Accounting for Fun and Profit: A Guide to Understanding Financial Statements

Accounting for Fun and Profit: A Guide to Understanding Financial Statements

$21.99

Accounting is an economic information system, and can be thought of as the language of business. Accounting principles cannot be discovered; they are created, developed, or decreed and are supported or justified by intuition, authority, and acceptability. Managers have alternatives in their accounting choices; the decisions are political, and trade-offs will be made.
Accounting information provides individuals, both inside and outside a firm, with a starting point to understand and evaluate the key drivers of a firm, its financial position, and performance. If you are managing a firm, investing in a firm, lending to a firm, or even working for a firm, you should be able to read the firm’s financial statements and ask questions based on those statements.
This book explains the fundamentals of financial statements. It is designed and meant to explain the language of accounting to non-accountants (i.e., those who hire accountants). After reading this book, you should be able to pick up an annual report, read it, understand much of it, and have a solid foundation to start asking questions about the firm.
This book will show you that accounting can be informative and fun!

Eastern European Economies: A Region in Transition

Eastern European Economies: A Region in Transition

$21.99

Nearly seven decades ago, six countries in Western Europe (Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) decided to take economic cooperation to the next level. The vision of the EU founding states, epitomized by the Schuman Declaration in 1950, was to tie their economies so closely together that war would become impossible.
Robert Schuman, author of the plan, believed Europe could not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It would have to be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The countries within the “European Community” benefited enormously from free trade and common economic policies, in particular structural funds designed to foster convergence by funding infrastructure and investments in poorer regions.
This book examines how similar transitions and integration into the European Union are experienced in individual central and eastern European states through the use of country scans in the regional blocks of CEE, SEE, and CIS.

Company and Industry Research: Strategies and Resources

Company and Industry Research: Strategies and Resources

$21.99

The goal of this book is to describe information search strategies and techniques critical for business practitioners and to pinpoint credible sources of information on specific topics in company and industry research. In today’s information age, businesses have an ever-growing need to obtain quality information in a timely manner and incorporate it effectively into decision making, and when such a need occurs business managers often face a situation of performing information research themselves with a limited budget.
Rather than frantically running searches on random websites with much time wasted, it is imperative that they understand the nature of business information research, develop a systematic plan for data collection, and use appropriate information from credible sources. Learning and becoming familiar with the significance of these information resources is a key for successful business research.

The Art of Computer Modeling for Business Analytics: Paradigms and Case Studies

The Art of Computer Modeling for Business Analytics: Paradigms and Case Studies

$21.99

Companies today routinely utilize computer models to help make decisions. These models take many forms, from simple spreadsheets to sophisticated computer simulations. The chief underlying reason for constructing a model is to assess the impact of a decision on business performance. Based on that assessment, model users will make recommendations and take actions. The tacit assumption is that the model captures the relevant factors at a sufficient level of detail to make accurate projections. The validity of the model thus depends on a host of judgments that the model builder makes in constructing the model—some transparent, others implicit. These judgments are what make building a computer model more of an art than a science.
This book is about constructing and using computer models to help decision makers in the business world make more informed decisions. It is intended to provide useful case studies for individuals who are interested in building effective decision models—ones that will get used to drive important business decisions. The goal is to demonstrate how to build effective models quickly and inexpensively, using software that is widely available and often free. It is a practical guide, informed by the author’s experience building such models for an array of businesses in diverse industries.

Communication for Consultants

Communication for Consultants

$21.99

Congratulations to Rita Owens who won the 2018 ABC/APCC Excellence in Communication Consulting for her book, Communication for Consultants. She presented her project at the Association for Business Communication Annual Meeting in Detroit, October 2019.
From the moment of their first client engagement, consultants in all fields face communication opportunities and challenges. No matter what their focus may be, professional services, accounting, technology, operations, human resources, manufacturing or marketing, consultants drive change. That change, from its initial definition through its development and deployment, must be precisely communicated to a variety of audiences and through a variety of mediums.
Most business communication books do a good job leading professional writers and presenters through the basics of audience, organization, formatting, and mechanics. But, few focus on a specific business role, like that of a consultant, and give specific guidance for communicating during all stages of a project. From the pre-engagement process to the actual engagement to the post-engagement follow-up, consultants are challenged by the variety of audiences whose roles continually shift throughout a project.
This book guides a current or would-be consultant through the various phases of a typical engagement and gives practical advice and direction on written and oral communication throughout a typical project. Current and future consultants in all fields will gain specific knowledge about writing and presenting to a variety of audiences including clients, team members, managers and partners. The book also gives advice to new and seasoned consultants about state-of-the-art use of technology in communication and business communication etiquette.

Designing Ethical Workplaces: The Moldable Model

Designing Ethical Workplaces: The Moldable Model

$21.99

Executive leaders need a framework with which to evaluate current and to create new corporate ethical management systems in their organizations. This book offers such a framework, called the Moldable Modelc, a system of consistent components that give leaders a framework and a guide to build an organization-specific corporate ethical management system (CEMS). This book teaches how to design ethical workplaces utilizing the role modeling, context, and accountability components.
In a step-by-step process, the author guides the reader through the research-based components with definitions, theory, explanations, and the practical application of those components through suggested organizational activities. Readers can expect to develop ethical tools and a complete corporate ethical management system for implementation into their specific organizations. In just a few hours, a busy executive can have the knowledge and tools to design an ethical workplace that creates satisfied and committed employees who increase organizational productivity and competitive advantage.

