A Primer on Corporate Governance, Second Edition

$21.99

This long-awaited second edition book is a primer on corporate governance for large, publicly held companies in the United States–the system that defines the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants in a corporation, and spells out the rules and procedures for making decisions on corporate affairs. As with any complex system, corporate governance functions best when all of its constituent elements work in harmony, when each performs its assigned role, with the right incentives, properly aligned interests, and the right tools for the job. The turbulent history of corporate governance in recent years is a testimony that this has not always been the case. A good number of the books written on corporate governance focus on legal issues–the rights and obligations of the various stakeholders under federal and state laws–or take the perspective of individual or institutional external shareholders. This book, with much updated material, is positioned differently; it approaches corporate governance from an executive perspective and is designed to help the reader become a more effective participant in the corporate governance system–as an executive dealing with a board, as a director, or as a representative of a company’s other numerous stakeholders.

Marketing Strategy for Small- to Medium-Sized Manufacturers: A Practical Guide for Generating Growth, Profit, and Sales

$21.99

Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried to grow your business but have produced less-than-desired results. You’ve learned that your working capital, cash flow, financial ratios, and overall profitability are insufficient to afford the costs of needed sales, marketing, and promotional strategies typically called for to find and develop new customers, markets, and products. It’s very common that company executives do not follow generally accepted basic business practices such as knowing product costs and margins, obtaining strategically useful information about customers, conducting market research to identify prospective customers, and understanding competitors’ advantages and disadvantages needed to build effective growth strategies. Based on 21 case studies and 126 reviews of manufacturers’ sales and marketing practices, this book explains the common pitfalls so many companies experience, and it offers common sense, practicable, and affordable step-by-step ‘how to’s’ for cost and profitability analyses on products and customers. It will help you find prospective new customers, conduct smart market research, and decipher and use competitor intelligence. It also provides guidelines for determining the best combination of sales coverage for inside/outside sales and independent reps and for estimating the cost to implement sales, marketing, promotional, and growth strategies.

Multi-objective Decision Analysis: Managing Trade-offs and Uncertainty

$21.99

Whether managing strategy, operations or products, knowing how to make the best decision in a complex, uncertain business environment is dif_ cult. You might be faced with multiple, competing objectives, which means making trade-offs. To complicate matters, any uncertainty makes it hard to explicitly understand how different objectives will impact potential outcomes. This book will help you face these problems. It provides a decision analysis framework implemented as a simple spreadsheet tool. This multi-objective decision analysis framework helps you to measure trade-offs among objectives and incorporate uncertainties and risk preferences. With this book, you will be able to identify what information is needed to make a decision, de_ ne how that information should be combined, and, finally, provide quantifiable evidence to clearly communicate and justify the decision. The process involves minimal overhead and is perfect for busy professionals who need a simple, structured process for making, tracking, and communicating decisions. This process makes decision making more efficient by focusing only on information and factors that are well-defined, measureable, and relevant to the decision at hand. The framework requires clear characterization of a decision, ensuring that it can be traced and is consistent with the intended objectives and organizational values. Using this structured decision-making framework, anyone can consistently make better decisions to gain competitive and strategic advantage.

Revenue Recognition: Principles and Practices

$21.99

Revenue is the ‘top’ line on the income statement and is the fundamental driver of business success. To understand all the complexities involved in recognizing revenue under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) you should primarily be concerned with two things: (a) the timing aspect (the when issue) and (b) the amount to be recorded (the how much issue). This book will provide just that–extensive guidance in assisting you with the appropriate answers and much more. This book is designed for you and all the organizational responsibility you carry for your company in order to deliver real profits. It’s a comprehensive yet readable examination of the existing rules of revenue recognition for corporate entities, and after reading the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of how accountants measure and record revenue. This ‘skill-set’ will prove invaluable in understanding the impact that your business decisions will have on the financial statements with an emphasis on the income statement and the statement of cash flows. (It will also have an executive-level overview of the proposed ‘IASB and FASB Standard: Revenue from Contracts with Customers.’)

Decision Analysis for Managers: A Guide for Making Better Personal and Business Decisions

$21.99

Everybody has to make decisions–they are unavoidable. However, we receive little or no education or training on how to make decisions. Business decisions are difficult: which people to hire, which product lines or facilities to expand, which proposal to accept, how much R&D to invest in, which environmental projects are high priority, etc. Personal decisions (college, getting married, changing jobs, buying a house, retiring, dealing with a health problem) can be even more difficult.
This book gives you the tools you need to…
‧ Clarify and reach alignment on goals and objectives,
‧ Understand trade-offs associated with reaching those objectives,
‧ Develop and examine alternatives, ‧ Systematically analyze the effects of risk and uncertainty, and
‧ Maximize the chances of achieving your goals.
Success (getting what you want) depends on luck and good decision making. You can’t control your luck, but you can maximize your odds by making the best possible decisions, and this book gets you there. The author organizes and presents otherwise formal decision-making tools in an intuitively understandable fashion. The presentation is informal, but the concepts and tools are research-based and formally accepted. Whether you are a business owner, a manager or team leader, or a senior professional, these tools will help both your personal and your business life.

