Revenue enhancement,part 1: a straightforward approach for making more money

Revenue enhancement—comprising strategies for increasing the amount of money a business makes—requires that a business solve a guest's problems in such a way that the guest pays to have those needs satisfied and is pleased at the outcome. Involving creative approaches to serving guests, revenue enhancement implies a management commitment to seek guests who are willing and able to pay for solutions to their problems. Revenue enhancement can be as simple as letting guests know what services are available or asking them about their needs so that one can match up desired services to those offered by a hotel or restaurant, or it can be as complicated as applying computer-based yield-management algorithms. In addition to encouraging guests to spend their money, managers committed to revenue enhancement must set up incentives that allow their employees to share in the additional profits brought about by the extra services that the employees offer. Developing new services, repackaging existing services, and shifting peak demand to off-peak times are all tactics that can enhance revenue. This is the first in a series discussing specifically how hotels and restaurants can apply revenue-enhancing strategies.     

Compensating corporate venture managers

This article reports the results of a questionnaire survey addressed to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies concerning incentive practices for venture managers. Data was also collected for venture performance history in these companies.Highlights of the results are:Most companies are not providing different incentives for venture managers than for other managers.Companies that do and companies that do not provide special incentives seem to agree on the types of incentives which would promote improved venture performance, which include milestone bonuses, equity, and/or options in the new venture, variable bonuses based on venture ROI.The primary obstacle to installing such incentives is reported by firms without special incentives in place to be concern about internal equity.Firms with special incentives already in place have less concern with this problem. A moderate problem to such firms is difficulty in defining venture objectives.There is no evidence, from this study, that special incentives for venture managers affected the outcome in venture performance, when such performance was measured by the percentage of “successes” and “failures.” About 50% success rate was reported by each group.The article deals with these questions:Are performance incentives essential?Certainly not, from the data in this sample, but this was a “head count” of successes and failures—a study of overall economic performance might yield a different result. One expensive failure can wipe out the gains from many small successes.Are the incentives reported effective?Obviously not enough to show a difference between those who use them and those who don't. Analysis of the incentive elements used and the earnings limits imposed suggest that the special incentives are not particularly special, nor very much of an incentive. Further, the most common incentive reported, based on venture ROI, fails to consider the time period usually required to achieve a positive ROI, and the many changes of management which occur during that period.What criteria should be used for designing an incentive program for venture managers?Recognition of the probability of management change, incentives which promote early identification of need for change of direction or to abort, focus on event completion milestones rather than the calendar, the relationship of reward potential to risk potential including job security and actual financial risk by the venture manager, achievability, and simplicity are factors to be considered.What kind of financial incentives might be included in incentive design?Depending on the life cycle stage of the venture, fixed and variable bonuses, options for equity or shadow equity in the venture itself, actual equity in the new venture, and to a lesser extent, salary increases and equity or equity options in the parent are suggested. How can the obstacles to installation of performance incentives for venture managers be reduced?To reduce perception of internal inequity, relating potential risk to potential reward and extending performance incentives to other managers is suggested. The problem of defining venture objectives as an obstacle is instantly solved as an incentive issue by making ownership possibility a reality for venture management, especially with financial investment required by venture management.     

Should you manage ethics or corruption?

Corruption is truly a global scourge. Ethical scandals are recurring theater on the business stage, coming most often in the wake of financial booms that feed individual greed and lead managers to make decisions that favor personal gain over organizational good. The recurring cycle of scandalreform‐scandal, however, demonstrates the challenges of ethics management. Some companies are discovering a better way to confront the challenge and managing not just ethics, but corruption as well. The advantage of a corruption perspective lies in its focus on systems instead of a personal philosophy. Taking a corruption management perspective doesn't ignore the individual but sees the individual in a larger systemic context. Taking a corruption management approach requires fusing the insights of managerial ethics with the tactics used to fight systemic corruption. When successful it creates something simple and elegant: integrity. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Managing Family Businesses in Small Communities

Small businesses located in communities with populations of less than 10,000 were identified in a national sample of family businesses and examined for differences in their management strategies (n = 384). These businesses were first clustered by level and type of management strategy and then analyzed to ascertain differences and similarities in both personal and business firm characteristics among the family business manager groupings. Problems associated with small business management and sources of assistance were also identified. Findings suggest that managers of small family businesses located in small U.S. communities who practiced strategies focusing on extensive planning and controlling perceived their businesses to be successful; however, these managers noted that their greatest problem involved development of sound marketing strategies.     

