The Search For Best Practices: Doing the Right Thing the Right Way

$21.99

The book is geared to those interested in doing the right thing the right way, often in the face of organizational roadblocks. The book is a ‘how to’ book to assist management and operations personnel to analyze their operations in a program of continuous improvements. It proposes an on-going search for best practices so that each entity operates most economically, efficiently, and effectively–consistent with why the entity is in existence in the first place. Best practice techniques assist the company in identifying its critical problem areas and treating the cause and not the symptom. With sensible business principles as the hallmark for the company’s quest for best practices, the company can be clear as to the direction for movement and avoid merely improving poor practices or matching competitors less than desirable practices. Clear business principles that make sense to all levels of the organization allow the company to identify and develop the proper best practices. In this manner, everyone in the organization is moving in the same desired direction–and singing from the same songbook. The viruses that corrupt a business organization can be widespread and quite contagious. Nouveau quick fixes may be okay in the short term, but over the long haul the company needs to know what they are doing. If the company doesn’t, some other company will. The main audience for this book is anyone currently or desirous of working in business–including management/supervision/employees and anyone interested in the world of business and how businesses operate. As many businesses are struggling to be competitive, or merely to survive, this book becomes a primer or ‘how to’ for identifying and maintaining excellence in their operations using best practices in developing a learning organization. The book can be used by individuals, groups or departments–management and operations personnel–in business as a learning, coaching, and mentoring tool in their quest to make their operations the best possible. Another audience is undergraduate and graduate business programs where the book could be used as a course text or supplemental readings for an existing course. Courses could include any course related to business operations, management courses, or its own specific course.

Followership: What It Takes to Lead

$21.99

Followers dominate all organizations, but a preoccupation with leaders hinders the consideration of the importance of followers and the relationship between followers and leaders.

Followership: What It Takes to Lead will teach you how to become a better leader by becoming a better follower. The book includes chapters on the topics of: leadership theory, followership theory, preparation for the job, understanding what is required for the job, communication, initiative, positive attitude, responsibility, problem solving, and teamwork. It also provides suggestions for becoming an exemplary follower, which will demonstrate and manifest the skills associated with leadership as well as bridge the gap between leadership training and followership.

Experimental Design: Unified Concepts, Practical Applications, and Computer Implementation

$21.99

This book is a concise and innovative book that gives a complete presentation of the design and analysis of experiments in approximately one-half the space of competing books. With only the modest prerequisite of a basic (non-calculus) statistics course, this text is appropriate for the widest possible audience, including college juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students in business, the sciences, and statistics, as well as professionals in business and industry. This book is a concise and innovative book that gives a complete presentation of the design and analysis of experiments in approximately one-half the space of competing books. With only the modest prerequisite of a basic (non-calculus) statistics course, this text is appropriate for the widest possible audience including college juniors, seniors, and first-year graduate students in business and statistics, as well as professionals in business and industry. The book is able to accommodate this wide audience because of the unique, integrative approach that it takes to the teaching of experimental design. This text organizes and presents the two procedures for analyzing experimental design data – analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression analysis – in a way that allows the student to move through the material more quickly and efficiently than usual, making the true advantages of both ANOVA and regression analysis more apparent. The book devotes most of its first three chapters to showing how to use ANOVA to analyze the type of experimental design data that it can appropriately be used to analyze: balanced (equal sample sized) data or unbalanced (unequal sample sized) data from one factor studies; balanced data from two factor studies (two-way factorials and randomized block designs); and balanced data from three or more factor studies. Chapter 3 includes a general ANOVA procedure for analyzing balanced data experiments. Regression analysis can be used to analyze almost any balanced or unbalanced data experiment but is less intuitive than ANOVA. Therefore, this book waits to discuss regression analysis until it is needed to analyze data that cannot be analyzed by ANOVA. This is in Section 2.4 where regression is explained from first principles and then used to analyze unbalanced data from two-way factorials and data from incomplete block designs. Regression is used again in Chapter 4 to analyze data resulting from two-level fractional factorial and block confounding experiments.

The Fundamentals of Financial Statement Analysis as Applied to the Coca-Cola Company

$21.99

One reason for the exacerbation of recent stock market crises is a lack of understanding by investors of financial ratio analysis and what it can reveal about the way companies operate. Stock markets are efficient in that they incorporate, and even anticipate, information about companies based on financial accounting data that is provided by companies. However, market efficiency results from extensive analysis performed by financial analysts. Much of this financial analysis is based on the analysis of company-provided financial information that is then analyzed using financial ratio analysis. The goal of this book is to provide a detailed step-by-step demonstration of how to download data from Internet sources, transfer the data into a spreadsheet, and conduct a financial ratio analysis. The company selected for financial analysis is Coca Cola but the same process outlined in the proposed book could be applied to any company. The data retrieved from the financial statements is copied to a worksheet and used to compute and to graph the financial ratios. The ratios and graphs are used to determine the performance drivers of Coca-Cola. The proposed book can be used as a supplement to basic courses in Corporate Finance, Financial Statement Analysis or in a variety of executive education courses dealing with financial accounting and corporate finance.

Learning Macroeconomic Principles Using MAPLE

$21.99

Traditional macroeconomic principles textbooks are theoretically based, and require students to apply definitions, analyze charts, graphs and tables, and use logic and reasoning skills to evaluate the effects of economic shocks or policy changes. Recognizing how challenging this is, economics instruction has adopted video, simulation, and other methods to aid in learning. These methods, however, while possibly stimulating students’ imagination, may also stifle it and contribute to a dependent learning style. It may also fail to connect topics and models in cohesive and meaningful ways. This book presents macroeconomic principles in a logical and concise order, and uses the Maple? mathematics program to build and analyze macroeconomic models. The method outlined in this book teaches readers with basic algebraic skill levels how to build a model of the macro-economy from the ground up. The method uses models derived from typical principles textbooks using Maple as a platform. Maple’s interface is as easy to use as typing a simple math problem in Microsoft Word using keys on a standard keyboard. The Maple syntax is kept simple, which allows readers to be proficient in Maple in a matter of minutes. In short, this book allows executives, advanced degree students, undergraduate students, business executives, managers, policy makers, and others to gain a fuller understanding of how the macro-economy works. Topics covered in the book range from individual demand and firm supply to aggregate demand and supply, and fiscal and monetary policy from the Austrian to Keynesian schools of thought.

