This text describes and focuses on the accounting profession, financial reporting, and the evolving business landscape. Specifically, the key theme and idea embedded throughout this text, and supported with academic and market examples, is the idea of a more strategic management accounting function. Integrated financial reporting represents a framework and platform through which accounting professionals achieve a more strategic and leadership-centric role.
The toy industry is one of the most consistently misunderstood sectors of American business. That’s no surprise because on many levels it resists easy definition. It’s a commodity business. No, it’s a fashion business. No, it’s a consumer products business. No, it’s an entertainment business. The fact is it’s all of these businesses, each of which addresses and responds to market forces differently. And often, especially with the larger, publicly traded companies—all of these businesses share a balance sheet. This book will provide a concise and in-depth introduction to the structure, practices and market forces that impact the toy industry. It will offer a short history of the industry, a description of the current market landscape, major and emerging industry competitors, contemporary trends, changes and expectations for the future. It will further cover aspects of retailing, consumer behavior, and financial markets as they relate to the industry. As noted, the book will focus primarily on the U.S. toy industry, but will provide guidelines for extrapolating the information to the global toy market and a highlight of those issues, such as manufacturing, that are relatively consistent worldwide. The book is intended to provide a foundation for understanding the diverse and changing nature of the toy industry and to help readers develop a context for appreciating it relevant to other, more predictable and definable industries. Many students—and professionals for that matter—come to the toy industry ill equipped for success because they are unable to understand the various disciplines and business practices it encompasses and therefore unable to apply those practices appropriately for the product or product category. A preschool toy will never behave like a toy from a hot movie. It’s something many successful people in the business know and have learned over time, but it remains a mystery to the uninitiated. Withal this book is intended as an initiation into a fascinating, fast-paced and fiercely competitive business that is very often more an art than a science.
This book, Entrepreneurial Selling addresses the unique challenges faced by entrepreneurs of all kinds in startup, small, medium, or large organizations in their quest to get buy-ins for novel ideas, products or services. In addition to describing typical sales hurdles, the book offers strategies and tactics for effectively overcoming them and growing their list of customers, collaborators, financiers, suppliers, board members, and other sympathizers. While most books on Entrepreneurship focus on the characteristics of Entrepreneurs, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, and how to get startup capital, Entrepreneurial Selling sheds light on how Entrepreneurs can excel at selling to build their team and obtain resources. The future of a novel idea hinges on reaching, engaging and convincing target audience about its merits. Basically, Entrepreneurial leadership without selling ability is unrealistic. Based on multiyear field studies and several consulting projects with Entrepreneurs of all kinds in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and North America, this book shows how Entrepreneurs can effectively reach out, enroll collaborators, prospect for businesses, handle typical objections, ask for buy-ins, reach agreement, and treat requests for discounts (in the case of commercial exchanges). The insight contained in this book should give Entrepreneurs early head start, prevent costly mistakes, and increase the odds of realizing new venture dreams. The goal is to preempt fantasies by facilitating early reality checks that will inform productive usage of Entrepreneurs’ limited resources.
The purpose of this book is to provide practicing and aspiring managers and students of management a practical and comprehensive reference source for communicating on the job with all people in all situations. This “how-to” book provides readers with the essential knowledge, attitudes, and skills to perform the communicating aspects of their routine and special duties. The information is presented in two volumes and each topic is divided into “Things to Know” and “Things to Do.”
Volume I topics are divided into six sections:
Overview of the Book
Fundamentals of Communicating
Communicating Competencies Required of Managers
Personal Qualities Managers Need to Communicate Effectively
Communicating Strategies for Safeguarding the Manager’s Job
The purpose of this book is to provide practicing and aspiring managers and students of management a practical and comprehensive reference source for communicating on the job with all people in all situations. This “how-to” book provides readers with the essential knowledge, attitudes, and skills to perform the communicating aspects of their routine and special duties. The information is presented in two volumes. Each topic is divided into “Things to Know” and “Things to Do.”
Volume II topics are divided into five sections:
‧ Sending Effective Messages
‧ The Four Methods of Communicating: Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading
‧ Planning and Conducting Productive Meetings
‧ Communicating Skills for Dealing with Special Situations
‧ Communicating Attitudes and Techniques for Coping Competently with Difficult Employees
Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning—falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement.
Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The opening chapter summarizes nine challenges for public involvement, together with over sixty aspirational recommendations. Subsequent chapters provide detailed case studies illustrating these challenges for a range of projects—a new bridge, a light rail line, a highway interchange, neighborhood street modi fications, urban streetscaping, bicycle routes, movement of freight, and a transportation master plan. The close government-academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.
This book sets out new approaches, formulas, and software needed to enable HR function or organization to forecast trends and to use existing retrospective data to their organization’s advantage, which, in short, is to maximize efficiency and productivity.
The reader will encounter new formulas to use and new approaches that will add value. Readers will also learn that most of the existing 52 formulas available don’t work in today’s environment. There is new software that will enable you to do forecasts with certainty and you can use a new mathematical model to rightsize any organization.
Are you using an outdated organizational model? Do you have processes that don’t work any more? These are areas that are major inhibitors to productivity and can be significantly improved. Most important of all, this book will help you to create immense added value in any organization.
Given the influential role that business professionals now play in society, high-quality education is essential. A recognition that business programs can and should nurture leaders committed not only to personal and corporate success but also to social progress rests at the core of a revised and renewed education model.
Steeped in the liberal arts, this book presents a practical plan to achieve that goal. It makes a cogent argument for incorporating a theoretical model of professionalism into undergraduate and graduate business programs, and offers guidance to business deans and faculty interested in preparing students for the evolving role of business leadership in the 21st century. Using an adapted “wheel of professionalism” model, it describes curricular content and educational approaches designed to guide students toward higher levels of professionalism, social consciousness, and ethical decision-making.
This is the first book on the global auto industry viewed through the lens of technology. It starts by tracing how innovation shaped the fi rst century of its history, then it examines the industry’s shifting footprint in Europe and North America, and the rise of new producers, particularly China. Succeeding chapters emphasize the role of suppliers in what is now a high-tech industry.
This book describes new forms of collaboration that challenge traditional supply chain relations, analyzing regulation as a driver of innovation, and the enabling role of the materials science revolution, such as the shift of steel from a commodity to a highly engineered product. It covers innovations in management, from computer-aided engineering, roadmapping, and just-in-time methods to the evolving role of workers and public policy. The authors finish with an overview of electric vehicles, shared mobility, and autonomous vehicles, concluding that they will not prove disruptive.
Data visualization involves graphical and visual tools used in data analysis and decision making. The emphasis in this book is on recent trends and applications of visualization tools using conventional and big data. These tools are widely used in data visualization and quality improvement to analyze, enhance, and improve the quality of products and services. Data visualization is an easy way to obtain a first look at the data visually. The book provides a collection of visual and graphical tools widely used to gain an insight into the data before applying more complex analysis.
The focus is on the key application areas of these tools including business process improvement, business data analysis, health care, finance, manufacturing, engineering, process improvement, and Lean Six Sigma. The key areas of application include data and data analysis concepts, recent trends in data visualization and “Big Data,” widely used charts and graphs and their applications, analysis of the relationships between two or more variables graphically using scatterplots, bubble graphs, matrix plots, etc., data visualization with big data, computer applications and implementation of widely used graphical and visual tools, and computer instructions to create the graphics presented along with the data files.
