There’s a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization’s strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they’re misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?” And they use tools to command and control frontline teams, not empower them—a serious and costly mistake. In this eminently useful, clear-eyed book, the authors critically review dozens of well-known management tools—from mission statements, balanced scorecards, and rolling forecasts to key performance indicators, Six Sigma, and performance appraisals. They explain how to select the right tools for your organization, how to implement them correctly, and how to extract maximum value from each. Brimming with rigorous analysis and solid advice, Beyond Performance Management helps you swiftly gauge the value of each management tool, as well as navigate the increasingly crowded field of offerings—so the tools you select deliver fully on their promise.

The modern church is being poorly managed but does not know it. The level of inefficiency and waste in today’s churches is staggering. 40 Days to Excellence in Church Management was written specifically for churches to convey basic business wisdom, management principles, and the best business practices. Unlike intimidating business textbooks, it includes forty short vignettes designed to be read like a daily devotional. Each chapter deals with everyday challenges and offers real-life examples derived from the author's more than thirty years of experience. It shows how to (and sometimes how not to) handle each situation of conducting business for the church.

Introduces the world of Systems Thinking and its 'Dean', Russell Ackoff, to curious and enquiring managers, teachers, business people, and those who work in an organisation. This book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws".

A must-read for any project management professional or student. Projects are the life blood of any organization. Revised to reflect the latest changes to A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK(R)) and the Project Management Professional Exam(R), the fourth edition of The AMA Handbook of Project Management provides readers with a clear overview of a complex discipline. Covering everything from individual projects to programs and strategic alignment, it addresses: Project initiation and planning Communication and interpersonal skills Scheduling, budgeting and meeting business objectives Managing political and resource issues Implementing a PMO Measuring value and competencies. The book compiles essays and advice from the field's top professionals and features new chapters on stakeholder management, agile project management, program management, project governance, knowledge management, and more. Updated with fresh examples, case studies and solutions to specific project management dilemmas, it remains an essential reference to the critical concepts and theories all project managers must master.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International IFIP WG 5.7 Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems, APMS 2011, held in Stavanger, Norway, in September 2011. The 66 revised and extended full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 124 papers presented at the conference. The papers are organized in 3 parts: production process, supply chain management, and strategy. They represent the breadth and complexity of topics in operations management, ranging from optimization and use of technology, management of organizations and networks, to sustainable production and globalization. The authors use a broad range of methodological approaches spanning from grounded theory and qualitative methods, via a broad set of statistical methods to modeling and simulation techniques.