How would you react to unexpected circumstances? Would you call it a ‘miracle?’ Would you call it ‘destiny?’ Can destiny be changed? Meet Dave, a guy who grabbed the chance of becoming a large company’s CEO. There are stormy skies ahead for him as the company is on the verge of closure. With a never-give-up attitude and insightful, step-by-step managerial solutions, will Dave be able To Change the Rules of the Game? Or will his company be reduced to rubble forever?

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

An incredible ability awaits managers who practice Theory of Constraints (TOC) techniques: they can take a problem, look beyond the less important details, and directly identify the source of trouble. They've been known to promptly resolve perplexing matters - while the uninformed remain stuck.So many more managers could gain the benefit of TOC thi

It has always been about Sophia. She is the only woman who is fit to carry your child. She has to bear you children, so you better take that Luna girl to a hospital and have that pregnancy terminated. You need to pay her any amount to keep her mouth shut and live a clean life with Sophia"" Mum orders. I look at her in total disbelief. Ace Damon, the wealthiest and most powerful billionaire in the city has a one-night stand with Luna Ramora and she gets pregnant for him. His mother and fiancé are against him accepting the pregnancy and swear to make Luna lose that child. Now Ace has to deal with his mother and fiancé who are hell-bent on making Luna lose his baby. Everything gets more complicated when he falls in love with Luna and at some point, he realizes that he will have to choose between Luna and his Fiancé (Sophia). Will he choose Luna, the mother of his child, or Sophia, his childhood best friend, first love, and fiancé?...

New tools for managing complexity Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone. According to The Boston Consulting Group’s fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past sixty years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness—that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems—has increased by a whopping factor of thirty-five. In their attempt to respond to the increasingly complex performance requirements they face, company leaders have created an organizational labyrinth that makes it more and more difficult to improve productivity and to pursue innovation. It also disengages and demotivates the workforce. Clearly it’s time for leaders to stop trying to manage complexity with their traditional tools and instead better leverage employees' intelligence. This book shows you how and explains the implications for designing and leading organizations. The way to manage complexity, the authors argue, is neither with the hard solutions of another era nor with the soft solutions—such as team building and feel-good “people initiatives”—that often follow in their wake. Based on social sciences (notably economics, game theory, and organizational sociology) and The Boston Consulting Group’s work with more than five hundred companies in more than forty countries and in various industries, authors Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman recommend six simple rules to manage complexity without getting complicated. Showing why the rules work and how to put them into practice, Morieux and Tollman give managers a much-needed tool to reinvigorate people in the face of seemingly endless complexity. Included are detailed examples from companies that have achieved a multiplicative effect on performance by using them. It’s time to manage complexity better. Employ these six simple rules to foster autonomy and cooperation and to effectively handle business complexity. As a result, you will improve productivity, innovate more, reengage your workforce, and seize opportunities to create competitive advantage.

Finding the right successor to a well-loved founder or president is often the most difficult task an organization can face—and the challenge can be even greater for family-run businesses. Succeeding Generations explores leadership transitions in family businesses, offering a clear-eyed assessment of the different options, from direct succession to building partnerships between siblings and cousins. Family-owned companies may dominate the worldwide business landscape, yet surprisingly few are successfully passed down from one generation to the next, and fewer still reach the third generation intact. Author Ivan Lansberg, an organizational psychologist who grew up in a family business, examines the reasons behind this high failure rate and reveals the factors that contribute to long-term success. He offers practical advice on how to mentor successors, how to set up a systematic selection process, and how to make the best use of the board of directors during times of transition. With a wealth of examples from companies in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Succeeding Generations provides a thoughtful and comprehensive look at the sensitive dynamics of leadership succession in family businesses.

Airlines willing to develop insight from foresight relating to the expected ’step phase changes’ will eventually improve their margins. However, the backward-looking airline, managed using old strategic levers and short-term metrics, will cease to exist, merge, shrink, become more dependent on government support, or become irrelevant. ’Management innovations’ are not going to deliver the required improvements; innovation within management is essential for airlines' survival. In Flying Ahead of the Airplane, Nawal Taneja analyzes global changes and thought-provoking scenarios to help airline executives adjust and adapt to the chaotic world. Drawing on his experience of real airline situations worldwide, the author concludes that there is a gulf between what executives are doing now and what they need to do to stay ahead of the curve. To close this gap, the author suggests that airline executives focus on just three relevant initiatives: a) aligning business and technology strategies, b) redesigning organization structures to centralize the role of the scheduling function, and c) developing relevant brands that integrate social networking technology. To support this third initiative, the book provides insights on branding from 20 fascinating non-aviation case studies from around the world. Flying Ahead of the Airplane will assist practitioners in airlines of every size to integrate future trends into their mainstream thinking and launch flexible business models to manage risk and compete effectively in the ’flattening world’.

Today's top financial professionals have come to rely on ever-more sophisticated mathematics in their attempts to come to grips with financial risk. But this excessive reliance on quantitative precision is misleading--and puts everyone at risk. In Plight of the Fortune Tellers, Riccardo Rebonato forcefully argues that we must restore genuine decision making to our financial planning. Presenting a financial model that uses probability, experimental psychology, and decision theory, Rebonato challenges us to rethink the standard wisdom about risk management. He offers a radical yet surprisingly commonsense solution: managing risk comes down to real people making decisions under uncertainty. Plight of the Fortune Tellers is a must-read for anyone concerned about how today's financial markets are run. In a new preface, Rebonato explains how the ideas presented in this book fit into the context of the global financial crisis that followed its original publication. He argues that risk managers are still stuck in a probabilistic rut, and need to engage with the structural causes of real events.

An examination of work—including the organization of work and the market forces that surround it—through the lens of the collaborative practice of game development. Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O’Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on our understanding of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that shape (and are shaped by) media industries. O’Donnell shows that the ability to play with the underlying systems—technical, conceptual, and social—is at the core of creative and collaborative practice, which is central to the New Economy. When access to underlying systems is undermined, so too is creative collaborative process. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in game studios in the United States and India, O’Donnell stakes out new territory empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. Mimicking the structure of videogames, the book is divided into worlds, within which are levels; and each world ends with a boss fight, a “rant” about lessons learned and tools mastered. O’Donnell describes the process of videogame development from pre-production through production, considering such aspects as experimental systems, “socially mandatory” overtime, and the perpetual startup machine that exhausts young, initially enthusiastic workers. He links work practice to broader systems of publishing, manufacturing, and distribution; introduces the concept of a privileged “actor-intra-internetwork”; and describes patent and copyright enforcement by industry and the state.