The crisis: Mobilizing boards for change (journal article)
by Andrew Campbell and Stuart Sinclair
from The McKinsey Quarterly, February 2009
"As companies grapple with uncertainty of a magnitude that few have experienced before, their boards should begin by questioning fundamental strategic assumptions: Is our view of the market realistic? Does our financing strategy take into account the new conditions? Should we reset the incentive scheme or abandon any approach based on share prices? Can we exploit the current glut of talent? How can we take advantage of the pain our competitors are experiencing?"
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10 Principles for Effective Performance Management in Government and Public Sector Organizations
Source: ActuateGovernment
from Federal Computer Week March 17 2009
"Public sector organizations invest a lot of time and effort into finding and implementing effective performance management strategies. Delving deeper into this phenomenon, little has actually been paid to ensure that operational activities measure up and deliver against top-level goals. How does your agency measure up against other public sector organizations? "

Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in the Tourism Sector: Frameworks, Tools and Practices
Source: United Nations Environment Programme
"This publication is designed to provide a pragmatic platform to strengthen the capacity of professionals to understand and respond effectively to the global challenges of climate change in tourism destinations. It is the result of the ongoing cooperation between UNEP, UNWTO and WMO in the context of the wider UN response to climate change."

Glass Ceiling Clouds Over (journal article)
by Karalyn Brown
from Management Today, March 2009
"Despite decades of feminism and apparent attitudinal change, the evidence clearly shows that women are failing to achieve executive management positions in Australia."

Nurturing Gen Y (journal article)
by Mark Story
from Management Today March 2009
"Members of the generation Y demographic will comprise 40 per cent of the workforce in a decade. Employers must nurture these current-day employees who are, after all, future managers."

A time for Queensland to re-think? (journal article)
by John Hine
from Food and Drink Business, March 2009
"It is time for Queensland to re-think its basic approach to agriculture and food processing, given the long term problems of Golden Circle, the Queensland sugar industry, the virtual demise of KR ham and now Hans Smallgoods going into receivership..."
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Brilliant project management : what the best project managers know, say and do [book]

Authors: Stephen Barker & Rob Cole

"As well as covering all the traditional topics, from planning through to risk management [this book] tackles the people side of the job that often gets overlooked ... Light on theory and heavy on practice, this is the ultimate project management guide for anyone who wants to become a better project manager." - cover.

The Cost of not paying attention : how interruptions impact knowledge worker productivity [online]

Authors: Jonathan B. Spira & Joshua B. Feintuch

"Interruptions now consume 28% of the knowledge worker's day ... this translates into 28 billion lost man-hours per annum to companies in the United States alone. ... It would be an understatement to say that attention management - the area of management science dealing with interruptions - merits immediate attention." - page 4.

What Not to Ask of Budget Processes: Lessons from George W. Bush's Years (journal article)
By Joseph White
from Public Administration Review Vol 69 Iss 2 Mar/ Apr 2009, pp. 224 - 232
" Budget reform requires goals that are both good public policy and achievable. The core purpose of budgeting is to consider and relate details and totals. Common demands for reform are dubious because they slight consideration of details. For this reason, too strict a definition of "balance" would be bad policy; the demand for balance over many decades is neither good policy nor realistic; and multiyear discretionary spending caps can be both bad policy and impractical. Concern about passing annual budget resolutions ignores the fact that the major reason for annual totals is no longer endorsed by policy makers and economists. Scorekeeping should be honest and accurate and often can be improved, but possible achievements are limited. Budget reforms will not make government accountable if the governing coalition is united in seeking to avoid that, and if neither the public nor elites demand it. "

Industry that pays, and art that doesn’t (journal article)
by Robyn Archer
from Griffith Review, Autumn 2009
"I take this opportunity to adopt a critical attitude to what I see as something of a hoodwink in current language about the arts. And it’s not just semantics. It is an overarching brand that casually (and largely without protest) engulfs the arts and threatens to diminish their importance and wash over their points of difference. The consequence of this is that it will then be easy to starve them. I am talking, of course, about ‘creative industries’. They are perfectly good and productive industries, often highly creative and certainly deserving of investment because they have the potential to make a return on that investment and be financially sustainable. But what do they have to do with art?"

A Streak of hypocrisy : reactions to the global financial crisis and generational debt [book]

Author: Jeremy Sammut / Centre for Independent Studies (Australia)

"Examines the policy challenges associated with the ageing of the Australian population through the prism of the global financial crisis. The paper observes that much of the commentary prompted by the financial crisis has featured a reaction against credit-driven consumption." - executive summary.

