Mastering Self-Motivation: Bringing Together the Academic and Popular Literature

$21.99

This book is designed to provide a roadmap for business students worldwide. The broad scope of academic research coupled with real-world application makes this book unique. It describes the contemporary and historical premise of motivation today. Each chapter has one or two theoretical concepts interwoven with motivational literary scholars. The heart of the book is based on the premise that many people read motivational books by non-academics such as Tony Robins and miss out on the theoretical scholarly books that are empirically grounded. While this book does not offer research or metrics on the subject of motivation, it does provide theoretical concepts that can enhance individual motivation and presents it in a comprehensive and enjoyable manner. When comparing motivational best sellers, academic books are often shelved in place of the more practical books that people feel more comfortable with and that they can relate to.
Derived from many years of consulting with business executives worldwide, the author is offering a free workbook to accompany your purchase or adoption of this book. This workbook addresses each chapter with a comprehensive application of the the content in the book. Develop your personal Vision, your personal Mission, and your Strengths to succeed as an effective leader while helping those aspiring to become leaders in your organization, your classroom, or your institution.

Customer-Driven Budgeting: Prepare, Engage, Execute:The Small Business Guide for Growth

$21.99

This comprehensive budgeting book emphasizes that the customer drives the business organization and processes and becomes the overriding purpose for a company’s existence and success. Customer-driven Budgeting offers a complete guide that covers every step in the budgeting cycle from the basics of organization, processes, and funding to budget execution and monitoring. It emphasizes that the budget is the starting point and catalyst for gaining customers. The budget prepares the company to supply the sales and marketing team reinforcements for giving a compelling reason for customers to buy from it. The customer is the object of every effort and dollar and drives the business, its goals, practices, processes, and activities. The market-focused, customer-driven principle takes budgeting out of the Finance organization and pushes it into Production, Shipping and Receiving, Purchasing, Inventory Management, IT, and outside the doors to vendors, bankers, investors, and others business partners. This book explains the treatment of these constituents in the budget. This book is one that can be used immediately in business budgeting. Its modular format permits the reader to start at the beginning of the budget process and work through it entirely or select a budget area most challenging to the business and work from there to other areas of priority. Given that this book covers the entire budget process, the author recommends following the format as presented to coalesce around the budget team.

Managerial Communication: Evaluating the Right Dose

$21.99

The metaphor of dosage offers us a rich organizing principle for managers. It focuses our efforts on such fundamental, pragmatic communication issues as: amount, frequency, delivery system, sequencing, interaction with what other agents, and contraindications. It suggests compelling new answers to fundamental problems that all managers must face, with an appreciation of basic issues beyond our conscious awareness. In our day-to-day lives – whether we are discussing things with our housing contractor, our cable repair man, with our doctor – we must constantly decide how much communication we should engage in to pursue our projects. This work focuses on the dosage metaphor as a way of confronting this question — what level of communication, both in terms of amount and of depth, is really necessary to accomplish particular purposes? Most communication theories implicitly paint a picture of the prevalence and paramount importance of communication, with a ‘communication metamyth’ that more is necessarily better. This book provides the first truly comprehensive treatment of dosage. It also focuses on perhaps the most contemporaneously interesting issues of change and of productivity. While fundamental to any practitioner of communication, in modern communication theory these issues receive only cursory attention. In the final chapter I analyze the dosage metaphor in broad sweep and suggest a countervailing minimalist approach to communication before turning to broader practice issues raised by application of the metaphor of dosage.

Business Integrity in Practice: Insights from International Case Studies

$21.99

The quest for integrity in business is not only a reaction against malfeasance in business and associated calls for reform, but also a result of changes and new demands in the global business environment as well as the latest economic crisis. Among the sources of these new demands are the expectations of stakeholders that corporations and their leaders will take more active roles as citizens within society and in the fight against some of the most pressing problems in the world, such as poverty, environmental degradation, defending human rights, corruption, and pandemic diseases. The quest for integrity in business is not only a reaction against malfeasance in business and associated calls for reform but also a search that stems from changes and new demands in the global business environment. Among the sources of these new demands are the expectations of stakeholders that corporations and their leaders will take more active roles as citizens within society and in the fight against some of the most pressing problems in the world, such as poverty, environmental degradation, defending human rights, corruption, and pandemic diseases. This book presents and critically discusses key case studies from all over the world, offering essential insights, practical advice, and guidance for any business leader wishing to lead an organization with reliable and proven integrity. The authors provide valuable research results as well as real teaching tools for faculty and students.

Intellectual Property in the Managerial Portfolio: Its Creation, Development, and Protection

$21.99

Intellectual Property Rights have been a part of the American pantheon of types of Property Rights since the beginning of the nation, but using the term to describe a particular type of property right is a new phenomenon dating to the second half of the last century. The recognition of the importance of protection of intellectual property rights became extremely important and distinctly more difficult at that time as new technologies made it possible for unscrupulous ‘intellectual property pirates’ to steal, or otherwise make off with the intellectual property of the unaware. This book introduces the reader to the underlying logic of intellectual property rights – how one can acquire them, why they exist, the benefits derived from their ownership, and how they can be protected from the unscrupulous. Legal and common-sense alternatives that provide the keys to protection are outlined and instructions on their use revealed. The availability of intellectual property rights protection, both domestic and international, is outlined and discussed, as are the history of and current trends relevant to the legal rights of the intellectual property owner and the limits of protection provided by the law and by extralegal alternatives of providing protection. The author has published extensively in the field, and has been an expert witness in a number of significant legal cases in which the interpretation and application of intellectual property concepts were tested.

