As I write, the financial systems of the world are collapsing with still no clear indication of what the consequences will be and which measures should be taken to avoid such a crisis in the future. There seems to be agreement though, that the financial instruments introduced in the past few decades entailed far too much complexity and uncertainty and that there was too little regulatory control over the use of these instruments. Management of uncertainty with the aim of achieving self-control is the core concern of this book. It was not written with a focus on financial systems, but many concepts developed in this book are applicable to this field as well. The - neric principles of reducing, maintaining or increasing uncertainties in view of the different contingencies an organization is faced with, the fundamental issue of how much control is possible and who should be in control, and the question of how much and what kind of regulation is necessary with the overall aim of finding an appropriate balance between system stability and flexibility are at the centre of heated debates on the future of finance.
Managing uncertainty has become a new business imperative. Technological discontinuities, regulatory upheavals, geopolitical shocks, abrupt shifts in consumer tastes or behavior, and many other factors have emerged or intensified in recent years and together conspire to undermine even the most carefully constructed business strategies. Managing Uncertainty: Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Turbulent Times addresses these new challenges, assessing the sources of business turbulence, how to classify uncertainty, and the different ways in which uncertainty can be embraced to allow greater innovation and growth. Drawing on examples from around the world, the book presents the most recent ideas on what it means to manage uncertainty, from practitioners, academics, and consultants. Addresses the challenges of managing uncertainty in business Presents a step-by-step guide to managing business uncertainty Draws examples from major international companies, including Intel, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Boeing, Quinetiq, Philips, China Telecom, Ford, Apple, Shell, Glaxo SmithKline and many more Written for business leaders and managers looking for new ways to ensure that their businesses continue to thrive in a world of increasing complexity, Managing Uncertainty presents new and innovative ideas about reducing risk by understanding difficult-to-predict shifts.
Dealing effectively with uncertainty requires today's project manager to be familiar with a broad spectrum of strategies, encompassing both 'hard' and 'soft' methods. This theme of unified thinking (i.e. the need to selectively draw upon a wide range of strategies in any given situation) will differentiate the book from its contemporaries. By picking up where traditional risk management techniques begin to fail, it brings together leading-edge thinking from a variety of disciplines and shows how these techniques can be used to conquer uncertainty in projects. The ability to make good decisions when faced with uncertainty is the real challenge. It is a universal truth that a decision is only as good as the information it is based on. But good information is often hard to come by, and all projects are vulnerable to the unknown and the unknowable. Thus, uncertainty becomes the sworn enemy of the project manager. Wherever we try to analyse, quantify, plan and act, uncertainty lies in wait to surprise us with its ambiguity and unpredictability. It lurks in every stage of the project lifecycle: in the planning (how long will this really take?), the initiation (this isn't the situation I expected!), the execution (who could have foreseen that happening?), and even the completion of a project (where are the expected benefits?). But managing uncertainty is a lot more than just applying risk management techniques. It requires a deep appreciation of how uncertainty arises and, by recognising its different guises, the appropriate strategies can be formulated. If we can learn how to reduce uncertainty, we can make better management decisions and increase the chances of the project succeeding. This book addresses five key questions: ¢ Why is there uncertainty in projects? ¢ How do you spot the symptoms of uncertainty, preferably at an early stage? ¢ What can be done to avoid uncertainty? ¢ What strategies can be used to deal with project uncertainty? ¢ How can both the individual and the organisation learn to cope more effectively in the future? The reader is assumed to be a either a project management professional, or a senior manager looking for ways to improve project management strategy within their organisation. As such, a foundation in project management basics is assumed, although not essential. The book then builds on this by exposing new ideas and concepts, and shows how these can be harnessed to tackle uncertainty in its many guises.
A comprehensive framework for assessing strategies for managing risk and uncertainty, integrating theory and practice and synthesizing insights from many fields. This book offers a framework for making decisions under risk and uncertainty. Synthesizing research from economics, finance, decision theory, management, and other fields, the book provides a set of tools and a way of thinking that determines the relative merits of different strategies. It takes as its premise that we make better decisions if we use the whole toolkit of economics and related fields to inform our decision making. The text explores the distinction between risk and uncertainty and covers standard models of decision making under risk as well as more recent work on decision making under uncertainty, with a particular focus on strategic interaction. It also examines the implications of incomplete markets for managing under uncertainty. It presents four core strategies: a benchmark strategy (proceeding as if risk and uncertainty were low), a financial hedging strategy (valuable if there is much risk), an operational hedging strategy (valuable for conditions of much uncertainty), and a flexible strategy (valuable if there is much risk and/or uncertainty). The book then examines various aspects of these strategies in greater depth, building on empirical work in several different fields. Topics include price-setting, real options and Monte Carlo techniques, organizational structure, and behavioral biases. Many chapters include exercises and appendixes with additional material. The book can be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in risk management, as a guide for researchers, or as a reference for management practitioners.
