Business Intelligence: Lessons Learned from the Oxymorons at Work

For thousands of years, story-telling has been a wonderful way to reinforce life lessons.

Stories help drive home the teacher’s message. They may be fables or history, fact or fantasy, and often tales from real contemporary life can be most memorable for the student. They demonstrate that the lesson has practical application, and can show the consequences that may occur for failing to heed the advice being offered.

Keith Launchbury is such a story teller, from the fields of business and operations management. His is practically a household name among members and friends of APICS, The Association for Operations Management. And now he has authored a new book titled Business Intelligence: Lessons Learned from the Oxymorons at Work: The Real World Secrets They Don’t Teach you at Business School.

The print edition, which promises to be an entertaining read, and a valuable tool for instructors everywhere, is now available from Amazon USA by The Supply Chain Almanac for only $19.99  Just click here to review the book and place your order…

It is available in electronic Kindle format internationally (price is $16.99) by clicking here…

In Canada, place an order by clicking here…

You may preview the book (Kindle Edition) by clicking here…

Keith Launchbury is a Business Scientist, obsessed with finding out what makes businesses work. He has conducted extensive research with 130 different sized businesses from small one person operations to large multinational organizations. He has uncovered countless examples of what businesses do well, and what they don’t do well. He is a widely recognized international speaker and authority in the area of Integrated Resource Management, Production and Inventory Management and Supply Chain Management, and he is certified in these three programs by APICS, the Society for Operations Management of which he was the International President in 1991. He is the sole owner of his own company and has 40 years of experience, is a renowned business educator and has taught generations of business students to think scientifically about business. He is an accomplished author and courseware developer, and has written courses such as the “Principles of Planning” and “The Master Planning of Resources” which were published by APICS. He has co-authored many business checklists, including “The World Class Manufacturing” Checklist, and he has also co-developed with his wife, Claire Bloom, the “Manufacturing Simulation Game” which is a business game designed to teach the principles of manufacturing planning and control in a Socratic way.

Here is a brief summary from Launchbury himself:

These are the rules that they won’t teach you in Business School, disguised as a collection of stories which, no matter how far-fetched they appear, are all true and come from real life business experiences. When I teach I use these stories and examples to support, enlighten, and entertain my students during otherwise long and boring classroom lessons. People will often remind me of a story that I told them once long before and how they still remember it and the lesson taught by it. There are powerful lessons to be shared in each of them. The lessons in this book have the power to change your business. They will stimulate your inquiring mind to look at the business world in a different way. How much change you want to make is up to you. Hopefully you will become, like me, obsessed with finding out why things happen the way they do, and committed to making things run in the best possible way.

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