Talking the talk (journal article)
by Karalyn Brown
from Management Today April 2009
'Managers need to be powerful communicators if they are to achieve their goals and inspire their people as individuals and in teams. ... While it's amazing that while most of us spend each day talking to each other, it's surprising how many people struggle to have a conversation of quality. "
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
The benefits of being good (journal article)
by Beverley Head
from Information Age, April 2009
"The ICT sector loves its TLAs (three-letter acronyms) and is learning to live with the GFC (global financial crisis). Now it’s getting to grips with CSR (corporate social responsibility)."
Queensland supports debt (journal article)
by John Arbouw
from Project Finance International, April 2009
"The Aspire Schools consortium has won the A$260m contract to build seven new schools in southeast Queensland and this will be the first project in Australia to use the supported debt model (SDM). About 70% of the post-construction financing requirements will be provided in the form of supported debt."
Ask us for a copy of this article
The Crisis: timing strategic moves (journal article)
by Richard Dobbs and Timothy M. Koller
from McKinsey Quarterly April 2009
"Timing is key as companies weigh whether to make strategic investments now or wait for clear signs of recovery. Scenario analysis can expose the risks of moving too quickly or slowly."
(free registration to read this article)
Document management - a hidden source of value (journal article)
by Ferruccio Lagutaine and Stefano Martinotti
from McKinsey Quarterly, April 2009
"Recently, a big insurance company looking for savings to finance growth decided to target document operations. Spending was high and evidence of waste widespread. In some locations, under a third of all marketing brochures reached designated customers; the rest sat in storage for years. Fragmented communications hurt the company’s brand image—logos, for example, were printed in different sizes and colors.
Top executives thought an integrated document-management strategy could cut costs and improve operations significantly. An analysis revealed that over three years these costs might fall by up to €150 million..."
Premium Content. Please ask us for a copy of this article.
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Monday, 27 April 2009
An empirical study about the status of business process management (journal article)
By Thomas Neubauer
from Business Process Management Journal Vol 15 Iss 2 2009, pp. 166-183
"Recently, business process management (BPM) is among the most important managerial topics because it allows companies an agile adaptation to changing business requirements. Consultants and researchers are regularly proposing new methods and concepts based on BPM for further increasing the efficiency of corporate processes. However, from an empirical point of view it is crucial to determine the current status in practice and derive goals for research and technology transfer. This paper aims to address these issues. "
New regions and regionalisation through clusters: City-regions and new problems for the periphery (journal article)
By Mike Danson
from International Journal of Public Sector Management Vol 22 Iss 3 2009, pp. 260 - 271
"The purpose of this paper is to introduce the role of territory in (city-) regionalisation and to revisit the problems of distance from the core in cluster strategies. The paper further aims to discuss the implications of how agglomeration and networking economies, strongly promoted and based on city regions, are being realised across national boundaries."
Why Teams DON'T Work (journal article)
Interview by Diane Coutu of RichardHackman
from Harvard Business Review Vol. 87 Iss 5 May 2009, pp. 98-105
"The belief that teams make us more creative and productive--and are the best way to get things done--is deeply entrenched. But Hackman, a professor of organizational psychology at Harvard and a leading expert on teams, is having none of it. Research, he says, consistently shows that teams underperform despite all their extra resources. In an interview with senior editor Diane Coutu, Hackman explains where teams go wrong. Shockingly, most of the time members don't agree on what the team is supposed to be doing or even on who is on the team. The belief that bigger is better also compounds problems; as a team grows, the effort needed to manage links between members increases almost exponentially. Leaders need to be ruthless about defining teams and keeping them small (fewer than 10 members), and some individuals (like team destroyers) should simply be forced off. The article also discusses other problems with teams."
