A Primer on Sustainability: In the Business Environment

A Primer on Sustainability: In the Business Environment

$21.99

What does sustainability in the business environment really mean? The concept has evolved from a vague goal to “save the planet” to become a strategic imperative for business to enhance performance across many dimensions. We live in an age of increasing corporate accountability and if a business expects to survive for the long term, it must adhere to ever higher standards of behavior.

This book is dedicated to the understanding of sustainability in business by exploring the challenges of assessing and measuring it, by studying the systems thinking required to analyze it, and by developing a deeper appreciation for the ambiguity and complexity of improving it.

The book provides concrete and practical methodologies and tools for implementation that are evaluated and discussed by means of debating sharply opposing points of view and by performing business case study analysis. The book answers the question: “what can we do right now to improve the sustainability of our world?”

Achieving Service Excellence: Maximizing Enterprise Performance through Innovation and Technology

Achieving Service Excellence: Maximizing Enterprise Performance through Innovation and Technology

$21.99

As the service sectors play an increasingly important role in all economies worldwide, service executives and professionals are well advised to recognize two main pathways to achieving sustainable success in services. The first path requires enhancing the strategic differentiation and operational excellence of their service enterprises; the second requires that these executives and their employees develop the knowledge and skills needed to achieve such success. Specifically, this book discusses actionable methodologies needed to generate creative ideas, including deciding on which ones to pursue; on how to justify projects financially; on how to manage the development projects for innovative services; and on how to reach out to customers and offer them superior service support. The book will illustrate how operational excellence can be achieved by emphasizing the importance of standardizing work processes. It will demonstrate how quality can be enhanced and time-to-market can be reduced through a variety of methods including the application of tools (such as Lean Six Sigma, Value stream mapping, quality assurance, FMEA, web-based enablers and SOA-based emerging productivity tools), the incorporation of emerging technologies into the workflow and, with reference to the Profit Chain Model, the retraining of staff, with a goal of increasing their productivity, by adopting and constantly improving upon known best practices. This book summarizes the key skills and knowledge in a Three Decker framework comprised of engineering management, business management and service leadership, cumulating in an actionable Take Charge model. After having studied this book, service professionals and executives will know how to apply the actionable methodologies outlined herein to maximize their contributions in achieving sustainable success for their service employers.

Belief Systems, Religion, and Behavioral Economics: Marketing in Multicultural Environments

Belief Systems, Religion, and Behavioral Economics: Marketing in Multicultural Environments

$21.99

Religion is a topic that businesses often ignore, in spite of 70% of the world being religious. Many do not realize (or resist) the idea that religion is a key contributor to a consumer’s core values, which then contributes to consumption decisions, voting practices, reaction to pro social messages and public policy, as well as donating behavior.

The field of behavioral economics discusses how various social and cognitive factors influence economic decisions, which encompass consumer decision making, but doesn’t incorporate religion as an influence on economic decision making.

This book provides one of the first comprehensive investigations into the relationship between religion and behavioral economics. The basic premises of the major religious affiliations are reviewed, and the authors bring to life prior research on religion and behavioral economics with an emphasis on how this research can help practitioners to improve business practices.

Basic Cost Benefit Analysis for Assessing Local Public Projects

Basic Cost Benefit Analysis for Assessing Local Public Projects

$21.99

CBA is an attempt to fully account for all costs associated with a new proposal along with a detailed calculation of specific private and public benefits. Properly employed, CBA is simply a method for assessing a proposal prior to a collective decision by calculating net benefits relative to an alternative project or the default option of doing nothing. Cost benefit analysis (CBA) guidelines exist in the form of highly theoretical, mathematically complex handbooks published by international and national organizations. These reports are generally beyond the scope of local decision makers entrusted with evaluation of small municipal projects. This work is an attempt to fill the gap between national and international manuals, on the one hand, and the need of local officials to perform or interpret CBA studies out-sourced to consultants, on the other. Because standard statistical packages, spreadsheets, and graphical analyses are more accessible than at any previous time, CBA, as a tool, is more accessible for informing decisions made in the public interest. We assume that there is some optimal amount for public good provision that reflects, to the degree possible, resident taxpayers’ willingness to pay. Our goal is four-fold: to discuss the economic underpinnings of cost benefit analysis, to address measurement problems associated with shadow pricing of public goods, to outline potential pitfalls for the non-specialist, and, finally, to present and explain a CBA template in reference to three cases relevant to local government decision making.

Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force: How to Gain Market Leadership Through Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force: How to Gain Market Leadership Through Competitive Intelligence

$21.99

Government intelligence agencies throughout the world are finding once again that human abilities and sources rather than technology are more reliable and instrumental in intelligence gathering efforts. Companies have known this for quite some time and have tried to leverage their best source of competitive intelligence: the sale force! Because of their daily presence in the field and favored relationships with their customers, salespeople are the eyes and ears of their companies. In the new economic war, managers cannot take the chance of not being fully aware of the way they could be threatened by the competition. Yet, organizations face great difficulties to stimulate salespeople’s collection and dissemination of competitive intelligence, and to manage market-based intelligence efficiently. This book aims to assist sales and marketing managers in facing such challenges while providing them with action-oriented answers to the following key questions: What kind of information salespeople should collect from the field and how to transform such information into intelligence? How to improve salespeople’s competitive intelligence collection and exploitation skills? How to enhance the sales force’s commitment to competitive intelligence activities? How to manage and distill market-based intelligence throughout the organization and maintain market leadership? And, how to approach the ethical aspects of competitive intelligence and remain protected against competitors’ competitive intelligence activities? By leveraging the latest research, practitioners’ interviews, companies’ best practices, along with practical tools and guidelines, this book help organizations achieve their market-orientation strategy and maintain a sustainable competitive edge.

