This open access book tells the story of how Sweden is becoming a virtually cashless society. Its goal is to improve readers’ understanding of what is driving this transition, and of the factors that ...are fostering and hampering it. In doing so, the book covers the role of central banks, political factors, needs for innovation, and the stakeholders involved in developing a cashless ecosystem. Adopting a historical standpoint, and drawing on a unique dataset, it presents an academic perspective on Sweden’s leading role in this global trend. The global interest in the future of cash payments makes the Swedish case particularly interesting. As a country that is close to becoming a cashless economy, it offers a role model for many other countries to learn from - whether they want to stimulate or reduce the use of cash. This highly topical book will be of interest to politicians, researchers, businesses, financial service providers and payment service providers, as well as fintech start-ups, regulators and other authorities.
This book focuses on the need to develop economically, environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains. It features examples from a wide range of real-life case studies and synthesizes the ...learnings from these many different situations.
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Smart industry requires better management. As industrial and production systems are future-proofed, becoming smart ...and interconnected through use of new manufacturing and product technologies, work is advancing on improving product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency, and cost, optimally using supply chains. Presenting innovative, evidence-based, and cutting-edge case studies, with new conceptualizations and viewpoints on management, Smart Industry, Better Management explores concepts in product systems, use of cyber physical systems, digitization, interconnectivity, and new manufacturing and product technologies. Contributions to this volume highlight the high degree of flexibility in people management, production, including product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency and cost in being able to finely adjust to customer needs and make full use of supply chains for value creation. Smart Industry, Better Management illustrates how industry can enabled by a more network-centric approach, making use of the value of information and the latest available proven manufacturing techniques.
One of the most significant and yet largely overlooked factors influencing performance and workplace problem solving in many large organizations is that of national culture. Managers, and the ...organizations for which they work, need to be able to understand the influence of cultural values and beliefs on performance in order to identify appropriate solutions; strategies appropriate in one part of the world may be ineffective or even counter-productive in another. Bryan Hopkins' ground breaking book relates the concept of cultural dimensions, as developed by writers such as Hofstede and Trompenaars, to the performance engineering approaches of Gilbert and Mager and Pipe, to show how strategies for solving workplace performance problems need to consider the cultural composition of the workforce. It then provides a practical structure for problem solving within the context of an international, multi-cultural environment. This is a book for both managers working in an international setting or for those in national organizations who are dealing with the challenge of culturally diverse workforces. It's also a book for governments seeking to understand the potential implications of national culture on civilian or even military interventions.
What drives or delivers engaged people? Employers need to focus on creating the right conditions. Employers can't impose engagement: people need to choose to engage themselves. In The Velvet ...Revolution at Work, the follow-up to his best-selling The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer, John Smythe explains that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves. Using models, examples and anecdotes from his client research he goes on to demonstrate exactly how to design an engagement process; one that is integrated with your business strategy and that is sustainable.
Contents: Foreword; Introduction; Part I What is the Velvet Revolution at Work?: The velvet revolution at work - why now? Defining employee engagement; Introducing the primary levers and supporting enablers of engagement. Part II Strategy Delivered through People: Delivering Strategy and Change through Participative Interventions that Engage the Right People: Getting started and negotiating business outcomes; Your default approach to engagement: enabler or disabler?; Negotiating who should be engaged: the power of the peach; Designing and running engagement interventions that deliver fast commercial and cultural results; Sustaining the benefits of an engagement intervention; Creative dynamics that liberate breakthrough ideas. Part III Beyond the Intervention: the Engaged Organization: The evidence, Jerome Reback; Helping leaders at every level to engage their people - capability, Jerome Reback; Brand needs engaged employees to deliver the customer promise; The impact of employee engagement on internal communication; Digital technology needs the right culture to be an enabler of engagement, John Smythe with Ben Hart and Max Waldron; Objections to employee engagement; Epilogue: employee engagement: social movement or fleeting fad?; References; Index.
John Smythe, a founding partner of the Engage for Change consultancy, specialises in organisational communication and engagement. He was an organisational fellow with McKinsey, undertaking research into employee engagement, and has held senior public affairs posts for three American corporations: Occidental Oil, Bechtel Corporation and Marathon Oil. After leaving SmytheDorwardLambert in 2003, a consultancy acknowledged to be the thought leader in organisational communication, McKinsey and Company invited him to take a visiting organisational fellow role, undertaking research among sixty corporations and institutions in Europe and North America into current approaches in engaging leaders and employees in driving strategy and change. The research is available from Engage for Change. Earlier John was behind a start up in the same field called Wolff Olins/Smythe (1985-1989). He published (with Colette Dorward and Jerome Reback, fellow founders of SmytheDorwardLambert) Corporate Reputation, The New Strategic Asset in 1989. John is author of The CEO - Chief Engagement Officer: Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance (Gower, 2007).
This open access book is among the first cross-disciplinary works about Manufacturing 4.0. It includes chapters about the technical, the economic, and the social aspects of this important phenomenon. ...Together the material presented allows the reader to develop a holistic picture of where the manufacturing industry and the parts of the society that depend on it may be going in the future. Manufacturing 4.0 is not only a technical change, nor is it a purely technically driven change, but it is a societal change that has the potential to disrupt the way societies are constructed both in the positive and in the negative. This book will be of interest to scholars researching manufacturing, technological innovation, innovation management and industry 4.0.
Retail shelf management means cost-efficiently aligning retail operations with consumer demand. As consumers expect high product availability and low prices, and retailers are constantly increasing ...product variety and striving towards high service levels, the complexity of managing retail business and its operations is growing enormously. Retailers need to match consumer demand with shelf supply by balancing variety (number of products) and service levels (number of items of a product), and by optimizing demand and profit through carefully calibrated prices. As a result the core strategic decisions a retailer must make involve assortment sizes, shelf space assignment and pricing levels. Rigorous quantitative methods have emerged as the most promising solution to this problem. The individual chapters in this book therefore focus on three areas: (1) combining assortment and shelf space planning, (2) providing efficient decision support systems for practically relevant problem sizes, and (3) integrating inventory and price optimization into shelf management.
In management, decisions are expected to be based on rational analytics rather than intuition. But intuition, as a human evolutionary achievement, offers wisdom that, despite all the advances in ...rational analytics and AI, should be used constructively when recruiting and winning personnel. Integrating these inner experiential competencies with rational-analytical procedures leads to smart recruiting decisions.
