Natural growth goals and short- term training: a boomerang effect

The purpose of this research project was to determine the effect of a training session about achieving natural growth goals on perceptions of a university classroom as a learning organisation. The results indicated that a short training session on how to achieve natural growth goals in an organisation appeared to have a boomerang effect on perceptions of a university classroom as a learning organisation. This study should alert us to the inevitable consequence of having our best training efforts backfire when they conflict with powerful, though latent, beliefs or cultural values.     

Asset Bubbles, Leverage and 'Lifeboats': Elements of the East Asian Crisis

Collapsing credit markets have been blamed for the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. Could similar mechanisms have played a role in ending the East Asian economic miracle – and in creating fragility in global financial markets? After a brief account of the nature of the East Asian crises of 1997/8, we use the framework of highly-leveraged, fully-collaterised firms due to Kiyotaki and Moore (1997) to explore the impact of a credit crunch. The paper emphasises the fragility of equilibrium and how rapidly boom can turn to bust.     

Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet

This paper examines workplace surveillance and monitoring. It is argued that privacy is a moral right, and while such surveillance and monitoring can be justified in some circumstances, there is a presumption against the infringement of privacy. An account of privacy precedes consideration of various arguments frequently given for the surveillance and monitoring of employees, arguments which look at the benefits, or supposed benefits, to employees as well as to employers. The paper examines the general monitoring of work, and the monitoring of email, listservers and the World Wide Web. It is argued that many of the common justifications given for this surveillance and monitoring do not stand up to close scrutiny.     

Minimum and preferred entry qualifications and training provision for British workers

This article reports the outcomes of a survey of British employers that requested information on the qualifications sought when recruiting employees, and on training and development offered subsequently to employees. Responses revealed that few employers actively sought vocational awards in potential employees. The only occupational category for which more employers specified a vocational award than an academic award was service workers. A substantial number of organisations specified no minimum entry level of qualification, even for higher–status occupations. Those organisations that did specify a minimum qualification level for recruits were significantly more likely to report that they trained their employees.     

People matter: commitment to employees,strategy and performance in Korean firms

The human element of enterprise is argued to be a vital resource for strategy execution. We show in a study of Korean businesses how an organization’s commitment to its employees’ well‐being (OCE) can aid in the profitable execution of its positioning strategies. We found that OCE, by itself, sometimes has a weakly positive association with return on assets (ROA). But far more important, we found that ROA is strongly and positively influenced by the interaction between OCE and the dedicated pursuit of Porter’s (1980) strategies for achieving competitive advantage: these are cost leadership, marketing differentiation and innovative differentiation. In short, dedicated positioning strategies appear to be executed more effectively where organizations exhibit a high level of commitment to their employees; and conversely, OCE is apt to have a strong impact on ROA only in the context of a dedicated, that is intensive and thorough, positioning strategy. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The harvest strategy: how to implement a disaster for the environment and the stockholders

This paper examines the harvest strategy – an often recommended approach for dealing with a weak business unit. It is shown to be a strategy that intertwines the distinct levels of strategy making with the ultimate goal of increasing corporate value. However, in order to be successful it must be carried out inconspicuously. Inconspicuousness is a euphemism for deception in the case of the harvest strategy. Such behavior, when an industrial accident occurs, exposes shareholders to the risk of substantial losses if the accident happens in high-risk technology industries. The authors illustrate their contention by analysing the financial consequences of the Union Carbide tragedy at Bhopal and the Exxon disaster at Valdez. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Financial performance patterns of new corporate ventures: an alternative to traditional measures

This paper describes some of the limitations involved in using traditional performance measures to evaluate new ventures and suggests an alternative. We argue that the use of traditional performance measures in the new venture setting can produce misdirected decision making by managers and misleading model development by researchers. The traditional performance measures evaluated are return on investment, cashflow, market share gain, and returns to stockholders. The alternative performance measured presented is based upon an evaluation of patterns of improvement in return on investment across time.These patterns of performance are mapped using regression analysis. Return on investment is regressed against time, and the parameters of the resulting models' parameters are themselves used as performance measures. The beta-coefficient (β) is used to measure the overall rate of change in financial performance from year to year and the coefficient of determination (r²) is used to measure the predictability of change. To combine the information available in each of these parameters into a single variable, we multiply β by r² and call the result “V.” Thus, V is a measure of the velocity of improvement in financial performance across time adjusted for the level of variability in the performance trend.Much work remains to be done that could substantially improve the usefulness of V to managers and researchers. More sophisticated approaches than the one used here might include weighting either β or r² to fit the particular goal orientation of a given management team. Other model parameters might be used in conjunction with, or in place of, β or r² to increase or improve the information captured in V. Measures of financial performance other than return on investment (ROI) could also be used as the basis of calculating V.Even in its current simple form, however, V appears to be a useful performance measure. In 87 of 112 NCVs studied, V provided a useful summary of the pattern of performance's development. In 25 of 112 cases, there were important characteristics of performance that could not be captured by V. The most important managerial implication of V entails the shift to evaluating a new venture on the basis of its progress toward a desirable end rather than on the end itself. This provides a logical means of evaluating the financial performance of a new venture at an earlier time than would be possible otherwise.