Rotman-Utp Publishing – serie

In the new knowledge economy, traditional modes of thinking are no longer effective. Compartmentalizing problems and solutions and assuming everything can be solved with the right formula can no longer keep pace with the radical changes occurring daily in the modern business world.It’s Not Complicated offers a paradigm shift for business professionals looking for simplified solutions to complex problems. In his straightforward and highly engaging style, Rick Nason introduces the principles of "complexity thinking" which empower managers to understand, correlate, and explain a diverse range of business phenomena. For example, why some new products go viral while others remain unnoticed, how office cliques develop despite collaborative work policies and spaces, how economic bubbles form, and how an unknown retiree foiled one of the most carefully planned product launches ever with a single letter to the editor of his local newspaper. Rather than consider complicated and complex as interchangeable terms, Rick Nason explains what complexity is, how it arises, and the errors in solving complex situations with complicated thinking. It’s Not Complicated provides managers with fresh, counterintuitive, and actionable models for dealing with challenging business problems.

In Small Business and the City, Rafael Gomez, Andre Isakov, and Matt Semansky highlight the power of small-scale entrepreneurship to transform local neighbourhoods and the cities they inhabit. Studying the factors which enable small businesses to survive and thrive, they highlight the success of a Canadian concept which has spread worldwide: the Business Improvement Area (BIA). BIAs allow small-scale entrepreneurs to pool their resources with like-minded businesses, becoming sources of urban rejuvenation, magnets for human talent, and incubators for local innovation in cities around the globe.Small Business and the City also analyses the policies necessary to support this urban vitality, describing how cities can encourage and support locally owned independent businesses. An inspiring account of the dynamism of urban life, Small Business and the City introduces a new “main street agenda” for the twenty-first century city.

The modern hospital represents a complex community in which life and death decisions are made on the front lines of patient care, and difficult operational and strategic initiatives are developed in the offices of institutional leaders. Effective Medical Leadership describes the unusual position of a medical leader in an organization often administered by non-medical managers.Through extensive and situational examples in the complex hospital setting, Dr. Bryce Taylor illuminates the principles of leadership, focusing on the challenges, the solutions, and the daily life of the head of a division, department, or program. In hospitals, just as in other large organizations, effective leaders must appreciate the big picture, pay attention to detail, and, above all, care about the careers of their constituents in addition to patient health. Here, Taylor outlines successes as well as failures, emphasizing that leadership, while an imperfect science, is based on common sense, integrity, an orientation to the welfare of colleagues, and a passionate and consistent commitment to the mission of an organization.

The American economy is profoundly dependent on the success of its retailers and the strength of its consumer spending. Yet, how do leading retailers create value for their customers?To a large extent this has been accomplished by streamlining operations and a decades-long focus on cost cutting and price competitiveness. Today, retailers realize that they need to discover new ways to differentiate themselves and attract consumer spending. The American Retail Value Proposition provides the framework for building that differentiation and establishing a competitive advantage that goes beyond price discounting. This framework is based on more than a decade of research, including hundreds of hours of interviews with executives from the world’s leading retailers, including Starbucks, Walmart, Apple, Amazon, and Lowe’s. Whether you are an aspiring merchant or an industry veteran, this book's strategic framework will help you build a solid foundation for your business in today's ever-evolving retail marketplace.

Measureable, data driven outcomes are not the only indicators of success in today’s multicultural and globalized workforce.  How employees interact with their colleagues and customers is also a significant factor in their career development.Luciara Nardon draws on her extensive research and international experience to guide employees and managers through the ambiguous and uncertain waters of today’s multicultural workplace. Each intercultural encounter is unique, involving different people, contexts, dynamics, and actions which general cultural protocols are unable to address. In Working in a Multicultural World, Nardon offers a comprehensive framework for understanding intercultural interactions and developing skills for successful intercultural situations. Numerous examples and exercises, including how to reconcile personal beliefs of equality with a hierarchical workplace and how to respond to perceived aggressiveness in business negotiations, enable employees and managers to embark on reflective processes that will springboard their intercultural competence. Working in a Multicultural World is an accessibly written and valuable resource for all professionals in today’s workplace as well as students and travelers interested in intercultural relations.

