This title was first published in 2000: Global competition is increasingly impacting on even the most isolated of companies; the only way for any company to sustain competitive advantage is by tapping into the single remaining area of great potential - the management of people. If we want to be an above-average company, we will need an above-average ratio of above-average people who perform at above-average levels. None of which will happen without above-average levels of management. Malcolm Birkin’s Building the Integrated Company offers a model for exploiting the human potential within organizations. This potential is one which, in previous decades, through an absence of focus on business basics and an adherence to mistaken ideas about sustainable competitive advantage, we have contrived to turn into all-too-limited performance. The first stage in any new learning process is to unlearn the misplaced concepts and bad habits we have developed. Section One of the book describes and contrasts the similarities and differences of American, European and Japanese management and then describes the characteristics of the Integrated Company, which has absorbed and perfected the best systems and philosophies from around the world. Anyone seeking to follow this lead needs to be able to distinguish the realities of these management systems from the myths. Section Two is built around a series of 13 detailed and scored questionnaires, containing over 240 individual questions, enabling the reader to assess every aspect of their business, from management focus to the behaviours of the workforce, against the Integrated Company model. Section Three, the largest and most important section, deals with integration, addressing the practical implementation of the systems and philosophies in a clear, logical and hands-on manner. As the name suggests, the Integrated Company is a holistic model, involving every aspect of the business. Nevertheless, managing people - the unlimited potential - remains the most complex

ICEIMT '97 is the second International Conference on Enterprise Integration and Modeling Technology. Like the first, it is the main event of a European-US initiative on building consensus in enterprise engineering and integration - supported in Europe by Esprit and in the USA by DOC/NIST. These proceedings contain papers presented at the conference and at five international workshops preceding the conference. The workshops addressed integration issues related to people and organization, metrics and standardization, applications, fundamentals and principles, and users and vendors. The conference papers present points of view of users, vendors, and researchers, the current state of research and development worldwide, and the needs to be identified and summarized in project proposals.

This book examines the development of big business in Russia since the onset of market oriented reform in the early 1990s. It explains how privatized post-Soviet enterprises, many of which made little sense as business units, were transformed into functional firms able to operate in the environment of a market economy. It provides detailed case studies of three key companies – Yukos Oil Company, Siberian (Russian) Aluminium and Norilsk Nickel – all of which played a key role in Russia’s economic recovery after 1998, describing how these companies were created, run and have developed. It shows how Russian businesses during the 1990s routinely relied on practices not entirely compatible with formal rules, in particular in the area of corporate governance. The book fully explores the critical role played by informal corporate governance practices - such as share dilution, transfer pricing, asset stripping, limiting shareholders access to votes, and 'bankruptcy to order’ - as Russian big business developed during the 1990s. Unlike other studies on Russian corporate governance, this book highlights the ambiguous impact of informal corporate governance practices on the companies involved as commercial entities, and suggests that although their use proved costly to Russia’s business reputation, they helped core groups of owners/managers at the time to establish coherent business firms. Overall, the book shows that we cannot understand the nature of current economic changes in Russia without recognising the crucial role played by informal corporate governance practices in the creation and development of big business in post-Soviet Russia.

A report, requested by the East African Community (EAC) Secretariat, that provides an assessment and recommendations as to policy, legal, institutional and financial product actions the EAC could take to promote increased private investment in the Community s regional infrastructure.

This book offers an ethnographic analysis of how corporate culture has been transformed in the age of globalization and promotes the importance of a national ideology’s role in corporate culture studies. Based on 15 months of participant observation as a shop-floor salesperson, this book explores the gap between management-created corporate ideology and employees’ interpretations of and responses to this ideology. This book approaches the issue by examining the formation, dissemination, and interpretation of corporate ideology at a global Japanese fashion retailer in Hong Kong. It does so by charting the history of the company’s corporate policy: from centralized attempts at corporate employee management, through the creation of store manager "missionaries" intended to disseminate their ideology, to the ultimately unexpected outcomes as corporate ideology collided with its interpretations by store employees. The interdisciplinary nature of this book will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the fields of management, marketing, anthropology, and cultural studies as well as those interested in globalization, cross-cultural management, and retail management.

A digital experience is a personalized experience that provides employees, customers, business partners, and citizens with a single point of interaction with people, content, and applications anywhere, anytime, and from any device. The IBM® Digital Experience is a platform that is used to build powerful contextual websites. The strengths of the platform include the ability to mix applications and web content into a coherent user experience. Developers can build upon a prescriptive standard to build reusable building bricks, which can be used by line-of-business (LOB) users in a flexible way. LOB users can assemble pages from these building bricks and from rich web content. The page creation is performed inline by easy drag-and-drop operations without requiring sophisticated IT skills. This IBM Redbooks® publication describes how a team can build a website starting from a new installation of Digital Experience. The book provides examples of the basic tasks that are needed to get started with building a proof-of-concept (PoC) website example. The resulting example website illustrates the value and key capabilities of the Digital Experience suite, featuring IBM WebSphere® Portal and IBM Web Content Management. The target audiences for this book include the following groups: Decision makers and solution architects considering Digital Experience as a platform for their internal or external facing website. Developers who are tasked to implement a PoC and must be enabled to start quickly and efficiently, which includes the integration of existing back-end systems. A wide range of IBM services and sales professionals who are involved in selling IBM software and designing client solutions that include Digital Experience.