Should You Spin Off Your Internet Business?

The purpose of most corporate spin-offs is to unlock the shareholder value of a business unit that is not critical to the parent company's success. Internet spin-offs raise additional problems, partly because they are so new. This article sets out a multi-dimensional framework to help managers decide how to structure their internet businesses: whether to keep them integrated into the parent company, to establish them as wholly-owned subsidiaries or to spin them off 'wholly or partially'. The authors argue that companies must weigh the trade-offs between what they call the 'three Cs': control, currency and culture. The collapse of internet stock prices in April/May 2000 reduced but did not eliminate then 'currency' attraction of the spin-off option. But issues of control and culture were always just as important. Above all, the decision must be made in the context of a company's total 'digital agenda': that is, as part of a company's overall strategy for creating and sustaining value in the new economy.     

Local authorities, tourism and competition

Tourism development has become a popular pursuit for local authorities seeking to generate new economic horizons. This requires the existence of some special attraction or package, something to distinguish an area from the basic diet of potentials that everywhere else can offer, or a strong competitive edge in what might be labelled as conventional markets. Unfortunately, new ways of nurturing tourism activity are increasingly hard to find and the tourism development scene is an increasingly competitive arena. Yet, competition is an unspoken word within the realms of tourism professionals, and a matter that is rarely confronted in any overt way by researchers.     

Modeling and Assessing Sustainable Enterprise Excellence

The enterprise excellence and modern sustainability movements have developed along near parallel timelines. Skilled use of enterprise excellence systems has been documented to significantly boost performance across an array of key domains, including financial, human capital, operations and supply chain, and other areas. Notably absent are social and environmental performance, with their absence attributable to the inadequate emphasis on enterprise excellence of these domains. Similarly, although the triple bottom line is core to the sustainability movement, many adherents of sustainability approach its people and planet domains with ardor, yet virtually neglect its profit domain. A simple model of sustainable enterprise excellence and accompanying maturity assessment regimen are introduced and advanced as a means of merging these movements to drive an equity, ecology and economy triple top line strategy to produce triple bottom line people, planet and profit performance with innovation and organizational design playing pivotal roles in both the model and its assessment. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Assessing Managers’ Ethical Decision-making: An Objective Measure of Managerial Moral Judgment

Recent allegations of unethical decision-making by leaders in prominent business organizations have jeopardized the world’s confidence in American business. The purpose of this research was to develop a measure of managerial moral judgment that can be used in future research and managerial assessment. The measure was patterned after the Defining Issues Test, a widely used general measure of moral judgment. With content validity as the goal, we aimed to sample the domain of managerial ethical situations by establishing links to dimensions of managerial performance, as well as to the types of organizational justice issues managers encounter. Proposed scenarios were evaluated for realism by ethics officers and human resource managers. Results indicated that the new measure is reliable and correlates with a number of relevant variables in the hypothesized manner, demonstrating evidence of construct validity. Implications for future research and for human resources management are discussed.     

Adoption of conservation tillage in Australian cropping regions: An application of duration analysis

The diffusion of agricultural innovations is rarely rapid. As a result, adoption decisions over time are very likely to be influenced by changes in generic factors such as the price of complementary inputs and environmental conditions. Despite this, the vast majority of studies aiming to explain innovation adoption are limited to cross-sectional data and analysis techniques that cannot accommodate time-dependent variables. This study departs from these attempts by using a duration analysis technique to investigate the significance of time-dependent economic and environmental variables, along with cross-sectional variables such as technology-specific perceptions, on the adoption of soil-conserving cropping practices by grain growers in southern Australia over the period 1983–2003. Of particular interest is the possible trade-off faced by farmers where adoption of no-tillage cropping technology can lead to greater herbicide reliance and subsequently unsustainable weed management due to high risks of herbicide resistance. Results show that factors affecting the cost-effectiveness of herbicides are important in the adoption of the erosion-reducing cropping systems. Several factors relating to the availability and use of technical information are also shown to be influential. The duration analysis approach allowed changes in time-dependent variables, including the fall in the price of the herbicide glyphosate, to be identified as determinants of the timing of no-till adoption.