Corporations need great leaders – particularly during times of distress and crisis. Shareholders, employees, and longtime customers all experience firsthand the disastrous effects poor leadership can have on the human side of the business equation.Leadership in the Eye of the Storm is a practical and inspirational guide that helps professionals create opportunity out of chaos. The book's insights are gleaned from the real life experiences of four North American profiled leaders who successfully navigated through the epicenter of their own storms by focusing first on the needs of their employees and families, and then the needs of their organizations. Events discussed include the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the SARS outbreak. Tibbo offers a framework emerging from these narratives that enable future leaders to identify and cultivate the skills and behaviours required to not only meet the challenges but seize the opportunities that arise in times of chaos.

Organizations all too often create impressive strategies but fail at implementing them. Based on research with over 750 organizations, Shift conceptualizes execution with energy management in mind to offer discrete capabilities that will help leaders "shift" into more sustainable and dynamic execution practices. With the importance of orchestrating balance between stability and flexibility at the core, Shift is written in four parts - identifying execution barriers, filling gaps, removing distractions, and differentiating execution leaders that are capable of driving improvement.Most novel is the introduction of a performance indicator, called the Cost of Execution (COx), that quantifies execution capabilities and challenges. Shift includes real case studies and describes a comprehensive approach that will help organizations satisfy the business demands of today and adapt to embrace the challenges of tomorrow.

Living with China urges Canadians to adopt a forward-looking China strategy that recognizes the significance of China’s history and values for its development model of authoritarian state capitalism and managed markets. Market reforms will be key drivers of China’s long-term growth, yet Chinese policy is ambivalent about the potential dangers of spontaneous market forces undermining the Party’s central goal of political stability. The tensions between market forces and state intervention and between political and economic goals are identified in the book’s early chapters that outline what Canadians need to know about the Chinese economy. The book also examines how Chinese enterprises are going global through direct investments and participation in the dynamic but troubled Belt and Road Initiative. In an environment of rising tensions over trade and technology – evident in negotiating the USMCA with the United States and doing business with Huawei, the China-based telecommunication giant – Canada needs a China strategy. Living with China is one of the first comprehensive volumes on a forward-looking Canada-China strategy. The recommended strategy includes more leadership from top officials, building a Canada brand, strengthening our international human capital, addressing security issues, and negotiating bilateral trade and investment liberalization. Dobson also acknowledges the importance of addressing such key issues as intellectual property protection, cybersecurity, and value differences such as respect for individual rights.

How can you future-proof your organization by making it humanly sustainable? Creating Healthy Organizations answers this question, showing how to forge stronger links between employee well-being and the future success of any organization. The book makes a compelling case for resilient and humanly sustainable businesses by focusing on improving employees’ well-being.Employee stress, burnout, work-life conflict, and disengagement remain significant workplace problems. Yet, there are important signs of progress. The healthy organization concept has begun moving into the mainstream of corporate wellness. Scholarly research has advanced beyond making a business case for workplace health promotion to showing how successful interventions are based on a culture of health and closer ties with occupational health and safety. More companies are addressing mental health issues, striving to make workplaces psychologically healthy and safe. Expanded environmental sustainability frameworks provide an opening for the more sustainable use of human resources. As well, extensive tools are now available in many countries to guide actions aimed at developing healthy, safe, and thriving workplaces.These recent workplace trends and resources highlight the need for an updated, concise, integrated, and practical analysis of the challenges of creating a healthier organization, the hurdles that must be overcome along the way, and the key success factors that can guide the improvement process. Creating Healthy Organizations, Revised and Expanded Edition fills this gap in knowledge and practice, guiding those committed to making their organizations healthier.

The words of business leaders matter. They can spark action, enhance branding, share knowledge, transmit values, and influence social and cultural behavior.Decoding CEO-Speak critiques the public language of a powerful class of people – the Chief Executive Officers of major companies. Interest in the behavior and thinking of CEOs is not confined to their corporation’s direct stakeholders only: the public is increasingly interested in how CEOs stand on current issues and community debate.Through case study analysis of companies such as News Corporation, BP, Wells Fargo, Satyam, Uber, Canadian National Railway, Tesla, and Boeing, authors Russell Craig and Joel Amernic illustrate ways of mining meaning or decoding a CEO’s written words and speeches. They critically examine a variety of public media, including social media, testimony, and speeches, performed by leaders of major companies.Decoding CEO-Speak demonstrates how monitoring the language of CEOs can yield valuable insights into a company’s policy, strategy, and ethicality; and how it can point to the priorities, values, and personality of the CEO. The book will appeal to CEOs, senior managers, and public relations and media consultants, as well as business professors, students, and corporate stakeholders who want to find otherwise disguised meaning in the words of leaders.

