Feet to the Fire: How to Exemplify and Create the Accountability that Creates Great Companies

$21.99

“Lorraine Moore is an insightful leader and executive coach who brings a wealth of knowledge to the table in Feet to the Fire. Her years of experience as a senior executive, mentor to CEO’s and leader of CEO Forums come alive in this important work that shares her insights and shared learning from a cross section of industries and industry leaders. Lorraine challenges leaders to hold themselves and their teams accountable both professionally and personally in the context of the ever elusive work life balance that is so frequently ill defined. I have found her impartial, thought provoking counsel to be an invaluable game changer.”—David Blodgett, President & Chief Executive Officer
“This book is a must read for both novice and experienced leaders who are looking for sophisticated practical information on how to lead powerfully. Unlike most books on leadership, Feet to the Fire does not provide a simple step-by-step “formula” for success but instead offers insightful information and suggestions for how leaders might think and behave more complexly. Informed by her many years of experience in leadership positions and her work with successful leaders Moore offers both pragmatic information and insightful analyses. Feet to the Fire has affirmed many things that are important in cultivating effective leadership and it also challenges some assumptions and habits of practice. This is the hallmark of a book that truly educates.”—Dennis Sumara, Professor and Dean, Werkliund School of Education,University of Calgary.

KNOWledge SUCCESSion: Sustained Performance and Capability Growth Through Strategic Knowledge Projects

$21.99

Check out a recent book review from Project Management World Journal!!

KNOWledge SUCCESSion is intended for executives and developing professionals who face the challenges of delivering business benefits for today, while building the capabilities required for an increasingly changing future. The book is structured to build from foundational requirements toward connecting the highly interdependent aspects of success in an emerging complex world. A wide range of concepts are brought together in a logical framework to enable readers of different disciplines to understand how they either create barriers or can be harvested to generate synergistic opportunities. The insights are robust as and pragmatic to help leaders create an environment in which their teams develop the knowledge and capabilities for sustained strategic success. This book also has extended learning for postgraduate students of business and project management in either an informal or a formal learning context. All successful medium to large organizations now need to have active management of projects and the ability to develop knowledge and capability to drive innovation and maintain relevance. There are detailed books on how to manage projects, texts of knowledge management, and volumes on innovation and change, but there is no one book that brings all these interdependent aspects of success together within the context of projects.

Forecasting Fundamentals

$21.99

Check out the review in the just-released “Inbound Logistics, January 2018, Winter Reading Guide” !

This book is for everyone who wants to make better forecasts. It is not about mathematics and statistics. It is about following a well-established forecasting process to create and implement good forecasts. This is true whether you are forecasting global markets, sales of SKUs, competitive strategy, or market disruptions. Today, most forecasts are generated using software. However, no amount of technology and statistics can compensate for a poor forecasting process. Forecasting is not just about generating a number. Forecasters need to understand the problems they are trying to solve. They also need to follow a process that is justifiable to other parties and be implemented in practice. This is what the book is about. Accurate forecasts are essential for predicting demand, identifying new market opportunities, forecasting risks, disruptions, innovation, competition, market growth and trends. Companies can navigate this daunting landscape and improve their forecasts by following some well-established principles. This book is written to provide the fundamentals business leaders need in order to make good forecasts. These fundamentals hold true regardless of what is being forecast and what technology is being used. It provides the basic foundational principles all companies need to achieve competitive forecast accuracy.

1 + 1 = 100: Achieving Breakthrough Results Through Partnerships

$21.99

1 + 1 = 100 guides readers through developing, implementing, and maintaining close relationships within their own company (employees, design engineering, product development, sales and marketing, operations, and supply chain) as well out outside (suppliers, customers, and the community). By avoiding overreliance on cost reduction measures and instead developing partnerships, the company, and its partners can achieve world-class profitability and cash flow.
For more than 30 years, the focus in industry has been to improve productivity and cut costs using approaches like Lean Thinking, World Class Manufacturing, Reengineering, Strategic Supply Chain strategies, and off-shoring. Unlike the techniques that these process improvement methods espouse, partnerships go beyond correcting mistakes or solving problems; they entail looking at the big picture and building on each partner’s strengths, making breakthrough results possible for all stakeholders in the relationship. 1 + 1 = 100 speaks directly to operations and supply chain executives in manufacturing and distribution environments, but the concepts are essential for all members of the executive team in any industry that has an operations component and suppliers.

Innovative Business Projects: Breaking Complexities, Building Performance, Volume Two: Financials, New Insights, and Project Sustainability

$21.99

“…innovation is not just a state of mind of entrepreneurs woven around new insights but a major challenge rests in commercializing it and gaining competitive advantage. Managing innovative business projects is thus an art and science, which has been meticulously explained in this book by Rajagopal through real business examples and illustrations. This book helps the managers learn how to lead the innovations of start-up enterprises to a successful business icon. The book is a distinctive reading on innovation projects, which stands apart from those on the project management. A simple, lucid, and intellectual journey through the book. Kudos to the author…” –Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School at Dartmouth, and Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School
“The global competitive environment has become exceedingly complex and changes more rapidly than most companies realize. Professor Rajagopal offers a systematic approach to how companies can cope with these challenges, remain competitive, and innovate. A must read for executives.”–Mauro F. Guillen, Director of The Lauder Institute and Dr. Felix Zandman, Professor of International Management, The Wharton School, Philadelphia, PA
This book addresses the project management tools and techniques in reference to innovation management analyzing global-local business scenarios, project environment, and administrative perspectives. It also details the financial, risk management, new project designs, complexities in managing innovation, and developing customer-centric innovation projects. Discussions in the book also deliberate on how innovation business project can be managed systematically to enhance organizational performance.