As its title suggests, "Uncertainty Management in Information Systems" is a book about how information systems can be made to manage information permeated with uncertainty. This subject is at the intersection of two areas of knowledge: information systems is an area that concentrates on the design of practical systems that can store and retrieve information; uncertainty modeling is an area in artificial intelligence concerned with accurate representation of uncertain information and with inference and decision-making under conditions infused with uncertainty. New applications of information systems require stronger capabilities in the area of uncertainty management. Our hope is that lasting interaction between these two areas would facilitate a new generation of information systems that will be capable of servicing these applications. Although there are researchers in information systems who have addressed themselves to issues of uncertainty, as well as researchers in uncertainty modeling who have considered the pragmatic demands and constraints of information systems, to a large extent there has been only limited interaction between these two areas. As the subtitle, "From Needs to Solutions," indicates, this book presents view points of information systems experts on the needs that challenge the uncer tainty capabilities of present information systems, and it provides a forum to researchers in uncertainty modeling to describe models and systems that can address these needs.
The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve? Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways. Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective.
This book provides a new point of view on the subject of the management of uncertainty. It covers a wide variety of both theoretical and practical issues involving the analysis and management of uncertainty in the fields of finance, management and marketing. Audience: Researchers and professionals from operations research, management science and economics.
Risk and uncertainty may sound scary, but todays best business leaders are navigating both to gain strategic advantage over competitorsand you can, too. This guide for business leaders examines risk and opportunity through the lens of some of the worlds most respected visionaries, including Howard Schultz, Andy Grove, Peter Huntsman, John Krafcik, Peter Leibinger, Doug Hepper, and many more. These visionaries looked beyond financial performance to see opportunitiesand they did so by understanding uncertainty. Then, they decisively acted to create measurable results that coincided with the future they envisioned. Find out how they did it, and learn how to: identify, define, and convert uncertainty into value; become more opportunistic when facing uncertainty; develop the skill to spot where advantages are likely to emerge; and create an environment where managers and leaders complement each other. Filled with case studies on companies such as Hyundai, Starbucks, Roche, and Intel, this guide delivers proven ways to create value and leverage uncertainty. It is the culmination of a decade of research and interaction with dozens of companies and growth leaders who prove that pursuing a market driven strategy to navigating uncertainty will gain measurable market advantage.
This book studies the variety of organizational strategies selected to cope with critical uncertainties during crises. This research formulates and applies an institutional sense-making model to explain the selection of strategies for coping with uncertainties during crises to answer the question why some organizations select a rule-based strategy to cope with uncertainties, whereas others pursue a more ad hoc-based strategy. It finds that the level of institutionalization does not affect strategy selection in the initial phase of responding to crises; that three rigidity effects can be identified in the selection of sense-making strategies once organizations have faced the failure of their selected strategies; that discontinuities in the feedback loop of sense-making do not necessarily move organizations to switch their sense-making strategies, but interact with institutionalization to contribute to switching sense-making strategies. This book bridges the gap between institutional thinking and crisis management theorizing. A major step forward in the world of crisis management studies! ——Professor Arjen Boin, Leiden University, the Netherlands In a world of increasingly complex, sociotechnical systems interacting in high-risk environments, Professor Lu’s analysis of how organizations manage uncertainty is both timely and profound. ——Professor Louise K. Comfort, Director, Center for Disaster Management, University of Pittsburgh, USA Prof. Lu greatly enhances our understanding of how organizations cope with uncertainty and make sense of their challenges under the pressures of catastrophe. ——Dr. Arnold M. Howitt, Faculty Co-Director, Program on Crisis Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School, USA This book provides not only a theory of crisis management but also a key concept around which research and practice can be conducted. ——Professor Naim Kapucu, Director of School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, USA A generic institutional model for analyzing and managing hazards, disasters and crises worldwide. ——Professor Joop Koppenjan, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands This book has done an excellent job in opening the black box of how organizations make sense of the crisis situations they face and develop strategies to respond. It should be read by all of us who wish for a peaceful and safe world. ——Professor Lan Xue, Dean of School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China
This volume integrates scholarly work on disclosure and uncertainty with the most up-to-date, cutting edge research, theories, and applications. Uncertainty is an ever-present part of human relationships, and the ways in which people reduce and/or manage uncertainty involves regulating their communication with others through revealing and concealing information. This collection is devoted to collating knowledge in these areas, advancing theory and presenting work that is socially meaningful. This work includes contributions from renowned scholars in interpersonal uncertainty and information regulation, focusing on processes that bridge boundaries within and across disciplines, while maintaining emphasis on interpersonal contexts. Disciplines represented here include interpersonal, family, and health communication, as well as relational and social psychology. Key features of the volume include: comprehensive coverage integrating the latest research on disclosure, information seeking, and uncertainty a highly theoretical content, socially meaningful in nature (applied to real-world contexts) an interdisciplinary approach that crosses sub-fields within communication. This volume is a unique and timely resource for advanced study in interpersonal, health, or family communication. With its emphasis on theory, the book is an excellent resource for graduate courses addressing theory and/or theory construction, and it will also appeal to scholars interested in applied research.
