Christine Brentani
Introduction:
The single most prominent factor that has spurned the growth of portfolio management globally has been demographics. As more and more people across the developed world live longer, accumulate more wealth and have progressively higher standards of living, the need for financial security for the ageing population becomes vital. Increasingly, governments are withdrawing [...]

MALCOLM McDONALD
Introduction:
In the present business climate of increasingly competitive markets, there is a growing realization that success in the future will come only from meticulous planning and market preparation. In order to make a confident commitment to the future, an organization’s marketing plans must be meaningful: they must be relevant, realistic, and useable. To be [...]

Bryan Bergeron
Essentials of Knowledge Management is a practical survey of the field of Knowledge Management (KM)—a business optimization strategy that identifies, selects, organizes, distills, and packages information essential to the business of the company in a way that improves employee performance and corporate competitiveness. The preservation and packaging of corporate knowledge (i.e., information in the [...]

Christina Evans
Introduction:
It is difficult to pinpoint an exact time when the current interest, possibly obsession, with knowledge management took off. Certainly some of the seminal books from management writers began to emerge in the early 1990s. Yet managing knowledge is not a new concept. Professionals, i.e. individuals whose work depend on them making judgments that [...]

J. Davidson Frame
Introduction:
People have been undertaking projects since the earliest days of organized human activity. The hunting parties of our prehistoric forebears were projects, for example; they were temporary undertakings directed at the goal of obtaining meat for the community. Large, complex projects have also been with us for a long time. The pyramids, the [...]

The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Managemen
Michael J. A. Berry
Gordon S. Linoff
Introduction:
Part One o this book introduces data mining in the context of customer relationship management (CRM) in companies with large numbers of customers.
This does not mean that data mining is not useful in other fields! Data mining is used in the pharmaceuticals industry [...]

Pauline Ratnasingam
Introduction:
In this chapter we introduce the motivation for the study and discuss the background of inter-organizational trust, followed by significant prior research leading to a rationale of this study. Then we discuss previous research in ecommerc adoption, its history, growth, and an analysis of the factors that drive and inhibit e-commerce adoption. E-commerce is [...]

Michel Syrett and Jean Lammiman
Introduction:
‘‘Managers are no longer people in control, but to a very large extent coaches. They do not focus so much on putting directly supervised systems into place, but on self-perpetuating processes. Above all they need to receive the signals that come from the market, from the competitors, and integrate them into [...]

Baptiste Lebreton
Introduction:
The fact that manufacturers have to rethink their supply chain in order to ensure the future of their business has been recognized at least since 1972 and the publication of a Club of Rome’s report entitled The limits to growth (Meadows et al., 1972). The availability of non-renewable resources such as metals or oil [...]

David L. Cahill
Introduction:
A multitude of companies today has already identified the need to create a loyal customer base and acknowledges that maintaining existing customers and extending business with them is significantly less expensive than acquiring new customers (Stone, Woodcock, and Wilson 1996). Empirical proof of the proliferation of such customer loyalty efforts in the business [...]