Contemporary Strategy Analysis


Book Description

The updated new edition of the classic strategic analysis textbook, addresses the emerging challenges that businesses face in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment A market-leading title across the world in upper-level undergraduate and MBA courses, Contemporary Strategy Analysis combines a rigorous approach to business strategy analysis with highly relevant examples of current practice and a rich collection of case studies. With a lively narrative style, expert strategist and lecturer Robert M. Grant introduces students to some of the latest thinking in the strategy field while addressing the strategic issues that business enterprises face today. Designed to be accessible for students from different backgrounds with varying levels of experience, the twelfth edition of Contemporary Strategy Analysis builds upon its tradition of clarity of exposition, emphasis on practicality, and concentration on the fundamentals of value creation and appropriation. A wide range of contemporary topics are presented alongside fully integrated business models, real-world examples of business model innovation, and practical tools for formulating and implementing business strategies. Contemporary Strategy Analysis, Twelfth Edition, remains the ideal textbook for core strategy courses in Business Studies, Management, and MBA programs, as well as for executive courses on competitive strategy, corporate strategy, and management consulting skills. It is also a valuable resource for managers, business owners, founders, and other professionals who are responsible for the strategic direction of a modern enterprise.




Competitive Intelligence


Book Description

What is your competition doing right now? What tools can you use to predict what your competition will do next? How can you getand keepa competitive advantage? If you cant answer these questions, you need this book. Whether youre an innovator, entrepreneur or manager, Competitive Intelligence: Fast, Cheap & Ethical will help you make smart decisions that lead to profit and success. To make smart decisions about your business, you need intelligence. Not the kind of intelligence measured with IQ tests, but the kind that involves your ability to find, interpret and respond to the information around you. It is vital for entrepreneurs, innovators and managers to be able to understand what their competitors are doing, how they think and what they are likely to do in the future. Intelligence is everywhere, but do you know how to find and make use of it? Competitive Intelligence: Fast, Cheap & Ethical shows you how to use all your senses and mental powers to develop an in-depth picture of the competition and the broader business environment. This book gives you a wealth of easy to understand tools to help you keep tabs on your competitors and predict how they will behave in the future. You can use all of the techniques presented in this book at virtually no cost and in a legal and ethical manner. Let Rob Duncan show you how to create a vibrant CI process, one that is constantly being challenged, updated and refocused and one that is sure to lead you toward competitive success.




Psychological Capital and Beyond


Book Description

Although there are as many answers to the question of how organizations can gain competitive advantage in today's global economy as there are books and experts, one lesson seems very clear: traditional answers and resources are no longer sufficient. This seminal book offers not only an answer regarding how to gain competitive advantage through people, but also a brand new, untapped human resource--psychological capital, or simply PsyCap. Generated from both the positive-psychology movement and the authors' pioneering work on positive organizational behavior, PsyCap is a rigorous concept: to be included in PsyCap, a given positive construct must be based on theory, research, and valid measurement, must be open to development, and must have measurable performance impact. The positive constructs that have been determined to best meet these PsyCap criteria--efficacy (confidence), hope, optimism, and resiliency--are covered in separate chapters in Psychological Capital and Beyond. Following an exploration of other potential positive constructs such as creativity, wisdom, well-being, flow, humor, gratitude, forgiveness, emotional intelligence, spirituality, authenticity, and courage, the authors summarize the research demonstrating the performance impact of PsyCap. They go on to provide the PsyCap Questionnaire (PCQ) as a measurement tool, and the PsyCap Intervention (PCI) as a development aid. Psychological Capital and Beyond provides theory, research, measurements, and methods of application for psychological capital, a resource that can be developed and sustained for competitive advantage. Each copy includes a complimentary PsyCap online self-assessment.




