The book considers the opportunities and challenges of harnessing digital technologies for improved public services and governance. It focuses on the challenges of applying digital technologies in developing countries, particularly in Africa, where dramatic results can be realized. If also focuses on ways to improve services beyond supply-side measures such as business-process-engineering and improved management of service providers. Instead, it focuses in strengthening the demand for good governance and improved services via informed citizens, client feedback, and enhanced monitoring of service provider performance.
In 2007, the world economy was hit by a banking crisis which originated in the US. It is yet to recover fully from the impact of the crisis. This book seeks to address issues thrown up by the banking crisis, better known as the sub-prime crisis: ‧
Why do banking crises happen so often and why is their impact so severe? ‧
What were the main causes of the sub-prime crisis? ‧ In terms of bank regulation, what steps have been taken to prevent such crises in the future and make banking safer? ‧
Is banking today indeed safer than in 2007? If not, what are the issues that remain to be addressed in regulatory terms? The book is aimed primarily at students of business management, economics and international economics and at bank executives. The objective is to help them understand the sub-prime crisis, why it is so important to make banking safer, where the banking sector was in 2007 and where it is now. It should also be of interest to general readers who are curious to know what the sub-prime crisis was all about.
A number of studies have revealed a correlation between employee attitudes about their companies and the degree of value customers attribute to the company. This phenomenon is called employee ambassadorship, a state beyond satisfaction and engagement where all employees are focused on, and tasked with, delivering customer value as part of their job description, irrespective of location, function or level. This book will describe and investigate this phenomenon and demonstrate how it can be used to add value to the customer experience.
“Although I have always touted that companies should put the customers first, this can only happen if a company puts its employees first. A company is its employees! Michael Lowenstein does an excellent job in showing why and how your company needs to build employee ambassadors.” — Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
“If ‘Only 24 percent of employees consider themselves truly loyal, committed to their organization and its goals, and planning to stay two years,’ how is it possible for an organization to train and motivate its employees to deliver quality customer value and experiences? Human Resources departments often have their own annual employee surveys, but those studies fail to model the critical relationship between employee attitudes and customer behavior. Michael Lowenstein’s book fills a sorely needed gap in this area. The book helps identify linkages between employee commitment and the customer experience, and provides management with the tools and wisdom required to motivate a work force to become true employee ambassadors”. —Terry H. Grapentine, customer experience and marketing research consultant “Any company or manager wanting the many benefits of customer-oriented employees should read this book. It is full of practical concepts and techniques. Michael Lowenstein effectively explains and offers guidance for developing, and keeping, employee ambassadors who turn customers into advocates.” — Jochen Wirtz, Professor and Vice Dean, Graduate Studies and Director, UCLA-National University of Singapore Executive MBA Program:
“The number one impact on customer relations is employee relations. Michael Lowenstein has captured the power, promise and pragmatics for turning employees into strong ambassadors for the brand, smart scouts for insights, and shrewd solutions-seekers for today’s picky, fickle and vocal customers.” — Chip R. Bell, service and customer value innovation consultant; author of Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkle “The concept of creating employee ambassadors is a very powerful one. Existing and new customers want to do business with companies that have highly motivated employees. In Employee Ambassadorship, Michael Lowenstein gives a number of practical suggestions in how to achieve this and includes ways of measuring performance that goes well beyond the conventional. The customer experience is inexorably tied to developing a highly motivated and strategically aligned employee culture, where all know their value and can represent their organization as true ambassadors.” – Joel Vardy, innovation/change management strategy consultant; Adjunct Professor in Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, Temple University “Michael Lowenstein’s Employee Ambassadorship goes beyond traditional theories with outstanding insight on the linkages between employee experience, customer experience and business results. The ideas in are supported with real numbers and brilliantly illustrated with memorable anecdotes and case-studies. This is a must read for everyone involved in organizational effectiveness, and anyone who wants their business to make a profit.” – Sean Belding, customer experience consultant, and author of Winning With The Customer From Hell: A Survival Guide, and Win At Work: Navigate the Nasties, Get Things Done, and Get Ahead “Check out this commonly-overlooked leadership fundamental: Your company must now engineer employee behavior in terms of customer experience. All too often, employee performance metrics focus on job function and product fulfillment while overlooking the most critical requirement, customer-centricity. In this book, Michael Lowenstein develops a rich conceptual framework for what he calls employee ambassadorship. His razor-sharp focus on connecting every employee to the customer will inspire you and your colleagues to rally, and the best practices he lays out will guide your practical implementation.”