Skilling India: Challenges and Opportunities

Skilling India: Challenges and Opportunities

$21.99

India’s transition to a knowledge-based economy requires a new generation of educated and skilled people. A knowledge economy requires India to develop workers who are flexible and analytical and can be the driving force for innovation and growth. This book focuses on the status of vocational education programs, challenges of achieving quality and attaining competitive excellence in a globalized socioeconomic order, and the role of government and industry in achieving these avowed goals. The need for revival of traditional family-centric vocations pursued in the rural communities that provide livelihood options to a multitude of socially disadvantaged artisans is also discussed.
The book provides a systematic understanding of the processes of skill formation and provides several pathways for enhancing entrepreneurial skills. The authors seek to heighten the under- standing of structures and processes of governance and initiatives for enhancing the quality of skilling programs.

The Art and Science of Financial Modeling

The Art and Science of Financial Modeling

$21.99

To use a cliche, we live in a volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world.
Organizations simply cannot afford to try out new strategies in reality and correct mistakes, once they’ve occurred. The stakes are too high. Thus emerges the utility of this technique across functions like financial planning and risk management. Financial models help a business manager simulate the future and see the impact of their change, with- out risking costly setbacks of real world trials and errors.
Mastering the art of financial modeling is imperative for those who want to enter the ultra-competitive world of corporate finance, investment banking, private equity, or equity research. Only those who excel (pun intended) in modeling early on are often the most successful long-term.
The book will help readers dive deep into the vocabulary and the syntax, the art and science of financial modeling and valuation. Readers will be able to prepare/use existing models more competently, interpret the results and have greater comfort over the integrity and accuracy of the model’s calculations.

Scrum for Teams: A Guide by Practical Example

Scrum for Teams: A Guide by Practical Example

$21.99

Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. This book gives examples, tools, and tricks to do Scrum well. For each trick it is explained why it helps. The practices themselves may be worth trying, but by understanding why it works the readers will be able to come up with their own ideas that work better in their organization and situation.
All the practical examples in this book have helped someone, some where to become a part of a better Scrum team. Scrum’s motto is: “Inspect and Adapt”; change small things one at a time and see what works. Scrum is not done by project leaders or managers, but really by the teams— to succeed in an organization, the teams must do Scrum well. If the teams do Scrum well, the whole organization will benefit from it.
Scrum helps a team self-organize, which fits in well with developers, who usually don’t like to be micromanaged. At the same time, Scrum can scale: Self-organized teams work together well, and one manager doesn’t have to manage all the people.
The lessons from this book help Scrum teams develop into autonomous, proud, and independent teams. Often teams fail to become powerful enough to change the organization, so they cannot perform to their full potential. A good team can lead the stakeholders into trusting them. They will then make plans based on the team’s release planning instead of making roadmaps out of thin air, and thus make the organization much more predictable.

Creating a Successful Consulting Practice

Creating a Successful Consulting Practice

$21.99

Most people develop specific skills through education, training and experience. A lot of those people have a desire to market those skills to those who need them. Starting a consulting practice is often a gratifying and fulfilling means of taking those sought after skills to market.
Starting a consulting practice allows an individual to work for individuals and companies that are likely to value the skills and experience offered. Theoretically, the individual is in control of the work hours and the types of jobs that are accepted. As one might suspect, as consultants gain clients and grow their companies, the control of the consulting company’s time and resources must be managed carefully.
To start a consulting company in a way that has the greatest chance to succeed over the long term requires attention to building the practice one project at a time. Each project should be subjected to a process that will have the best chance of yielding a successful outcome.
The purpose of this book is to take the reader through each step of building a consulting practice by understanding how to acquire and execute a consulting project. By creating successful projects, a consultant can build a reputation, acquire more projects and create a successful consulting practice.”

T-Shaped Professionals : Adaptive Innovators

T-Shaped Professionals : Adaptive Innovators

$21.99

“The purpose of this book is to provide both academic and industry perspectives on T-shaped talent as a framework to develop the next generation workforce. This book will include a number of chapters from the authors of this book (Y. Moghaddam, H. Demirkan and J. Spohrer), and edited chapters from a number of additional experts who have been working on next generation of workers.

The ISSIP BEP T-Summit collection aims to offer insights and practical wisdom easily applicable to the workplace. The context in which service is designed, delivered and experienced has been changing fundamentally. With exponentially growing and evolving technology-enabled, service transformations and innovations (e.g. IBM, Rolls-Royce, Amazon, Google, Lego, Disney, Tesco, iTunes, Uber, Smart Phones, Etsy, AirBnB, eBay).