The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Goood Times and Bad (journal article)
By Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, Boris Groysberg and Nitin Nohria
from Harvard Business Review Vol 87 Iss 5 May 2009, pp.74-84
"Few companies are thinking about hiring right now, but that's a mistake. If history is any guide, staffing will become a front-burner issue once the economic upheaval eases. Even now, companies are running into staffing problems in emerging markets, and many will have to find talented replacements for baby-boom retirees. Will they be able to meet their needs? Not likely, say Fernández-Aráoz of Egon Zehnder and Harvard Business School professors Groysberg and Nohria. Their research, conducted with scores of CEOs, HR executives, and recruiters, found current hiring practices to be haphazard at best and inept at worst. And no wonder. Ignorant of their staffing needs, most companies treat hiring top-level executives as an emergency. That leaves them little choice. One study found that nearly a quarter of the time, the executive selected was the only candidate considered. Far too few companies conduct reference checks; far too many rely on gut reactions when judging qualifications and cultural fit. Hardly anyone considers whether candidates will be good team players. And, shockingly, only half of the top managers recruited by the companies studied were interviewed by anyone in the C-suite. The result: About a third of promising new hires depart within three years of being recruited. As a remedy, the authors offer their best thinking about state-of-the-art hiring practices for the top levels of the organization. Their recommendations cover the entire hiring cycle in seven steps: anticipating the need for new hires, specifying the job, developing a pool of candidates, assessing the candidates, closing the deal, integrating the newcomer, and reviewing hire-process effectiveness. Whatever the future brings, firms that follow these practices successfully will have a distinct advantage over their short-sighted competitors."
Do Take That Break (journal article)
By Samuel Z. Goldhaber
from Harvard Business Review Vol 87 Iss 5 May 2009, pp. 30-30
"A recent study from Wellington Hospital in New Zealand found that office workers who sat for several hours without getting up were more likely to form a deep-vein thrombosis--that is, a blood clot in a vein deep in the leg--than those who moved about more often. Together, deep-vein thromboses and pulmonary embolisms (which occur when a piece of the clot breaks away and blocks blood flow to the lungs) kill upwards of 100,000 Americans each year, or about as many as die from breast, prostate, and colon cancer combined. In this article, Goldhaber, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains the connection between DVTs and prolonged periods of sitting anywhere (not just on airplanes) and offers tips for prevention."
Looking Toward the Future in the Midst of Economic Uncertainty (journal article)
By Martin Wolf
from Futurist Vol 43 Iss 3 May/June 2009, pp. 36-39
"A Financial Times columnist looks at challenges facing the global economy and how the
actions of governments could improve the situation — or worsen it."
Friday, 24 April 2009
Job protection legislation and productivity growth in OECD countries (journal article)
by Andrea Bassanini, Luca Nunziata and Danielle Venn
from Economic Policy, Vol 24 No 58, April 2009, pp. 349-402
"We examine the effect of dismissal regulation on productivity in the OECD, using annual cross-country aggregate data on the stringency of employment protection legislation and industry-level data on productivity from 1982 to 2003. Our empirical results suggest that mandatory dismissal regulations have a depressing impact on productivity growth in industries where layoff restrictions are more likely to be binding. By contrast, we find no evidence of a productivity effect of regulations concerning temporary contracts, which suggests that partial reforms, facilitating the use of fixed-term and atypical contracts, are unlikely to have an important impact on efficiency and technological change and cannot therefore be a substitute for comprehensive reforms whereby dismissal restrictions for open-ended contracts are also weakened. "
Balancing training and development programmes for your team (journal article)
by Andy Preston
from Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol 41 No 3, 2009, pp. 142-145
"Training should be bite-sized and incorporate real situations, coaching and feedback. The paper provides new thoughts and distinctions around the internal training arena and is suitable for training managers and directors of organisations. "
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
"Examines everyone from business giants to scientific geniuses, sports stars to musicians, and reveals what they have in common. He looks behind the spectacular results, the myths and the legends to show what really explains exceptionally successful people. ... [Argues that] the real secret of success turns out to be surprisingly simple, and it hinges on a few crucial twists in people’s life stories - on the culture they grow up in and the way they spend their time." - cover.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
"This fifth edition of Going for Growth comes at a time when OECD countries are faced with the most severe financial and economic crises in a lifetime. The still unfolding global crisis and recession have inevitably raised questions about the extent to which markets can be trusted to deliver good outcomes and whether earlier reforms have contributed to make economies more vulnerable. ... This report identifies three broad fiscal/structural reforms that could yield a “double-dividend” at present: increased spending on infrastructure; increased spending on active labour market policy, including on compulsory training courses; and reduction of personal income taxes, notably on low-income earners. In addition, product market reforms that ease entry restrictions and strengthen competition may boost demand in some cases in the short term and increase productivity in the long term."
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
An innovation economics agenda for the Obama administration (journal article)
By Robert D. Atkinson
from The Journal of Technology Transfer Vol 34 No 4 Aug 2009, pp. 440 - 447
"Seven recommendations are offered for the Obama Administration to ensure that the economy is on a robust growth path over the next decade. These recommendations are intended as first steps towards building the innovation-based public-private partnerships needed to drive economic growth and prosperity."
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Friday, 17 April 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
