A company's ability to quickly adapt to the changing demands and requirements of its customers has become an essential requirement for it's long-term survival. Managers must not limit their thinking to 'just' the product or project's value but more importantly what will make customers prefer their offerings to those presented by rivals. It's about a 'Result Focus' aimed not simply at what is made and how much it will cost to manufacture but how it will be useful to those who buy it: it's about exceeding the customer's experience and so beating the competition. This significant new book explains how rational thinking is key to leadership and competitive advantage. The author's combine the theories of value engineering and knowledge management with leadership techniques to provide a methodology that will help you develop the technological advantages that will deliver desired results. Achieving results: How to Create Value is not another book of tools and techniques for value engineering. Many such books already exist. Unfortunately, few of them explain the theories underlying the practice that they preach. Readers are expected to enter into a blind faith that accepts the 'magic' of value engineering without question or even evidence or understanding. Achieving results: How to Create Value is a book that puts the value of science back into value engineering. It moves value engineering from being a low-tech art to a hi-tech methodology capable of being used by the likes of the Drug Discovery processes, NASA's Mars mission and in charity work. The authors focus on the underlying theories that link leadership, value engineering and technology management. It argues that the practice of value engineering has hardly moved forward in the last 30 years because the underlying theories upon which practice is based have rarely been critically examined or explained and that the subjective models upon which practice is based have been promoted at the expense of objective models - this is what the authors seek to overthrow. Achieving results: how to create value provides a new foundation for value engineering, and will help its many advocates to see it as a method that enables the improvement of artificial constructs, from artefacts to organizations. It will help you to become a leader and a value technologist who thinks not just of product or project value but also of how this value will bring improvement to your customers and shareholders.
By:
Roy Woodhead,
James McCuish
Imprint: Thomas Telford Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 16mm
Weight: 204g
ISBN: 9780727731845
ISBN 10: 072773184X
Pages: 180
Publication Date: 01 January 2003
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Chapter 1 - Towards value leadership: Presents the case for value leadership by examining the advantage of rational thinking in decision-making. It discusses how systems develop in paradigms and perspectives. It also discusses how a global economic system is emerging, and how `Old World’ economies are being forced to change as customers and fund managers gain more power over the aims of organizations. Chapter 2 - The context for value leadership: Provides an overview of how to develop a competitive advantage model in the context of the organization. It also provides an insight into the way decision-making processes can be articulated in terms of the people involved and the stages they work through. Chapter 3 - Towards objective value in organizational decision-making: Looks at some of the practical issues a value leader must face. It discusses the need to have an organizational framework for value creation, and builds the case for a rethink of organizational design, so that it is more focused on results rather than on the supply-demand-production logic that lingers from the industrial age. Chapter 4 - Structuring a value creation programme in an organization: Explores the relationship between value creation and a value creation template or blueprint. It provides a value-creation template that is based on a model commonly used by multinational companies to benchmark their projects’ performances. Chapter 5 - Towards technological advantage with value engineering: Considers value engineering alone as a key methodology for achieving technological value leadership from projects and organizations. If companies exist to do something that people value, then they should be capable of doing it. If they can perform the same functions better than their rivals, or offer more functions than their customers are paying for, they will have a competitive advantage. Therefore, any methodology that helps an organization to improve the way it provides value will be at the core of its strategic competitive advantage. This chapter explains how you can develop a methodology for your organization.