Managing Commodity Price Risk: A Supply Chain Perspective, Second Edition

$21.99

Check out the review in the just-released “Inbound Logistics, January 2018, Winter Reading Guide” !

Almost every organization is exposed to financial risk stemming from commodity price volatility. Risk exposure may be direct, from the prices paid for raw materials transformed into products sold to customers, or indirect, from higher energy, transportation costs, and supplier commodity purchases. Managing Commodity Price Risk: A Supply Chain Perspective provides a range of approaches organizations can implement and adapt for assessing, forecasting, and managing commodity price volatility and reducing financial risk exposure associated with purchased goods and services. Understanding and managing commodity price risk is important for organizations and supply chain professionals due to the significant direct financial effects price volatility has on profitability, organizational cash flow, the ability to competitively price products, new product design, buyer–supplier relationships, and the negotiation process.

Innovative Business Projects: Breaking Complexities, Building Performance Volume One – Fundamentals and Project Environment

$21.99

“…innovation is not just a state of mind of entrepreneurs woven around new insights but a major challenge rests in commercializing it and gaining competitive advantage. Managing innovative business projects is thus an art and science, which has been meticulously explained in this book by Rajagopal through real business examples and illustrations. This book helps the managers learn how to lead the innovations of start-up enterprises to a successful business icon. The book is a distinctive reading on innovation projects, which stands apart from those on the project management. A simple, lucid, and intellectual journey through the book. Kudos to the author…” –Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School at Dartmouth, and Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School
“The global competitive environment has become exceedingly complex and changes more rapidly than most companies realize. Professor Rajagopal offers a systematic approach to how companies can cope with these challenges, remain competitive, and innovate. A must read for executives.”–Mauro F. Guillen, Director of The Lauder Institute and Dr. Felix Zandman, Professor of International Management, The Wharton School, Philadelphia, PA This book addresses the project management tools and techniques in reference to innovation management analyzing global-local business scenarios, project environment, and administrative perspectives. It also details the financial, risk management, new project designs, complexities in managing innovation, and developing customer-centric innovation projects. Discussions in the book also deliberate on how innovation business project can be managed systematically to enhance organizational performance.

Business Engineering and Service Design, Second Edition, Volume I

$21.99

The author presents business engineering (BE) and its application to service offerings design by using:
‧ Several disciplines—strategy, business models, modularization, business processes (BP), business intelligence (BI), information systems (IS) and IT- in generating enterprise architecture designs for services, which are aligned with and make operational stakeholders’ interests.
‧ A hierarchical methodology that allows managing the complexity of full enterprise design by starting with overall aggregated designs detailed by hierarchical decomposition. ‧ Business, architecture, and process patterns that abstract and formalize the knowledge and experience generated from hundreds of cases.
‧ Advanced analytics—data based and operation research (OR) models – to support business development, by generating new or improved service designs, and management, by embedding models in operating process design, allowing truly BI that optimize service performance.
‧ Formal constructs to model designs based on BPMN, allowing simulation and their eventual execution using BP management suits.
This book provides the foundations of BE, reviews the disciplines integrated within its methodology, and presents plentiful evidence of its power by giving detailed application cases, including impressive results in private and public situations.

Making HR Technology Decisions: A Strategic Perspective

$21.99

The goal of this book is to help HR decision makers recognize where to capture value from HR technology, learn how to demonstrate that value, and make better implementation decisions. The authors include topics such as how HR technology can deliver strategic value; whether to outsource HR processes, HR technology, and project management; training and change management; measuring value through ROI analyses and HR Analytics; and, how to evaluate and manage future HR innovations.
Our approach is to introduce theoretical frameworks from management science to guide decision making about HR technology. These theoretical approaches provide a scientific basis and structure to analyze business challenges and improve decision making compared with using intuition alone or relying on vendor best practices. The theories and frameworks come from strategic management, economics, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, and information systems. This breadth helps managers understand the many ways HR technology decisions can increase value.

Dark Sides of Business and Higher Education Management, Volume II

$21.99

Contemporary management studies usually focus on positive and desirable solutions that increase the organizational effectiveness and performance. As a result, graduates of higher business schools are totally unaware of the risk associated with management misconduct that often results in corrupt scandals, erosion of public trust to their organizations, or even the collapse of profitable corporations. The last decade, in fact, has been abundant in numerous examples of corruption scandals in modern organizations and instances of management misconduct that have eroded public faith (such as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, and Parmalat).
Due to repeated misconducts and a highly active dark side, scholars started paying more attention to the so-called “dark side” of organizations, as something no longer exceptional to organizational life. This book attempts to shed light on the reality of challenges for business practices and higher education management that stem from misconduct occurring in various aspects of business and educational environment.