Defining Management charts the expansion of management as an idea and practice from a time when it was limited to churches and households to its current ubiquity, focusing in particular on the role of business schools, consultants, and business media in this process. How did an entire industry develop around business schools, consultants, and business media who are now widely considered the authorities regarding best management practice? This book shows how these actors – on their own and in interaction – became taken-for-granted and gained such definitional power over management and managers, expanded across the globe from often modest and not always respected origins, and impacted, and continue to impact businesses and, increasingly, the broader economic and social context. Building on extant and some new research, the book is unique in bringing together issues and actors that have been examined elsewhere separately. Any student or professional of management interested in the evolution of their field or the rise of business schools, consultants and business media will find this book both novel and thought-provoking.

Visionary companies build markets today to be market leaders tomorrow. This book provides the blueprint. Defining Your Market: Winning Strategies for High-Tech, Industrial, and Service Firms contains research, case studies, and literature reviews on market definition to help marketers, managers, researchers, and strategic planners formulate profitable marketing strategies. Timely and practical, this book offers a research-based methodology for defining markets that will help your company determine relevant markets and make it the most competitive business in the industry. Although market definition is the foundation for formulating business strategies and is critical to corporate performance, marketers and top management often rely on intuition or incomplete analyses when targeting markets. This text discusses the marketing methods used by leading companies and executive and provides you with the knowledge to create strategies that will work for your company. Defining Your Market examines the topics that will help your company become more successful now and into the next century, including: customer and competitive-driven market definitions the five core dimensions of market definition-- customer needs, customer groups, technology, products, and competition managerial implications related to strategic planning, formulating the marketing mix, integrating marketing and technology, and global strategy strategies for businesses for redefining markets and successfully competing in the 21st century the impact company size has on marketing strategies how to avoid the dangers of creating a market definition that is too narrow and limiting or one that is too broad and overlooks profitable niches in the market Each chapter of Defining Your Market features exercises that will help you understand new concepts and allows you to put these methods to immediate and profitable use. You will be able to learn about the tools and techniques that work for Andersen Consulting, Dell, General Electric, Intel, Merck, and Microsoft, and dozens of leading business marketers.Defining Your Market provides you with strategies that will help you define and redefine the most relevant and profitable markets for a successful and competitive business.

Many references on Six Sigma stress the importance of defining processes. All too often, practitioners on a Six Sigma project rely on flowcharts for this crucial step. Unfortunately, flowcharts only show decision points, and the steps taken to reach those decisions are overlooked, including vital departmental interactions and communication patterns. This is the focus of Defining and Analyzing a Business Process: A Six Sigma Pocket Guide, which helps to fill the gaps found on flowcharts and provides a more complete big-picture view of the processes. This pocket guide details a methodology on how to analyze your existing processes. The book uses two distinct approaches: first a Business Interaction Model and second an Integrated Flow Diagram. Once the analysis phase is complete, the pocket guide presents a method on how to innovate your process to optimize its operation. The book moves away from the theory and jumps headlong into a systemic approach to change. As a pocket guide, it can easily be used as a reference or as a teaching aid, and is ideal for anyone who uses processes at any level.

The Service Catalog is a fundamental IT tool covering the services themselves, default capabilities, measures and primary means of access and provision. In short, it represents the value IT provides to facilitate business operations. Written by industry experts and using real case studies, this valuable title takes the reader beyond the theoretical to focus on the real business benefits of Service Catalogs and how to implement them successfully within an organization: Services are made standard and rational, leading to lower costs and increased service availability Standard service products enable forecasting of demand, leading to better volume discounts from vendors and improved inventory and capacity planning Controls over consumption of services are enhanced The fulfillment of IT services is improved with the catalog. Standardization of services leads to recurrent workflows, rather than relatively expensive one-off projects

This book is a series of curated essays by high-profile architecture and design leaders and educators on the topic of professionalism. The book first sets out the current agenda - defining professionalism for the architecture sector - before moving on to focus on delivering the increased professional skills curriculum content within architecture schools as set by the RIBA. With an introduction and conclusion by the Editors, this book explores what contemporary professionalism within architecture is, and its future, encouraging the current and future profession to address professionalism across the industry.