The New Leader: Harnessing the Power of Creativity to Produce Change

$21.99

Leaders in the 21st-century must learn to solve problems and motivate followers with a combination of creativity, leadership, and effective change. In The New Leader: Harnessing the Power of Creativity to Produce Change, readers will develop an understanding of the relationship between creativity, leadership, and change. They will analyze the creative process, learn how to develop a creative culture, and understand effective leadership styles that promote creativity and change. They will explore training to enhance creativity and leadership, and develop practical ways to create an environment that encourages positive growth. The book offers simple techniques to enhance creativity and leadership immediately, while also pointing to long-term changes that will bring even more success. Stories, reflection questions, and theories are intertwined to help the reader develop sound strategies to lead with enhanced creativity.
The book will help an overwhelmed leader learn engaging tools to lead change, while encouraging disengaged leaders to try new methods to revive their leadership and accomplish a motivating vision. In the end, leaders will become more effective, engaging, and transformational by adopting the ideas in the book. They will serve as a model for creativity, create spaces that enhance creative growth, and encourage cultures where employees are free to create positive changes for their organizations.

Matching Services to Markets: The Role of the Human Sensorium in Shaping Service-Intensive Markets

$21.99

This book begins an adventure wherein the author outlines for us the particular shape our minds impose on that journey; he takes as his analytic, the human sensorium: the panoply of sensory channels (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) we use to grasp our world. His primary insight is that our sensorium does not, beyond immediate social groups, present smooth, mirror-like vistas of our socially networked world.
Contrariwise, he shows that this uniquely human array of channels presents a mosaic of disparate inputs with subtle fissures and sutures between and among them. That more sophisticated view of our sensory apparatus allows him to describe with great practicality, the fissured, segmented architectures we inject into our enterprises and, above all, our markets.
These insights particularly illuminate the revolution reshaping our understanding of the basic couplet of value exchange driving markets: Buying and selling.
In this revolution a more telling focus on services as catalysts of value exchange is supplanting the traditional terms: goods and product, as the architecture of that very human sensorium broached above modulates value exchange across the chain of institutional need in markets.
Armed with this novel set of insights, we come away with a far better sense of what is happening “overhead,” as we work out our missions and careers amid our socially constructed edifices: enterprises, institutions, and their battlegrounds, our markets.

Performance Leadership ™

$21.99

A fearsome aspect of management is the performance appraisal. It has become a byword for unfairness and irritation among employees. Some management writers are even proposing in doing away with it. We agree that the current method of appraisal is unsustainable and counterproductive. In this book, we discuss Performance Leadership – the idea of leading employee performance, which should be the focus of management. Just doing appraisal or evaluation is not enough. Managers must incorporate the entire model of performance management and use it to lead within their workgroup, department, or organization. We walk managers through the steps of Performance Leadership, discussing the benefits and pitfalls of each step. The idea of making performance management work as a leadership style is new and simple, but it takes dedication to complete the task. This book is valuable for supervisors, managers, human resource staff, and others – anyone who needs to manage performance!

Project Teams: A Structured Development Approach

$21.99

Projects generally require skills and effort from multiple disciplines to develop project deliverables. Projects are executed in teams, as project tasks require multiple skills, judgment, and experience. Project teams roles should be assigned based on strengths of individuals.
Project team process is a mediating mechanism linking variables such as members, team, and organizational characteristics that include structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive systems, employee morality, and top management support.
Team performance or teamwork is impacted by the structure of a team. Team structural characteristics include the number of team members, the status hierarchy, roles and responsibilities, and accepted norms for behaviors of individuals within the team. Further, understanding characteristics of virtual teams and their key attributes for improving global project performance are of critical importance.
Social and behavioral skills that each person brings are important influencing factors in interactions with other team members and in forming a cohesive and productive team. Also, organization and national cultures influence their behaviors.
Project Teams is an attempt to address all these topics in detail and offer a practical approach to managing projects successfully in the current business environment by including concepts, processes, techniques, and tools to manage and enhance performance of project teams and projects. This book would be meaningful for project management professionals and project managers in any organization and can be a useful resource for academic institutions in teaching management and project management disciplines.

Selling: The New Norm: Dynamic New Methods for a Competitive and Changing World

$21.99

Why read another book on selling? Simple. Today’s client is more informed, more sophisticated, and has more access to information. Selling professionals today need to be keener to fulfill the needs of the client by offering value, and most important, trust.
In the increasing age and rage of globalization and the Internet, competition rises. Selling professionals today need to determine better ways to reach the economic decision maker and better articulate their value. Selling: The New Norm is such a book. This book will provide the tools and templates required to meet today’s sales challenges.

