretical considerations to data provision concerns and applied case studies. While most papers have a clear methodological focus, they address policy-relevant questions at the same time. The target audience therefore includes academics and experts in industry as well as policy makers, who are interested in state-of-the-art quantitative modelling of policy relevant problems in energy systems. The 2nd International Symposium on Energy System Optimization (ISESO 2018) was held at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) under the symposium theme "Bridging the Gap Between Mathematical Modelling and Policy Support" on October 10th and 11th 2018. ISESO 2018 was organized by the KIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), the Heidelberg University, the German Aerospace Center and the University of Stuttgart.

The purpose of this book is to describe how lean and supply chain management can be combined to achieve world-class business performance. To accomplish this purpose, the book contains both basic material on lean and supply chain management, as well as content from current journal research findings, strategies, issues, concepts, philosophies, procedures, methodologies, and practices in managing a lean supply chain. Presented in a topical fashion, the chapters deal with a wide-range of subjects that support, nurture, and advance principles, concepts, and methodologies of lean supply chain management.

This book proposes novel methods for solving different types of non-cooperative games with interval/fuzzy/intuitionistic fuzzy payoffs. It starts by discussing several existing methods and shows that some mathematically incorrect assumptions have been considered in all these methods. It then proposes solutions to adapt those methods and validate the new proposed methods, such as Gaurika method Ambika-I-IV, Mehar method and others, by using them for solving existing numerical problems. The book offers a comprehensive guide on non-cooperative games with fuzzy payoffs to both students and researchers. It provides them with the all the necessary tools to understand the methods and the theory behind them.

Since its opening in 1978, China has undergone radical change. By establishing special economic zones along its Eastern coastal borders under Deng Xioping's tutelage, China entered the global market. Loosening controls from central government allowed for a more free-market approach that facilitated easier trading partnerships across national boundaries. Leadership and China: Philosophy, Place and Practice explores the impact of these changes today. Companies across the globe are doing business with Chinese counterparts, but recently the Western world has begun treating China with suspicion, with some commentators claiming nefarious aims on the part of Chinese Communist Party, and intentions of favoring China's growing middle class and political elites, while impoverishing other international trading partners. This calls for wise leadership on both sides of the political divide and this book facilitates conversations that explore synergies between East and West, aiming to move past suspicion and discuss how leaders might work for the benefit of all humanity. With an orientation towards conversations rather than polemics, graduate students, scholars and business leaders across the globe will benefit from this book.

With the beginning of the twentieth century, American corporations in the chemical and electrical industries began establishing industrial research laboratories. Some went on to become world-famous not only for their scientific and technological breakthroughs but also for the new union of science and industry they represented. Innovative ideas do not simply appear out of the blue and spread on their own merit. Rather, the laboratory's diffusion takes place in a cultural context that goes beyond corporate capital and technological change. Using discourse analysis as a method to comprehensively capture the organizational field of the early American R&D laboratories from 1870 to 1930, this book uncovers the collective meanings associated with the industrial laboratory. Meanings such as what and where a laboratory is supposed to be, who the scientist is, and what it means to practice science provided cultural resources that made the transfer of the laboratory from academic science into an industrial setting possible by rendering such meanings understandable and operable to big business and organizational entrepreneurs fighting for hegemony in a rapidly evolving market. It analyzes not only the corporations that established laboratories in the United States but also their contexts - economic, political, and especially scientific - showing how "the industrial laboratory" was transformed from an organizational novelty into an expected institution in less than two decades. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, historians, and students in the fields of organizational change, discourse studies, the management of technology and innovation, as well as business and management history.