Michael Beer - Böcker

How to create the high-performance, high-commitment organizationIntegrating knowledge from strategic management, performance management, and organization design, strategic human resource expert and Harvard Business School Professor Michael Beer outlines what the high-commitment, high-performance organization looks like and provides practitioners with the transformation process to help them get there. Starting with leaders who have the right values, Beer shows how to weave together a complete system that includes top-to-bottom communication, organization design, HR policies, and leadership transformation process, and outlines what practitioners must do in HR, structure, systems, goals, culture, and strategy to create high-performance organizations.

The safety and serviceability of in-service structures and infrastructure systems are often threatened by natural hazards. Owners and decision-makers are especially concerned about the resilience of an asset (structure or infrastructure), namely its ability to be in readiness for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to disruptive events. Climate change is increasingly producing nonstationary natural hazards such as wind hazards, and concurrent multiple hazards may result in especially severe performance reduction.This book focuses on hazard modeling and resilience methods and their application in engineering cases. It presents the state of the art of the theory, methodology, and applications related to infrastructure resilience and offers practical approaches to enhancing resilience for engineers, policymakers, and researchers.

Meeting the new standard for leadership. Higher Ambition is required reading for every leader who refuses to compromise between people and performance. Choosing one or the other may have worked in the past, but it won't work now. As global competition stiffens and businesses face increased public scrutiny and renewed government regulation, leaders must win on all fronts--with their people, their customers, their communities, and their shareholders. In short, they must deliver superior economic and social value. Brimming with powerful stories and thoughtful advice from CEOs themselves, Higher Ambition equips leaders with the practical insights they need to meet this new and higher standard. The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well. These organizations are as diverse as Standard Chartered Bank, Infosys, Volvo, Cummins, IKEA, the Tata Group, and Campbell's Soup.Readers will learn the principles and practices these pioneering leaders are using to: * Build enduring enterprises that simultaneously solve for people and profits * Forge winning strategies that leverage their companies' unique cultural and human capabilities * Dramatically raise the aspirations and ambitions of their people * Energize and align their diverse global firms * Relentlessly upgrade leadership capabilities throughout their organizations Drawing on the author team's extensive research and in-depth interviews with successful leaders from around the globe, this provocative new book is poised to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last.

Is Silence Killing Your Strategy?In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their company's fitness to compete, and employees lose trust in those leaders and become less committed to change.In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence--principles and a time-tested innovative process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over eight hundred organizations across the globe, the strategic fitness process has helped leaders in a diverse range of industries--including medical technology, information technology, banking, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals--hear the raw but necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organizations.In addition to step-by-step instructions, Beer offers detailed and illustrative case studies of companies that have conducted honest conversations to great effect. He also shows how to apply the process more broadly to a variety of strategic challenges and at multiple levels throughout the organization.Practical, enlightening, and comprehensive, Fit to Compete is the book you should turn to if you to want create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.

This book provides an analysis of the origin and effect of human errors in engineering. Using cases from everyday construction and large-scale accidents, the circumstances associated with the creation of errors are illustrated, along with strategies for their prevention, with the goal to eventually minimize cost overruns, delays, and accidents.The book features a discussion of the circumstances related to error proneness, the review of some sixty mishaps or near misses from real-life construction, the systematic analysis of 238 large-scale accidents in engineering systems, the perspective of psychology on the origin of faulty human performance, and a review of the relation of management to error proneness.

This book provides an analysis of the origin and effect of human errors in engineering. Using cases from everyday construction and large-scale accidents, the circumstances associated with the creation of errors are illustrated, along with strategies for their prevention, with the goal to eventually minimize cost overruns, delays, and accidents.The book features a discussion of the circumstances related to error proneness, the review of some sixty mishaps or near misses from real-life construction, the systematic analysis of 238 large-scale accidents in engineering systems, the perspective of psychology on the origin of faulty human performance, and a review of the relation of management to error proneness.

The subject of the book is the comprehensive consideration of uncertainty in the numerical analysis, the safety assessment, and the design of structures. Stochastic as well as non-stochastic uncertainty is treated on the basis of the superordinated uncertainty model fuzzy randomness. This new uncertainty model contains the special cases of real valued random variables and fuzzy variables and permits to take account of both uncertainty characteristics simultaneously. The book introduces to the problem of uncertainty and provides a current survey of relevant uncertainty models and their application in civil engineering. The necessary, special mathematical basics of the fuzzy set theory and the theory of fuzzy random variables are explained in an engineering manner and illustrated by way of examples. Basic ideas and methods for appropriately quantifying uncertain structural parameters are presented and demonstrated by means of characteristic examples.For processing uncertainty in structural analysis, safety assessment, and structural design completely new algorithms are introduced and described in detail as fuzzy structural analysis, fuzzy probabilistic safety assessment, and fuzzy cluster design. The application of the new methods is demonstrated for selected examples from civil engineering, their essential advantages are emphasized. For the first time this represents a coherent, overall concept for considering uncertainty in civil engineering. The book in particular addresses to civil engineers and requires a university degree as well as basic knowledge in stochastics. But also for mechanical engineers, colleagues from applied mathematics, and other people who are interested in uncertainty problems the book represents a suitable introduction to the problem of uncertainty modeling and provides general solutions and algorithms, which may also be applied to problems from other fields beyond engineering.

The subject of the book is the comprehensive consideration of uncertainty in the numerical analysis, the safety assessment, and the design of structures. Stochastic as well as non-stochastic uncertainty is treated on the basis of the superordinated uncertainty model fuzzy randomness. This new uncertainty model contains the special cases of real valued random variables and fuzzy variables and permits to take account of both uncertainty characteristics simultaneously. The book introduces to the problem of uncertainty and provides a current survey of relevant uncertainty models and their application in civil engineering. The necessary, special mathematical basics of the fuzzy set theory and the theory of fuzzy random variables are explained in an engineering manner and illustrated by way of examples. Basic ideas and methods for appropriately quantifying uncertain structural parameters are presented and demonstrated by means of characteristic examples.For processing uncertainty in structural analysis, safety assessment, and structural design completely new algorithms are introduced and described in detail as fuzzy structural analysis, fuzzy probabilistic safety assessment, and fuzzy cluster design. The application of the new methods is demonstrated for selected examples from civil engineering, their essential advantages are emphasized. For the first time this represents a coherent, overall concept for considering uncertainty in civil engineering. The book in particular addresses to civil engineers and requires a university degree as well as basic knowledge in stochastics. But also for mechanical engineers, colleagues from applied mathematics, and other people who are interested in uncertainty problems the book represents a suitable introduction to the problem of uncertainty modeling and provides general solutions and algorithms, which may also be applied to problems from other fields beyond engineering.

The Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering is designed to be the authoritative and comprehensive reference covering all major aspects of the science of earthquake engineering, specifically focusing on the interaction between earthquakes and infrastructure. The encyclopedia comprises approximately 265 contributions. Since earthquake engineering deals with the interaction between earthquake disturbances and the built infrastructure, the emphasis is on basic design processes important to both non-specialists and engineers so that readers become suitably well-informed without needing to deal with the details of specialist understanding. The content of this encyclopedia provides technically inclined and informed readers about the ways in which earthquakes can affect our infrastructure and how engineers would go about designing against, mitigating and remediating these effects. The coverage ranges from buildings, foundations, underground construction, lifelines and bridges, roads, embankments and slopes. The encyclopedia also aims to provide cross-disciplinary and cross-domain information to domain-experts. This is the first single reference encyclopedia of this breadth and scope that brings together the science, engineering and technological aspects of earthquakes and structures.