With this project, we envision to capture the latest thinking, experiences and results, and to publish a collection of practical, focused, easily digestible short papers in the increasingly important area of T-shape talent development, which integrates a variety of disciplines – including areas in engineering, social sciences and management – to focus education, research and practice on an expanding innovation economy.”

How Successful Engineers Become Great Business Leaders

How Successful Engineers Become Great Business Leaders

$21.99

Get serious about accelerating your business career as an executive, manager, or professional with an engineering background. High performance expert Paul Rulkens provides the inside advice you need to accelerate your career as a business leader with an engineering background—from building on your unique strengths to achieving big business goals.

How Successful Engineers Become Great Business Leaders is full of thought-provoking insights, practical applications, and pragmatic techniques to help you get everything you can out of everything you have. You don’t have to be ill in order to get better. Whether you’re an experienced business executive, corporate manager, or ambitious professional, this book will show you how to apply your specific engineering strengths to:

  • Maximize your skill and talent to accelerate your career
  • Grow your business with the least amount of effort
  • Set and achieve ambitious business goals
  • Focus on strategic quitting to raise the performance bar
  • Avoid behaviors that mask your strengths
  • Create a high-performance execution culture
  • Improve your own executive judgment
  • Build long-term client relationships
  • Develop a blueprint to become an unstoppable goal achiever

The road to business success for leaders with engineering back grounds is common and predictable, but not always obvious. There is a method to the madness. This unique book will show you how.

The Story Underlying the Numbers: A Simple Approach to Comprehensive Financial Statements Analysis

The Story Underlying the Numbers: A Simple Approach to Comprehensive Financial Statements Analysis

$21.99

When faced with financial statements of a firm, very often students and even practitioners are seen to be at a loss where to begin with analysis. Most simply compute every ratio they know and interpret them in a standalone manner. They are unable to thread them together to spin a meaningful story that can completely or at least substantially explain what might be happening at the firm. Decision making of any kind based on such a piecemeal approach will remain flawed.
This book uses a logical, top-down approach to unraveling the underlying story of the firm. It can be used by students and working executives who have a rudimentary prior idea of financial statements as well as familiarity with the very basic financial ratios. It is a myth that only executives in the finance function need to understand financial statements. Every decision within a firm has implications for the financial statements, and the need for such knowledge increases as one goes up the corporate ladder.
The book is intended to be free flowing, with minimum jargon so as to be understood and appreciated especially by non-finance executives and students of business and management.

Why Projects Fail: Nine Laws for Success

Why Projects Fail: Nine Laws for Success

$21.99

Check out the slides the author prepared for additional insight into his book.

We are all involved at some time in our lives in projects, if not professionally then in our private and community lives. Some projects fail completely and many more disappoint. We frequently hear reports of IT, construction, engineering, and personal projects failing by going over budget, or running late, or failing to meet the client’s expectations; or all three.
This book deals with the nine features that almost all failing projects share. In this easy to read book, the author uses his nine laws of project design and control to lead the reader through the traps that can catch out not only project managers but also the project client and other members of a project community. This book is not a treatise of project management theory but practical guide, based on wide experience and the study of the causes of project failure, aimed at the professional and amateur alike.

Data-Based Decision Making and Digital Transformation

Data-Based Decision Making and Digital Transformation

$21.99

Digital disruption is accelerating. Implementing a successful digital transformation strategy requires that senior managers make trade-off decisions to reinvent a business. Equally important all decision makers must learn to ask the right questions, use data and computer support in decision making, and increase their knowledge and skills. Creating a data-centric culture and rewarding data-based decision making leads to successful digital transformation. Join the digital journey.
This book is targeted at managers, especially middle-level managers who are trying to come to grips with using data-based decision making in a transforming organization. The authors explore a number of broad questions including: How can managers become data-based decision makers? How can digital transformation become part of an organizational strategy?What new skills do managers need to implement digital transformation? How will we know an organization has been successfully transformed?

Managing Using the Diamond Principle: Innovating to Effect Organizational Process Improvement

Managing Using the Diamond Principle: Innovating to Effect Organizational Process Improvement

$21.99

Change is inevitable, but, poorly handled, can spell disaster. A bold new vision for implementation of new strategies and processes call for an understanding of what is to be changed, based on The Diamond Principle. The Diamond Principle, brielfly, is that the people who actually do the work in question need to be consulted before the work is changed, or a new process is implemented. There is a knowledge diamond in most organizations that will show you where to get the information you need for success in change management.
This book will show where to look for the information, how to get it when you find it, and how to implement changes with a view toward success. Written in a conversational style that is easy to follow, examples both good and bad are analyzed to determine what did and did not work, and how implementation of the principles in this book were used to effectuate better performance (or not used, to ruin performance.)