Expanding Customer Service as a Profit Center: Striving for Excellence and Competitive Advantage

$21.99

Striving for excellence in customer service is critical to gain a competitive advantage. It is the keystone for business growth and prosperity as it builds repetitive sales to existing customers and referrals for new customers. If customer service is looked at as a major business component and all customers are treated with excellence prior to the sale, during the sale, and after the sale, customer service will become a profit center that builds sales dollars to the top line and real profits to the bottom line. Customer service is not as simple as offering a smiling ‘good morning’ greeting and a ‘have a nice day’ parting, but an integrated system that manifests itself in all activities of the business to wield an overall customer service organizational mentality. Every time a customer comes in ‘contact with the company there is what we call a ‘touch point’ and each touch point must be a Wow! Moment’ for the customer. It is the build-up of these wow moments that develops into a superior customer service experience. No longer does the company sell whatever the customer is willing to buy or the company wants to sell, but realigns its customer service efforts to sell those products that the customer really needs. This book is geared to those interested in delivering customer service as a profit center concept that enables the organization to grow in the desired directions–doing the right thing the right way in spite of organizational roadblocks.

Financial Reporting Standards: A Decision-Making Perspective for Non-Accountants

$21.99

Accounting is the score keeping system in the ‘game’ of business – you can’t do well in any ‘game’ if you don’t understand how the score is kept. This book is intended to benefit MBA students and upper division non-accounting business majors. It should also serve as an excellent desk reference for practicing managers. The book emphasizes how management’s choice of accounting methods and their required estimates in reporting transactions and events impact financial statements, both immediately and in the future. This book takes an exclusive user’s decision making perspective by utilizing the accounting equation format to directly illustrate financial statement effects. Readers should make better decisions based upon financial statement information through an enhanced understanding of its usefulness and limitations. United States financial reporting standards are compared and contrasted with international financial reporting standards where appropriate. Most of the topics addressed in this book are typically studied by accounting majors in the two course ‘intermediate’ accounting sequence, but the text also includes discussion of consolidations – a topic generally covered in the ‘advanced’ accounting course. Unlike typical accounting books, journal entries are not used to illustrate topical coverage. By exclusively applying a user’s decision making emphasis, and limiting topical content to areas relevant to financial analysis, this book allows non-accounting majors to acquire the underlying knowledge in a concise and easy to understand text. The book assumes the reader has a basic understanding of financial statements (through previous study in accounting principles) and a familiarity with time value of money concepts.

Essential Concepts of Cross-Cultural Management: Building on What We All Share

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You may recognize the statement on the back cover of so many textbooks concerning the global environment of commerce–‘to help you understand and appreciate the economic, political, and technological context in which international business operates.’ But this defined approach is tantamount to placing three wheels on a car and expecting it to drive smoothly. It cannot be operated without the balance that a fourth one provides, and that required wheel is culture. The author believes, in this modern era of globalization, managers venturing forth to engage alien societies must be armed with cross-cultural skills that go above and beyond the instructions of how to kiss, bow, or shake hands. This book provides a more concise, simple, and practical approach that cuts through the complicated cultural matrix. This book is divided into three sections. The first section explains how culture acts as the prime driver of our life–the filter of our senses and the guide of our values, hence the measurement barometer upon which all our decisions and behavior are constructed; the second section examines how cross-cultural determinants should function as a worthwhile tool in cross-cultural engagement proposing a two-step concentration; and the final section offers the practical application of specific techniques that will help you navigate the cross-cultural milieu and become a cultural detective.

Strategic Leadership of Portfolio and Project Management: Bridging the Gaps Between Setting and Executing Strategy

$21.99

Check out the Powerpoint slides and the below video, the authors have prepared to give you better insight into this book.

As an executive, your organization may have limited resources. This book will instruct you and your leadership teams on implementing strategy through identifying, selecting, prioritizing, resourcing, and governing an optimal work portfolio.
You’ll learn how to sponsor every project stage, as well as leading project managers as direct reports. Detailed advice is given for developing project management competency and utilizing input from customers, employees, and processes.
You’ll learn how your organization can capitalize upon information technology to become competitive and to effectively implement business strategies, as well as how to make portfolio and project decisions using both qualitative and quantitative data and reliable analysis methods.

