A Primer on Sustainability: In the Business Environment

A Primer on Sustainability: In the Business Environment

$21.99

This book takes a broad look at the ways in which the concept of sustainability is being applied in the business context. It answers the question, ‘What does Sustainability mean to the way we practice business?’ This book will take a broad look at the ways in which the concept of sustainability is being applied in the business context. It answers the question, ‘What does Sustainability mean to the way we practice business?’ A key characteristic is its concise, readable, comprehensive treatment of the complex issues sustainability raises for the business world. The goal of the book is to provide the reader an introduction to knowledge and skills they need to help organizations understand and act upon the principles of sustainability. The reader will also gain a deeper understanding of the relationships among business, society, and the environment. The approach of this book is to examine a variety of market failures and how different businesses choose to respond to them. It will explore strategies to correct these market failures – with improved product innovation, entrepreneurial activity, and government action. This book will also explore the techniques and tools of sustainability from a practical, business-oriented perspective. As an introduction to sustainability, this book will function to anchor the Business Expert Press sustainability collection, helping the reader appreciate its coherence and depth. This book is written for an advanced undergraduate and graduate-level business school reader, as well as for their professors. It will also find a readership with science, social science and engineering professors and students for courses on sustainability in those disciplines and with the management practitioner striving to build the competitive advantage sustainability can confer.

Achieving Service Excellence: Maximizing Enterprise Performance through Innovation and Technology

Achieving Service Excellence: Maximizing Enterprise Performance through Innovation and Technology

$21.99

As the service sectors play an increasingly important role in all economies worldwide, service executives and professionals are well advised to recognize two main pathways to achieving sustainable success in services. The first path requires enhancing the strategic differentiation and operational excellence of their service enterprises; the second requires that these executives and their employees develop the knowledge and skills needed to achieve such success. Specifically, this book discusses actionable methodologies needed to generate creative ideas, including deciding on which ones to pursue; on how to justify projects financially; on how to manage the development projects for innovative services; and on how to reach out to customers and offer them superior service support. The book will illustrate how operational excellence can be achieved by emphasizing the importance of standardizing work processes. It will demonstrate how quality can be enhanced and time-to-market can be reduced through a variety of methods including the application of tools (such as Lean Six Sigma, Value stream mapping, quality assurance, FMEA, web-based enablers and SOA-based emerging productivity tools), the incorporation of emerging technologies into the workflow and, with reference to the Profit Chain Model, the retraining of staff, with a goal of increasing their productivity, by adopting and constantly improving upon known best practices. This book summarizes the key skills and knowledge in a Three Decker framework comprised of engineering management, business management and service leadership, cumulating in an actionable Take Charge model. After having studied this book, service professionals and executives will know how to apply the actionable methodologies outlined herein to maximize their contributions in achieving sustainable success for their service employers.

Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force: How to Gain Market Leadership Through Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Force: How to Gain Market Leadership Through Competitive Intelligence

$21.99

Government intelligence agencies throughout the world are finding once again that human abilities and sources rather than technology are more reliable and instrumental in intelligence gathering efforts. Companies have known this for quite some time and have tried to leverage their best source of competitive intelligence: the sale force! Because of their daily presence in the field and favored relationships with their customers, salespeople are the eyes and ears of their companies. In the new economic war, managers cannot take the chance of not being fully aware of the way they could be threatened by the competition. Yet, organizations face great difficulties to stimulate salespeople’s collection and dissemination of competitive intelligence, and to manage market-based intelligence efficiently. This book aims to assist sales and marketing managers in facing such challenges while providing them with action-oriented answers to the following key questions: What kind of information salespeople should collect from the field and how to transform such information into intelligence? How to improve salespeople’s competitive intelligence collection and exploitation skills? How to enhance the sales force’s commitment to competitive intelligence activities? How to manage and distill market-based intelligence throughout the organization and maintain market leadership? And, how to approach the ethical aspects of competitive intelligence and remain protected against competitors’ competitive intelligence activities? By leveraging the latest research, practitioners’ interviews, companies’ best practices, along with practical tools and guidelines, this book help organizations achieve their market-orientation strategy and maintain a sustainable competitive edge.