In Sight is a memoir about how a love of science and discovery drove Julia Levy, a celebrated scholar and biotech CEO, to work her way through gender bias in order to achieve academic and professional recognition. Her story traces the unconventional invention of a breakthrough drug treatment from its development from laboratory research to its application as a medical treatment for vision loss.Told from a female perspective, In Sight is a unique and personal story covering Levy’s early years as a refugee, her university training in the UK, and her appointment as professor at the University of British Columbia. Years spent as an academic led the author to unexpected exposure to the biotechnology industry and a chance meeting with colleagues that led to the formation of a lucrative biotechnology company, known today as QLT Inc. The bulk of the book covers the years spent building the company, and Levy’s surprising transition from chief scientific officer to CEO. In Sight is an honest description of the trials of drug development, the tensions inherent in the commercialization of health innovations, and the truly remarkable hurdles faced by women in the scientific community.

With supply chain disruptions increasingly discussed in the media and impacting our daily lives, Flow offers an important framework and solutions for remedying the rampant delays and bottlenecks that exist in global supply chains.This book describes the concept of flow, which evokes physical properties that exist in nature, such as the flow of electricity, the flow of materials, and the flow of time. In terms of process optimization, flow encompasses the integration of end-to-end supply chains and the movement toward relocation of global supply bases to nearshore/onshore geographies. Achieving flow is essential for organizations seeking to improve their supply chain performance in a time of increasing disruption.This book highlights the high-level effectiveness of business strategies that use predictions based on the sequence of world events, global supply chains, and data by exchanged smart technologies. By broadly applying physical laws to the global supply chain, Rob Handfield and Tom Linton explore the impact of supply chain physics on global market policies, such as tariffs, factory location, pandemic response, supply base geographies, and outsourcing.The authors provide specific recommendations on what to do to improve supply chain flows, and include important insights for managers with examples from companies such as Biogen, General Motors, Siemens, and Flex with regard to their response to COVID-19. Flow is an important resource not only for procurement and supply chain management professionals, but for any manager concerned with enterprise-level success.

What constitutes successful thinking in business? What are some of the techniques used by top business minds in order to solve problems and create value? Diaminds breaks new ground in addressing these questions.Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin, creators of the Integrative Thinking curriculum at the Rotman School of Management, draw upon case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to offer a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations. The 'diamind' (or dialogical mind) is characterized by bi-stability (simultaneously holding opposite plans, models, courses of action in mind while retaining the ability to act), meliorism (increasing the logical depth and informational breadth of one's thinking processes), choicefulness (retaining the ability to choose among various representations of the world, the self and others) and polyphony (thinking about the way one formulates and solves a problem while at the same time thinking about the problem itself).End-of-chapter exercises encourage readers to examine and re-engineer their own thought and perception patterns to develop these qualities and cultivate their own 'diaminds.'

Aimed at practicing engineers and scientists as well as students, Everyone a Leader: A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations for Engineers and Scientists offers innovative learning frameworks for acquiring competence in leadership that were originally developed at DuPont Canada.This book is specifically tailored to meet the needs of those in engineering and scientific fields. David Colcleugh, leadership educator and former CEO of DuPont Canada, draws examples of value-added processes and systems familiar to engineers and scientists to illustrate the importance of developing leadership capabilities in addition to technical skills. Colcleugh brings theories to life through a wealth of case studies and examples from his own career.The models presented in this book have been tested both in the field and as teaching tools at the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering at the University of Toronto. Stressing continuous improvement, ethical standards, and teamwork, Everyone a Leader: A Guide to Leading High-Performance Organizations for Engineers and Scientists reveals how organizational change becomes possible when every employee is not only a functional expert, but also a leader.EVERYONE A LEADER® is a registered U.S. Trademark of TeamTech, LLC. The term is used by the author with permission of TeamTech, LLC but TeamTech, LLC is not responsible for the contents of any aspect of this book.

Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success.Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book’s central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.