Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes wo...

All too often, when investors go in search of investment advice, they are met with television personalities and so-called investment gurus who do little more than push the latest and greatest scheme to retire rich. Your retirement funds-in the form of IRAs, 401(k)s, SEP or Simple IRAs, and other plans you can direct to some degree-are, however, far too precious to bet on the latest scheme, trend, or tip you heard at a party. In Invest Like an Institution: Professional Strategies for ...

Every day, Main Street businesses wrestle with the challenge of finding the cash to finance growth or use as working capital. The local banker often wants a credit score of 720, three or more years in business, and a fat savings account. No wonder local bankers approve only 10% of loan applications.Getting a Business Loan: Financing Your Main Street Business shares something your local banker might not want you to know—small business owners have options. And this book desc...

From Techie to Boss teaches technical people who are making or mulling the transition from team player to team leader all the management techniques and soft leadership skills they never needed before—but need now, pronto. Veteran team lead and project manager Scott Cromar lays out the classical management training course, but stripped down to precisely the essentials that techies need to start managing on the fly. He gets it that a front-line techie getting a field promotion to te...

Here is a sample chapter from Six Sigma Black Belt Handbook, which offers the best and the latest information to assist you in solving some of the most complex problems imaginable. In this book written by the instructors of the world renowned Motorola University, you'll find valuable advice on how to integrate research and development, manufacturing, human resources, finance, marketing, quality, and customer service goals with their corporate vision, mission and key strategies.

Advances in Business and Management Forecasting presents state-of-the-art studies in the application of forecasting methodologies to suce areas as finance, economics, technology, and forecasting accuracy. Volume 11 is split into four sections which address Forecasting in Marketing and Sales, Forecasting in Health Care, Forecasting in Business and Economics, and Topics in Forecasting. A number of topics are examined including brand experience, hospital bed management, population growth and ...

This book arises from a meeting held at Wiston House, Sussex, UK, in September 1987. The meeting brought together academic, governmental and industrial experts from eight countries to discuss the increasingly important sUbject of the relations between civil and defence technologies. It was primarily funded under the Advanced Research Workshops Programme of NATO's Scientific Affairs Division, and was the first science policy workshop funded by the Programme. Additional financial support cam...

Information sharing is frequently promoted as a mean to improve the supply chain performance. This work shows the results of behavioral experiments, in which the participants share private information in order to influence the contract terms in a Just-in-Time environment. It is shown that the impact of information sharing is ambiguous, and dependent on several factors, such as contract flexibility and complexity or the interacting behavioral types. The experimental results form the basis f...

Fraud has become a challenging phenomena affecting economies worldwide. Anti-fraud measures are an integral part of today’s management practices and have found their way into business education. Yet in developing countries these topics have long been neglected and only limited research has been conducted in this area. This book fills an essential gap by analyzing the impact of fraud on developing economies, describing successful anti-fraud methods and featuring cases that exemplify the mea...

The Poetic Logic of Administration is an investigation of the most important organizational forms of our time, theoretically as well as practically. Central to the presentation are four main trends: the rational bureaucracy, the human network, the harmonious system and the strong culture.The book provides a new and challenging picture of these organizational forms. Difficult to capture in common logical terms, they appear to follow a certain pattern: a 'poetic logic'. They ...

How do small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) adopt environmental innovations? Do they have the necessary internal competence? Is any support offered by external parties (i.e. network involvement)? What are the policy implications? This book is based on extensive fieldwork, conducted in four traditional industrial sectors: offset printing, electroplating, textile finishing, and industrial painting. The work was carried out in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK. Twenty ...

First published in 1972, this book combines concepts from the philosophy of science and statistics with social science techniques to form a methodological text for all those engaged in the social sciences and in management. It details the processes of inquiry – namely description, explanation, evaluation and prediction – and shows the role they play in prescriptive decision-making. It is argued that an understanding of these processes lies behind successful inquiry and is an aid to effecti...