The Economics of Crime

The Economics of Crime

$21.99

This book will guide the reader to a better understanding of effective public policy designed to reduce criminality. By understanding how incentive mechanisms affect criminal behavior, business managers can use this information to either reduce criminal activity in their own enterprise or to understand how unethical business decisions affect the wider society.

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage

$21.99

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage speaks to modern managers in all functions as well as to IT professionals. Implementing an effective IT sustainability strategy is essential for organizations pursuing sustainability as a means of business advantage and this book shows how to do it. The critical first step is getting clear about the ends of the IT sustainability program–the mission must be to further the company’s sustainability objectives and strategic intents should include: 1) Making IT operations as sustainable as possible; 2) Partnering with other functions to leverage IT in making their business processes more sustainable and to grow the business; and 3) Building a culture of sustainability within the IT organization. The next step is to implement strategies to achieve these ends and the book explores the ways and means of doing this. These include industry best practices on how to apply the processes, techniques, and technologies related to Green IT and IT for Sustainability (ITfS). They also include techniques for change management and building social capital.

Integrated Management of Processes and Information

Integrated Management of Processes and Information

$21.99

Many process management books focus on manufacturing applications. A few discuss services applications and occasionally some comment on the information processes outside of the normal information technology (IT) function. When a business seeks to improve the processes it uses in order to provide efficiency and cost savings to a product or service, that business needs to consider its manufacturing, service, and information handling processes together because they are not independent. This book has two goals: First, to help business practitioners integrate their management of manufacturing or service processes with information processes; and second, to provide business schools with a textbook that can be used for a basic process management course to precede or accompany the typical operations management course Because information handling approaches vary considerably with organizational size, both large and small business approaches are discussed. This discussion is focused on basic concepts rather than specific technical aspects like what type of information hardware to be used. One chapter will discuss the considerations necessary when adding information process management to enterprise resource planning (ERP), statistical process control (SPC), and supply chain logistics approaches from both large and small business perspectives.

Service Thinking: The Seven Principles to Discover Innovative Opportunities

Service Thinking: The Seven Principles to Discover Innovative Opportunities

$21.99

Business paradigm shifts are rare. However, the shift to a services-dominant economy and to services-dominant value creation genuinely merits the designation. Almost 80% of GDP in developed economies is attributable to services, and some economists regard products as merely the physical embodiment of service delivery.This is a must-read for anyone trained in traditional process improvement or business architecture. In surprisingly clear language this book lays out the essentials of service thinking, and how the service paradigm transforms the way in which organizations innovate on behalf of their customers. It shifts the focus from product to experience, from one-sided production to co-creation of value, from the simply measurable to the emotional. I intend to buy a copy for every member of my team–Dart Lindsley, Cisco Sr. Manager of Transformation Planning and Analysis This book will introduce you to Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME)–a term introduced by IBM to describe service science, which is the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another. The authors detail the disciplines, principles, insights and tools of SSME that are now ready to transition to the mainstream business world with transformative effect. They coin the new term ‘Service Thinking’ to communicate this mainstream business transformation. It includes expository case histories of the service thinking-based transformation of familiar businesses, illustrating the seven principles of service thinking, with compelling examples and clear direction for application.

Service and Service Systems: Provider Challenges and Directions in Unsettled Times

Service and Service Systems: Provider Challenges and Directions in Unsettled Times

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Unsettled times can arise from a variety of causes, including ones that are environmental, climatic, economic, social or political in nature. They can result in citizens’ loss of homes and possessions, jobs, health or mobility. Citizens move from above the level of consumption adequacy, where their behaviors reflect long-term and higher-order needs, to below the level of consumption adequacy, where they are forced into a short-term focus on simple existence.Unsettled times can arise from a variety of causes, including ones that are environmental, climatic, economic, social or political in nature. They can result in citizens’ loss of homes and possessions, jobs, health or mobility. Citizens move from above the level of consumption adequacy, where their behaviors reflect long-term and higher-order needs, to below the level of consumption adequacy, where they are forced into a short-term focus on simple existence. In parallel, services provided by various organizations – utilities, transportation, medical, maintenance, housing, education, broadcasting, national state and local governments – may become ineffective or unavailable under such conditions. This book explores the effect of unsettled times on spatial service systems. It describes the scope and breadth of the problem as well as providing solutions by offering original insights from managers of service organizations (especially public services), policy-makers and service system researchers and students. The book briefly introduces the related concepts of consumption adequacy and spatial service systems. The impact of these issues for spatial service systems is analyzed, implications discussed, the lessons to be learned and conclusions will be drawn on the actions needed to build spatial service system resilience for future occurrences. The potential for this book is interdisciplinary, and could be relevant not only for business/management courses, but also in the areas of public administration and also economic geography.