Fostering Creativity in Self and the Organization: Your Professional Edge

$21.99

As a professional, this book will help you maximize your creative potential – learning that successful creative expression is a function of hard work and discipline rather than innate talent or genius. The author explains more in his video below. Fostering Creativity in Self and The Organization: Your Professional Edge helps individuals, and their organizations, learn to maximize creative potential. The book explodes the myth that creative people are born rather than developed through practice and hard work. All people are creative and have the ability to be innovative, not just artists, musicians and writers. The Professional Edge defines these skills and demonstrates how to develop them. These are the skills required of 21st century professionals, which can be developed through awareness, coaching and practice resulting in mastery. This book will appeal to anyone seeking to advance his or her career. It will also be of great value to human resource executives who want to guide the development of a workforce that has the skills to effectively compete in fast-paced competitive industries or to open up new and innovative blue ocean market spaces.

A Profile of the Automobile and Motor Vehicle Industry: Innovation, Transformation, Globalization

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The motor vehicle industry is one of the world’s largest. More than 1 billion vehicles are in use around the world, and 80 million are produced and sold annually. Motor vehicles–including passenger cars, trucks, and commercial vehicles such as buses and taxis–are the principal means by which people and goods are transported within and among most communities in the world. This book details the history of the motor vehicle and of the leading carmakers. Inside, you’ll learn just how cars are made and sold; the leading suppliers of parts that go into a car; the increasing role of government in regulating vehicles; and future challenges for the industry. The motor vehicle industry includes corporations that design, develop, and manufacture cars and trucks. These carmakers, such as Ford and Toyota, are among the world’s most-familiar corporate brands. The motor vehicle industry also encompasses lesser-known businesses, including several thousand parts makers, tens of thousands of retailers, and specialized lending agencies. The importance of the motor vehicle industry transcends even its central role in the global economy. The industry was responsible for many of the fundamental innovations of 20th century production, such as corporate organization, manufacturing processes, and labor relations, as well as sales innovations including product branding and consumer financing. In the 21st century, the motor vehicle industry has been a leader in adopting new production strategies and expanding into new markets.

Service Mining: Framework and Application

$21.99

The shifting focus of service from the 1980s to 2000s has proved that IT not only lowers the cost of service but creates avenues to enhance and increase revenue through service. The new type of service, e-service, is mobile, flexible, interactive, and interchangeable. While service science provides an avenue for future service researches, the specific research areas from the IT perspective still need to be elaborated. This book introduces a novel concept–service mining–to address several research areas from technology, model, management, and application perspectives. Service mining is defined as ‘a systematical process including service discovery, service experience, service recovery, and service retention to discover unique patterns and exceptional values within the existing services.’ The goal of service mining is similar to data mining, text mining, or web mining, and aims to ‘detect something new’ from the service pool. The major difference is the feature of service is quite distinct from the mining target, like data or text. This book devises concepts of service mining and identifies the possible applications. The author provides a roadmap of service mining to researchers, managers, and marketers in service sectors.

Leadership Talk: A Discourse Approach to Leader Emergence

$21.99

Traditionally, management theories have taken a psychological approach to leadership, often assuming that it is a personality trait located within an individual. In contrast, the discursive approach to leadership, which is the focus of this book, assumes that leadership is created through communication practices. As a leader, this book will provide you with an in-depth look at an emerging approach to the study of business leadership that focuses on language as a vehicle for communicating leadership. The authors explore a new definition of leadership as the expression of ideas in talk or in action that are recognized by others as capable of progressing tasks or solving problems. The practical implication of this view of leadership suggests that leaders must constantly enact and communicate their relationship to their followers in such a way as to be recognized by them as a leader. Inside, you and future leaders will learn how to approach leadership more effectively as a communication practice that involves and depends upon the response of potential followers.

Management in Islamic Countries: Principles and Practice

$21.99

Up until now, much of the Islamic perspectives discussed and published center around understanding Islamic finance and banking. Given that Islam is an all-encompassing code of conduct and offers insight on all aspects of life, there is clearly a need for more all-encompassing academic content related to topics other than Islamic finance. The recent growth and interest in Islamic finance has left many business CEOs, students, and managers around the world without an inside view of Islamic management–until now. This book offers an Islamic perspective on business ethics, marketing, leadership, and human resource management, and the author explains it all with a true inside understanding. The author also includes insight into the Islamic religion and how that affects business and overall management. From a personal, firsthand experience and perspective, the author provides an authentic picture of Islamic management. This book includes models, exercises and examples, discussion questions, and study questions; and if you’re conducting research into this area, it includes references for additional readings.

