Mastering Business Chaos - 12 Secrets to Being Indispensable and Becoming a Playmaker

James Proctor is the CEO of The Inteq Group, Inc. He frequently lectures on business strategy, innovation and business process optimization and serves on the board of commercial and non-profit organizations.Gifted with an innate talent for pattern recognition, in Mastering Business Chaos he reveals secret patterns he has discovered in thousands of client interactions ranging from Fortune 500 to emerging growth companies and government agencies throughout the spectrum of industry.Proctor has a B.S. in Industrial Management and Operations Research and an MBA in Information Technology from Indiana University. He started his career with the firm of Ernst and Young (then, Ernst and Whinney) with their consulting group in Dallas and specialized in the aerospace, manufacturing and defense industries.In the mid- 1980's, Proctor began his own consultancy. Today, The Inteq Group, Inc is a team of top industry professionals that serve commercial and governmental organizations worldwide. Inteq has trained over 300,000 business and information technology professionals around the world in his analysis techniques.

National Oil Companies and Value Creation (World Bank Working Papers)

National Oil Companies (NOCs) directly or indirectly control the majority of oil and gas reserves. As such, they are of great consequence to their country’s economy, to importing countries’ energy security, and to the stability of oil and gas markets. The paper analyzes the available evidence on the objectives, governance and performance of 20 NOCs from both net importing and net exporting countries, and draws conclusions about the design of policies and measures that are more likely to lead to social value creation. NOCs differ from private companies on a number of very important variables, including the level of competition in the market in which they operate, their business profile along the sector value chain, and their degree of commercial orientation and internationalization. Most share some core characteristics: they are usually tied to the national purpose and serve political and economic goals other than maximizing the firm’s profits. This paper introduces a conceptual model to analyze value creation by NOCs that takes into consideration their complex objective function. Our analysis aims to answer the following questions: Are certain corporate governance arrangements more suited than others to promote value creation? Is good geology a pre-condition for NOC value creation? Are there benefits from exposing the NOC to competition from private oil companies? Does the development of forward and backward linkages hamper NOC value creation?

Un mundo sin lampalaguas (Verde nº 2) (Spanish Edition)

Paulo Padrós Garzón es uno de los exponentes de la nueva literatura latinoamericana, una literatura con claro compromiso social en donde lo inexplicable convive con lo cotidiano, y lo irreal se puede tornar en algo común y corriente. “Un mundo sin lampalaguas” es su séptimo libro, el segundo de su Serie Verde de poesía, en donde expresa la eterna melancolía del poeta en búsqueda del amor, de la belleza, de lo sublime, y aborda un lenguaje corriente pero sin embargo sin abandonar la profundidad de algunos hallazgos literarios.  La ausencia de las “lampalaguas”, (aquellas escurridizas serpientes de río, algunas si se quiere peligrosamente eléctricas pero siempre movilizantes, siempre inquietantes), expresa en una hermosa metáfora la ausencia del amor, de las cálidas caricias, de los gemidos por las noches, o de la seducción espontánea de la mujer hacia el hombre, acomode cada uno esa seducción según su gusto. Encontramos en este libro una amalgama perfecta entre lo trascendental y lo cotidiano, entre el amor sentimental y físico y la relación del poeta - o del hombre en sí - con lo que trasciende más allá de lo físico, lo que en definitiva nos queda como verdaderamente perdurable; “Pero qué impunidad, tanta ausencia gratuita debería tener el costo del invierno, los gravámenes de tu huida deberían tener la dimensión de una sequía”. El poeta no deja de ver aquí la indiferencia ante el amor como un gesto que no debería quedar impune.