The Economics of Crime

The Economics of Crime

$21.99

This book will guide the reader to a better understanding of effective public policy designed to reduce criminality. By understanding how incentive mechanisms affect criminal behavior, business managers can use this information to either reduce criminal activity in their own enterprise or to understand how unethical business decisions affect the wider society.

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage

$21.99

IT Sustainability for Business Advantage speaks to modern managers in all functions as well as to IT professionals. Implementing an effective IT sustainability strategy is essential for organizations pursuing sustainability as a means of business advantage and this book shows how to do it. The critical first step is getting clear about the ends of the IT sustainability program–the mission must be to further the company’s sustainability objectives and strategic intents should include: 1) Making IT operations as sustainable as possible; 2) Partnering with other functions to leverage IT in making their business processes more sustainable and to grow the business; and 3) Building a culture of sustainability within the IT organization. The next step is to implement strategies to achieve these ends and the book explores the ways and means of doing this. These include industry best practices on how to apply the processes, techniques, and technologies related to Green IT and IT for Sustainability (ITfS). They also include techniques for change management and building social capital.

Service Thinking: The Seven Principles to Discover Innovative Opportunities

Service Thinking: The Seven Principles to Discover Innovative Opportunities

$21.99

Business paradigm shifts are rare. However, the shift to a services-dominant economy and to services-dominant value creation genuinely merits the designation. Almost 80% of GDP in developed economies is attributable to services, and some economists regard products as merely the physical embodiment of service delivery.This is a must-read for anyone trained in traditional process improvement or business architecture. In surprisingly clear language this book lays out the essentials of service thinking, and how the service paradigm transforms the way in which organizations innovate on behalf of their customers. It shifts the focus from product to experience, from one-sided production to co-creation of value, from the simply measurable to the emotional. I intend to buy a copy for every member of my team–Dart Lindsley, Cisco Sr. Manager of Transformation Planning and Analysis This book will introduce you to Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME)–a term introduced by IBM to describe service science, which is the application of science, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another. The authors detail the disciplines, principles, insights and tools of SSME that are now ready to transition to the mainstream business world with transformative effect. They coin the new term ‘Service Thinking’ to communicate this mainstream business transformation. It includes expository case histories of the service thinking-based transformation of familiar businesses, illustrating the seven principles of service thinking, with compelling examples and clear direction for application.

Service and Service Systems: Provider Challenges and Directions in Unsettled Times

Service and Service Systems: Provider Challenges and Directions in Unsettled Times

$21.99

Unsettled times can arise from a variety of causes, including ones that are environmental, climatic, economic, social or political in nature. They can result in citizens’ loss of homes and possessions, jobs, health or mobility. Citizens move from above the level of consumption adequacy, where their behaviors reflect long-term and higher-order needs, to below the level of consumption adequacy, where they are forced into a short-term focus on simple existence.Unsettled times can arise from a variety of causes, including ones that are environmental, climatic, economic, social or political in nature. They can result in citizens’ loss of homes and possessions, jobs, health or mobility. Citizens move from above the level of consumption adequacy, where their behaviors reflect long-term and higher-order needs, to below the level of consumption adequacy, where they are forced into a short-term focus on simple existence. In parallel, services provided by various organizations – utilities, transportation, medical, maintenance, housing, education, broadcasting, national state and local governments – may become ineffective or unavailable under such conditions. This book explores the effect of unsettled times on spatial service systems. It describes the scope and breadth of the problem as well as providing solutions by offering original insights from managers of service organizations (especially public services), policy-makers and service system researchers and students. The book briefly introduces the related concepts of consumption adequacy and spatial service systems. The impact of these issues for spatial service systems is analyzed, implications discussed, the lessons to be learned and conclusions will be drawn on the actions needed to build spatial service system resilience for future occurrences. The potential for this book is interdisciplinary, and could be relevant not only for business/management courses, but also in the areas of public administration and also economic geography.

