Moral Leadership: A Transformative Model for Tomorrow’s Leaders

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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

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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.

Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom: Why Our Companies Have Lost It–and How They Can Get It Back

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This book is about an unintended—and unnoticed—consequence that is needlessly costing commerce and industry an unimaginable amount of money. It was in the early 1980s that someone smart thought that the flexible labor market would allow employers to quickly adapt their workforce to the new industrial technology-led revolution.
It did, but the trouble is that nobody thought of the downside consequences— short jobs tenure and the continual loss of the organizations’ unique, hard-won and expensively acquired knowledge and experience.
Inside, you’ll learn how employers can continue to take advantage of the flexible labor market while holding on to their special knowledge and experience. It’s a way of recovering lost continuity, allowing rolling generations of employees to learn more effectively from tried-and-tested experience and thus improve their decision making. Called experiential learning that has been adapted to the modern workplace, it’s a way of helping to banish all those repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter modern industry and commerce.

Managing Employee Turnover: Dispelling Myths and Fostering Evidence-Based Retention Strategies

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Get ready to deal with ‘pent-up’ turnover! When the job market improves, many employees who have had few options will be looking for new alternatives. Employee turnover can be expensive, disruptive, and damaging to organizational success. Despite the importance of successfully managing turnover, many retention management efforts are based on misleading or incomplete data, generic best practices that don’t translate, or managerial gut instinct at odds with research evidence. We synthesize volumes of academic research on employee turnover into a practical guide to managing retention. Turnover fictions are dispelled and replaced by research-based facts. Keys to diagnosing and managing employee turnover are presented such that readers can effectively manage employee retention today! These ideas are invaluable to audiences from CEOs who care about the impact of turnover on the organization’s bottom line to the Managers who suffer the most when their best talent leaves; from Human Resource Professionals whose career success may depend on effectively managing turnover to students mastering new knowledge and skill sets.

Learning Organizations: Turning Knowledge into Action

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Learning Organizations: Turning Knowledge into Actions discusses the importance of transforming traditional organizations into learning organizations– entities that foster a culture of continuous learning so that external change in all its facets can be recognized when it happens and internal change can be effected and managed when necessary. Learning organizations are poised to transform knowledge into actions, which become best practices that ultimately lead to improved performance. The book features cases and lessons from leading world organizations that invested in knowledge management in order to remain competitive. The importance of both knowledge capture and knowledge transfer throughout organizations is stressed throughout the book. Learning Organizations: Turning Knowledge into Actions offers strategies and guidance to organizational leaders who endeavor to deliver heightened value to all their stakeholders while eliminating the learning ‘disabilities’ that threaten corporate productivity and success.

The Emerging Markets of the Middle East: Strategies for Entry and Growth

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Mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures in the Middle East have developed rapidly between 2000 and 2008, driven by strong economic growth, increasing openness to foreign investment and an appetite for deals among local and foreign investors. Given restrictions on foreign ownership, M&A activity has been nearly all by companies from within the Middle East, whereas outside investors have entered into joint ventures. Over time, greater openness will make M&A as well as joint ventures valid options for international investors. Although deal volumes have reduced significantly during the global financial crisis (2008 — 2010), the Middle East will continue to be a highly attractive emerging market, characterized by rapid growth, improved regulation and significant oil wealth. This book provides a clear step-by-step framework for defining and implementing direct investment strategies in the Middle East, illustrated with examples and cases in each chapter. Regional considerations, such as cultural differences, legal aspects and local market structures will be dealt with throughout.

Regression Analysis: Understanding and Building Business and Economic Models Using Excel

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This book covers essential elements of building and understanding regression models within the context of business and economics. It is a nonmathematical treatment that is accessible, even to readers with limited statistical backgrounds. It is useful for business professionals, MBA students and others who seek to understand regression analysis without having to work through tedious mathematical and statistical theory. The importance of using regression models in modern business and economic analysis can hardly be overstated. In this book we describe exactly how such models can be developed and evaluated. The data used is real data with real world business applications, not data that has been contrived to demonstrate some purely academic point. These data are likely to be encountered and used in the actual world of business. In an appendix using screen shots and step by step instructions, we include how to do use Excel to perform regression analysis. When readers have completed this book they will understand how to build basic mathematical models illustrating business/economic relationships using regression analysis. In addition, they will know how to interpret and evaluate regression models using a five step process (which includes evaluating the model; identifying its statistical significance; determining its explanatory power; for time-series applications, identifying how the error terms are distributed; and understanding the concept of multicollinearity). Readers will understand what is possible and what to look for in evaluating regression models. It is unlikely that most readers will build such models in the course of carrying out their own professional responsibilities, but it is very likely that they will, at some point in their careers, be exposed to such models. This book will help such readers understand models that someone else has developed.

Communication in Responsible Business: Strategies, Concepts, and Cases

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Stakeholders today want to know about your company’s social and environmental performance. Effectively communicating these topics has become critical to economic success. This book offers an extensive toolbox of the most effective instruments that can help you, and each chapter provides specific examples of how to communicate social and cause-related marketing, sustainability reporting, issues and crisis communication, vision, mission statements and codes, and web-based stakeholder communication. You will find hands-on concepts and actual illustrations. Chapter cases provide rich practical coverage and translate concepts into solutions for dayto- day business realities.

Corporate Bankruptcy: Fundamental Principles and Processes

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This book does not attempt to provide advice; each case is unique and should be addressed by competent legal counsel. Rather, this work is intended to provide an overview of the fundamental principles and processes of both Chapter 11 reorganizations and Chapter 7 liquidations, incorporating examples drawn from relevant legal decisions, research findings and common experience to highlight the issues involved and provide a basis for discussion. In addition, the text covers the bankruptcy law implications of a number of special topic areas, including governance and compensation issues, the treatment of intellectual property, contractual agreements and obligations, and newly emerging issues surrounding the use of derivatives.

Assessing and Mitigating Business Risks in India

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This book outlines India’s opportunities and challenges in progressive stages and allows for a meaningful analysis of the risks posed. First, it provides the background to understanding India and sets the stage by highlighting the economic, legal and cultural variances that exist. This is necessary to understand the complexity that is India. The potential markets are then discussed focusing on the growth sectors, MNEs, the upper, middle and lower income segments, and regions and cities where growth is taking place. Next are presented the various pitfalls and obstacles that are frequently faced when operating in India. These can not only increase risk, lead to costly delays, involve lengthy litigation and payment of bribes, aggravate and frustrate, but may even result in total loss of investments. Keys to success are provided. Guidelines are also provided in selecting partners and appointing representatives, as well as the negotiating techniques that work in India. Finally, the book provides a comprehensive list of web resources to help the reader explore further, and connect with government and private sector bodies.