Business and Management (R0)

This is an Open Access book.

Hoping to incubate a unique idea about workplace design, Dr. Agustin Chevez walked in isolation for 42 days from Melbourne to Sydney. His pilgrimage delivered 34 Signposts, a collection of insights which hold the promise to guide us to a better place to work.

While firmly positioned within the shifting context of work, the Signposts point away from reactive solutions with a short shelf life. Instead, these markers are infused with a diversity of thought instilled by Agustin’s pilgrimage and reclaim the forgotten qualities of solitude, boredom, adversity, and absurdity as mechanisms to deliver innovation and create improved working environments. 

On his way to Sydney Agustin relied on maps and people with local knowledge of the lands he traversed. Similarly, in this book, he consults people with local knowledge in various design disciplines, management, and technology as he navigates the many regions of the workplace and work practices covered by the Signposts. When he reaches the end of the known trails, he starts laying paths that take us closer to where the Signposts converge.

“This book takes about three hours to read, and it could take a lifetime to fully extract all the benefits that it contains. This does not suggest that there are not immediate benefits available from reflecting on and applying the Signposts that are core to the book's intellectual contribution.”
                                                                       - Peer Review extract

This book discusses all aspects of money laundering, starting from traditional approach to financial crimes to artificial intelligence-enabled solutions. It also discusses the regulators approach to curb financial crimes and how syndication among financial institutions can create a robust ecosystem for monitoring and managing financial crimes. It opens with an introduction to financial crimes for a financial institution, the context of financial crimes, and its various participants. Various types of money laundering, terrorist financing, and dealing with watch list entities are also part of the discussion. Through its twelve chapters, the book provides an overview of ways in which financial institutions deal with financial crimes; various IT solutions for monitoring and managing financial crimes; data organization and governance in the financial crimes context; machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in financial crimes; customer-level transaction monitoring system; machine learning-driven alert optimization; AML investigation; bias and ethical pitfalls in machine learning; and enterprise-level AI-driven Financial Crime Investigation (FCI) unit. There is also an Appendix which contains a detailed review of various data sciences approaches that are popular among practitioners.

The book discusses each topic through real-life experiences. It also leverages the experience of Chief Compliance Officers of some large organizations to showcase real challenges that heads of large organizations face while dealing with this sensitive topic. It thus delivers a hands-on guide for setting up, managing, and transforming into a best-in-class financial crimes management unit. It is thus an invaluable resource for researchers, students, corporates, and industry watchers alike.

This book explores the practices and policies of human resource management (HRM) in higher education institutions (HEI), while also analyzing the governance and structural challenges. It explains the assessment of university as an organization, outlining the distinction between universities and firms from an HRM point of view by analysing various objectives, parameters and outcomes.  The book broadly probes the relevance of HRM systems in HEIs in India and their potential impact. It also examines whether existing HRM practices and policies in HEIs in India drive motivation and enable employees to perform their functions to achieve the highest possible levels of excellence. It explores whether the enhanced motivation of employees consistently impacts students, their placements, progress to higher education, and quality teaching and research output. To strengthen the research output, to better understand the functioning of HRM practices in foreign HEIs and for comparative reasons, the book also studies HEIs in the United States against a diverse set of HEIs in India. It concludes by highlighting the impact of India’s National Education Policy 2020 and its scope to transform and professionalise the higher education system in the country.  The book is indispensable for researchers in education management and policy studies and those in governing positions in higher education institutions. It is also a valuable resource for regulatory and government bodies, and policy-formulating think tanks in South Asia which have a similar education system as India.