- Eric Siegel, Ph.D., founder of Predictive Analytics World, and author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die “I have been an admirer of Michael Lowenstein’s thought-leadership in customer loyalty and customer experience for years. His newest book, Employee Ambassadorship, is one of the most thought-provoking and valuable works I have read on this subject. While there have been numerous books written on the subject, Employee Ambassadorship is not only an easy read, complete with graphics and case studies, but an equally detailed text book test based on research and Michael’s vast experience examining all aspects of successful organizations outlining what works and what doesn’t. He questions old paradigm thinking and provides readers new questions to ponder, explaining how, when all employees understand how their role ultimately contributes to customer loyalty success, each becomes an ambassador. His book will open doors and change corporate cultures to rethink how they measure, appraise and infuse stakeholder-centricity through-out the organization that will spell success.? Thumps up! Well done!” – Richard Shapiro, Founder & President, The Center For Client Retention, author of, The Endangered Customer: Eight Steps to Guarantee Repeat Business.
Coastal and marine tourism are the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry. Beaches and coastlines are being rapidly bought up and built up, while the number, size and ports-of-call of cruise ships is growing rapidly. Nowhere is the more apparent than in the Caribbean, the most tourism dependent region in the world. Some 20 million cruise passengers and another 22 million overnight resort tourists – most from the United States — vacation in the Caribbean each year. These forms of large-scale, mass market, sun-and-sand tourism are causing a range of environmental and social problems, while often bringing few benefits to the host communities. In recent years, these island nations have also become some of the most vulnerable places to climate change, including sea level rise and warming, coral and mangrove destruction, increasingly fierce and erratic storms, a host of other human-included phenomena. As an industry, tourism both contributes to and is a victim of climate change. Tourism cannot continue to pursue business as usual. These two interconnected volumes are organized around a central theme: How coastal and marine tourism must be sustainably planned, built, and operated in this era of climate change. The primary audience is the tourism industry, both individual businesses and associations, especially those connected with coastal and marine tourism but also anyone with interests in sustainable practices. In addition, the market for this publication will include university courses in areas such as tourism planning and management, sustainability, climate change, and economic development. We expect that the volume will also interest government planners, international development and financing agencies, NGOs, and others involved in or interested in the nexus of tourism and climate change. We propose that it be co-published by Business Expert Press and the Center for Responsible Travel. Given length guidelines, we are proposing that BEP and CREST co-publish two connected but standalone volumes, one focusing on coastal tourism and the other on marine tourism. We also envision that CREST may publish a combined single volume, with additional materials, through another publisher or self-published at a future date.
Coastal and marine tourism are the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry. Beaches and coastlines are being rapidly bought up and built up, while the number, size and ports-of-call of cruise ships is growing rapidly. Nowhere is the more apparent than in the Caribbean, the most tourism dependent region in the world. Some 20 million cruise passengers and another 22 million overnight resort tourists – most from the United States — vacation in the Caribbean each year. These forms of large-scale, mass market, sun-and-sand tourism are causing a range of environmental and social problems, while often bringing few benefits to the host communities. In recent years, these island nations have also become some of the most vulnerable places to climate change, including sea level rise and warming, coral and mangrove destruction, increasingly fierce and erratic storms, a host of other human-included phenomena. As an industry, tourism both contributes to and is a victim of climate change. Tourism cannot continue to pursue business as usual. These two interconnected volumes are organized around a central theme: How coastal and marine tourism must be sustainably planned, built, and operated in this era of climate change. The primary audience is the tourism industry, both individual businesses and associations, especially those connected with coastal and marine tourism but also anyone with interests in sustainable practices. In addition, the market for this publication will include university courses in areas such as tourism planning and management, sustainability, climate change, and economic development. We expect that the volume will also interest government planners, international development and financing agencies, NGOs, and others involved in or interested in the nexus of tourism and climate change.
