The Fail-proof Enterprise


Book Description

This is the Rolls-Royce of the how-to and how-not-to books on entrepreneurship. It covers things that are not even touched-upon by other entrepreneur books. It takes the reader through every stage of funding (without money), partnership compatibility, unique structure, sales, marketing, patents, legal problems, selling out or going public, and much more. It is as fail-proof as anything can be.




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.




Persistence in the Enterprise


Book Description

The Definitive Guide to Today’s Leading Persistence Technologies Persistence in the Enterprise is a unique, up-to-date, and objective guide to building the persistence layers of enterprise applications. Drawing on their extensive experience, five leading IBM® Web development experts carefully review the issues and tradeoffs associated with persistence in large-scale, business-critical applications. The authors offer a pragmatic, consistent comparison of each leading framework--both proprietary and open source. Writing for IT managers, architects, administrators, developers, and testers, the authors address a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from coding complexity and flexibility to scalability and licensing. In addition, they demonstrate each framework side by side, via a common example application. With their guidance, you’ll learn how to define your persistence requirements, choose the most appropriate solutions, and build systems that maximize both performance and value. Coverage includes Taking an end-to-end application architecture view of persistence Understanding business drivers, IT requirements, and implementation issues Driving your persistence architecture via functional, nonfunctional, and domain requirements Modeling persistence domains Mapping domain models to relational databases Building a yardstick for comparing persistence frameworks and APIs Selecting the right persistence technologies for your applications Comparing JDBCTM, Apache iBATIS, Hibernate Core, Apache OpenJPA, and pureQuery The companion web site includes sample code that implements the common example used throughout the technology evaluation chapters, 5-9. The IBM Press developerWorks® Series is a unique undertaking in which print books and the Web are mutually supportive. The publications in this series are complemented by resources on the developerWorks Web site on ibm.com. Icons throughout the book alert the reader to these valuable resources.




Getting Skills Right Training in Enterprises New Evidence from 100 Case Studies


Book Description

Enterprises are a key provider of education and training for adults across OECD countries. Yet, policy-makers lack a detailed understanding of how training in enterprises takes place. This report opens the black box of training and informal learning in enterprises by providing in-depth insights on: i) what training and learning opportunities enterprises provide; ii) why they provide training (or not); and iii) how they make decisions about training.




The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty


Book Description

The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty, Second Edition addresses the persistence of poverty across the globe while updating and expanding the landmark work, Encyclopedia of World Poverty, originally published in 2006 prior to the economic calamities of 2008. For instance, while continued high rates of income inequality might be unsurprising in developing countries such as Mexico, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported in May 2013 even countries with historically low levels of income inequality have experienced significant increases over the past decade, including Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. The U.N. and the World Bank also emphasize the persistent nature of the problem. It is not all bad news. In March 2013, the Guardian newspaper reported, “Some of the poorest people in the world are becoming significantly less poor, according to a groundbreaking academic study which has taken a new approach to measuring deprivation. The report, by Oxford University’s poverty and human development initiative, predicts that countries among the most impoverished in the world could see acute poverty eradicated within 20 years if they continue at present rates.” On the other hand, the U.N. says environmental threats from climate change could push billions more into extreme poverty in coming decades. All of these points lead to the need for a revised, updated, and expanded edition of the Encyclopedia of World Poverty. Key Features: 775 evaluated and updated and 175 entirely new entries New Reader’s Guide categories Signed articles, with cross-references Further Readings will be accompanied by pedagogical elements Updated Chronology, Resource Guide, Glossary, and thorough new Index The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty, Second Edition is a dependable source for students and researchers who are researching world poverty, making it a must-have reference for all academic libraries.







Complex Criminal Litigation: Prosecuting Drug Enterprises and Organized Crime - Third Edition


Book Description

Complex Criminal Litigation: Prosecuting Drug Enterprises and Organized Crime provides practitioners and others interested in the federal criminal justice system with a comprehensive analysis of the arsenal of federal laws that provide federal prosecutors the means to combat criminal organizations, their leadership (i.e. the so-called "kingpins") and their infrastructure. These statutes include the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO); the Continuing Criminal Enterprise or CCE statute; the Money Laundering Control Act; federal firearms statutes; and criminal and civil forfeiture laws that permit the seizure and forfeiture of the profits and instrumentalities of illegal enterprises. Further, the treatise includes an analysis of the principal legal issues that federal prosecutors and defense attorneys need to consider in handling long-term, complex criminal conspiracies that frequently involve multiple and diverse criminal acts from the rules relating to grand jury secrecy, granting immunity, bail, criminal discovery, and all points in between. Finally, because organized criminal activity respects no national boundaries, the treatise includes a comprehensive discussion of international criminal law, including extraterritorial jurisdiction and extradition. Criminal trial attorneys involved in litigating complex criminal cases will benefit greatly from reading this treatise.




Lean Management for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises


Book Description

This book provides a step-by-step guide to implementing lean at SMEs using an approach that has been tested and fine-tuned at over a hundred organizations across India, South East Asia and the Middle East. The book approaches Lean through an implementation project cycle flow and enables the reader to understand the imperative for Lean, how to diagnose current operations, how to plan and deploy Lean and shows a path for long-term sustenance. Diverse situations such as meeting the demand fluctuations, designing a facility, or improving profit margin etc. are included in the case studies from multiple sectors, to ensure that every reader finds a situation similar to their organizational situation. While the publicly available literature on lean offers a large collection of tools and techniques, given each organization’s unique context, the choice of the right sequence of tools differ. The book offers guidelines in terms of which solutions work in which context, backed by real-cases, which is a big help to the resource constrained SMEs. This book is an equally good resource for the organizations that have already implemented lean, as it provides realistic pointers about sustaining, tackling supply chain uncertainties and going beyond Lean by integrating emerging technologies and management principles. It is an excellent resource for students and researchers studying this area and also for corporates, professionals and industry watchers.




Inside Social Enterprise


Book Description

A lively and clear introduction to social enterprise, including nearly forty interviews with the most influential and experienced social enterprise practitioners, supporters, thinkers and policy makers.




Infrastructures for Virtual Enterprises


Book Description

The area of virtual organizations, and industrial virtual enterprises in particular, is attracting a large and growing interest both in terms of the research and development and the implementation of new business practices. An ever-increasing number of international projects and national initiatives have been launched recently. Most of the earlier efforts are focused on the development of supporting infrastructures, although more and more initiatives now pursue the exploitation of this concept in business terms. Being a recent research and development area, and in spite of the mentioned interest, there is a lack of a structured and comprehensive text that can be used as a reference source. Most available literature is dispersed in several conference proceedings, journals, and book chapters. This book represents an attempt towards such structured text. Although the book was prepared in the framework of PRO-VE'99, a working conference on infrastructures for virtual enterprises organized by the Esprit project PRODNET II and IFIP, it has the goal of covering more generic VE requirements and addressing several other approaches and important aspects in this paradigm.