Sustainability Delivered: Designing Socially and Environmentally Responsible Supply Chains

$21.99

If you are a supply chain manager, entrepreneur, executive, or a stakeholder, this book will help you develop the awareness and skills needed to support sustainable supply chain management. The authors introduce the many ways that social and environmental responsibility can be integrated into supply chain management, from sustainable product and process design to programs and techniques that support product end-of-life management. The book begins with the initial stages of strategy and policy development, and continues with product design, purchasing, manufacturing, and delivery (logistics) in the supply chain. This is followed by product end-of-life programs and, finally, assessment and reporting systems. The authors include real-world examples and cases from some of the world’s leading companies in sustainable supply chain management. The examples range from small local companies to large multinational players to give a broad range of ideas to the reader. With case examples, workshops, and step-by-step instructions on how to create a sustainable supply chain, Sustainability Delivered is the most practical and usable book on the market that will help you and other business leaders to authentically pursue and deliver on sustainability ideals.

Managing for Ethical-Organizational Integrity: Principles and Processes for Promoting Good, Right, and Virtuous Conduct

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For some time people thought that business and ethics constituted separate and mutually exclusive realms. Businesses that perpetuate such a belief or still hold that “business ethics” is an oxymoron are at risk. Indeed, managers are now being called on to actively promote ethical organizational integrity. This means understanding the principles that define and creating an organizational culture that measurably encourages ethical conduct. The reason for this shift in paradigm is clear.It was once believed that business and ethics constituted separate and mutually exclusive realms. Businesses that perpetuate such a belief or still hold that ‘business ethics’ is an oxymoron are at risk. If you are a manager, you may have been called on to actively promote ethical-organizational integrity. But this means understanding the defining principles of and creating an organizational culture that measurably encourages ethical conduct. This book will help provide you and other managers with much needed guidelines for ethical decision making in business that are philosophically sound and strategically advantageous. This book provides a brief introduction to and general framework for managing for ethical-organizational integrity in a way that will enable you to identify those ethical duties that must be fulfilled in order to morally justify the pursuit of profit. It will help you develop a morally imaginative and socially entrepreneurial decision making process that is driven towards generating and sustaining social value.

How to Coach Individuals, Teams, and Organizations to Master Transformational Change: Surfing Tsunamis

$21.99

Transformational coaching by a person who has personally experienced transformation and has mastered a specific coaching methodology is a powerful catalyst for holistic change. The transformational coach can awaken individuals and groups to greater awareness and a sense of purpose that enables them to move through these barriers and access untapped sources of energy for breakthrough potential. This book offers a practical yet provocative approach and gives coaches, organizational and business leaders, HR executives, and other change agents a proven approach for creating transformative change on an individual and collective scale by first coaching themselves and then other individuals, their teams, and their organizations for significant improvements in performance and effectiveness. This is a hopeful book that envisions individuals bringing their whole selves to work; work as an act of co-creation among everyone in the organization; and organizations deepening their connection to their employees, stakeholders and partners, and society as a whole. The book’s unique contributions to the field of individual and collective transformation in the workplace are built on three central ideas: Radical improvement is possible only through a transformation rooted in expanding consciousness and integrating the body, mind, and spirit. Purpose and vision can then be drawn from deeper wisdom and fueled from a larger source of creative energy, spirit-generated creativity. Radical improvement in collective performance is not a top-down phenomenon. Rather it hinges upon the individual members embracing transformation in their own lives and finding alignment between their and the group’s purpose, vision, and values Radical improvement can be implemented, sustained, and repeated if it is pursued through a holistic, systematic, yet practical framework that also incorporates solid processes for planning and implementing change and measuring results.

China: Doing Business in the Middle Kingdom

$21.99

Foreign firms typically engage China as a sourcing location or as a market to sell their goods. China is increasingly taking on a more prominent role in global business. After 30 years of economic reforms that have enabled China to become the workshop of the global economy, we are now witnessing the transformation of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ into one of the world’s largest consumer markets and one of the world’s most productive centers of innovation. If you are interested in doing business in China, you’ll need this book. This book details the history, culture, economy, marketing, sourcing, staffing, etiquette, negotiation, and daily life. Anyone hoping to achieve global business success in the 21st century must be familiar with these concepts. Strother takes you inside the requirements; what works; what won’t; and so much more.

As I Was Saying…Observations on International Business and Trade Policy, Exports, Education, and the Future

$21.99

With a Foreword by Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the artistic touch by David Clark—an award winning and syndicated cartoonist—this exciting new title by Michael Czinkota is the perfect read for businesspeople to better understand just what is at stake in understanding and strategizing about international issues and opportunities.Editorials by Michael Czinkota