Why Quality is Important and How It Applies in Diverse Business and Social Environments, Volume I

Why Quality is Important and How It Applies in Diverse Business and Social Environments, Volume I

$37.99

“Paul’s book is, in my view, one of the most comprehensive treatise on the challenging topic of Quality, since the works of Deming. It covers the topic, in an almost 3D manner, such that it doesn’t really matter how the reader comes to the subject – as a novice or with experience, that viewpoint is described. Indeed, the book explains the subject matter without being shackled by the conventional wisdoms typically associated with “Quality”. I look forward to it being my next “go to” reference.” –Andrew Nichols, Quality Program Manager, Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center
These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application— how—and aim to provide guidance and introduction to both. Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions.
Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality.
There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and so “… it applies in diverse business and social environments.”
Quality is everyone’s business, and there is no single professional dis?cipline that can properly express this. Best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries.

Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value, Third Edition

Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value, Third Edition

$31.99

The service process design landscape is changing, with many of the previous limitations disappearing on how and by whom services are delivered. Opportunities for new service design con?gurations are being supported, to a large extent, by technology- enabled innovations; many tasks previously performed by the service provider may now be performed by either the customer or the service provider. As a result, customers are playing a more active role in the service process, not only through self-service but also by providing information to the service provider to create a more personalized service experience.
Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value explores how service processes can be designed to leverage the expanding range of opportunities for service providers and customers to co-create value. Readers will learn about frameworks for value co- creation and models for designing all types of service processes, as well as the unique challenges of designing knowledge-intensive services. And with the growing number of alternatives for designing service processes and determining who performs the various service tasks, service performance outcomes are increasingly dependent on the knowledge, skills, and abilities—that is, capabilities—of both service providers and customers. Thus, the book concludes with approaches to unlock these capabilities–and further boost value co-creation.

Introduction to Business Analytics, Second Edition

Introduction to Business Analytics, Second Edition

$31.99

This book presents key concepts related to quantitative analysis in business. It is targeted at business students (both undergraduate and graduate) taking an introductory core course. Business analytics has grown to be a key topic in business curricula, and there is a need for stronger quantitative skills and understanding of fundamental concepts.
This second edition adds material on Tableau, a very useful software for business analytics. This supplements the tools from Excel covered in the first edition, to include Data Analysis Toolpak and SOLVER.

Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21st Century New Growth Engines

Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21st Century New Growth Engines

$34.99

Disruptive Innovation and Digital Transformation: 21 Century New Growth Engines is for executive leadership, senior management, innovation catalysts, and digital marketing teams tasked with transforming businesses by accelerating growth through disruptive innovations and digital capabilities. It is a practical guide with concise insights for understanding the applications of disruptive innovation and how to iteratively apply them to projects and opportunities. It garners insights from the best minds across relevant disciplines—from its original theory and latest updates—to arrive at new insights on digital transformation.
The author evolves key approaches to disruptive innovation theory to reveal new digital applications and tells leaders what to look for–major categories of customers’ expectations in an escalating pattern to understand in what context digital plus disruptive innovations must be aligned with consumer preferences, environments, and the jobs-to-be-done, which is modeled in a new theory, Disruptive Innovation Customers’ Expectations (DICE).
DICE provides methods to use to lead digital disruption across products, services, and business models. DICE translates the vague parts of disruptive innovation by simplifying them down to what-to-do. DICE takes away the elusive nature of disruptive innovation by advising leaders: how to scan, to track, and to detect disruptions.
This book provides leaders with the right lenses to filter markets, giving order to complexity, and making disruptive innovation simpler.

The Cost: A Business Novel to Help Companies Increase Revenues and Profits

The Cost: A Business Novel to Help Companies Increase Revenues and Profits

$31.99

The Cost is a story of a cost engineering consultant named Doug Benson who does his best to help companies understand and improve cost. When Doug arrives at Electronica, the company is on a verge of bankruptcy and hardly even knows why. He must use all his cost engineering knowledge and leadership skills amidst some considerable corporate drama all the while fighting his own personal demons in order to give Electronica a chance. The type of situations that he finds himself in are happening all over the world every day and the results are often dramatic with people losing jobs, stakeholders losing millions of dollars, and communities losing hope.
The Cost is not only for those in the cost engineering field. This book is for everyone that is in a manufacturing business. It is for engineers, buyers, sales reps, accountants, operations folks, and business consultants. This book is also for anyone that is leading a business and has the power to employ cost engineering to make their company successful.

