In business, some problems are so complex, intractable and threatening to organizations—or entire industries—that they are best described as “wicked.” These problems appear to be unsolvable and they render traditional analytical tools of strategy virtually impotent. Wicked Strategies offers a comprehensive framework for identifying, responding to and profiting from wicked problems. John C. Camillus, drawing on detailed, real-life examples from companies across the globe, has skillfully woven together the analytical techniques, processes and organizational designs that will enable managers to navigate a disruptive marketplace. His feed-forward framework for fashioning wicked strategies empowers firms to presciently transform their business models before they are made obsolete by the competition. Wicked Strategies is a practical and evocative guide that demonstrates how business leaders can profitably capitalize on unknowable futures.

Solving today’s environmental and sustainability challenges requires more than expertise and technology. Effective solutions will require that we engage with other people, wrestle with difficult questions, and learn how to adapt and make confident decisions despite uncertainty. We need new approaches to leadership that empower professionals at all levels to tackle wicked problems and work towards sustainability. Leadership for Sustainability gives readers perspective and skills for promoting creative and collaborative solutions. Blending systems thinking approaches with leadership techniques, it offers dozens of strategies and specific practices that build on the foundation of three main skills: connecting, collaborating, and adapting. Inspiring case studies show how the book’s strategies and principles can be applied to diverse situations: Coordinating the activities of widely dispersed individuals and groups who may not even know they are connected, illustrated by the work of urban planners, local businesses, citizens, and other stakeholders advancing ambitious climate action goals via a Community Energy Plan in Arlington County, Virginia Collaborating with diverse stakeholders to span boundaries despite their differences of opinion, expertise, and culture, as illustrated by the bold actions of a social entrepreneur who transformed the global food service industry with the “plant-forward” movement Adapting to continuous change and confounding uncertainty, as a small nonprofit organization mobilizes partners to tackle poverty, water scarcity, sanitation, and climate change in rural India Readers will come away with a holistic understanding of how to lead from where they are by applying leadership principles and practices to a wide range of wicked situations. While the challenges we face are daunting, the authors argue that these situations present opportunities for creating a more just, healthy, and prosperous world.

A "wicked problem" isn't one with an evil nature, but a problem that is impossible or difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often hard to recognize. Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues. We now live in a world full of wicked problems, most of them urgent challenges calling out for creative, democratic, and effective solutions. Ed Weber, Denise Lach, and Brent Steel, of the Oregon State University School of Public Policy, solicited papers from a wide variety of accomplished scholars in the fields of science, politics, and policy to address this challenge. The resultant collection focuses on major contemporary environmental and natural resource policy issues, and proposes an assortment of alternative problem-solving methodologies to tackle such problems. New Strategies for Wicked Problems will appeal to scholars, students, and decision-makers wrestling with wicked problems and "post-normal" science settings beyond simply environmental and natural resource-based issues, while providing much needed guidance to policymakers, citizens, public managers, and other stakeholders.

How can government leaders build, sustain, and leverage the cross-organizational collaborative networks needed to tackle the complex interagency and intergovernmental challenges they increasingly face? Tackling Wicked Government Problems: A Practical Guide for Developing Enterprise Leaders draws on the experiences of high-level government leaders to describe and comprehensively articulate the complicated, ill-structured difficulties they face—often referred to as "wicked problems"—in leading across organizational boundaries and offers the best strategies for addressing them. Tackling Wicked Government Problems explores how enterprise leaders use networks of trusted, collaborative relationships to respond and lead solutions to problems that span agencies. It also offers several approaches for translating social network theory into practical approaches for these leaders to build and leverage boundary-spanning collaborative networks and achieve real mission results. Finally, past and present government executives offer strategies for systematically developing enterprise leaders. Taken together, these essays provide a way forward for a new cadre of officials better equipped to tackle government's twenty-first-century wicked challenges.

Investment strategies relate to an extensive range of aspects and have attracted the attention of investors and students, academics, researchers, financial executives, portfolio managers, security analysts, financial engineers, practitioners, including at the level of Nobel prizes (Tobin, 1981, for the analysis of financial markets; Markowitz, Sharpe, 1990, for modern portfolio models; Black, Scholes, Merton, 1997, for option pricing; Akerlof, Stiglitz, Spence, 2001, for markets with asymmetric information). Even common people talk daily about investments, investment tactics and strategies, and how to obtain success. In the absence of an investment philosophy, they try to copy celebrities or professional advisors without understanding the mechanics of markets, their core beliefs, strengths, or weaknesses. Beyond the traditional stocks and bonds, there are many other types of assets and alternative investments, and investors are overwhelmed by the huge number of portfolio architecture and management options. Regardless of the types of investors, portfolios are no longer a simple list of assets, and their management requires impressive skills. Decision models have significantly evolved from the Markowitz portfolio model toward capital market paradigms in the context of managing unrealistic assumptions or adding the treatment of market imperfections, multiperiod objectives, and transaction costs. The index of portfolio risk provides an intuitive image of diversification. There is an interest in the integration of new visions in investment strategies: determinism, complexity, nonlinearity, self-organization and chaos, trading rules, evolutionary games, real-options games and artificial markets, bounded rationality, heterogeneous agents, and behavioral investments. From the evolutionary perspective, investors interpret information by encoding and categorization, trying to simplify the strategies by using rules of thumb and heuristics. The present work contributes to the understanding of current investment processes by offering the tactical and strategic elements specific to global markets as well as emerging ones in a multilayer approach useful to decision-makers, investors, students, and researchers in the field.

A resource for industry professionals and consultants, this book on corporate strategy lays down the theories and models for revitalizing companies in the face of global recession. It discusses cutting-edge concepts, constructs, paradigms, theories, models, and cases of corporate strategic leadership for bringing about transformation and innovation in companies. Each chapter in the book is appended with transformation exercises that further explicate the concepts.

The U.S. today faces the most complex and challenging security environment in recent memory— even as it deals with growing constraints on its ability to respond to threats. Its most consequential challenge is the rise of China, which increasingly has the capability to deny the U.S. access to areas of vital national interest and to undermine alliances that have underpinned regional stability for over half a century. Thus, the time is right for the U.S. to adopt a long-term strategy for dealing with China; one that includes but is not limited to military means, and that fully includes U.S. allies in the region. This book uses the theory and practice of peacetime great-power strategic competition to derive recommendations for just such a strategy. After examining the theory of peacetime strategic competition, it assesses the U.S.-China military balance in depth, considers the role of America's allies in the region, and explores strategies that the U.S could adopt to improve its strategic position relative to China over the long term.