Service Excellence: Creating Customer Experiences That Build Relationships

$21.99

Check out Forbes Magazine, July issue, which refers to Bolton’s book — “…some positive guidance summarized in a new book…”
By providing excellent service, organizations build strong relationships with customers, generate barriers to competition, utilize resources more efficiently, and increase profitability. This book provides concepts and tools to help managers:
‧ Uncover new sources of revenue from innovations and improvements in the customer experience, including leveraging business analytics and metrics;
‧ Design service processes, operations and channels to create customer experiences that build relationships, as well as design responses to service failures; and
‧ Manage people, physical evidence, branding and communications to effectively cocreate experiences with customers. The Customer Experience is the sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral dimensions of all activities that connect the customer and the organization over time across touch points and channels. It encompasses all activities involving the customer where the organization is the focal object, including prepurchase activities (such as exposure to a website ad), and purchase, consumption, and engagement behaviors (blogging, sharing photos).
This book analyzes the challenges of creating excellent customer experiences, including the management of technology and new media. It describes how customers coproduce and cocreate their experiences, and how these activities influence business revenues and costs. The book takes a deep dive into the psychology of customers, revealing the conceptual building blocks of customer experiences and how they build relationships over time. These ideas provide a business perspective on how to manage relationships with customers to generate cash flows and profitability, including the role of pricing.

Making Projects Sing: A Musical Perspective of Project Management

$21.99

This book explores project management (PM) from a musical perspective. Music is a significant example of a nontraditional arena where PM is vital, yet it is only beginning to be seen as a vital tool. Therefore, this book will give an in depth and preeminent look at the PM processes and knowledge areas that are of utmost importance in many fields that PM is not used for currently. Seeking to understand projects in musical ways, synergies between music and the wider project management profession are many and varied.
Written and developed by international experts in the project management and music professions, this book rep?resents a unique and insightful approach to the study of the subject. The authors take a fresh look at practical models of musical thinking capable of application at every scale of project management, and in every possible project management environment. If you want to make your projects more musical, or simply have an interest exploring project management in music, this is the book for you!

Managerial Communication for the Arabian Gulf

$21.99

The Arabian Gulf comprises some of the most thriving economies of the world. Since the discovery of oil, the openness to commercial activity has attracted many MNCs and this has led to a proliferation of activity in both the industrial and service sectors. The region also boasts one of the largest contemporary expatriate communities, resulting in a dynamic and multicultural managerial environment. The complexity of this workforce and its inherent diversity, made up of more than two hundred different national cultures, present managers with a considerable communication challenge.
This volume provides an accessible introduction to managerial communication in the region targeted at practitioners, managers, and students. It provides extensive practical advice as well as insights from current academic thinking.

Relationship Marketing Re-Imagined: Marketing’s Inevitable Shift from Exchanges to Value Cocreating Relationships

$21.99

Marketing is arguably amidst a paradigm shift. With the emerging value co-creation perspective, a single transaction can blossom to a process in which the customer and the marketer collaborate (rather than negotiate) for best total value through products, features, delivery terms, maintenance, and financing options for both B2B as well as B2C markets. Marketers increasingly need to develop and maintain long-term, win-win relationships that extend beyond customers, such as those with distributors, dealers, suppliers, competitors and other external influencers.
Business executives, marketing students, and those who are interested in learning about the transformative power of relationship marketing and CRM analytics in the business enterprise would highly benefit from reading this book.

Mapping Workflows and Managing Knowledge: Capturing Formal and Tacit Knowledge to Improve Performance, Volume II

$21.99

This book is Volume II of simple but powerful tools for performance improvement. It is written for managers, analysts, and consultants who realize the value that system dynamic modeling can bring to companies and organizations, and would like to have that capability without a degree in math or computer science. It features the iThink modeling program, which requires no extensive knowledge of math; instead, iThink uses a small set of symbols and rules to allow any keen observer of a system to create models graphically—the user literally draws a graphic of the system within the program and works from that.
In Chapter 1, the author describes his own experiences with modeling, the growth and development of modeling software, and makes the case for its value. Chapter 2 is an overview of iThink symbols and rules, sufficient to enable the reader to interpret and understand iThink models; while the program has many advanced features, a great many models are based on the fundamentals in this chapter. Chapter 3 provides guidelines for converting workflow-mapping models into iThink dynamic models, and discusses approaches to building models from scratch.
This approach to modeling is consistent with the author’s approach to workflow mapping and analysis, which uses a small symbol set and related discipline to map workflows in any company or organization, without the need for expensive software or extended training. That process is described in this volume of the series, and these maps are often the foundation for modeling the system as a dynamic entity.