Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles

This comprehensive text provides fundamental and broad knowledge about strategic management and policy. It offers a thorough, state-of-the-art treatment of the critical business skills that are required to plan and manage strategic activities and business policies in todays corporate world. It introduces the readers to the various tools and techniques being used by the firms competing in the national, as well as in the global economy. The book has been enriched with examples and brief descriptions given as Strategic Memo in each chapter. The case studies given at the end of the book can be used to teach and discuss a comprehensive

Most organizations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue that the responsibility for this critical alignment lies with corporate headquarters. In this book, the authors apply their revolutionary Balanced Scorecard management system to corporate-level strategy, revealing how highly successful enterprises achieve powerful synergies by explicitly defining corporate headquarters’ role in setting, coordinating, and overseeing organizational strategy.

Based on extensive field research in organizations worldwide, Alignment shows how companies can build an enterprise-level Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard that clearly articulate the “enterprise value proposition”: how the enterprise creates value above that achieved by individual business units operating alone. The book provides case studies, actionable frameworks, and sample scorecards that show how to align business and support units, boards of directors, and external partners with the corporate strategy and create a governance process that will ensure that alignment is sustained.

The next breakthrough in strategy execution from the field’s premier thinkers, Alignment shows how today’s companies can unlock unrealized value from enterprise synergies.

Operational Risk is one of the important arms of the risk management triangle, the other two being Credit Risk and Market (Treasury) Risk. Any organisation, particularly in the banking sector, is squarely exposed to operational risks emanating within or outside the organisation.There was no precise definition of operational risk until Basel Accord II came into being in June 2004. For the first time in the history of global banking, operational risk capital charge has been made a mandatory requirement in banking. This certainly puts in a lot of stress and strain on a bank’s management. The entire gamut of operational risk has been visited and covered in the appropriate chapters of this book.