Performance Leadership ™

Performance Leadership ™

$21.99

A fearsome aspect of management is the performance appraisal. It has become a byword for unfairness and irritation among employees. Some management writers are even proposing in doing away with it. We agree that the current method of appraisal is unsustainable and counterproductive. In this book, we discuss Performance Leadership – the idea of leading employee performance, which should be the focus of management. Just doing appraisal or evaluation is not enough. Managers must incorporate the entire model of performance management and use it to lead within their workgroup, department, or organization. We walk managers through the steps of Performance Leadership, discussing the benefits and pitfalls of each step. The idea of making performance management work as a leadership style is new and simple, but it takes dedication to complete the task. This book is valuable for supervisors, managers, human resource staff, and others – anyone who needs to manage performance!

Project Teams: A Structured Development Approach

Project Teams: A Structured Development Approach

$21.99

Projects generally require skills and effort from multiple disciplines to develop project deliverables. Projects are executed in teams, as project tasks require multiple skills, judgment, and experience. Project teams roles should be assigned based on strengths of individuals.
Project team process is a mediating mechanism linking variables such as members, team, and organizational characteristics that include structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive systems, employee morality, and top management support.
Team performance or teamwork is impacted by the structure of a team. Team structural characteristics include the number of team members, the status hierarchy, roles and responsibilities, and accepted norms for behaviors of individuals within the team. Further, understanding characteristics of virtual teams and their key attributes for improving global project performance are of critical importance.
Social and behavioral skills that each person brings are important influencing factors in interactions with other team members and in forming a cohesive and productive team. Also, organization and national cultures influence their behaviors.
Project Teams is an attempt to address all these topics in detail and offer a practical approach to managing projects successfully in the current business environment by including concepts, processes, techniques, and tools to manage and enhance performance of project teams and projects. This book would be meaningful for project management professionals and project managers in any organization and can be a useful resource for academic institutions in teaching management and project management disciplines.

Service Excellence: Creating Customer Experiences That Build Relationships

Service Excellence: Creating Customer Experiences That Build Relationships

$21.99

Check out Forbes Magazine, July issue, which refers to Bolton’s book — “…some positive guidance summarized in a new book…”
By providing excellent service, organizations build strong relationships with customers, generate barriers to competition, utilize resources more efficiently, and increase profitability. This book provides concepts and tools to help managers:
‧ Uncover new sources of revenue from innovations and improvements in the customer experience, including leveraging business analytics and metrics;
‧ Design service processes, operations and channels to create customer experiences that build relationships, as well as design responses to service failures; and
‧ Manage people, physical evidence, branding and communications to effectively cocreate experiences with customers. The Customer Experience is the sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral dimensions of all activities that connect the customer and the organization over time across touch points and channels. It encompasses all activities involving the customer where the organization is the focal object, including prepurchase activities (such as exposure to a website ad), and purchase, consumption, and engagement behaviors (blogging, sharing photos).
This book analyzes the challenges of creating excellent customer experiences, including the management of technology and new media. It describes how customers coproduce and cocreate their experiences, and how these activities influence business revenues and costs. The book takes a deep dive into the psychology of customers, revealing the conceptual building blocks of customer experiences and how they build relationships over time. These ideas provide a business perspective on how to manage relationships with customers to generate cash flows and profitability, including the role of pricing.

Mapping Workflows and Managing Knowledge: Capturing Formal and Tacit Knowledge to Improve Performance, Volume II

Mapping Workflows and Managing Knowledge: Capturing Formal and Tacit Knowledge to Improve Performance, Volume II

$21.99

This book is Volume II of simple but powerful tools for performance improvement. It is written for managers, analysts, and consultants who realize the value that system dynamic modeling can bring to companies and organizations, and would like to have that capability without a degree in math or computer science. It features the iThink modeling program, which requires no extensive knowledge of math; instead, iThink uses a small set of symbols and rules to allow any keen observer of a system to create models graphically—the user literally draws a graphic of the system within the program and works from that.
In Chapter 1, the author describes his own experiences with modeling, the growth and development of modeling software, and makes the case for its value. Chapter 2 is an overview of iThink symbols and rules, sufficient to enable the reader to interpret and understand iThink models; while the program has many advanced features, a great many models are based on the fundamentals in this chapter. Chapter 3 provides guidelines for converting workflow-mapping models into iThink dynamic models, and discusses approaches to building models from scratch.
This approach to modeling is consistent with the author’s approach to workflow mapping and analysis, which uses a small symbol set and related discipline to map workflows in any company or organization, without the need for expensive software or extended training. That process is described in this volume of the series, and these maps are often the foundation for modeling the system as a dynamic entity.