Business Models and Strategic Management: A New Integration

Business Models and Strategic Management: A New Integration

$21.99

Finally, a book comes along that provides a unique yet simple and powerful approach to understand the business model and the critical role strategic management has in supporting it. Its value is in business model thinking. It brings you a combination of the best contributions of academe and industry that will help build business model-centric organizations. Inside, you’ll learn about strategy from a business model perspective. What does that mean? It means that you’ll first have to think rigorously about your value proposition; your current or future competencies; and your revenue streams and cost structure before developing, adopting, or modifying your strategies. What is the difference between a business model and a strategy? A business model is how a company operates, and a strategy is how a company competes. When the basis of competition changes because a new model disrupts the economics in the industry, it requires an adjustment in business models before any new strategy can work. This book adds a business model level to the traditional strategic management process that is more consistent with current ‘real-world’ practices in strategic thinking and analysis. It takes you deeper into the intricacies of what constitutes a business model and how current strategy derives from it, and offers 7 modules that will show you the key components to manage your business model, to help conduct business model analysis, and to assess the financial viability of a business model, just to name a few.

Strategy Making in Nonprofit Organizations: A Model and Case Studies

Strategy Making in Nonprofit Organizations: A Model and Case Studies

$21.99

The leaders of business and non-profit organizations that provide social services will find a set of principles that apply specifically to their organizations. The need for better management and social innovations is critical as the demand for essential social services is growing even as the budgets available from the government and non-profit foundations are declining. How are social enterprises different and what are the management challenges unique to them? Using case-studies and theories of management, we offer some principles that are uniquely applicable to social enterprises. Such organizations provide mission critical or essential social services under severe resource constraints. They often work with volunteers in highly political contexts. They are purpose driven organizations led by people committed to their causes. They face growing demand that typically outstrips available supply. They face competition for resources in the external environment. These organizations rely on harnessing the creativity of their people through processes that are poorly understood by outsiders. These organizations focus on delivering the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental impact. This book articulates the management problems unique to such organization and offers a set of principles for addressing these.

Strategy and Training: Making Skills a Competitive Advantage

Strategy and Training: Making Skills a Competitive Advantage

$21.99

This book explores corporate training in the context of deploying strategic initiatives within organisations. It goes beyond merely explaining strategy, to investigating how it relates to skills training, and how companies can leverage this to implement their initiatives. Drawing on real-life client examples and the inspirational stories of highly successful individuals, this book highlights approaches that have transformed organisations and re-invented training. It dispels myths that exist around traditional training paradigms and brings to light the effectiveness of new methods and approaches. Social learning, using technologies such as Twitter and video-blogs, is today revolutionising the way training is undertaken. At the same time, the age-old communication technique of storytelling is being reinvented as a way to roll out strategic programs to large multi-cultural groups on a global scale. The author presents key questions that are relevant at project and company level, and provide practical checklists and summaries complementing each chapter of the book. This text highlights how you can develop your team’s expertise through systematic coaching when cascading a strategy throughout your organisation, and explains the benefits of reinforcing strengths, identifying weaknesses and correcting failures to build competitive advantage. It also addresses the risk of ‘unlearning’ post-training, and issues that arise with maintaining performance evaluation and measuring tangible progress. Succinct and pragmatic, the book reveals how strategic projects can be successfully rolled out globally; using cost-effective training that will ensure a return on investment for your organisation.

Working with Excel: Refreshing Math Skills for Management

Working with Excel: Refreshing Math Skills for Management

$21.99

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 in the electronic environment with raw data. 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 in the electronic environment with raw data. Although some statistical and financial techniques for analyzing data 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. While specialized software packages may be used in a particular business setting, Microsoft Excel is routinely available on computer desktops. Managers who have been in the field any length of time may not be sufficiently familiar with the capabilities of Excel to make optimal use of its functionalities. Prior to undertaking a program to pursue executive training, managers who are refreshed with basic algebra skills and the capabilities of Excel will be prepared to develop a richer understanding from their more advanced work. The primary foci of this text are (1) to refresh fundamental mathematical operations that broadly support statistical and financial equations and formulas, (2) to introduce work with equations and formulas in Excel spreadsheets, (3) to expand statistical and financial analysis with the programmed Excel functions readily available through the ‘Insert Function’ toolbar button and the more advanced Data Analysis Toolkit, (4) to facilitate graphic representations of data, and finally (5) to prepare data mounted in differing file formats. This text is a companion to a series of books that addresses the analysis of sample data, time series data, managerial economics, and forecasting techniques. Together these books will equip the manager and the student with a solid understanding of applied data analysis and prepare them to apply the methods themselves.

Academic Ethos Management: Building the Foundation for Integrity in Management Education

Academic Ethos Management: Building the Foundation for Integrity in Management Education

$21.99

This topical and much needed book constitutes an important part of the debate on the integrity in an academic context as a sine qua non of responsible management education. This discussion in management education occurred partly in reaction to highly publicized corporate scandals and instances of management misconduct that have eroded public faith. Concomitantly, management scholars and educators have begun to question the assumptions underlying the traditional management education, which in their view not only contributed to a recent moral crisis but has also failed to prepare students and executives for coping with the responsible leadership challenges and ethical dilemmas that face managers in contemporary corporations. The last decade, which might be called an epoch of moral catastrophes, sets for universities the stage for effectively performing their missions through conscious and consequent incorporating the core values of university into academic activities. This book discusses with stimulating examples how universities should bring alive their core values. Using case studies and examples from universities from all over the world, this book offers what few other title are able to offer: practical advice and guidance, explaining in detail how administrators and educators should discover, articulate and institutionalization (implementation, securing and controlling by creating adequate policies, procedures process etc.) university core values into academic daily activities and create a foundation for academy integrity. The universities, educators and instructors committed to socially responsible management education will find many valuable tools and pragmatic strategies to effectively spread practices of integrity based on university core values across organizational institutions. It provides as well valuable teaching case studies and should be used by course leaders at undergraduate, master’s and MBA level in all business schools.

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

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

$21.99

The surge of motivational titles flooding bookstore shelves amid the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is evidence of our society’s growing obsession with self-improvement. Recently two areas of growing interest among academics have been positive organizational behavior and psychological capital. While books on these subjects have led to a new understanding of motivation, they have limited their focus to two ends of a continuum.

Mastering Self-Motivation pays heed to the extensive research and careful conclusions of academicians, and then crosses into the realm of self-help and mass market literature. It has nine chapters that blend topics being taught over two decades in the classroom and practiced in management consulting.

Each chapter invites you to learn both theoretical and practical concepts and encourages you to apply this knowledge to the workplace. This book thus seeks to mediate market-driven self-help dreams and academic literature, and provides theoretical concepts that can enhance individual motivation presented in a comprehensive and enjoyable manner.

This is the first motivational book that brings together the academic and popular literature to bridge the gap between common sense and theoretical concepts.

Click HERE for downloadable workbook.

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

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

$21.99

Customer-Driven Budgeting 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. Inside, you’ll find crucial details that sum up a complete guide that covers every step in the budgeting cycle from the basics of organization, processes, and funding to budget execution and monitoring.

The author believes that the budget is the starting point and catalyst for gaining customers and that the budget prepares the company to supply the sales and marketing team reinforcements for giving a compelling reason for customers to buy from it.

This book can be used immediately in business budgeting that presents you with a modular format—starting at the beginning of the budget process and working through it entirely; or select a budget area most challenging to the business and work from there to other areas of priority.

Data Sets to Accompany the Book Available to Download HERE.

Managerial Communication: Evaluating the Right Dose

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

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

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.