This book provides an overview of the organizational mechanisms of TMT impact. When having finished this book, readers will know how a TMT exerts influence and have more insight in how to make TMTs more effective in their organizations. Insight into the ways in which TMTs influence their organizations can benefit practicing top managers, as well as non-executive directors, consultants, team coaches etc. It may help them in establishing early indicators of organizational performance, selecting new TMT members, diagnosing dysfunctional TMT behavior, and assessing the TMT’s interaction with middle managers. Therefore, I expect this book to be interesting for a wide audience of practitioners and researchers.
“Want to generate more profits? Applying the 80/20 rule, Top Market Strategy lays out an easy-to-follow, research-based way to increase your profits.” —Ken Bernhardt, Taylor E. Little Professor of Marketing, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University Virtually every business seeks to increase its profit from customers, but few business executives realize that a universal principle governs their customer profitability. They may be applying the 80/20 rule to sales, quality control, investing, production, or other business functions without realizing that the 80:20 ratio actually summarizes the Pareto distribution of inputs to outputs. According to his equilibrium theory of relationships, stability is reached when inputs in the top 20% generate 80% of the outputs while inputs in the bottom 80% generate 20% of the outputs. Recently mathematicians confirmed that the Pareto distribution is as universal as the normal “bell-shaped” distribution, but is log linear and predicts results, rather than probabilities. Applying this universal principle to customer profitability, a typical business can predict that customers in the top 20% generate 80% of customer profitability (four times more profit than expected), whereas customers in the bottom 80% generate only 20% (one-fourth as much as expected). This means the 20% most profitable customers tend to be 16 times more profitable than the 80% least profitable customers. In order to capitalize on the Pareto principle, a business should 1. segment its customers by their profitability, 2. distinguish the top 20% of its customers in top market segment from the bottom 80% of the customers in the bottom market segment, and 3. target the top market segment with its marketing strategies. The purpose of this book is to show business students and executives how to implement this process and thereby achieve the predicted results.
This book will walk you through the five ingredients of transformation: The subject of organizational change is receiving increasing attention. Whether it is re-inventing government, re-engineering corporations, or reforming churches, all kinds of organizations are attempting major transformations. This book will “walk” you through our framework of the five ingredients of transformation: Burning Platform, why should you do anything; Vision, where are you going; Leadership, are you leading the effort, and do you have the skills necessary to lead; Technical Plan, how will you close the gap between the vision and the burning platform; Social Plan, how will you enroll others in the plan. At the end of reading this book, you will understand why change efforts fail, what ingredients are needed to ensure success, and what skills are needed at the organizational, group, and individual level to maximize improvement efforts.
Managers and analysts routinely collect and examine key performance measures to better understand their operations and make good decisions. Being able to render the complexity of operations data into a coherent account of significant events requires an understanding of how to work well with raw data and to make appropriate inferences.Managers and analysts routinely collect and examine key performance measures to better understand their operations and make good decisions. Being able to render the complexity of operations data into a coherent account of significant events requires an understanding of how to work well with raw data and to make appropriate inferences. Although some statistical techniques for analyzing data and making inferences are sophisticated and require specialized expertise, there are methods that are understandable and applicable by anyone with basic algebra skills and the support of a spreadsheet package. By applying these fundamental methods themselves rather than turning over both the data and the responsibility for analysis and interpretation to an expert, managers will develop a richer understanding and potentially gain better control over their environment. This text is intended to describe these fundamental statistical techniques to managers, data analysts, and students. Statistical analysis of sample data is enhanced by the use of computers. Spreadsheet software is well suited for the methods discussed in this text. Examples in the text apply Microsoft Excel. Readers will have access to the example workbooks and Adobe Flash videos illustrating key steps using Microsoft Excel from the Business Expert Press website.
This book explores how naturally connected organizations ( NCOs) can survive and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world using the principles of natural connectivity, organic growth and collaboration. It shows how naturally connected organizations are resilient through cycles of boom and bust. The book argues that the success of these organizations is in their design, and that they are the organizations of the 2lst century. They demonstrate that a natural way of running a global business can work. This book builds on earlier work on networks and contributes to the Organizational Design field of management study. Naturally connected organizations are associations of companies and/or individuals, which function via collaboration, communication and connectivity for a shared purpose. NCOs use organic organizing principles rather than control mechanisms’. Traditional organizations embrace mechanical metaphors, the results of which are engineered or re-engineered organizations based on command and control. NCOs are based on natural, organic metaphors.
As a business leader, you may be looking to the future, especially in troubling economic times, and wondering how to remain competitive in an era of scarce resources. Are your capital projects constrained and the idea of growing the workforce a distant dream? And like other savvy leaders, you are recognizing the potential of virtual business and more specifically, you may even be implementing a virtual business strategy to build a sustainable competitive advantage. If so, then you’ll need this book. This book combines academic theory with real world, practitioner success stories to provide executives a summary of current best practices. This book examines five virtual business strategies that are showing unprecedented opportunity. The Any Place, Any Time strategy focuses on providing high quality service 24/7 by ignoring traditional geographic challenges.