David Charlesworth is a licensed chemical engineer, obtained his MBA from the University of Florida, and obtained a BS ChE from Indiana Tech. He has experience in a broad range of businesses, completing decision analysis and portfolio analysis projects in oil and gas, LNG, pharmaceutical, and chemicals, both as a consultant (Decision Strategies, Inc.) and as an in-house resource (Conoco and Chevron). He has presented a variety of technical talks at conferences and has been an invited guest lecturer at the University of Texas, Rice University, JPL, and Virtual-workshops.com.

Customer-Oriented Marketing Strategy: Theory and Practice

$21.99

What is customer orientation? And how does it fit in your idea of a good marketing strategy? This book can help you understand more about the relationships, applications, and steps to take to drive continuous relationships with customers to aid in the process of defining and implementing niche strategies, international marketing efforts, and electronic commerce. Inside, the authors start with classic marketing concepts and then review important developments and research of the latest findings (both from the theoretical and applied points of view) to present specific examples, methodologies, policy measures, and strategies that can be implemented to increase and perfect customer satisfaction. Both manufacturing and service businesses are addressed, and the results will give you a combination of the major studies in this specific field of marketing and strategy to offer a comprehensive strategic tool for decision makers in organizations.

Transfer Pricing in International Business: A Management Tool for Adding Value

$21.99

For centuries, trade has endured stumbling blocks, mistakes, and moments of inspiration. It has contributed to the modern, globalized world in which we live, and the increasing economic, social, and political importance of trade has spawned a phenomenon called the multinational organization. However, these organizations have a national home to where profits will ultimately have to come, and in their effort to maximize the amount repatriated, they often engage in internal-pricing practices, known more commonly as transfer pricing This book reminds us all of the important issues of transfer pricing, and how easy it is to create friction between all of the interested parties. This book also goes on to provide an insight into how such conflicts can be assuaged or avoided altogether, and explains how transfer pricing may become a managerial tool by establishing a common language that may be used as one driver for creating added value throughout the organization. Transfer pricing is not simply about maximizing income. It is a much more important strategic management issue that, treated unwisely or with ignorance, is likely to lead to an incongruity in the added value of an organization’s products and services as well as its crucial return on capital employed.

Business Model Design and Learning: A Strategic Guide

$21.99

So many of us have asked ourselves–what’s a business model? What’s a good business model? This book has all the answers–it explains what a business model is, what you have to do to get one, and what to do about the one you’ve already got.
So many of us have asked ourselves–what’s a business model? What’s a good business model? This book has all the answers–it explains what a business model is, what you have to do to get one, and what to do about the one you’ve already got. To be successful, your business model must be focused sharply on your customer. And you must think strategically about how to use your business model if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors. Whether an aspiring entrepreneur or a practicing manager who wants to create new business model, or a manager and leader who wants to understand, refine, and even reinvent a current model, this book will help with the creation, the delivery, and the capture of value. Business models describe the value proposition to the customer, the system that must be in place to create that value, and the logics needed to capture a reasonable share of that value for the _ rm. This book shows that the core of every business model is an agreement with your customers. If they don’t get the value they are seeking, you won’t either.

The Manager’s Guide to Building a Successful Business

$21.99

In today’s world, managers need real market examples to demonstrate the effective use of certain management and marketing principles. This book will give you just that as well as an introduction to programs developed over a 40-year career to help manage all aspects of a business and to develop and execute marketing strategies. You and other managers and executives will utilize this book as a guide to grow an established business or start a new one, and a reference book for unique management challenges as well. It differs from other business books in that it introduces certain management techniques and processes and shows how they are critical to executing successful marketing strategies. Each chapter covers a founding principle of management in Part I and a founding principle of marketing in Part II. The examples used in the book are from large and small organizations in which the author was personally involved. The techniques introduced are based on those studied at most universities, and are used in solutions applied to challenges facing these organizations.

Game Theory: Anticipating Reactions for Winning Actions

$21.99

From its beginnings in the early 1900s, game theory has been a very mathematical, technical subject. However, it also provides valuable, everyday lessons that are important for managers and executives to understand. But current books and textbooks are mostly highly mathematical, and almost all are very long. This book will deliver a focused and precise, but nonmathematical, overview of topics in game theory that are directly relevant to managing an organization. Game theory is the science of action and reaction. While most standard economic analyses embody the science of making an optimal choice, this kind of analysis is largely undertaken in a vacuum. For example, when a firm raises or lowers its price, this is rarely the end of the story–competitors are likely to react by changing their prices and quantities as well. Game theory adds in this extra layer of realism. It teaches managers to think ahead and foresee possible reactions to their actions.