Making Competent Organizations


Book Description

Travel where you will in todays America, and youre likely to be drawn into a conversation about mistreatment by one or more of todays organizations. Someone ordered something. But when the order came it wasnt what they ordered. That was two years ago and still ongoing. Or Your call is very important to us. Thats why youre number 19 in the queue. Doctors and hospitals make mistakes. Only a few are really fatal. But they have insurance for that. Will you get what you want from an organization? It may depend upon whom in the organizations youre talking to. An organizations marketing is not an organizations performance. Its just talk. Organizations live and die by their deeds. This book tells you how. Malfunctions in organizations are ubiquitous. They occur in every kind of organization of every size. Why is that? How do you avoid falling victim to the conventional, to mediocrity? This book can be your guide. Add to that the fact that highly paid CEOs are often frustrated by the performance of their own organizations. Thats one reason for their ever-shortening tenure in that role. They are often disgruntled by the performance of their own executives and managers. And those employees are often openly dissatisfied with the organizations where they work. Even after thousands of books and many thousands of conferences since the 1970s, our organizations dont seem to be doing much better. Here is that rare book that tells you how to perform in the real world. This book addresses those problems head-on. It addresses the sources (not the symptoms) of organizational dysfunctions. Regardless of title, you wont find elsewhere a better guide to making competent organizations, which is where the problems lie. This book is about how you, the CEO or CEO aspirant, need to think about what needs thinking about, for how you think about what needs thinking about will determine who you are. And who you are determines what you can and cannot do about making yours a fully functioning, competent organization. Just reading about it is not of much help. Aristotle said many years ago, What you must learn, you must learn by doing. This book is unique; it tells you how to do just that.




Creating the Functionally Competent Organization


Book Description

Olmstead writes from an open systems perspective—a viewpoint of organizations that adapt quickly to turbulent, uncertain business environments—offering an integrated, understandable, and highly practical way to analyze, assess, and improve organization performance. He demonstrates how organizations actually function, and shows how they can identify and overcome obstacles by creating organizational competence-the critical elements that give organizations the ability to perform effectively in the modern business world. Upper level students, scholars, and teachers will find Olmstead's book an important addition to their academic reading lists. For practitioners, particularly those in rapid response organizations, this book will be an indispensable aid in the struggle to keep their organizations up to date and abreast of the competition.




The Competent Organization


Book Description

This book is about how the chief executivealong with everyone else directly involvedneeds to think about transforming an okay organization into a fully competent one. Everyone would like to have a more competent organization. There is a lot of fairy dust out there about how to accomplish that the easy way. But there is no easy way . . . that works. To customers and other stakeholders, it is the performance of the organization that matters. They could not care less about promises that are only sometimes kept. They expect performance. This book not only tells you how you have to think in order to make this happen but it offers many of the basic tools and techniques for doing so. Making a fully competent organization is a tough go, but it is doable. This book tells you how. It is based upon many years of successful, hands-on experience in creating fully competenteven greatorganizations of all sorts and sizes. With this book as your guide, you, too, could have that competent organization you dare to dream of. For the past forty-five years or so, I have been traveling the world doing hundreds of seminars for chief executives. My main contribution, however, has been working in the trenches with a few of them to help them make competent or even great organizations. Each is a complex endeavor that has to be customized to the particular organization and its particular executives. Ive talked about this. And Ive answered many questions about it. The time finally came to set forth how to think about doing this, as well as how to get started in actually implementing some of the basics. This book summarizes my unique approach to making high-performance organizations and the leadership required to do so. It is dedicated to those courageous and committed chief executives who volunteered to undergo the stresses and anguish of making great things happen. It is likely that I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me. We have been passionate partners in making great things happen.




Transcultural Concepts in Nursing Care


Book Description

Now in its Fourth Edition, this transcultural nursing text conveys the importance of diverse cultural knowledge for the evaluation of patient outcomes, understanding persons in clinical settings and appropriate responses to clinical situations during the nurse/client interaction. Detailed theory is discussed and each chapter contains awareness exercises to ensure comprehension of the nursing role as trusted health care providers. Coverage includes cultural variation in lifestyle, communication and beliefs. New to this edition is a two-color design; revised content on assessment and applications of concepts; a new chapter on culturally appropriate interventions; and, more case studies, research studies and clinical vignettes.




Intercultural Competence in Organizations


Book Description

This book addresses one of the most critical issues facing global business leaders and the multicultural workforce – how to work and relate effectively in the intercultural contexts. The author presents business professionals, practitioners and academics with the Collaborative Intercultural Competence Model. Based on solid theoretical assumptions and real intercultural experiences, this model is to help professionals work more effectively across and within cultures. This book expands the traditional presentation of existing knowledge by providing a unified discussion of intercultural communication and its conceptual foundations. The book offers readers with a contemporary insight into the intercultural competence phenomenon and highlights the basis for its experience-based inquiry, assessment and development. A distinctive feature of Intercultural Competence in Organizations is its comprehensive coverage of the intercultural competence framework from both communication and organizational behavior perspectives. This book does not cover traditional areas of international business, international management, global management strategy and policy and cross-cultural comparative management, but focuses on theoretical foundations of intercultural competence and intercultural competence research and practice. The author describes the complex nature of intercultural competence in a straightforward format which helps professionals, practitioners and students to envision a variety of intercultural situations in which they may behave competently. Thus, the conceptual acumen of this title is to understand the premises of intercultural competence, embrace its theoretical assumptions, see its practical applicability, and advance individual intercultural competence. Featuring examples and skill development exercises, this book will be appealing to professionals, practitioners, students, academics and policy makers in the field of international business, management and communication. “Dr. Matveev challenges his readers to develop their intercultural competence so as to make themselves more effective, more humane and more socially skilled in a world that increasingly involves extensive contact across various groups of people.” --from the Foreword by Richard W. Brislin, University of Hawaii “Dr. Matveev creates an awareness of intercultural competence by exposing the reader to the theoretical concepts and practical tools. Business people and academics will use this book to recognize and leverage the benefits of cultural diversity.” --Berthold Mukuahima, Director of Human Capital, Ohlthaver & List Group, Namibia “Dr. Matveev reveals how intercultural competence of professional multicultural teams helps in achieving corporate competitive advantage and longevity in a challenging globalized world. This book is very useful for managers, scholars and students who want to elevate the efficacy of intercultural relationship in their professional and personal lives.” --Srečko Čebron, Management Board Member, Sava Reinsurance Company, Slovenia /div




Designing Stress Resistant Organizations


Book Description

Designing Stress Resistant Organizations demonstrates, in a persuasive way, how computational organization theory can be applied to advance the field of management with its successful integration of theory and practice. At the theoretical level, the book contains a comprehensive computational framework called DYCORP, which simulates dynamic and interactive organizational behaviors by incorporating multiple factors such as organizational design, task environment, and stress, and which generates consistent and insightful propositions on organizational performance. The book utilizes an organization science based approach to computational modeling. This approach recognizes the limit of human cognition as it was outlined by Herbert A. Simon in 1947. The model strives to focus on the essence of the reality that is most relevant to the research issue. This approach has been proven to be more beneficial for us to understand the underlying dynamics of the phenomenon.




Prerequisites for Healthy Organizational Change


Book Description

"We live in a time where organizational change has become the norm. Organizations are constantly undergoing major restructurings be it outsourcing, downsizing or major reorganizational changes, e.g., team or LEAN implementation. Stability has become the ex"




International Economic Organizations in the International Legal Process


Book Description

Voitovich presents a clear and lucid discussion of the manner and form in which international economic organizations (IEOs) participate in two main stages of the international legal process: law making and law implementation. The book is based on normative instruments and fragments of practice of about fifty IEOs. In order to ensure a proper and timely realization of their normative acts, IEOs exercise a number of law implementing functions which are subject to a thorough comparative examination. The author concludes that existing IEOs, not being ideal institutional models, possess a sufficient arsenal of law implementing instruments to make a considerable impact on the international legal regulations in the economic field. The book will be of interest to academics and economic political scientists.




Multicultural Perspectives in Working with Families


Book Description

This book addresses cutting edge issues in the assessment and treatment of families from diverse cultural backgrounds. It covers a wide array of related family issues and skills which are important for human service practitioners in the helping disciplines.




Collaborating with Community-based Organizations Through Consultation and Technical Assistance


Book Description

Community groups and human service organizations are under a tremendous amount of pressure to strengthen their programs and measure the effectiveness of their work. These challenges have prompted many to seek consultation and technical assistance in order to better plan, develop, and evaluate their services and resources and be more responsive to the needs of funders and the community. In this volume, practitioners and researchers present methods and strategies for assisting and collaborating with groups and agencies serving families. Helping a community or organization involves many tasks (reaching out to the community, building leadership, developing and planning for action) and requires specialized knowledge and skills. Contributors combine a research-based, theoretical framework with practical guidance to explain this process and offer cross-cultural case studies in a wide range of settings. The book begins with a discussion of the role of the coach or capacity-building consultant and the related but distinct activities of consultation, technical assistance, and service. The value of empowerment theory, adult learning theory, and change theory, among other theories, are outlined. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of cultural competence-the need to balance diverse needs, ethical mandates, and dilemmas is crucial. The book concludes with a detailed, step-by-step guide for helping an agency or program perform a self-evaluation. Skilled consultation and assistance enable organizations to better support and strengthen families. While this book is grounded in research, it also reflects the lived experiences of each contributor and illuminates the complex yet vital role of the consultant.