The book aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic and practical framework for readers who are interested or involved in developing a marketing plan so that they can appreciate various marketing concepts and put them together in an easy to read guide. Demanding and savvy customers along with a turbulent marketing environment, require marketers to be highly sensitive to the environmental monitoring systems capable of identifying the latest marketing trends and opportunities and threats at an early stage.The book aims to provide a comprehensive, holistic and practical framework for readers who are interested or involved in developing a marketing plan so that they can appreciate various marketing concepts and put them together in an easy to read guide. Demanding and savvy customers along with a turbulent marketing environment, require marketers to be highly sensitive to the environmental monitoring systems capable of identifying the latest marketing trends and opportunities and threats at an early stage. In response to these issues, the proposed manuscript covers the themes of planning, implementing and controlling marketing activities, which will provide guidance to marketers and non-marketer alike, in undertaking a marketing plan. The latest research findings in the marketing area are included. This book is written for marketing students and it is the intention of the authors to make this manuscript as basic, straightforward and to the point as possible. Business practitioners will also find this book useful.
Dr. Geiger gives us tools to attack the issue proactively, providing an attractive alternative to reacting to the budget cuts we all know are coming.– Ms. Anderson is a certified defense financial manager and a member of The American Society of Military Comptrollers. She is currently employed as the Director for Revolving Funds at the Department of Defense. Government organizations spend enormous amounts of money. They employ a large percentage of the work force. They have an undeniably huge impact on the national economy and wealth. Yet they are, for the most part, unmanaged. What passes for management is a combination of oversight and audit. Oversight is primarily reactive: offering negative feedback for failures and demanding additional rules and regulations to prevent reoccurrences. Audits look for “bright line” discrepancies and clear violations to those rules and regulations. Government operations are often criticized for “waste and mismanagement.”Yet the current situation, unfortunately, can best be described as one of “un-management” rather than “mis-management.” Government can run better. The purpose of this book is to look at how government can move from “rule driven” to “leadership driven” management. Specifically, it will document and discuss specific examples of successful cost informed decision making and cost management and control in government. It will also delineate the requirements of such success and explore the special needs of transforming the management culture of government from its well embedded past practices to a new paradigm of leadership driven management.
Economic principles inform good business decision making. Although economics is sometimes dismissed as a discourse of practical relevance to only a relatively small circle of academicians and policy analysts who call themselves economists, sound economic reasoning benefits any manager of a business, whether they are involved with production/operations, marketing, finance, or corporate strategy. Along with enhancing decision making, the field of economics provides a common language and framework for comprehending and communicating phenomena that occur within a business, as well as between a business and its environment. This text addresses the core of a subject commonly called managerial economics, which is the application of microeconomics to business decisions. Key relationships between price, quantity, cost, revenue, and profit for an individual firm are presented in form of simple conceptual models. The text includes key elements from the economics of consumer demand and the economics of production. The book discusses economic motivations for expanding a business and contributions from economics for improved organization of large firms. Market price quantity equilibrium, competitive behavior, and the role of market structure on market equilibrium and competition are addressed. Finally, the text considers market regulation in terms of the generic problems that create the need for regulation and possible remedies for those problems. Although the academic literature of managerial economics often employs abstract mathematics and large corporations create and use sophisticated mathematical models that apply economics, this book focuses on concepts, terminology, and principles, with minimal use of mathematics. The reader will gain a better understanding of why businesses and markets function as they do and how those institutions can function better.
Intended for an audience of graduate students, executive MBA students, and mid-to upper level government and corporate managers, Design, Analysis and Optimization of Supply Chains: A System Dynamic Approach examines the complexity of the types of organizations that comprise a modern supply chain, the problems that arise as a result of this complexity, and the solutions and analytical approaches available to managers that can help resolve these real world problems and dilemmas. The modern enterprise, be it a large corporation or a government agency, has two key dimensions of complexity: static and dynamic. The static complexity refers to the remarkable number of companies and agencies that enable delivery of the product or service. A static “snapshot” of this end-to-end enterprise would reveal hundreds if not thousands of companies involved in the supply network and many additional firms involved in the distribution and delivery to customers. Planning, communication, coordination and execution of this large system network is fundamentally challenging just because of the sheer size. This large, extended network represents the static complexity. The dynamic complexity arises from the difficulty of managing the performance of this extended enterprise over time. This requires having the appropriate metrics to track performance over time, the management skills to develop strategies, the ability to collect and monitor the correct data for true visibility, and the recognition and understanding of the long lags between actions and results. Design, Analysis and Optimization of Supply Chains: A System Dynamic Approach incorporates real-world examples and cases, representing actual complex enterprise systems including firms involved and with long lead times, to illustrate the multi-faceted activities occurring within a modern supply chain and the challenges they pose to managers. Simulation and optimization techniques are introduced and used to develop strategies for improved performance.