Lean Sigma Methods and Tools for Service Organizations: The Story of a Cruise Line Transformation

$21.99

Every business aspires to be competitive and profitable in its market. To do this, an organization needs to offer customers value propositions, which may be manifest in the product it produces or the service it provides. This in turn will create customer loyalty and growth. There are a number of organizational philosophies and strategies used by businesses to help accomplish this goal, among which are the concepts of Six Sigma and Lean. This book proposes to integrate the best practices from each of these philosophies and apply them to a customer-focused organization–a cruise ship–whose overriding mission is to deliver superior service to its customers. The authors demonstrate in this book how key components of both Six Sigma and Lean–such as identifying and removing defects, elimination of waste, metrics, speed of delivery, and the seamless integration of these concepts and practices throughout the operation–serve to enhance the kind of value propositions that customers recognize and that allow an organization to be successful.

Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization

$21.99

Cosmopolitans are individuals with a distinctive kind of extended national and international orientation, a global vision, and sense of belonging to the world. These people are sophisticated and importantly engaged in the cultures outside of local geographical boundaries. But what do we know about them as consumers–their origins, values, media usage, and buyer behavior? This unique book details much about this group, and fills a knowledge gap that has long been overlooked largely because other related marketing areas have overshadowed and overlooked the notion of cosmopolitan consumers. Until this book, in fact, there has been no single authoritative source that directly and comprehensively covers the field of consumer cosmopolitanism. This book also includes original essays by an all-star cast of contributors, giving you an introduction to a powerful new approach to marketing, eclectically packed with novel ideas and insights that noticeably advance the marketing field and bring it more fully into the age of globalization.

Applying Scientific Reasoning to the Field of Marketing: Make Better Decisions

$21.99

Upcoming the February issue of MarketingPower.com from the AMA, is Terry’s article, How to Think, Not What to Think: Move beyond ‘flavor-of-the-month marketing problem solvers.’ See below for your advance copy. And check out Terry’s upcoming speaking engagements. Marketing decisions often misfire when driven more by beliefs than by knowledge. This book will guide you on how to differentiate between the two and to think more clearly and correctly when making those decisions, thereby increasing organizational success. The author has based this book on the fields of epistemology–the study of how knowledge is created–and the philosophy of science– the study of what it means for a science to be called a science. The motivation behind the book is quite simple: Given that science is so successful, why shouldn’t marketers borrow thinking and reasoning skills from science and apply them to marketing? Indeed, why not? The book details the groundwork for learning how to apply scientific reasoning to the field of marketing, such as some basic and important definitions (‘What is a belief?’ ‘What is knowledge?’), and identifies barriers to scientific reasoning, giving an example from the Dow Chemical Company and just how Dow uses critical thinking and reasoning skills to make more effective marketing and business decisions. You’ll also learn some real ‘thinking tools’ you will need to apply scientific reasoning to solving your marketing problems. It introduces topics relating to attributes versus constructs, the meaning of causation, the relationship between coherence and justified beliefs, the importance of logic to sound reasoning, and the avoidance of logical fallacies in making sound recommendations. The book concludes by giving you direction to further improve your ability to apply scientific reasoning to solving marketing problems.

Moral Leadership: A Transformative Model for Tomorrow’s Leaders

$21.99

The challenge facing leaders in the 21st century is to restore stakeholder trust, build employee commitment, and create organizations that are able to sustain long-term competitive advantage. Great leadership combines both character and competence, but corporate values must include excellence and quality as well as integrity and honesty. Creating organizational systems that reinforce and support core values and that achieve outstanding performance must be founded upon principles that work on the street, in the office, and on the shop floor. Ethical leadership that honors a commitment to world class standards is a mandatory requirement for today’s incredibly competitive global business environment, but ethical leadership encompasses far more than avoiding polluting the environment or misrepresenting product features to customers. This book clarifies the duties and obligations that leaders owe to their many stakeholders as they seek to create long-term wealth, but it also provides insights about how to build the organizational culture and systems required to sustain highly ethical organizations that inspire commitment and compete successfully.

A Profile of the Electric Power Industry: Facing the Challenges of the 21st Century

$21.99

The electricity industry plays an important role in the US economy. Electricity is used in the vast majority of economic activity and consumption. The business is very capital intensive and is a significant part of the economy. In addition the characteristics of the industry illustrate many important concepts in economics. This book is designed to provide information about the industry to students and the wider public. The student audience includes those studying business, economics, public policy and the engineering disciplines required by the electricity industry. Public policy makers, investors, regulators and electricity industry employees will also benefit from this book. The aim is allow readers to be able to develop informed opinions about the current status and future directions of the electricity industry. This book begins by describing how the industry operates by converting fuels into electricity, transporting it to the place of use and designing retail products that provide the electricity to end use customers. These activities are conducted by organizations that can differ in ownership type (profit making or non-profit public organizations) and by the part of the industry value chain that they specialize in. Regulation plays a huge role in the electric industry. Since many industry functions are considered natural monopolies the companies are often granted a monopoly franchise to provide services under regulated prices. The industry has undergone a significant amount of technical, economic and regulatory change during its history. Looking forward the electricity industry will likely see even greater change as problems such as new technologies, climate change and increased demand for electricity use create significant challenges. The success of the industry will depend on identifying and managing the opportunities to mitigate the risks associated with these challenges.