Introduction to Business

Introduction to Business
Author: Lawrence J. Gitman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1455
Release: 2024-09-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life
Author: Bill Burnett
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 110187533X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning

An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning
Author: Yasar Ergen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2018-12-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789848342

Urban and regional planning is a spatial design practice that brings limitations to the intervention in natural areas to ensure a balance between population growth, housing, and employment in residential areas. It includes spatial design that enables living creatures to live while planning the interventions to ensure suitability to ecology, geology, climate, and land structure since intervention in nature should be balanced. In this context, the profession generally includes regional, spatial and urban planning, urban transformation that involves the urban decline areas in the city, urban renewal and protection, urban transportation, and urban management. Therefore, it is believed that this book will be useful for those who work in this area on a practical or academic basis and follow the innovations in the profession.

Introduction to Rural Planning

Introduction to Rural Planning
Author: Nick Gallent
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2008-01-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1134086342

Providing an overview of rural (spatial) planning for students on planning, geography and related programmes, this book charts the major patterns and processes of rural change affecting the British countryside, its landscape, its communities and its economies in the twentieth century. The authors examine the role of ‘planning’ in shaping rural spaces, not only the statutory ‘comprehensive’ planning that emerged in the post-war period, but also planning and rural programme delivery undertaken by central, regional and local policy agencies. The book is designed to accompany a typical teaching programme in rural planning and considers: the nature of rural areas and the emergence of statutory planning in England the agents of rural policy delivery and the potential for current planning practice to become a ‘policy hub’ at the local level, co-ordinating the actions and programmes of different agents economic change in the countryside and the influence planning has in shaping rural economies social change, the nature of rural communities and recent debates on housing and rural service provision environmental change, the changing fortunes of farming, landscape protection, and the idea of a multi-functional landscape made by forces that can be shaped by the planning process key areas of current concern in spatial rural planning, including debates surrounding city-regions, the rural the challenge of managing rural change in the twenty-first century through new planning and governance processes. A comprehensive coverage of the forces, processes and outcomes of rural change whilst keeping planning’s influence and role in clear view at all times.

Introduction to Financial Models for Management and Planning

Introduction to Financial Models for Management and Planning
Author: James R. Morris
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1498765041

A properly structured financial model can provide decision makers with a powerful planning tool that helps them identify the consequences of their decisions before they are put into practice. Introduction to Financial Models for Management and Planning, Second Edition enables professionals and students to learn how to develop and use computer-based models for financial planning. This volume provides critical tools for the financial toolbox, then shows how to use them tools to build successful models.

An Introduction to Project Modeling and Planning

An Introduction to Project Modeling and Planning
Author: Gündüz Ulusoy
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2021-04-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030614239

