Decision Making in Business


Book Description

Decision Making in Business is a versatile casebook for business and management courses. It features 34 realistic, functional business situations portrayed by 16 business professionals. The cases are short and varied, allowing instructors maximum flexibility. Each case is set up independently, so that the cases may be completed in any sequence. Students are exposed to a much broader spectrum of topics than is available in the cases that accompany most introductory business texts. The Third Edition has been completely revised and updated. Objective questions now follow each case, which facilitates instructor evaluation of student comprehension. There are also additional applications-oriented discussion questions. In addition to gaining early exposure to case analysis, students actually enjoy doing the problem solving necessary for each business situation. The book eases the job of teaching by stimulating classroom interaction and promoting active learning. Students learn to think about actual, real-world situations and how to make business decisions for themselves. Decision Making in Business stands alone or can be used to supplement another text. A comparative matrix enables instructors to integrate the case book into the course with a minimal amount of effort. It correlates the cases with appropriate chapters in the most commonly used introductory business texts. Instructors will find comprehensive pedagogical support in the accompanying Instructor's Manual/Testing Program which features: * Case objectives * Key terms * Additional points for consideration * Major and minor case issues * Test bank of additional objective questions * Answer thrusts to discussion questions * Answer keys for the objective questions




Business Decision Making, Second Edition


Book Description

How do executives make decisions? Are their decisions conscious or unconscious? Can they explain each decision they make? What tools can they use to improve their decision-making process? These are some of the questions this book addresses. During the past 35 years, as an entrepreneur and senior executive of several medium-sized Canadian hi-tech businesses, the author noticed that his decision-making processes were often based either on experience or on advice received from colleagues. Seldom were the decisions based on formal or informal academic-based methods. There is no substitute for years of experience in any human endeavor. However, tapping into some of the methods and lessons learned from personal experience can result in useful principles for others to follow. These principles are very useful, especially for entrepreneurs interested in building their businesses or executives looking for some additional help in acquiring a better decision-making mousetrap.




Decision Making and Business Performance


Book Description

This breakthrough study examines how business decisions explain successful and unsuccessful performance. Real world and academic research is evaluated, including interviews and cases studies, to create a model of how decisions and performance are connected for businesses of all sizes. Recommendations are made to optimize decision making and projections about the future of decision making and performance are provided.




Business Decision Making


Book Description

Originally published in 1981. Risk is a problem which all business decision makers have to cope with. The problem is not insurmountable, however, as there now exist well-established techniques for minimising risk and for calculating which of various available options is the optimal one to pursue. This book outlines and discusses these techniques and the theories behind them. Unlike many economic theories which only rarely have any practical applications, the techniques put forward in this book can be used by real businessmen to solve real business problems. The book concentrates on decision-making in two main areas: the allocation of a firm’s resources and the selection of new investments; and the techniques and theories discussed fall into three broad groups: linear programming, decision theory and capital market theory. Intended as an advanced undergraduate textbook for students taking business economics or managerial economics courses, this valuable book will interest specialists and students involved in management studies, microeconomics, strategic planning, operational research, accounting and MBA programmes.




Business Strategy


Book Description

The effectiveness of a good strategy well implemented determines a business' future success or failure. Yet history is full of strategic decisions, big and small, that were ill-conceived, poorly organized and consequently disastrous. This updated guide looks at the whole process of strategic decision-making, from vision, forecasting, and resource allocation, through to implementation and innovation. Strategy is about understanding where you are now, where you are heading and how you will get there. There is no room for timidity or confusion. Although the CEO and the board decide a company's overall direction, it is the managers at all levels of the organization who will determine how the vision can be transformed into action. In short, everyone is involved in strategy. But getting it right involves difficult choices: which customers to target, what products to offer, and the best way to keep costs low and service high. And constantly changing business conditions inevitably bring risks. Even after business strategy has been developed, a company must remain nimble and alert to change, and view strategy as an ongoing and evolving process. The message of this guide is simple: strategy matters, and getting it right is fundamental to business success.




Decision Making for Business


Book Description

Decision Making for Business gathers crucial contributions to our understanding of decision making and assembles them to form a coherent and sustained analysis of the key factors that influence the process. The selected articles are stimulating, provocative and analytical, resulting in a critical, comprehensive and innovative analysis of decision making.




Decision-making


Book Description

This book examines various decision-making processes, influences and its role in business management. The chapters describe the original decision-making approach based on joint use of the multi-criteria method and the method of group preferences in business management; a discussion on the internationalization decision-making process of small-medium enterprises (SMEs); and an examination on the efficiency of computer decision support systems by developing a set of universal analytic models for increasing the efficiency of fuzzy input information processing.




Leading Teams


Book Description

Hackman (social and organizational psychology, Harvard U.) identifies the factors of being a team leader that will enable a team to work together efficiently to achieve organizational goals. He suggests that five conditions are necessary: having a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert team coaching. He integrates insights from interviews with team leaders with concepts from the social sciences. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Data Science for Business and Decision Making


Book Description

Data Science for Business and Decision Making covers both statistics and operations research while most competing textbooks focus on one or the other. As a result, the book more clearly defines the principles of business analytics for those who want to apply quantitative methods in their work. Its emphasis reflects the importance of regression, optimization and simulation for practitioners of business analytics. Each chapter uses a didactic format that is followed by exercises and answers. Freely-accessible datasets enable students and professionals to work with Excel, Stata Statistical Software®, and IBM SPSS Statistics Software®. - Combines statistics and operations research modeling to teach the principles of business analytics - Written for students who want to apply statistics, optimization and multivariate modeling to gain competitive advantages in business - Shows how powerful software packages, such as SPSS and Stata, can create graphical and numerical outputs




The Sentient Enterprise


Book Description

Mohan and Oliver have been very fortunate to have intimate views into the data challenges that face the largest organizations and institutions across every possible industry—and what they have been hearing about for some time is how the business needs to use data and analytics to their advantage. They continually hear the same issues, such as: We're spending valuable meeting time wondering why everyone's data doesn't match up. We can't leverage our economies of scale while remaining agile with data. We need self-serve apps that let the enterprise experiment with data and accelerate the development process. We need to get on a more predictive curve to ensure long-term success. To really address the data concerns of today's enterprise, they wanted to find a way to help enterprises achieve the success they seek. Not as a prescriptive process—but a methodology to become agile and leverage data and analytics to drive a competitive advantage. You know, it's amazing what can happen when two people with very different perspectives get together to solve a big problem. This evolutionary guide resulted from the a-ha moment between these two influencers at the top of their fields—one, an academic researcher and consultant, and the other, a longtime analytics practitioner and chief product officer at Teradata. Together, they created a powerful framework every type of business can use to connect analytic power, business practices, and human dynamics in ways that can transform what is currently possible.