Intrapreneurship: Managing Ideas Within Your Organization

As an employee, you suspect that your best ideas are valuable and could greatly benefit your organization. Management also recognizes that a company’s ability to compete is contingent on how well it leverages its employees’ ideas. So, why are individuals at all levels of organizations typically poor advocates for ideas? Intrapreneurship provides an engaging guide for both managers and employees on how to direct the flow of ideas and foster a culture of entrepreneurship within their company’s existing structure. Based on my research and experience consulting with thirty global organizations, Intrapreneurship outlines ways to mobilize all types of ideas – including blockbusters with the potential to create radically new external products and services, and more incremental innovations for improving internal processes. With practical frameworks and real life examples for both employees and managers, Intrapreneurship will help you to identify the value in your own ideas and those of others to ultimately benefit your organization. Buy ‘Intrapreneurship: Managing Ideas Within Your Organization’

Knowledge Management: An Introduction

Knowledge management as a discipline has matured over the last decade. It has moved from being a mere buzzword to an inherently fundamental concept. Simply put, the knowledge-based assets of the organization are the only source of sustainable competitive advantage in today s marketplace. Traditional resources such as land, labor, and capital, while important, are no longer sufficient for survival in today s fiercely competitive marketplace. Here, Desouza and Paquette provide an introductory overview of KM today. This book balances the theory and practice of KM. Desouza and Paquette consider the issues organizations encounter in the global marketplace. Their book is the first to integrate social media and networking into KM practice. The book s nine chapters are divided into three major parts: Part I covers foundational concepts and introduces the reader to the key elements of knowledge management. Part II explores critical activities of knowledge management. Part III offers a strategic view of knowledge management in organizations. Each chapter provides a broad overview, graphics that help readers visualize key points, and several vignettes documenting case scenarios that will help the reader digest concepts. Knowledge Management will prove ideal for instructors who have been forced to design courses around KM business texts, augmented with scholarly articles. It will also be useful to anyone who needs to better understand KM to apply it in his or her organization.

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Agile Information Systems

In today’s information intensive global economy, large organizations face a wealth of challenges as they wrestle with resolving the tensions between coordinating globally and responding locally. As a result, a prime consideration of major enterprises is to find an organizational design that enables them to accommodate these joint goals. Not surprisingly, given the volume of information that organizations need to process to synchronize globally and react locally, information systems play a key role in enabling pursuit of this dual goal. The acceleration of the shifting plates of social, economic, political, and competitive forces magnifies the need for effective information systems. Thus, the search for organizational agility is intricately linked to and highly dependent on an enterprises ability to build agile information systems that support nimble managers and employees in adapting to and foreseeing changing circumstances Humans are the critical success factor of agility. No organizational design or information system can overcome rigid, closed thinking. The agile mind is the determining driver. This book is food for nurturing an agile mind. It stimulates thinking about agility and galvanizes the neurons that need to be engaged to build agile organizations and information systems.

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The Outsourcing Handbook

Outsourcing is now increasingly used as a competitive weapon in today’s global economy. The Outsourcing Handbook is a step-by-step guide to the whole outsourcing process. It looks at key factors in the success of a project as well as problem areas and potential pitfalls. It provides an objective, repeatable process that allows organizations to maximize returns on outsourcing investments. Unlike most outsourcing books, The Outsourcing Handbook takes a process-oriented, actionable, and structured approach to understanding the intricacies of constructing, managing, and even terminating an outsourcing engagement. Buy ‘The Outsourcing Handbook’