This textbook teaches the basic concepts and methods of project management but also explains how to convert them to useful results in practice. Project management offers a promising working area for theoretical and practical applications, and developing software and decision support systems (DSS). This book specifically focuses on project planning and control, with an emphasis on mathematical modeling. Models and algorithms establish a good starting point for students to study the relevant literature and support pursuing academic work in related fields. The book provides an introduction to theoretical concepts, and it also provides detailed explanations, application examples, and case studies that deal with real-life problems. The chapter topics include questions that underlie critical thinking, interpretation, analytics, and making comparisons. Learning outcomes are defined and the content of the book is structured following these goals. Chapter 1 begins by introducing the basic concepts, methods, and processes of project management. This Chapter constitutes the base for defining and modeling project management problems. Chapter 2 explores the fundamentals of organizing and managing projects from an organization’s perspective. Issues related to project team formation, the role of project managers, and organization types are discussed. Chapter 3 is devoted to project planning and network modeling of projects, covering fundamental concepts such as project scope, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS), Cost Breakdown Structure (CBS), project network modeling, activity duration, and cost estimating, activity-based costing (ABC), data and knowledge management. Chapter 4 introduces deterministic scheduling models, which can be used in constructing the time schedules. Models employing time-based and finance-based objectives are introduced. The CPM is covered. The unconstrained version of maximizing Net Present Value (NPV) is also treated here together with the case of time-dependent cash flows. Chapter 5 focuses on the time/cost trade-off problem, explaining how to reduce the duration of some of the activities and therefore reduce the project duration at the expense of additional costs. This topic is addressed for both continuous and discrete cases. Chapter 6 discusses models and methods of scheduling under uncertain activity durations. PERT is introduced for minimizing the expected project duration and extended to the PERT-Costing method for minimizing the expected project cost. Simulation is presented as another approach for dealing with the uncertainty in activity durations and costs. To demonstrate the use of the PERT, a case study on constructing an earthquake-resistant residential house is presented. Classifications of resource and schedule types are given in Chapter 7, and exact and heuristic solution procedures for the single- and multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) are presented. The objective of maximizing NPV under resource constraints is addressed, and the capital-constrained project scheduling model is introduced. In Chapter 8, resource leveling, and further resource management problems are introduced. Total adjustment cost and resource availability cost problems are introduced. Various exact models are investigated. A heuristic solution procedure for the resource leveling problem is presented in detail. Also, resource portfolio management policies and the resource portfolio management problem are discussed. A case study on resource leveling dealing with the annual audit project of a major corporation is presented. Project contract types and payment schedules constitute the topics of Chapter 9. Contracts are legal documents reflecting the results of some form of client-contractor negotiations and sometimes of a bidding process, which deserve closer attention. Identification and allocation of risk in contracts, project control issues, disputes, and resolution management are further topics covered in this Chapter. A bidding model is presented to investigate client-contractor negotiations and the bidding process from different aspects. Chapter 10 focuses on processes and methods for project monitoring and control. Earned Value Management is studied to measure the project performance throughout the life of a project and to estimate the expected project time and cost based on the current status of the project. How to incorporate inflation into the analysis is presented. In Chapter 11, qualitative and quantitative techniques including decision trees, simulation, and software applications are introduced. Risk phases are defined and building a risk register is addressed. An example risk breakdown structure is presented. The design of risk management processes is introduced, and risk response planning strategies are discussed. At the end of the Chapter, the quantitative risk analysis is demonstrated at the hand of a team discussion case study. Chapter 12 covers several models and approaches dealing with various stochastic aspects of the decision environment. Stochastic models, generation of robust schedules, use of reactive and fuzzy approaches are presented. Sensitivity and scenario analysis are introduced. Also, simulation analysis, which is widely used to analyze the impacts of uncertainty on project goals, is presented. Chapter 13 addresses repetitive projects that involve the production or construction of similar units in batches such as railway cars or residential houses. Particularly in the construction industry repetitive projects represent a large portion of the work accomplished in this sector of the economy. A case study on the 50 km section of a motorway project is used for demonstrating the handling of repetitive project management. How best to select one or more of a set of candidate projects to maintain a project portfolio is an important problem for project-based organizations with limited resources. The project selection problem is inherently a multi-objective problem and is treated as such in Chapter 14. Several models and solution techniques are introduced. A multi-objective, multi-period project selection and scheduling model is presented. A case study that addresses a project portfolio selection and scheduling problem for the construction of a set of dams in a region is presented. Finally, Chapter 15 discusses three promising research areas in project management in detail: (i) Sustainability and Project Management, (ii) Project Management in the Era of Big Data, and (iii) the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the New Age Project Management. We elaborate on the importance of sustainability in project management practices, discuss how developments in data analytics might impact project life cycle management, and speculate how the infinite possibilities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the new technologies will transform project management practices.

An Introduction to Rural Settlement Planning (Routledge Revivals)

An Introduction to Rural Settlement Planning (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Paul Cloke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134693303

This book, first published in 1983, provided the first thorough and informative introduction to the theory, practice and politics of rural settlement planning. It surveys the conceptual and ideological leanings of those who have developed, implemented and revised rural settlement practice, and gives detailed analysis of planning documentation to assess the extent to which policies have been successfully implemented. Paul Cloke assesses the shortfalls of rural planning and resource management and suggests methods by which a sustainable rural future might be attained. This reissue provides essential background and a comprehensive handbook for those with an interest in rural settlement planning.

An Introduction to Health Planning for Developing Health Systems

An Introduction to Health Planning for Developing Health Systems
Author: Andrew Green
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2007-01-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198571348

Health planning is a critical component when responding to the health needs of low and middle income countries, characterised by particularly stringent resource constraints. The major communicable diseases such as AIDS, TB and malaria often appear in parallel with growing non-communicable diseases including heart disease and diabetes, and yet resources are often less than the levels recommended by the World Health Organisation for basic health care.The new edition of this well-respected text explains the importance of health planning in both developing regions such as Africa, and those in transition, such as Central and Eastern Europe. It stresses the importance of understanding the national and international context in which planning occurs, and provides an up to date analysis of the major current policy issues, including health reforms. Separate chapters are dedicated to the distinct issues of finance for health care and humanresource planning. The various techniques used at each stage of the planning process are explained, starting with the situational analysis and then looking in turn at priority-setting, option appraisal, programming, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. The book ends by examining the challengesfacing planners in the 21st century, particularly in the light of growing globalisation. A major theme of the book is the need to recognise and reconcile the inevitable tension that lies between value judgements and 'rational' decision-making. As such, in addition to introducing techniques such as costing and economic appraisal, it also outlines techniques such as stakeholder analysis for understanding the relative attitudes and power of different groups in planning decisions.Each chapter includes a comprehensive bibliography (including key websites), a summary, and exercises to help the reader practise techniques and better understand the content. The book argues that all health professionals and community groups should be involved in the planning process for it to be effective, and will therefore appeal to anyone involved in planning.