Understanding gift giving in Japan

It's frowned on in the U.S., but in Japan gift giving has a long tradition. The practice of gift exchange has many complicated rules that an American should understand if he or she doesn't want to appear illmannered to a prospective business associate.     

Green Business Strategies of Exporting Manufacturing Firms: Antecedents,Practices, and Outcomes

This research investigates the drivers that lead exporting manufacturing companies to adopt environmentally friendly actions, exploring green business practices/strategies they conducted and examining the outcomes which resulted from companies' green business activities. This exploratory study particularly focuses on green business strategies of Turkish manufacturing exporters. Thirty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with executive managers from 22 companies and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The results of the study reveal two internal (i.e., capabilities and resources) and four external stimulating forces (i.e., stakeholder pressures, institutional-based, network-based, and external factors) that encourage companies to implement green business operations, which were also classified under six functional themes. This study emphasizes several noteworthy outcomes (i.e., export competitive advantage and export performance). In doing so, the findings of this study provide a holistic insight into green business strategies within the exporting context by outlining both theoretical and managerial implications.     

Business Ethics versus Economic Incentives:<Emphasis Type="Italic">Contemporary Issues and Dilemmas</Emphasis>

Contemporary economic thought presumes that individuals in a society always act according to their self-interest or private economic incentives, while important ethical motivations for action, such as a concern for others and public interest, are largely ignored. This paper is based on my experience of teaching an undergraduate course that highlighted the divergence between economic incentives and ethical motives for action in present-day life and business. Teaching tools such as lectures, case and group discussions were employed to address important ethical dilemmas of individuals and managers in contemporary societies. Readings underscored the evolving relationship of business ethics and economic incentives, and the relevance of ancient ethical principles (e.g., Ethics of Interdependence, and Ethics of Prudence and Self-Development) to present-day business ethics. The course emphasized the imminent need in contemporary societies to reduce the divergence between economic incentives and ethical motives for action, and called for a greater understanding of business ethics today, given the complex ethical concerns that managers confront in the current global environment.     

Corporate Ethics Codes: A Practical Application of Liability Prevention

With the great increase in litigation, insurance costs, and consumer prices, both managers and businesses should take a proactive position in avoiding liability. Legal liability may attach when a duty has been breached; many actions falling into this category are also considered unethical. Since much of business liability is caused by a breach of a duty by a business to either an individual, another business, or to society, this article asserts that the practice of liability prevention is a practical business application of ethics. In today's highly litigious environment, it is appropriate for the concept of general liability prevention to be included in corporate codes of ethics.     

Quality function deployment in failure recovery and prevention

This paper presents a strategic model for proactively recovering and preventing service failures; it employs an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to measure the severity of failure categories and ultimately employs quality function deployment (QFD) to identify the execution order of proactive recovery and prevention strategies. Questionnaires on AHP and QFD were used to collect data. The results show that the three most important strategies, ‘Educational training of employees,’ ‘Managerial level professional expertise and leadership,’ and ‘Staff appraisal, reward, and punishment systems,’ are within the purview of human resources management. Human resource management plays a key role in service failure and recovery management. For individual failure categories, business managers can select those that are most severe and execute proactive recovery and failure prevention strategies. We propose a methodology for designing service recovery systems and that addresses the gap in academic research on proactive recovery and service failure prevention.     

