Decision Analysis for Managers: A Guide for Making Better Personal and Business Decisions

Decision Analysis for Managers: A Guide for Making Better Personal and Business Decisions

$21.99

Everybody has to make decisions–they are unavoidable. However, we receive little or no education or training on how to make decisions. Business decisions are difficult: which people to hire, which product lines or facilities to expand, which proposal to accept, how much R&D to invest in, which environmental projects are high priority, etc. Personal decisions (college, getting married, changing jobs, buying a house, retiring, dealing with a health problem) can be even more difficult.
This book gives you the tools you need to…
‧ Clarify and reach alignment on goals and objectives,
‧ Understand trade-offs associated with reaching those objectives,
‧ Develop and examine alternatives, ‧ Systematically analyze the effects of risk and uncertainty, and
‧ Maximize the chances of achieving your goals.
Success (getting what you want) depends on luck and good decision making. You can’t control your luck, but you can maximize your odds by making the best possible decisions, and this book gets you there. The author organizes and presents otherwise formal decision-making tools in an intuitively understandable fashion. The presentation is informal, but the concepts and tools are research-based and formally accepted. Whether you are a business owner, a manager or team leader, or a senior professional, these tools will help both your personal and your business life.

David Charlesworth is a licensed chemical engineer, obtained his MBA from the University of Florida, and obtained a BS ChE from Indiana Tech. He has experience in a broad range of businesses, completing decision analysis and portfolio analysis projects in oil and gas, LNG, pharmaceutical, and chemicals, both as a consultant (Decision Strategies, Inc.) and as an in-house resource (Conoco and Chevron). He has presented a variety of technical talks at conferences and has been an invited guest lecturer at the University of Texas, Rice University, JPL, and Virtual-workshops.com.

Transfer Pricing in International Business: A Management Tool for Adding Value

Transfer Pricing in International Business: A Management Tool for Adding Value

$21.99

For centuries, trade has endured stumbling blocks, mistakes, and moments of inspiration. It has contributed to the modern, globalized world in which we live, and the increasing economic, social, and political importance of trade has spawned a phenomenon called the multinational organization. However, these organizations have a national home to where profits will ultimately have to come, and in their effort to maximize the amount repatriated, they often engage in internal-pricing practices, known more commonly as transfer pricing This book reminds us all of the important issues of transfer pricing, and how easy it is to create friction between all of the interested parties. This book also goes on to provide an insight into how such conflicts can be assuaged or avoided altogether, and explains how transfer pricing may become a managerial tool by establishing a common language that may be used as one driver for creating added value throughout the organization. Transfer pricing is not simply about maximizing income. It is a much more important strategic management issue that, treated unwisely or with ignorance, is likely to lead to an incongruity in the added value of an organization’s products and services as well as its crucial return on capital employed.

The Manager's Guide to Building a Successful Business

The Manager’s Guide to Building a Successful Business

$21.99

In today’s world, managers need real market examples to demonstrate the effective use of certain management and marketing principles. This book will give you just that as well as an introduction to programs developed over a 40-year career to help manage all aspects of a business and to develop and execute marketing strategies. You and other managers and executives will utilize this book as a guide to grow an established business or start a new one, and a reference book for unique management challenges as well. It differs from other business books in that it introduces certain management techniques and processes and shows how they are critical to executing successful marketing strategies. Each chapter covers a founding principle of management in Part I and a founding principle of marketing in Part II. The examples used in the book are from large and small organizations in which the author was personally involved. The techniques introduced are based on those studied at most universities, and are used in solutions applied to challenges facing these organizations.

An Introduction to Supply Chain Management: A Global Supply Chain Support Perspective

An Introduction to Supply Chain Management: A Global Supply Chain Support Perspective

$21.99

An Introduction to Supply Chain Management: A Global Supply Chain Support Perspective offers an overview of supply chain management and provides a framework for subsequent, more detailed study in various aspects of supply management. The book reviews the evolution of supply chain management concepts and discusses trends in global markets and strategic competitiveness. It then focuses on the major issues involved in managing a competitive supply chain including: forecasting, inventory management, distribution, dealing with uncertainty, reverse logistics, and customer service.An Introduction to Supply Chain Management: a Global Supply Chain Support Perspective offers an overview of supply chain management and provides a framework for subsequent, more detailed study in various aspects of supply management. The book reviews the evolution of supply chain management concepts and discusses trends in global markets and strategic competitiveness. It then focuses on the major issues involved in managing a competitive supply chain including: forecasting, inventory management, distribution, dealing with uncertainty, reverse logistics, and customer service. Coverage of the dynamic, evolving issues pertaining to supply chains that affect the global business community concludes the book. Readers of An Introduction to Supply Chain Management will be better equipped to conceptualize the management of supply chains as a collection of business processes; identify primary and secondary value chain processes; distinguish between the umbrella term, ‘supply chain management,’ and its component functions; and understand the basic tools of forecasting and the need for accurate data and forecasts on which to base supply chain management decisions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom: Why Our Companies Have Lost It--and How They Can Get It Back

Knowledge Management: The Death of Wisdom: Why Our Companies Have Lost It–and How They Can Get It Back

$21.99

This book is about an unintended—and unnoticed—consequence that is needlessly costing commerce and industry an unimaginable amount of money. It was in the early 1980s that someone smart thought that the flexible labor market would allow employers to quickly adapt their workforce to the new industrial technology-led revolution.
It did, but the trouble is that nobody thought of the downside consequences— short jobs tenure and the continual loss of the organizations’ unique, hard-won and expensively acquired knowledge and experience.
Inside, you’ll learn how employers can continue to take advantage of the flexible labor market while holding on to their special knowledge and experience. It’s a way of recovering lost continuity, allowing rolling generations of employees to learn more effectively from tried-and-tested experience and thus improve their decision making. Called experiential learning that has been adapted to the modern workplace, it’s a way of helping to banish all those repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter modern industry and commerce.