Fashion Marketing: Influencing Consumer Choice and Loyalty with Fashion Products

$21.99

Fashion is everywhere! Fashion transcends domains and applies to almost any kind of product (e.g., apparel, cars, digital devices, food, literature, trips, music, house decoration, personal wellness). Fashion greatly influences public interest, media coverage, and product success. The global fashion apparel industry, for example, is one of the most important in terms of investments, trade, and employment while depending upon unpredictable demand. In the world of fashion, companies face a dilemma: On one hand, they create products with shorter life cycles; on the other hand they expect such products to repeatedly reap large profits. One of the main challenges fashion product managers face is to create and launch fashion products that will continuously meet the same success with customers. For example, will the long skirt have the same success than the skinny jean, or will the high heel prevail over the flats? Moreover, the fashion industry deals with products that greatly impact personal appearance, seduction, thus, relationships with others. Indeed, a fashion dress is more than just a dress, as it can change one’s appearance and reveal the consumer’s identity. Consequently, fashion managers not only are responsible for their product lines, but also for the symbolic image they help customers convey. This book focuses on the fashion apparel and accessories industry. It introduces the concept of fashion equity–the value fashion adds to products–a key concept to explain fashion products attractiveness and success, despite their constant renewal. This book will help managers answer the following questions: Why and how fashion products consistently appeal to consumers despite their renewal? What symbolic and experiential benefits fashion products bring to consumers and how fashion product managers can leverage them better? What marketing strategy and tactics companies should use to increase fashion products success while managing customers’ image? How companies can maintain customers’ loyalty and generate higher profits with fashion products? Based on deep analyses of manufacturers and retailers’ best practices, customers’ and companies’ interviews, and the latest academic research on fashion marketing, this book will assist companies to manage the value fashion adds to products, extract larger profits despite their shorter life cycles, and help them create long-term loyal customers.

Leader Evolution: From Technical Expertise to Strategic Leadership

$21.99

Most individuals who move into leadership positions experience the modern day version of trial by ordeal. It’s sink or swim. To reduce the learning curve and create a more effective process, Leader Evolution describes a roadmap for leadership development, a series of four stages that expand personal competence as well as a broader impact on the organization or business. Each stage also requires two unique changes: one in thinking and perspective taking, and one in behavior. The book takes self-motivated individuals who want to take control of their professional development through concepts, tools, techniques, and assignments to help develop leadership effectiveness where it counts the most – on the job.

In addition to new and existing managers, the book is ideally suited for professionals and leaders in technical organizations who are looking to develop critical leadership behaviors. These include individuals who are advancing their careers through their technical expertise rather than a managerial track. The broad application of concepts and techniques also makes this book appealing to organizations developing their leaders as part of broad change initiatives. While the content is directed towards the individual for on-the-job application, the book can also serve as an organizational and leadership development resource for Executive MBA programs and a blueprint for in-house leadership development programs.

Doing Business in Emerging Markets: Roadmap for Success

$21.99

“This book provides a good review of the challenges facing business in the emerging markets and initiates the discussion of the roadmap necessary for success. I found it thought-provoking and recommend it to anyone with a desire to take their business from local to global.” —Jayshree Pandya, Founder Risk Group LLC (http:// www.riskgroupllc.com) and author of the book, The Global Age: NGIOA @ Risk
“This book provides a complete review about political and economic impacts in developing business abroad. It shows a very interesting historical review with recent facts clearly punctuated. You will enjoy it.” —Osvaldo Costa, Senior HR Manager at Tigre S.A., Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil.

Corporate Valuation Using the Free Cash Flow Method Applied to Coca-Cola

$21.99

The value of a corporation is the discounted present value of future cash flows provided by the company to the shareholders. The valuation process requires that the corporate financial decision maker determine the future free cash flow to equity, the short-term growth rate, the long-term growth rate, and the required rate of return based on market beta. The book discusses the Black-Scholes option pricing model and the weighted average cost of capital. The objective of this book is to provide a template for demonstrating corporate financial management using a real company – Coca-Cola. The data used in this book comes from the financial statements of Coca-Cola available on EDGAR. Other data are from SBBI, Yahoo! Finance, the U. S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation, Market Results for 1926 -2010, 2011 Yearbook, Classic Edition, Morningstar, and US Department of the Treasury.

Healthcare Supply Chain Management: Basic Concepts and Principles

$21.99

According to the health data released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other OECD country. Currently, U.S. healthcare spending constitutes $2.5 trillion, or 17.3 percent of GDP, with healthcare costs increasing 9 percent annually. To reverse this alarming trend, the Obama administration recently led the effort to dramatically reform healthcare policy, laws, and regulations. This book provides you (whether a healthcare policy maker, hospital administrator, pharmaceutical company manager, or other healthcare professional) with practical guidance for leveraging supply chain principles to better manage healthcare resources and control healthcare costs. It introduces basic supply chain management concepts, terminologies, and tenets. Other included topics are strategic alliances among healthcare partners, value analysis of healthcare services and products, the impact of healthcare reforms on healthcare supply chains, and the development of performance metrics for the healthcare supply chain and benchmarking.