This takes an in depth and comprehensive assessment of corporate governance in Turkey. In this assessment, historical roots and cultural values shaping the Turkish business context are taken into perspective. Part I outlines the developments and characteristics of the Turkish Economy as well historical developments in corporate governance to provide a background for the readers. External and internal corporate mechanisms of corporate governance are explained in Parts II and III, respectively. Turkey is a civil law country. Its legal system, company laws, regulatory authorities and the state of the market for corporate control as well as the socio-cultural norms, ways of doing business and Turkish code of good governance are the external mechanisms that shape the corporate governance practices of companies. Characteristics of the board of directors, ownership structure and management teams of Turkish companies are analyzed as internal control mechanisms. The last part of the book includes conclusions and discusses current and future corporate governance challenges in the Turkish business context. This book is intended for a broad audience including students and professors in graduate business schools and practicing business executives. The goal is to inform those interested in or dealing with corporate governance about the practices in use in Turkey.
For Learning and Development the ability to deliver a return on investment is not about investing in good evaluation mechanisms, although this is important. This article emphasises the importance of designing for Return on Investment, providing the theoretical underpinning to explain how to use group and human dynamic processes to emphasise the ‘self-renewal’ ability of the individual, facilitate the movement of groups and improve the health and effectiveness of organisations in a sustainable way. It also offers a practical framework of two fundamentals of intervention design. The Diagnostic Phase – understanding the nature of the situation and the issues involved and The Evaluation Phase; aligning to organisational performance objectives.
The cascading effects of globalization in the form of changing business environment, economic uncertainties and economic meltdown have brought about a plethora of unprecedented challenges for industry and organizations across the globe in recent years.
Management education, which prepares human capital for industry, is expected to address these challenges along with others such as intensifying competition, advancing technology, increasing workforce diversity and accelerating complexity. Yet, current management education is largely based on traditional capitalism where the focus tends toward profits and competitiveness rather than toward a balance among profitability, responsibility, social accountability and sustainability.
Consequently, management education in general, and MBA education in particular, need to adopt a paradigm shift in order to be more responsible and sustainable.
This book contains contributions on the core management topics covered in general management, organizational behavior, ethics and social responsibility, with a focus on responsible management. Its chapters come from many authors in PRME schools from eight countries. Hence, it is expected to be useful to all the B-schools, across geographies that are interested in embedding responsibility in their management curriculum and teaching methodology.
Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning—falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement.
Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The opening chapter summarizes nine challenges for public involvement, together with over sixty aspirational recommendations. Subsequent chapters provide detailed case studies illustrating these challenges for a range of projects—a new bridge, a light rail line, a highway interchange, neighborhood street modi fications, urban streetscaping, bicycle routes, movement of freight, and a transportation master plan. The close government-academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.
This is the first book on the global auto industry viewed through the lens of technology. It starts by tracing how innovation shaped the fi rst century of its history, then it examines the industry’s shifting footprint in Europe and North America, and the rise of new producers, particularly China. Succeeding chapters emphasize the role of suppliers in what is now a high-tech industry.
This book describes new forms of collaboration that challenge traditional supply chain relations, analyzing regulation as a driver of innovation, and the enabling role of the materials science revolution, such as the shift of steel from a commodity to a highly engineered product. It covers innovations in management, from computer-aided engineering, roadmapping, and just-in-time methods to the evolving role of workers and public policy. The authors finish with an overview of electric vehicles, shared mobility, and autonomous vehicles, concluding that they will not prove disruptive.