De-Scarifying Change (journal article)
by Sue Bushell
from CIO, March 2009
"Selling change is never easy. Improving your soft skills and learning how to engage people in a direct and personal way can often mean the difference between success and failure."

Good business is a numbers game (journal article)
by Sue Hirst
from My Business, March 2009, pp. 28-29
"We're bombarded with stories of doom and gloom at the moment, especially from the big business end of the market. Job losses and cost cutting seem to be the news of the day.... The key area where the owners of strong businesses focus attention is on the numbers."
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Australia India Relations (journal article)
from The Diplomat, March/April 2009
Australia and India are starting to put the decades-old differences behind them.

Quiet leadership : six steps to transforming performance at work: help people think better- don't tell them what to do! [book]

Author: David Rock

"Provides a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction." - cover.

The Man who owns the news : inside the secret world of Rupert Murdoch [book]

Author: Michael Wolff

"Chronicles the astonishing growth of the $70 billion media kingdom. In intimate detail he probes the Murdoch family dynasty, from the battles that have threatened to destroy it to the reconciliations that seem to only make it stronger. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews, he offers accounts of the Dow Jones takeover as well as plays for Yahoo! and Newsday as they've never been revealed before." - cover.

Value-for-Money Strategies for Recessionary Times (journal article)
By Peter J. Williamson and Ming Zeng
from Harvard Business Review Vol 87 Iss 3 Mar 2009, pp. 66 - 74
"In tough economic times, some companies have outmaneuvered rivals to become market leaders through value-for-money strategies. That is, they have enabled recession-hit consumers to economize (do less and spend less), become more efficient (do the same for less), or become more effective (do more but spend no more). To implement such a strategy, argue this British professor and Chinese academic, companies must go beyond refining cost-cutting capabilities to develop expertise in cost innovation. That may not be good news for many U.S., European, and Japanese corporations, because multinationals from emerging markets, which have long experience with value-conscious customers, have already built cost-innovation capabilities that are unlocking mass markets in both developing -- and developed -- countries. Some, like battery maker BYD, have learned to sell high-tech products profitably at mass-market prices through a combination of lower labor costs and manufacturing innovations. Others, like drinks purveyor United Spirits, have dominated industries by blanketing sizable niches in their home markets with a full range of products or customized options. And still others, like appliance manufacturer Haier, have used low-price offerings to turn small, unguarded niches into mass markets in developed countries. In response, the authors argue, Western companies should turn to developing countries for vital lessons in lowering the cost of building brands and developing and manufacturing products. They should enter into alliances with emerging giants to gain cost-innovation capabilities. And they should use their superior financial strength to beat emerging giants at their own game of growing mass markets in developing countries. Multinationals that fail to learn from emerging rivals are unlikely to weather the recession well -- or stay competitive for very long. "

When Economic Incentives Backfire (journal article)
By Samuel Bowles
from Harvard Business Review Vol 87 Iss 3 Mar 2009, pp. 22-23
"The article offers the author's views on economic incentives and questions the effectiveness of social policy that is based on rewards and economic incentives. Topics include a tax on plastic grocery bags in Ireland, self-interest and public ethics, the idea of economist Richard Titmuss who claimed that incentives reduce supplies, and an experiment with incentives in Israel."

Extending a SVAR Model of the Australian Economy (journal article)
By Mardi Dungey and Adrian Pagan
from Economic Record Vol 85 Iss 268 2009, pp. 1 - 20
"Dungey and Pagan (2000) present a SVAR model of the Australian economy which models macroeconomic outcomes as transitory deviations from a deterministic trend. In this paper we extend that model in two directions. First, we relate it to an emerging literature on Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium modelling of small open economies. Second, we allow for both transitory and permanent components in the series and show how this modification has an impact on the design of macroeconomic models. "

Assessing the Incidence and Wage Effects of Overskilling in the Australian Labour Market
By Kostas Mavromaras, Seamus McGuinness and Yin King Fok
from Economic Record Vol 85, Iss 268 2009, pp. 60 - 72
"This paper examines the incidence and wage effects of overskilling in Australia. It finds that approximately 30 per cent of employees believed themselves to be moderately overskilled and 11 per cent believed themselves to be severely overskilled. The incidence of skills mismatch varied little when the sample was split by education. After controlling for individual and job characteristics as well as the potential bias arising from individual unobserved heterogeneity, severely overskilled workers suffer an average wage penalty of 10.2 per cent with the penalty ranging from about 6 per cent among vocationally qualified employees to just less than 20 per cent for graduates. "