This book will lift the lid on the airline industry and the world of aviation, highlighting the humorous and the sometimes downright alarming business of air travel. It avoids the question of fatal accidents and concentrates on stories, trivia, and salacious gossip that will make it an ideal read for the seasoned air traveler and an indispensable handbook for anyone working in the industry.
Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn’t, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You’ll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.
Today, business processes and information systems are so tightly intertwined that they must be designed together, as parts of a total architecture, to realize enterprise goals. In Succeeding with SOA, Paul Brown shows how service-oriented architectures (SOAs) provide the best structure for such integration: clean, well-defined interfaces between collaborating entities. But even SOAs need to be correctly understood and implemented to avoid common failures. Drawing on decades of experience, Dr. Brown explains what business managers and IT architects absolutely need to know–including critical success factors–to undertake this essential work.
This book demonstrates service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a concrete discipline rather than a hopeful collection of cloud charts. Built upon the author’s firsthand experience rolling out a SOA at a major corporation, SOA in Practice explains how SOA can simplify the creation and maintenance of large-scale applications. Whether your project involves a large set of Web Services-based components, or connects legacy applications to modern business processes, this book clarifies how — and whether — SOA fits your needs.
Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century. Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You’ll read about: • Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry. • Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production. • Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems. An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.
The supercharged growth of this low-cost airline has actually changed the way countless people live their lives, whether it be Ireland’s new “Ryanair Generation” for whom its cheap flights to Dublin have eliminated much permanent emigration to the UK, or the thousands of Britons now enabled to buy holiday homes in rural France. This is the first book to tell the full story of the Ryanair phenomenon, from its inauspicious beginnings to its current dominance, from the secret of its business strategy to its cavalier stunts and practices. Siobhan Creaton has spoken to Ryanair employees past and present, as well as its top management and those at its major rivals like British Airways and easyJet, to produce an authoritative, objective and compulsive account of one of the most colorful companies in Europe. With Ryanair continuing to expand, the battle for the low-cost airline market in Europe becoming ever more cutthroat, and chief executive Michael O’Leary happy to do battle with everyone from airports (for their landing charges) to his own pilots (over pay and conditions)—and generate an endless stream of PR and news stories in the process—this edition of Siobhan Creaton’s book is fully updated to take account of all Ryanair’s most recent history.
