Business Strategies For A Messy World

Using current business examples and academic research, Tools for Systematic Problem-Solving educates managers and executives on how to systematically examine key assumptions to ensure survival and success for their organizations.

Using current business examples and academic research, Tools for Systematic Problem-Solving educates managers and executives on how to systematically examine key assumptions to ensure survival and success for their organizations.

A comprehensive guide to developing a culture of learning and education within your business. In any kind of organization, learning has become a vital part of the growth and development process, but it only produces effective results if it is pursued strategically and embedded deeply into the culture of the workplace. In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that, for many organizations, learning is their only sustainable competitive advantage – ensuring a committed and engaged workforce that is positioned to identify and exploit business opportunities in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world. This makes it essential for leaders and senior managers to investigate the full range of learning processes and to understand exactly how individual, group, machine and organization-wide learning can produce long-lasting results for individuals as well as for the company itself. Backed by new academic theory, yet designed to be completely accessible to a business readership, The Learning-Driven Business highlights the importance of Organizational Learning (OL) for organizations which wish to remain competitive and profitable, before clarifying the various pathways and frameworks that can lead to success. With the onset of automation and artificial intelligence, as well as the proliferation of redundancies and the economic instability of modern times, organizations and their employees must prioritise effective OL in order to overcome these challenges and remain competitive and relevant in the 21st century. This book is a guide for all business leaders and academics looking to adapt to the changing world through OL, using Garand & Golds' unique and original academic model.

This book provides an integrative analysis of creativity and strategic practices, particularly strategic problem formulation and strategic decision making. It examines the decision and not the individual as a unit of analysis, which leads to a deeper understanding of creative outcomes. It draws a correlation between strategic intent and creative outcomes, both positive and negative, and provides an integrated framework for understanding creativity. Finally, the book develops a creative strategic framework and draws conclusions for the practice of management and for future research.

Over the past few decades marketing practices have shifted with the sudden growth of social media and the proliferation of devices, platforms, and applications. This rapidly changing environment presents new opportunities and challenges for marketers, who need to stay up to date with the development of e-marketing. Viglia instructs readers in the theories and practices of online marketing;, detailing the characteristics, consumer behaviors, and differences between platforms, analytics, and pricing strategies of new media. Pricing, Online Marketing Behavior, and Analytics covers many different aspects of how online marketing works and its continuous evolution. Case studies and examples are used throughout the book to outline theories and explain e-marketing characteristics in a practical way.

This open access book provides a comprehensive look at the pluses and minuses of leadership in times of an unparalleled crisis, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic. It examines the COVID-19 crisis in terms of psychodynamics, crisis management, and especially from the standpoint of complex, messy systems. It analyses how leaders need to think and act differently to cope better with—and potentially prevent—future crises.

“A truly expansive and valuable book that challenges the assumptions and constraints of current leadership thinking... Its focus on integrating theory and practice is particularly helpful in linking its key ideas to current public sector management concerns.”—Gareth Morgan, Author of Images of Organization “While other authors have offered general principles of systemic leadership or given readers single approaches, Hobbs is much more ambitious: she brings together diverse, well-tested theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to provide today's leaders with a multifaceted resource that can aid them in thinking systemically. In this respect, her book is a significant advance on previous offerings, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to leaders, aspiring leaders and leadership academics around the world.”—Gerald Midgley, University of Hull, UK “This is an impressive and innovative work that draws together the disparate strands of complexity theory, systems thinking and operational research to build an adaptive social learning approach for local governance, helping to shift it from a service-led to systemic-deliberative model. This is essential reading for local government actors, students of local policy and for the public policy generalist.”—Robert Geyer, Lancaster University, UK Addressing matters of complexity systemically rather than mechanistically is now an ethical and practical paradigm-changing challenge for public policy. This optimistic book explores how action could be led in a joined-up way, signposting resources to thinking differently. Attention is paid to leading the design of adaptive social learning around what matters, re-connecting with public purpose to enable tailoring towards contemporary needs and constraints. Relevant to postgraduates, academics, local government managers, curious practitioners and the wider public, private and third sectors where there is interest in interpreting leadership via the cognitive capabilities of Systems Science.

Using the cultural prism of race, this book critically examines the image of African Americans in media of the twenty-first century. Further, the authors assess the ways in which media focused on gender, religion, and politics in framing perceptions of the President and First Lady of the United States during the Obama administration.