Management decision making Books

Book SynopsisThe fourth edition of Cost-Benefit Analysis is an authoritative, market-leading textbook that provides a practical introduction to cost-benefit analysis through problem solving. The text uses a consistent application of a nine-step framework for interpreting a cost-benefit analysis. This edition has been fully revised, updated and re-organized to provide the material more effectively. It presents application over abstract theory and clear discussion over mathematics to appeal to a larger, more diverse audience.

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Book SynopsisBased on unique access interviews with leading chairmen and senior executives, All Above Board examines the key functions of the ideal 21st century board, how and why badly led boards fail, and what changes can be made to improve board behavior and efficiency for best practice.Trade Review'Corporate Governance has come to the forefront as a key to corporate success or failure. In this book Ulf Lindgren summarizes the issues around the board such as the composition, its role and responsibilities as well the relationships between the chairman, CEO and the rest of the board. But most importantly he gives very good real examples of what works and what doesn't. This is a must read for anyone engaged in corporate boards or corporate governance.' - Dr. Lars Thunell, Board member of Standard Chartered Bank ltd. Former Executive Vice President and CEO of the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group 'This book is equally valuable for Owners, Board Members and CEOs. All Above Board offers concrete insights and compelling examples of models that enable these three parties to not only achieve effective synchronization and communication of their core mission and strategy, but to excel in the execution of this beyond the mere sum of their collective competence. It is highly readable and full of practical takeaways.' - Nick Kaye, Executive Director, Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship 'Ulf Lindgren clearly knows his topic well and he gives many practical examples how to improve the role of the board in creating value for the corporation. All Above the Board has many real life stories and will be a must read for any business leader. The book summarizes in an excellent way practical lessons learned on the issues any board could have.' - Kjell Spångberg, Founder of Canyon Equity and chairman of the board of HEG 'As a member of multiple Boards I highly recommend anyone interested in, or, engaged in the functioning of corporate Boards to read All Above Board. The author gives, with his vast experience, very valuable insight into the actual and real functioning of the Board and the experiences learned in some of the world's leading corporations. This book is a must for both practitioners and academics interested in good governance!' - Dr. Laurent Leksell, Executive Director and Founder of Elekta AB 'The impact of the Board of Directors on corporate values is powerful and often overshadowed. This book is a must-read tool for all companies aiming to enhance theirs and create enduring organisations.' - Ann O'Leary, Co-founder of O'Learys Bar and Restaurants and EntrepreneurTable of ContentsIntroduction The Board of the Future Enhancing the Chairman's Value Chairman and CEO - Tandem at the Top The One Team Board Challenge The Board and Innovation Boosting Peak Performance Setting Strategic Agendas Summary and Conclusions Research Methodology

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Book SynopsisResilient people are happier, healthier, and more productive. Psychologist and business writer Adrian Furnham takes a sideways and entertaining look at the challenges of being a leader, demonstrating how resilience can be honed, developed, and used as a personal life raft to keep afloat in the face of adversity.Trade Review'Adrian Furnham is the best known social psychologist in the UK. He is widely travelled, widely read, broadly educated, and has a keen eye for the gritty absurdities of organizational life. This book, a collection of wide ranging and sharp observations on how management affects the well-being of everyone is a witty, fun, engaging, provocative, and ultimately very rewarding read.' -Robert Hogan, CEO Hogan Assessments, USA 'Furnham's latest masterpiece expertly blends academic rigour, real-world relevance and pithy observations to help managers and scholars alike get to grips with issues like how to build a team for resilience, getting the best out of people and dealing with the daily grind.' -Dr Mark Batey, Manchester Business School 'The Resilient Manager is another excellent book in the series. In these turbulent times, to survive and flourish managers need to be resilient. Professor Furnham has done a masterful job in helping managers confront this challenge a must read for all managers.' -Cary L. Cooper, CBE, Pro Vice Chancellor for External Relations & Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology & Health Lancaster University Management School 'Resilience, almost more than any other attribute, is needed to survive in a world where you are continually bombarded with competing and often biased views on everything, and where change is always top of the agenda. Resilience is a key attribute for a manager to survive in this kind of environment. This book explains the problems of modern management, identifies resilience as a key issue and provides helpful suggestions.' -Professor Chris J. Jackson, Head of School, School of Management Australian School of BusinessTable of ContentsPreface Introduction 1. Building a Team 2. Getting the Best out of People 3. The Daily Grind 4. It's all in the Delivery – Management Behavior 5. Learning on the Job 6. Life Beyond

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Book Synopsis An exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us.In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths show how algorithms developed for computers also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to peering in

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Book SynopsisThe definitive guide to eliminating the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done in organizations. Find out why Adam Grant says If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, The Friction Project by bestselling authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao teaches readers how to become friction fixers.Sutton and Rao kick off the book by unpacking how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of others' time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then their help pyramid shows how

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Book SynopsisTo facilitate the use of R, the authors have developed an R package called Benchmarking, which implements the main methods within both DEA and SFA.The book uses mathematical formulations of models and assumptions, but it de-emphasizes the formal proofs - in part by placing them in appendices -- or by referring to the original sources.Trade ReviewFrom the reviews:“Benchmarking with DEA, SFA, and R covers data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) … . Although more advanced readers … will gain more from reading this book, it contains something for all who are interested in the principles underlying DEA and SFA and who want to know how to use these methods … . the book is appropriate for readers who have a fairly good foundation in the methods of DEA and SFA and wish to raise their level of understanding.” (Emmanuel Thanassoulis, Interfaces, Vol. 42 (3), May-June, 2012)Table of Contents1. Introduction to Benchmarking.- 2. Efficiency Measures.- 3. Production Models and Technology.- 4. Data Envelopment Analysis DEA.- 5. Additional Topics in DEA.- 6. Statistical Analysis in DEA.- 7. Stochastic Frontier Analysis SFA.- 8. Additional Topics in SFA.- 9. Merger Analysis.- 10. Regulation and Contracting.- Appendix. Getting Started with R: A Quick Introduction.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides up-to-date analytical tools to address challenging operational problems in renewable energy production facilities, such as wind- and solar-based generation units. It includes many illustrative examples.Table of ContentsIntroduction.- Renewable Energy Sources - Modeling and Forecasting.- Clearing the Day-Ahead Market with a High Penetration of Stochastic Production.- Balancing Markets.- Managing Uncertainty with Flexibility.- Impact of Stochastic Renewable Energy Generation on Market Quantities.- Trading Stochastic Production in Electricity Pools.- Virtual Power Plants.- Facilitating Renewable Integration by Demand Response.- Random Variables and Stochastic Processes.- Basics of Optimization.- Introduction to Stochastic Programming.- Introduction to Robust Optimization.- GAMS Codes.

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Book Synopsis​This textbook on Linear and Nonlinear Optimization is intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in operations research and related fields.Trade Review“The historical notes in the book are interesting and well placed. … The book’s list of important references is quite complete. … this book is destined to become a classic in the field for beginning graduate students in optimization.” (S. Zlobec, Mathematical Reviews, January, 2018)Table of ContentsChapter 1. LP Models and Applications.- Chapter 2. Linear Equations and Inequalities.- Chapter 3. The Simplex Algorithm.- Chapter 4. The Simplex Algorithm Continued.- Chapter 5. Duality and the Dual Simplex Algorithm.- Chapter 6. Postoptimality Analysis.- Chapter 7. Some Computational Considerations.- Chapter 8. NLP Models and Applications.- Chapter 9. Unconstrained Optimization.- Chapter 10. Descent Methods.- Chapter 11. Optimality Conditions.- Chapter 12. Problems with Linear Constraints.- Chapter 13. Problems with Nonlinear Constraints.- Chapter 14. Interior-Point Methods.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis A 'detective story' that delivers key insights for any businessperson asking the questions: who really are our customers, why do we lose them, how do we regain them?Customers can be a mystery. Despite the availability of more data than ever before, everyone, from the CEO to salespeople in the field, struggles to understand who their customers really are, what they want, why they lose them, and how to regain them.To crack the case, start thinking like a market detective.David Scott Duncan shows how in his entertaining story of Tazza, a fictional chain of cafes with declining sales and leaders urgently seeking to understand why. The vivid characters of Tazza’s market detective force come to their aha moment when they finally understand why their most loyal customers walked out the door—and how they can get them back.The core of the Tazza story is a simple, powerful idea that upends how most businesses view their customers. Customers have “jobs to be done.” They “hire” companies to solve a problem or fulfill a need and “fire” them when unhappy. Duncan’s fresh way of thinking about how to understand your customers’ secret lives provides an innovative path for solving whatever market mysteries you face.

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Book SynopsisThe acclaimed bestseller about visual problem solving-now bigger and better There is no more powerful way to prove that we know something well than to draw a simple picture of it. And there is no more powerful way to see hidden solutions than to pick up a pen and draw out the pieces of our problem.So writes Dan Roam in The Back of the Napkin, the international bestseller that proves that a simple drawing on a humble napkin can be more powerful than the slickest PowerPoint presentation. Drawing on twenty years of experience and the latest discoveries in vision science, Roam teaches readers how to clarify any problem or sell any idea using a simple set of tools.He reveals that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can't draw. And he shows how thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve your ability to share your insights.Take Herb Kelleher and Rollin King, who figured out how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke airlines with a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.Now with more color, bigger pictures, and additional content, this new edition does an even better job of helping you literally see the world in a new way. Join the teachers, project managers, doctors, engineers, assembly-line workers, pilots, football coaches, marine drill instructors, financial analysts, students, parents, and lawyers who have discovered the power of solving problems with pictures.

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Book SynopsisNo one wins at everything they try. But any setback, whether professional or personal, can become a step forward with the right tools and mindset to turn loss into a gain. Drawing on nearly 50 years of leadership experience, Maxwell provides a roadmap for winning by examining the eleven elements that constitute the "DNA" of people who succeed in the face of problems, failure, and losses. Learning is not easy during down times. It takes discipline to do the right thing when something goes wrong. As John Maxwell often points out, experience itself isn't the best teacher; evaluating, understanding, and growing from your experience is. By examining how that process works, you can learn how to take risks and tackle challenges with a successful person's outlook. Derived from material previous published in Sometime You Win--Sometimes You Learn.

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Book SynopsisThis business analytics (BA) text discusses the models based on fact-based data to measure past business performance to guide an organization in visualizing and predicting future business performance and outcomes.It provides a comprehensive overview of analytics in general with an emphasis on predictive analytics. Given the booming interest in analytics and data science, this book is timely and informative. It brings many terms, tools, and methods of analytics together.The first three chapters provide an introduction to BA, importance of analytics, types of BA—descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive—along with the tools and models. Business intelligence (BI) and a case on descriptive analytics are discussed. Additionally, the book discusses on the most widely used predictive models, including regression analysis, forecasting, data mining, and an introduction to recent applications of predictive analytics—machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. The concluding chapter discusses on the current state, job outlook, and certifications in analytics.

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