Innovation and risk-taking in a transitional economy: A comparative study of chinese managers and entrepreneurs

This research was set in the People's Republic of China. As former socialist China moves from central planning toward a more market-driven economy, improved knowledge about the new environment and firm decisions within such an environment has significant implications. For organizational researchers, such a transition represents a genuine shift of paradigm, and thus offers a unique opportunity to test existing organizational theories and develop new ones. For multinational businesses seeking business opportunities, they have to compete or cooperate with these Chinese firms, whether state-owned or privately owned.Motivated by a deep curiosity in, using the language of Williamson (1996), “What is going on there” behind the “bamboo curtain,” and underpinned by a strong conviction that organizational researchers have much to gain as well as to offer by focusing on transitional economies, I undertook this study to examine characteristics of a regulatory environment and the impact on innovation and risk-taking among Chinese managers and entrepreneurs. I collected original primary data that represents managers from large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and entrepreneurs from small privately-owned enterprises (POEs) through personal interviews and a survey. Significant differences were found between managers and entrepreneurs in their reported environmental characteristics, strategic orientations, size, and firm performance, indicating that managers are not as innovative and are less willing to make risky decisions than entrepreneurs. Being smaller and faster than SOEs, entrepreneurial firms have adopted some strategies that distinguish them from their larger and more established competitors. Speed, stealth, and sound execution allow entrepreneurs to harvest first-mover advantages and thus increase their chances for survival in a turbulent environment.     

From Red to Green: Towards the Environmental Management in the Country in Transition

This paper investigates the driving forces behind the environment-oriented management in Slovenia, a country in transition. The study focuses on attititudes of managers towards different aspects of the concern for the environment, the most important sources of pressure on companies for better environmental performance, the potential conflict between environmental and other business goals, and perception of barriers to the environmentally responsible behaviour of a company. The study uncovers a strong belief that the government is responsible to prevent damage caused to the environment by industry.     

Computer‐based data and organizational learning: The importance of managers’ stories

While many organizations are investing large amounts of money to provide computer‐based data to their managers, little is known about how, or even whether, managers use these data to learn about the business environment. This issue is explored by examining how grocery product managers use supermarket scanner data to learn about changes in the marketing environment. Managers’ stories play a central role in the four‐step process used by one product management organization as it learns from analyzing computer‐based data. First, a manager examines the data and looks for unexpected results—findings that contradict one or more of her stories about the marketing environment. If something is found, the manager carries out a relatively unstructured, multistage process to make sense out of the unexpected result. This process can be viewed as a dialogue between the result and a set of tools at the manager's disposal (including analyses of computer‐based data). Next, the manager tells the story to share her insights with peers and superiors, developing a common understanding. Finally, the manager creates an official story, which is used to “sell”; new marketing approaches to people outside the product manager organization—the sales force and supermarket buyers.     

Buying into Europe

Danger may lurk for the U.S. companies that simply think, “Well, here comes 1992. I guess we had better get a foothold somewhere in Europe.” A company that doesn't make sound choices based on the many complex factors involved will find only trouble—not more profits.     

A framework for conducting a customer orientation audit

It can be all too easy for senior managers, especially those in large organisations to become cut off from their customers and hold comfortable illusions about how well products and services are being received. This underscores the difficulties companies face in sustaining a systematic programme of customer orientation. This paper argues that the difficulties arise primarily from lack of effective internal organisation. It provides a framework which is intended to help decision makers in organisations to analyse and evaluate their overall customer strategies, and determine whether or not such strategies truly reflect a culture of customer orientation. The method offered here is requisite for strategic customer management, which is called for in today's turbulent business environment.     

Barriers and stimuli to the use of information technology in retailing

The retail marketing environment is continuously changing. Changes in retail format, retailing processes and the competitive environment continue to create problems for retail management. This article examines the barriers and stimuli to the adoption of innovation in infonnation technology. Our objective is to demonstrate how managers might anticipate the problems associated with managing significant change and develop appropriate strategies to deal with such problems. Previous research has indicated that it is important to explore the views of a range of managers in the organization. Much of the previous research has relied on a single respondent from many organizations to provide an accurate picture. This research does not follow that tradition. It uses the views of more than one hundred managers within one organization. The research explores the relative attractiveness of the innovation to individual managers, the organization's receptivity to change and the presence or absence of a 'product' champion. It ends with recommendations on ways of improving the rate of acceptance of such technologies.     

