There are two main kinds of approach to sustainability ? ?top down? and ?inside out?. Top-down approaches emphasize management, measurement and control. On this path, while you may know what you have done, it may not be enough ? and it may not be possible to do enough within the structures and systems within which you are operating. Perfectly implemented environmental management systems that de…

Business people these days are becoming weary of new fads, movements, and revolutions, and rightly so. We have, in less than a decade, been taken through such ?revolutionary? transformations as total quality management, business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning, activity-based costing, and retail e-commerce. Companies have downsized, outsourced, empowered employees, shifted p…

From the beginning, nuclear weapons have both terrified and fascinated us. Fear of the bomb motivated the first atomic program; the allure of the bomb?s power later propelled national leaders to build ever-larger arsenals. Today, fear of a nuclear attack by terrorists or another country has made nuclear proliferation the number one security threat facing the United States and many other nations…

Finance has become one of the most important and popular subjects in management school today. This subject has progressed tremendously in the last forty years, integrating models and ideas from other areas such as physics, statistics, and accounting. The financial markets have also rapidly expanded and changed extensively with improved technology and the ever changing regulatory and social envi…

Before you dive into the detailed sections of this redbook, it is important to point out the business performance management (BPM) initiative is currently in its infancy and is changing rapidly. For example, there are many other terms being used to describe this area of interest. They are used at many seminars and conferences around the world. But there is indeed a lot of confusion and the defi…

Disputes over valuation issues fill the court's dockets and for good reason, fair market valuations are required frequently by the law. The authors believe that approximately 243 sections of the Code and several thousand references in the Regulations explicitly require fair market value determination. Consequently, taxpayers file an estimated 15 million tax returns each year reporting an event …

Aerospace giant Rockwell Collins typified the old-fashioned corporate approach to organizational learning: lackluster offerings in bland classroom settings, with little connection to the needs of employees or the goals of the company. Enter Cliff Purington and Chris Butler, who in three years transformed Rockwell into a full-fledged learning organization. With a strategy-based and technology-dr…

All managers, whether brand new to their positions or well-established in the organizational hierarchy, can use a little brushing up now and then. The skills-based Briefcase Books series is filled with ideas and strategies to help managers become more capable, efficient, effective, and valuable to their organizations. While they don't need the knowledge of a CPA, all managers must still have a …

As the world has become more complex and information more abundant, decisions have become more difficult; as the pace of change and the range of choice have increased, decisions have to be made more often. Yet, most of us still make decisions with no more knowledge about decision processes than our ancestors had in a simpler age, hundreds of years ago. Thanks to mathematicians, economists, psyc…

As the practice of scorecard measurement becomes more the norm than the exception, human performance practitioners and professionals of many disciplines need examples of scorecards for specific disciplines and activities. One process generating an urgent need for scorecard application is the field of project management. Within almost every industry, employees in many different jobs are required…