Strategic Planning for Sustainability

Strategic Planning for Sustainability

$31.99

Although corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) has been adopted by many companies, few of them are practicing it with any formal strategy, and the common situation seems to be a portfolio of disparate CSR programs and initiatives, some of which support core strategy and others of which appear adjacent and discretionary. The diversity of potential CSR initiatives is one issue (e.g., companies may simultaneously disburse funding for community activities, provide grants for nonprofits/NGOs, launch environmental sustainability programs to reduce energy and resource use and engage in “cause” marketing and comprehensive system-level efforts to remake their entire value chain); however, developing a strategic orientation is complicated by the fact that each company has its own unique set of drivers and motivations for CSR and ideas and responsibilities for those initiatives come from all parts and levels of the organization. Moreover, while it makes sense to identify a specific business logic and rationale for each CSR initiative, the reality is that companies often take on causes and projects that have little or no connection to their core competencies or business strategy. Serious interest in CSR strategy has been driven by the emergence of two challenging environmental conditions that must now be addressed by all companies: the growing interest in sustainability and the need to engage with a broad range of stakeholders beyond the owners of the business. These conditions have not made strategic planning any easier, given that they expand the levels of unpredictability and risk in any company’s environment, and the response has been the development of a new discipline: strategic planning for sustainability. Strategic planning for sustainability is far from easy or precise, if only because it requires that simultaneous consideration be given not only to economic performance and development, but also to environmental protection and the social wellbeing of employees and other persons and groups outside of the organization. Companies and their managers are struggling to find and deploy the tools and practices that are necessary for balancing and reconciling the “triple bottom line” of profits, planet and people. This book is intended to provide sustainable entrepreneurs with a comprehensive guide to the key steps required to strategically approach becoming a successful sustainable business including conducting a CSR assessment, developing a CSR strategy and accompanying business case, developing and implementing CSR commitments and measuring the performance and effectiveness of the planning initiative.

Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities

Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Society, and Communities

$34.99

“Olga V. Mack presents an essential read for those seeking to demystify the practical benefits of blockchain technology.” –Daniel Spuller, Chairman, North Carolina Blockchain Initiative and former Director, Chamber of Digital Commerce
“Olga V. Mack is a leading voice in the worlds of law, technology, and innovation. In Blockchain Value, she explains, with great insight, lucidity, and humor, one of the most powerful–and least understood–technologies transforming the world today.” –David Lat, Founding Editor, Above the Law, and Managing Director, Lateral Link
If you think that blockchain is everything you don’t understand about technology, finance, and law mixed together, then this book will help you appreciate its value more clearly. While it is a complex technology that is still largely experimental today, it will be transformative in the future.
This book focuses on the values of blockchain across industries. Among other things, it explores how blockchain technology adds value to data management, security, and sharing as well as ownership, property, collaboration, and trust. It also explores the possibilities of the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), digital goods or dGoods, and the transformative power of small acts and micropayments.

Strengths Oriented Leadership: The World Through Bee Glasses

Strengths Oriented Leadership: The World Through Bee Glasses

$31.99

This book is about talent, strengths, and positive psychology. Everyone is naturally talented in certain areas and if we get the opportunity to use our talents at work and develop them into strengths, then we can work better, faster, and far more productively.
Bees search for pollen, and they find it in the beautiful, successful, growing things around us: flowers. Flies search for rotting trash, bacteria, and ugliness. Do you want to go through life like a fly or like a bee?
These pages present the overwhelming scientific evidence that strengths-based leadership and collaboration lead to more productivity, more innovation, better well- being at work, lower absenteeism, and better health. Learning to recognize your talents, leveraging them into strengths, and mitigate your weaknesses will leverage the way you and your colleagues work.

Computers and Information Processing for Business: Microsoft Office 2019 and Python

Computers and Information Processing for Business: Microsoft Office 2019 and Python

$31.99

This book is an introduction to computers covering relevant topics that include: computers and society, the Internet, social media, Microsoft Office 2019, and high-level programming. The main goals are to help students to define computers and information processing and describe the main concepts related to hardware, software, and their use.
The author prepares students to identify how the Internet has changed people’s lives and develops critical thinking about the role of computers in society, recognize the impact of technology in the personal and professional base, to mention a few. Emphasis is placed on developing skills in Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and programming algorithms.