Is Environmental Governance Substantive or Symbolic? An Empirical Investigation

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance.     

The Greening of Business Schools

"New modes of thinking" are necessary to meet a new set of complex environmental challenges-greenery, globalization, diversity, complexity and acceleration of technological change of the 1990s. The green challenge to business schools is to articulate, develop, and deliver environmental education for managers as an effective tool for a sustainable world economy and society. Every business student must have at least broad understanding of the social, political, ethical, technological, economic, and ecological context of global business. The challenge of educating business leaders for a global future requires a new portfolio of capabilities, commitments. and visions on the part of business school faculty, the multinational corporations, and other stakeholders in management education. Business schools around the world have an obligation to present the ecological challenge as clearly to students as to faculty members. The more environmentally conscious business student community of the 1990s probably will demand to have structured learning opportunities about environmental issues and their impact on business management- with a superordinate goal of improving environmental sensitivity and environmental performance of individuals and their institutions.     

The dark triad and corporate sustainability: An empirical analysis of personality traits of sustainability managers

Middle managers responsible for sustainability operationalize top management decisions on the organization's social and environmental activities. With their focus on sustainability, they could be expected to consider ethical issues particularly well in their decisions and to possess ethical personality traits. While earlier research has focused on top management this paper examines the influence of personality traits of middle managers on their corporate sustainability preferences. Based on a primary survey sample of 204 professionals responsible for sustainability in their company, we study the relationship between dark triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) of sustainability managers and their environmental and social responsibility preferences. The analysis shows that managers who score higher on the dark triad personality scale are less concerned about environmental and social responsibility issues. The business environment, analyzed in a cross-cultural comparison between the United States and Europe, and the organizational context function as a moderator of the influence of personality traits on sustainability preferences. The results suggest that dark triad personality traits should be considered in recruitment and assessment processes of middle managers responsible for corporate sustainability.     

Implementing Green Practices as Sustainable Innovation Among Herbal-Based SME Entrepreneurs

The need for policies to foster green practices, sustainable environmental management and conservation of biodiversity has been given priority by world leaders. Various factors causing environmental degradation such as global warming, pollution, climate change, deforestation and increasingly threatened biodiversity have triggered awareness among the upstream and downstream players in the manufacturing industry, providing impetus for industries to practice sustainable manufacturing and environmentally friendly management. As a result, consumers are now increasing their demand for products that are made from natural or traditional rather resources, such as herbal based pharmaceutical products, rather than chemical-based products. The sustainability issue not only places pressure on entrepreneurs to move towards green practices, but also to meet the increasing demand for herbal-based products that are produced in a sustainable environment. This article aims to assess herbal based SME entrepreneurs’ intention to adopt green practices in their business activities. Two hundred fifty six (256) herbal based entrepreneurs were interviewed via a structural questionnaire to gather information regarding their perception of green practices and their intention to adopt them. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used as the theoretical framework to determine the relationships between TPB constructs. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the information. The results indicate that positive attitudes towards sustainability are being embraced by those who are concerned about the environment and the intention to adopt innovative green practices is realized by their possession of the caring attribute.     

Markets and managerial discretion: Tooth & Co., 1970–1981

Studies of business have often sought to explain features of management activity, particularly labour management activity, with reference to the product market conditions faced by managers. This paper argues that a more nuanced understanding of management can be gained by examining both the product and financial market environment. These conditions influence the structuring of management and the development and application of managerial policy. This paper examines the management, particularly the labour management, of one of Australia's leading companies during the twentieth century. Specifically it examines how the product and financial market environment faced by this company in the 1970s influenced the labour management strategies pursued. It shows that particular market conditions will privilege or provide justification for certain types of labour management activity. This is illustrated by examining this company's operation under two distinct sets of market conditions.