Dynamic Customer Strategy: Today's CRM

Dynamic Customer Strategy: Today’s CRM

$21.99

Marketers, merchandisers, and sales executives alike are struggling with Big Data – the data streaming at increasing speeds from myriad channels and options for communicating with customers. The tools are likely to continue to multiply, paralyzing many executives with simply too many choices. Using data from a four-year study, this book provides a process for rigorous decision making, eliminating the paralysis and optimizing decision making for marketing performance. 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 marketing practice and help current and future business leaders navigate through the competitive storms unleashed by technological change.

Accounting for Derivatives and Hedging Activities

Accounting for Derivatives and Hedging Activities

$21.99

Derivatives, and derivatives used to hedge financial and operating functions, are designed to allow managers of firms to manage effectively the downside risk of their financial and operating strategies. They also can be very useful tools that allow managers and executives to accurately predict financial and operational performance and manage the investment communities’ ‘expectations’ regarding overall firm performance. Derivatives and hedges, however, if not properly designed in conjunction with the firm’s risk management strategy, can be potentially disastrous for the firm. The ongoing financial turmoil in markets can be partially explained by company managers and executives not understanding the potential financial statement impact when derivative markets move in a particular direction for longer periods of time than anticipated by firms. This book is designed for managers and executives to be a comprehensive yet accessible resource for understanding the impact of derivative and hedge accounting on a company’s reporting of financial statements. The book’s primary purpose is to demystify derivatives and provide practical advice and counsel on how to use them to manage more effectively the operational and financial risk to the firm. When used properly derivatives are an extremely effective tool that managers and executives can use to reduce uncertainty regarding the future.

Teaching Anticorruption: Developing a Foundation for Business Integrity

Teaching Anticorruption: Developing a Foundation for Business Integrity

$21.99

The movement in management education towards a more serious concern with how corruption can be tackled has occurred in reaction to highly publicized corporate scandals and instances of management misconduct. Widespread scandals have eroded public faith in companies and public authorities, as well as fueled legislative reactions such as the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts in the United States, and the recent UK Bribery Act.The movement in management education towards a more serious concern with how corruption can be tackled has occurred in reaction to highly publicized corporate scandals and instances of management misconduct. Widespread scandals have eroded public faith in companies and public authorities as well as fuelled legislative reactions such as the Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank acts in the United States, not to forget the recent UK Bribery Act. Concomitantly, management scholars and educators have begun to question the assumptions underlying traditional management education, which in their view not only contributed to the recent financial and moral crisis but also failed to prepare students and executives for coping with the leadership challenges and ethical dilemmas that face any responsible manager in contemporary corporations. We believe that the statement ‘ a prepared mind favors ethical behavior’ carries some important truth to it and have therefore invited a group of world-class scholars with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives to develop our thinking on how teaching in anti-corruption practices can be conducted today. How to teach anti-corruption in business schools and universities is not an area that has received much scholarly attention. Widely publicized corporate scandals have pushed public trust in business to an all-time low; and have raised the question about the role and effectiveness of university education in developing moral competencies among students -future business leaders. Our book is clearly a response to this situation. This book therefore sets out to develop an empirical and theoretical platform for rethinking business school curricula, with a specific view to understanding and meaningfully confronting the challenges of corruption of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, the book will * offer examples of new tools, teaching methods and case studies for anti-corruption teaching * explore and discuss how particular approaches, such as Giving Voice to Values, may be used worldwide for teaching anticorruption * explore and discuss how curricula can be streamlined and rejuvenated in order to ensure a high level of integrity in the worlds of business