Management and Organizational Studies - Brescia

This edited volume offers a collection of original chapters focusing on the Ins and Outs of professional discourse research. The contributors discuss all aspects of the scholarly process, investigating written, oral, non-verbal and digital communication in professional settings. First the book analyses gaining access and collecting data by exploring questions such as, how can we convince practitioners to let us observe, record, interview, survey? What counts as data? How much data do we need? What shape and form can the data take? How does our research interfere with the professional practices we study? The book then examines feeding results back in the form of recommendations to practitioners, asking questions such as, how can professional discourse research be applied to help shape practice? How do we translate our methods and concepts for the communities that we investigate, including industry, government and non-profit organizations? Drawing on insights from LSP, ethnography and discourse analysis, this book will be of great value to researchers and practitioners of workplace settings.

A practical approach to better customer experience through service design Service Design for Business helps you transform your customer's experience and keep them engaged through the art of intentional service design. Written by the experts at Livework, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers' needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You'll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward. Highly visual and organized for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organizational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers' eyes. Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organizations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers. Approach customer experience from a design perspective See your organization through the lens of the customer Make customer experience an organization-wide responsibility Analyze the market factors that dovetail with customer experience design The Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product'the organizations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers' wants. Service Design for Business gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organization.

"Though the importance of business ethics is self-evident, academic discussions of the topic often occur at some remove from the people whose day-to-day decision-making they are meant to inform. With this book, Andrew Kernohan aims to connect the academic to the practical, extracting the basic elements of rigorous philosophical ethics into a format that can be understood and applied in the business world. Concepts such as utility, duty, and sustainability are given practical value and connected to examples and methods familiar to business people. Classical ethical theories are surveyed, as are modern perspectives on justice, equality, and the environment. Where possible, quantitative examples and methods are used to show that ethics need not be subjective or vague. Kernohan provides an overview of the basic tools of ethical decision-making and shows how each can be used to resolve moral problems in business environments. Readers are then invited to apply those tools by completing a series of online exercises, receiving immediate objective feedback on their success. The book and its accompanying exercises thus work in concert, offering a unique opportunity for interactive self-directed learning."-- Provided by publisher.

This is one of the first books to fully value and realise the connection between leadership and learning in SMEs. It provides a real-life narrative, encapsulating the development of business people on a leadership programme for SME managers, whilst explaining the key theories, models and techniques that underpin the leadership methods and approaches deployed at each stage of the delegate's journey. The authors examine comprehensive data sources associated with three managers within SMEs and follow them over a ten-month period. Each chapter splits into two - an aesthetic narrative on the learning journey and a 'theory sandwich', which draws the reader's attention to the theories, models and debates underpinning the learning at each stage of the delegate's journey. A cycle of leadership learning through 'lived experience' is outlined and the importance of leadership learning within a community of practice and developing concurrently three key capitals - human, social and institutional capitals - are emphasised.

The Legal Environment for Business -- The Law of Torts -- The Law of Contract -- The Law of Business Relationships -- The Law of Property -- Special Legal Rights and Relationships -- Appendix A: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- Appendix B: The British North America Act, 1867.
Contemporary Canadian Business Law provides students with a clear understanding of the legal environment for business professionals, owners and managers in Canada. The objective of Contemporary Canadian Business Law is to inform and educate business law students who will need to identify when legal advice may be required. Students taking undergraduate business law courses are unlikely to become lawyers and are more interested in applying the principles to situations commonly found in the contemporary business world. Instructors look for a text which speaks to their students as business students rather than as potential law students.

This is a hands-on book that focuses on the tasks that a new business owner must complete in the first 100 days of launching a business. Think of it this way. Imagine you've conceived a business idea, written a business plan, raised seed capital, and are set to launch your business on October 1. Now, what would you actually do on October 1, October 2, October 3 and so forth? How would you set your priorities? How would you know which tasks are the most urgent? Although the answers to these questions vary depending on the business, there are a set of key activities that all businesses must accomplish to get their businesses off to a good (and legally proper) start. Examples include securing the proper business licenses and permits, setting up a bookkeeping system, negotiating a lease, buying insurance, entering into contracts with vendors, recruiting and hiring employees, making the first sale, and so on. Broader issues such as developing a business model and building a brand will be touched upon. But the primary focus of the book will be on the practical issues that a business owner needs to accomplish, and needs to accomplish correctly, to get a business off to a good start. As a means of prioritizing and tracking the activities that must be completed at the onset of a business, the book will teach business owners how to set-up a 'First 100 Days Plan.' A template (titled First 100 Days plan) will be included in the book.

A provocative work that challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management -- and proves that they are outdated, outmoded, or simply don't work Do open floor plans really work? Are there companies that put their employees' welfare first, and their clients second? Are annual performance reviews necessary?      Dr. David Burkus is a highly regarded and increasingly influential business school professor who challenges many of the established principles of business management. Drawing on decades of research,  Burkus has found that not only are many of our fundamental management practices wrong and misguided, but they can be downright counterproductive.      These days, the best companies are breaking the old rules. At some companies, e-mail is now restricted to certain hours, so that employees can work without distraction. Netflix no longer has a standard vacation policy of two to three weeks, but instructs employees to take time off when they feel they need it. And at Valve Software, there are no managers; the employees govern themselves.    The revolutionary insights Burkus reveals here will convince companies to leave behind decades-old management practices and implement new ways to enhance productivity and morale.

Positive organizational psychology, with its focus on the identification and development of strengths, is a natural ally to executive development and leadership coaching. However, this approach is only just beginning to come to the attention of organizations and consequently, the research base for strength-based coaching is in its early stages of development. Strength-Based Leadership Coaching in Organizations reviews strength-based approaches to positive leadership development and evaluates the evidence for their effectiveness, critically assesses their apparent distinctiveness and considers how strengths can be reliably assessed and developed in their organizational context. Strength-Based Leadership Coaching in Organizations reviews key areas of leader and team development and describes a model of strengths development in organizations. It discusses the application of strength-based leadership coaching from the managerial and external perspective within the context of career stage, seniority, role challenges and organizational need in order to facilitate meaningful change. Finally, it covers the limitations of the strength-based approach to leadership development together with the challenges of integrating positive leadership development. It shows exactly what a strengths focus is and that there is increasing evidence that this approach does get results. Where other books focus on one model of identifying strengths, this book offers a balanced and critical examination, showing how to apply a positive strength-based approach.