销售质量的价值

如果你问任何一个销售人员什么是他们工作上最关心的问题时，大多数情况下他的回答会是“完成我的销售指标”。然后，如果你问那个销售人员是否会确保他们有提供给顾客解决问题的措施时，他的回答很可能是“对，我们也会那样做，但是只是在达到我们的销售目标后。”     

Viewpoint: Boosting Recessions

This paper explores the effectiveness of boosting, often regarded as the state of the art classification tool, in giving warning signals of recessions 3, 6, and 12 months ahead. Boosting is used to screen as many as 1,500 potentially relevant predictors consisting of 132 real and financial time series and their lags. Estimation over the full sample 1961:1–2011:12 finds that there are fewer than 10 important predictors and the identity of these variables changes with the forecast horizon. There is a distinct difference in the size and composition of the relevant predictor set before and after mid‐1980. Rolling window estimation reveals that the importance of the term and default spreads are recession specific. The Aaa spread is the most robust predictor of recessions three and 6 months ahead, while the risky bond and 5‐year spreads are important for 12 months ahead predictions. Certain employment variables have predictive power for the two most recent recessions when the interest rate spreads were uninformative. Warning signals for the post‐1990 recessions have been sporadic and easy to miss. The results underscore the challenge that changing characteristics of business cycles pose for predicting recessions.     

Women-friendly HRM good for QWL? The case of Hong Kong based companies

Organizations in Hong Kong were surveyed to gauge how women-friendly they were and how their human resource managers viewed the effect of women-friendly HRM policies and practices on employees' quality of work life. It was found that only about half of the policies mentioned in the questionnaire were practised by less than 10 per cent of the organizations. Principal component analysis conducted showed that organizational women-friendliness was multi-facet in nature. Using these facets - women friendly dimensions (WFDs) - as criteria and controlling for size, the study found that firms with American and European origins were more women-friendly than Hong Kong firms. Furthermore, when American companies were compared to Hong Kong companies, it was on the WFD of career development that the former were significantly higher than the latter. In contrast, when comparing European organizations with Hong Kong organizations, it was the WFD of flexibility on which the two differed most markedly.     

Minimizing Basel III Capital Requirements with Unconditional Coverage Constraint

The new Basel III framework increases the banks’ market risk capital requirements. In this paper, we introduce a new risk management approach based on the unconditional coverage test to minimize the regulatory capital requirements. Portfolios optimized with our new minimum capital constraint successfully reduce the Basel III market risk capital requirements. In general, portfolios with value-at-risk and conditional-value-at-risk objective functions and underlying empirical distribution yield better portfolio risk profiles and have lower capital requirements. For the optimization we use the threshold-accepting heuristic and the common trust-region search method.     

CEO Leadership Styles and the Implementation of Organizational Diversity Practices: Moderating Effects of Social Values and Age

Drawing on strategic choice theory, we investigate the influence of CEO leadership styles and personal attributes on the implementation of organizational diversity management practices. Specifically, we examined CEO transformational and transactional leadership in relation to organizational diversity practices and whether CEO social values and age may moderate these relationships. Our results suggest that transformational leadership is most strongly associated with the implementation of diversity practices. Transactional leadership is also related to the implementation of diversity management practices when either CEO social values or age are relatively high. These findings extend previous work examining predictors of diversity management in organizations and highlight the central role that organizational leaders may play in the successful implementation of these practices.     

Competitive blind spots in an institutional field

Unlike institutional or macro‐cultural explanations of competition, competition need not be viewed as a shared social reality. Instead, competition can be interpreted differently by multiple stakeholders of a value chain. However, due to managerial blind spots, such various interpretations of competition are less than apparent to management. Yet explanations of such blind spots are not well documented. Hence, to explain such blind spots, a conceptual model based on overconfidence biases is developed in which managers develop a ‘self‐centered’ view of competition that blinds them from the competitive beliefs of their value chain customers. Differences in competitive beliefs, thus, arise and are argued to contribute to such managerial blind spots. Furthermore, to empirically examine such managerial blind spots, the competitive perceptions held by various members of a swine genetics value chain were surveyed. Through cluster and MANOVA analyses, this study shows that, unlike institutional/macro‐cultural explanations of competition, these members do not share a common consensus of the key attributes and groupings of competition. The implications and contributions of this study are also discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Board Governance in Canadian Universities

In response to increasing fiscal pressure, Canadian universities have turned towards managerialism, that is, applying managerial tools of business with the objectives of improving operating efficiency, raising the institution's marketability, and generating commercial revenue. In addition to employing the services of professional administrators to enhance the institution's economic performance, universities appear to be switching from a collegial model of shared governance to a corporate model of governance. An objective of this exploratory study is to examine the current state of board governance in Canadian universities. Results of a survey from 133 board members of 28 universities indicate, by and large, that board members seem to have a good understanding of their roles and responsibilities. The boards are involved in setting strategic directions, goals, and objectives, and are making operating and capital resource allocation decisions. They are also monitoring the performance of the university and the president, and are involved in recruiting, succession planning, and determining the president's compensation package. The respondents report that the board committee structure and the support provided to board members allow them to discharge their responsibilities as board members properly. There is, however, room for improvement, especially in the board's participation in defining and reviewing the institution's strategic directions, plans, goals, and objectives, as well as monitoring the performance of the university and senior administrators. Other areas for possible improvement include continuing education on matters within the board's purview as well as providing better information for decision making to board members.     

Estimation of a dynamic model of weight

The ongoing debate about the economic causes of obesity has focused on the changing relative prices of diet and exercise. This paper uses a model that explicitly includes time and spatially varying community-level urbanicity and price measures as instruments to obtain estimates of the effects of diet, physical activity, drinking, and smoking on weight. The instruments control for bias due to unobservables that may be common determinants of weight and these explanatory variables. We apply a dynamic panel system GMM estimation model to longitudinal (1991–2006) data from China to model weight and find that among adult men in China, about 5.4% of weight gain was due to declines in physical activity and 2.8–3.1% was due to dietary changes over this period. Combined, changes in physical activity and diet only explain around 8% of the short run gain in weight and about 11% of the long-run gain in weight among Chinese men.     

The Distinction Between Charisma and Vision: An Empirical Study

It is argued that the confusion clouding new leadership theories can be cleared if charisma and vision are treated as distinct constructs. Consistent with the argument, new instruments for measuring the two constructs were developed and the moderating role of cognitive complexity in distinguishing charisma and vision was examined. Further, the study investigated the effects of charisma and vision on motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and performance of followers. Self-reports were obtained from 455 subordinates of 138 managers from 10 companies in Singapore. Findings suggest that both charisma and vision have two dimensions each and that these dimensions affect the four follower-level outcomes differentially.