Leading Latino Talent to Champion Innovation

$21.99

This book is a study on how to unlock the innovative potential of the US Latino workforce. It goes beyond diversity by looking into how this emerging segment of the workforce views, accepts, and embraces innovation. This book really lends itself to understanding that innovation emanates from human beings, and cultural influences will determine how innovation is defined. Latinos will make up 31 percent of the US workforce by the year 2050, and a significant part of the country’s knowledge workers will come from this demographic.
One of the most influential factors of the 21st century is the Latino community–how the culture views, defines, and helps lead innovation in the United States. But achieving sustainable innovation success is a concept many corporations struggle to attain, often the result of too much effort directed at processes rather than focusing on the source of innovation–its human capital. This book helps you realize that innovation emanates from human beings and people view innovation differently based on their cultural upbringing. Since the 1980s the United States Latino population has been on a steady growth path that has established this group as the largest ‘minority’ in the country, making this community a significant portion of the U.S. workforce for decades to come. The authors help you learn how to prepare, recruit, and position knowledge workers with this cultural background to contribute innovation successes to their firms.

Financing New Ventures: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Angel Investment

$21.99

Many business ventures today are looking to attract external financing, with an emphasis on business angel investment. Inside this text, the author incorporates the views of business angels, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and legal advisors; and draws upon the latest academic thinking on financing new ventures, providing comparisons between business angel and venture capital investing to further inform the reader. The concepts, principles, and guidelines presented can help you and any entrepreneur, business support agency, business student, and others interested in raising external investment and in developing an ‘investable’ business. The book is organized into seven chapters covering: * Fundamental concepts of entrepreneurial venturing and entrepreneurial finance * Market conditions from which investable businesses emerge * The investment process * Deal negotiations * The post-investment relationship between entrepreneur and investor * Recent trends affecting how entrepreneurs raise finance that include strategic exits, ‘super angels,’ and the emergence of ‘crowdfunding’.

Monetary Policy within the IS-LM Framework

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The majority of economists would admit that money is powerful and that changes in money will impact the economy. Monetary theory analyzes and determines how changes in the supply of money affect the economy. This book details the collection of policies that use monetary tools known as monetary policy. For example, the main monetary authority of a country is its central bank. In the United States it is called the Federal Reserve Bank System (Fed), which is a federation of 12 Federal Reserve Banks. The Fed is responsible for initiating printing of money, monitoring the interest rate, and controlling the supply of money in the economy. Monetary authorities are shielded from executive branch interference by serving 14-year terms. This allows them to act without worrying about political fallout or fear of losing their jobs. The ability to work and function independently from political pressure has been used to claim that the supply of money is exogenous. Inside this authoritative text, the author gives real insight to the IS-LM Framework (Investment Saving-Liquidity Preference Money Supply) and the effects on our economy.

SPeak Performance: Using the Power of Metaphors to Communicate Vision, Motivate People, and Lead Your Organization to Success

$21.99

Every leader needs to move people to action and align everyone’s actions toward the same goal. But how is this best accomplished? Words are a leader’s greatest tool, and metaphors are the most potent combination of words available.
This book will provide you with communication tools that will take your leadership to the next level and beyond. Through the proper use of metaphors, anyone can become a better leader, align his or her team with their organizational values, and lead the organization to success. Metaphors activate vision and mission statements, enliven goals and objectives, and literally align every aspect of an organization in its intended direction.
The knowledge gained from the principles in this book will help leaders develop stronger vision and mission statements that are action oriented, and it will provide a schematic to organize goals and objectives that are relevant and focused on accomplishing the vision.

Customers Inside, Customers Outside: Designing and Succeeding With Enterprise Customer-Centricity Concepts, Practices, and Applications

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Over the past several years, leading companies have entered a period of major marketing and operational adjustment and convergence, or intersection. It’s a reaction to a critical fact of life: Customers–not organizations– now control the decision-making dynamics and how organizations are perceived. We are witnessing significant multichannel media application (and resultant omnichannel access by consumers), along with more effective and pervasive customer data gathering, analysis, and modeling. If you’re observing these major shifts in your own organization, you’ll need this book. Inside, you’ll learn how to build proactive customer communication, improve relationships, drive positive brand perception, optimize channel selection and message personalization, and enhance employee-related factors (hiring, training, reward, recognition), all leading to superior customer experience and a customercentric culture. In addition, the author has incorporated content on ‘Big Data’ generation and analytics, which you’ll master while scoring a direct hit to the moving target–your continuously changing, and increasingly independent, customer base.