Building Google Cloud Platform Solutions


Book Description

Build cost-effective and robust cloud solutions with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using these simple and practical recipes Key FeaturesExplore the various service offerings of the GCPHost a Python application on Google Compute EngineSecurely maintain application states with Cloud Storage, Datastore, and BigtableBook Description GCP is a cloud computing platform with a wide range of products and services that enable you to build and deploy cloud-hosted applications. This Learning Path will guide you in using GCP and designing, deploying, and managing applications on Google Cloud. You will get started by learning how to use App Engine to access Google's scalable hosting and build software that runs on this framework. With the help of Google Compute Engine, you’ll be able to host your workload on virtual machine instances. The later chapters will help you to explore ways to implement authentication and security, Cloud APIs, and command-line and deployment management. As you hone your skills, you’ll understand how to integrate your new applications with various data solutions on GCP, including Cloud SQL, Bigtable, and Cloud Storage. Following this, the book will teach you how to streamline your workflow with tools, including Source Repositories, Container Builder, and Stackdriver. You'll also understand how to deploy and debug services with IntelliJ, implement continuous delivery pipelines, and configure robust monitoring and alerts for your production systems. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll be well versed with GCP’s development tools and be able to develop, deploy, and manage highly scalable and reliable applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Google Cloud Platform for Developers Ted Hunter and Steven PorterGoogle Cloud Platform Cookbook by Legorie Rajan PSWhat you will learnHost an application using Google Cloud FunctionsMigrate a MySQL database to Cloud SpannerConfigure a network for a highly available application on GCPLearn simple image processing using Storage and Cloud FunctionsAutomate security checks using Policy ScannerDeploy and run services on App Engine and Container EngineMinimize downtime and mitigate issues with Stackdriver Monitoring and DebuggerIntegrate with big data solutions, including BigQuery, Dataflow, and Pub/SubWho this book is for This Learning Path is for IT professionals, engineers, and developers who want to implement Google Cloud in their organizations. Administrators and architects planning to make their organization more efficient with Google Cloud will also find this Learning Path useful. Basic understanding of GCP and its services is a must.




Collective Genius


Book Description

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50 Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.




Advanced Googling


Book Description

This is the workbook for Garrett Wasny's Advanced Googling professional development seminar. He delivers the course online and in-person to accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers, pro sports executives and other elite knowledge workers worldwide. In easy-to-understand and non-techical language, the course and manual explain how to: Customize Google for maximum speed, security and style Utilize productivity-enhancing apps and plug-ins that instantly enhance your Google experience and performance Scan Google with added precision, nuance, speed and confidence Discover literally 10x more information that’s hiding in plain sight on the Google search results page Compose advanced search queries that generate more relevant results Automatically and continuously monitor your operational landscape using free alert and aggregation services Use Google’s new generation of predictive apps that know what you want without you having to ask Use little-known hot-words and commands to uncover concealed Google signals Creatively use language in Google search strings to boost relevancy Transform Google into your backup brain, robot assistant and ambient sidekick Leverage Google hundreds of ways to improve your online research, collaboration and communications in your professional and personal life




Digital Dieting


Book Description

Imagine if a student spent as much time managing information as celebrities doted on dieting? While eating too much food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, excessive information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and questioning. Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness probes the social, political and academic difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. But this book does not diagnose a crisis. Instead, Digital Dieting provides strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal. In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher education? If students complain that the reading is ’too hard’, then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage this challenge is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in the long term. Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.




Making Sense of Business Reference


Book Description

In times of recession, the library is more critical than ever for those who want to start a business and need to do research, and libraries are at the heart of a growing need to research business questions.




The Handbook of Peer Production


Book Description

The definitive reference work with comprehensive analysis and review of peer production Peer production is no longer the sole domain of small groups of technical or academic elites. The internet has enabled millions of people to collectively produce, revise, and distribute everything from computer operating systems and applications to encyclopedia articles and film and television databases. Today, peer production has branched out to include wireless networks, online currencies, biohacking, and peer-to-peer urbanism, amongst others. The Handbook of Peer Production outlines central concepts, examines current and emerging areas of application, and analyzes the forms and principles of cooperation that continue to impact multiple areas of production and sociality. Featuring contributions from an international team of experts in the field, this landmark work maps the origins and manifestations of peer production, discusses the factors and conditions that are enabling, advancing, and co-opting peer production, and considers its current impact and potential consequences for the social order. Detailed chapters address the governance, political economy, and cultures of peer production, user motivations, social rules and norms, the role of peer production in social change and activism, and much more. Filling a gap in available literature as the only extensive overview of peer production’s modes of generating informational goods and services, this groundbreaking volume: Offers accessible, up-to-date information to both specialists and non-specialists across academia, industry, journalism, and public advocacy Includes interviews with leading practitioners discussing the future of peer production Discusses the history, traditions, key debates, and pioneers of peer production Explores technologies for peer production, openness and licensing, peer learning, open design and manufacturing, and free and open-source software The Handbook of Peer Production is an indispensable resource for students, instructors, researchers, and professionals working in fields including communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and management studies, as well as those interested in the network information economy, the public domain, and new forms of organization and networking.




Rules and Reasoning


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning, RuleML+RR 2018, held in Luxembourg during September 2018. This is the second conference of a new series, joining the efforts of two existing conference series, namely “RuleML” (International Web Rule Symposium) and “RR” (Web Reasoning and Rule Systems). The 10 full research papers presented together with 5 long technical communications and 7 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions.