Traditional microeconomic theory has much to offer a manager. It suggests ways to increase profits by setting prices and packaging services, using advertising to increase demand and shows how internet auction sites like eBay affect competition and profitability. By using game theory to present and solve a manager’s decision-making problems and by focusing on the strategic nature of these problems, this text makes microeconomic theory much more intuitive and relevant for the business studen...

The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the m...

Addressing the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, Adam Smith made one of the most potent contributions to subsequent ideological history. In the West since the early-19th century he has been the patron saint of homo economicus. More recently, successive British governments have invoked his policy recommendations of free trade and laissez-faire to aid their extension of privatization and market effectiveness into areas such as health and education. Smith, however, not only viewed m...

The Long-Awaited Update for Building a Thriving ConsultancyCompletely updated for today’s busier-than-ever consultants, this classic guide covers the ins and outs for competing and winning in this ultracompetitive field. You’ll find step-by-step advice on how to raise capital, attract clients, create a marketing plan, and grow your business into a $1 million-per-year firm, plus brand-new material on:Blogging and social networkingGlobal consu...

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the ...

Understand Kaizen in no time! Find out everything you need to know about this innovative concept with this practical and accessible guide.In an increasingly competitive business world, companies must strive to constantly do better by boosting their productivity, optimising the quality of their products and services and eliminating waste and inefficiency. Kaizen, which was developed by the Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno, widely considered to be the father of the Toy...

Engineering Firms: A Survey of Factors Affecting their Growth & PerformanceThis is a detailed study of business-economic growth and performance in engineering. It covers a wide range of firm types – in all the main engineering fields – in Britain, the United States, Europe, and Japan.The study combines original field research findings with an extensive review of published literature on the subject.S...

The vertical/functional hierarchy has been the mainstay of business since the industrial revolution. But it has its problems. In fact, the vertical design all but guarantees fragmented tasks, overspecialization, fiefdoms, turf wars, the urge to control from the top--all the negatives that foster organizational paralysis. In The Horizontal Organization, Frank Ostroff provides executives with the first truly viable alternative to the age-old vertical alignment. Indeed, he offers not...

Manufacturing and Investment around the World: An International Survey of Factors Affecting Growth and PerformanceThere are significant differences between countries in terms of industrial manufacturing growth, competitiveness and capacities to attract foreign direct investment.This book reviews existing publications on the subject and presents new research findings – providing a comprehensive survey and analysis of production and investment in bot...

Just how risky is the movie industry? Is screenwriter William Goldman's claim that "nobody knows anything" really true? Can a star and a big opening change a movie's risks and return? Do studio executives really earn their huge paychecks? These and many other questions are answered in Hollywood Economics. The book uses powerful analytical models to

First published in 1984. This book represents a major study of union responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Abjuring governmental or managerial outlooks, it argues that unions, as representatives of essential producer groups, would be central to the renegotiation of the economic world. The work also stresses the importance of situating union responses to the crisis within the socio-historical evolution of their political economies during the rise and decline of the post-w...

The major challenges facing all of us today are time and financial pressures. Many small business owners deal with physical and mental stress while worrying about being sued by an unhappy customer. Many small business owners complain that they do not feel they own their business. Instead it owns them. After years of trying one technique after another, Dr. Williams has designed a system that limits the pressure and stress that you cannot control so you can better concentrate on the areas wh...