From vision into action

Utopian thinking, problematic as it can be, is used for imagining alternative visions of the future as a design process. Visioning adds foresight to an active-learning process in which participants share critical reflection, decision and change, as Anticipatory Action Learning. Guidelines, including ethics, are suggested. Once its limitations are recognised, it can be a used for integrating learning in a social system.     

Putting leadership back into strategy

In recent decades an infusion of economics has lent the study of strategy much needed theory and empirical evidence. Strategy consultants, armed with frameworks and techniques, have stepped forward to help managers analyze their industries and position their companies for strategic advantage. Strategy has come to be seen as an analytical problem to be solved. But, says Montgomery, the Timken Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, the benefits of this rigorous approach have attendant costs: Strategy has become a competitive game plan, separate from the company's larger sense of purpose. The CEO's unique role as arbiter and steward of strategy has been eclipsed. And an overemphasis on sustainable competitive advantage has obscured the importance of making strategy a dynamic tool for guiding the company's development over time. For any company, intelligent guidance requires a clear sense of purpose, of what makes the organization truly distinctive. Purpose, Montgomery says, serves as both a constraint on activity and a guide to behavior. Creativity and insight are key to forging a compelling organizational purpose; analysis alone will never suffice. As the CEO--properly a company's chief strategist--translates purpose into practice, he or she must remain open to the possibility that the purpose itself may need to change. Lou Gerstner did this in the 1990s, when he decided that IBM would evolve to focus on applying technology rather than on inventing it. So did Steve Jobs, when he rescued Apple from a poorly performing strategy and expanded the company into attractive new businesses. Watching over strategy day in and day out is the CEO's greatest opportunity to shape the firm as well as outwit the competition.     

Environmental regulations and firms' green innovations: Transforming pressure into incentives

Considering China's Eleventh Five-Year Plan as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper identifies the effect of environmental regulations on green innovations with a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) strategy. We find that: (1) environmental regulations promote both the quantity and quality of firms' green innovations, which are measured by patent counts and citations respectively. This effect is more salient for firms in regions with higher regulation intensity and firms in industries with higher pollution intensity. (2) Firms with greater pressure from environmental regulations are more likely to conduct green innovations, which is mainly reflected by the increased innovation efficiency of retained inventors. (3) Environmental regulations have a crowed-out effect, resulting in some firms exiting the market or migrating from high-pollution industries to low-pollution industries. (4) Environmental regulations improve firm performance in the long run and are conducive to the improvement of local environmental quality. This paper provides implications for regulators concerning environment and innovation.     

Management of frontline financial sales personnel

The employee turnover rate within the financial services industry is one of the highest among all industries. Studies demonstrate that a salesperson’s organizational commitment and propensity to leave are impacted by job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. This study examines the relationships among emotional exhaustion, organizational commitment, propensity to leave and the facets of job satisfaction. Findings support that: (i) financial services salespeople’s propensity to leave is influenced by emotional exhaustion, (ii) emotional exhaustion is mediated by multi-faceted job satisfaction in predicting organizational commitment and (iii) the facets of job satisfaction are, in part, mediated by organizational commitment in predicting propensity to leave.     

Transforming visionary products into realities: constituency-building and observacting in NewsPad

In September 1996, NewsPad—one of the first serious prototypes ever of the portable tablet computer went on show during Edinburgh's iTV96 Conference. The paper recounts and analyses the NewsPad experience and, simultaneously, tells a story of the explicit implementation of the sociotechnical constituencies theoretical approach to guide and inform the innovation process in highly uncertain conditions. The discussion is structured in short sections from the visions and realities of the portable tablet computer to the successful demonstration of the working NewsPad in Edinburgh.     

The kinesthetic speaker. Putting action into words

Speeches and presentations offer an interesting catch-22: executives don't want to spend long hours creating them, and people don't want to sit for long hours listening to them. Ultimately, though, executives can't live without them. That's because a good speech or presentation has the power to inspire people to act on the speaker's behalf and create change. Author Nick Morgan, a longtime speech-writer and speaking coach, says what's most often lacking in today's speeches and presentations is what he calls the "kinesthetic connection." Many good speakers connect aurally with their audiences, telling dramatic stories and effectively pacing their speeches to hold people's attention. Others connect visually, with a vivid film clip or a killer slide. Some people do both, but not many also connect kinesthetically. Morgan says the kinesthetic speaker feeds an audience's primal hunger to experience a presentation on a physical, as well as an intellectual, level. Through awareness of their own physical presence--gestures, posture, movements--and through the effective use of the space in which they present, kinesthetic speakers can create potent nonverbal messages that reinforce their verbal ones. In this article, Morgan describes techniques for harnessing kinesthetic power and creating a sense of intimacy with an audience--a closeness that is more widely expected from speakers since the advent of television. For instance, kinesthetic speakers should make use of audience proxies--individuals in the crowd who serve as representatives for the others. Ultimately, the author says, a speech or presentation offers something of great value to business executives: it's the best vehicle for winning trust from large groups of people--be they employees, colleagues, or share-holders.     

Transforming giants

Large corporations have long been seen as lumbering, inflexible, bureaucratic--and clueless about global developments. But recently some multinationals seem to be transforming themselves: They're engaging employees, moving quickly, and introducing innovations that show true connection with the world. Harvard Business School's Kanter ventured with a research team inside a dozen global giants--including IBM, Procter & Gamble, Omron, CEMEX, Cisco, and Banco Real--to discover what has been driving the change. After conducting more than 350 interviews on five continents, she and her colleagues came away with a strong sense that we are witnessing the dawn of a new model of corporate power: The coordination of actions and decisions on the front lines now appears to stem from widely shared values and a sturdy platform of common processes and technology, not from top-down decrees. In particular, the values that engage the passions of far-flung workforces stress openness, inclusion, and making the world a better place. Through this shift in what might be called their guidance systems, the companies have become as creative and nimble as much smaller ones, even while taking on social and environmental challenges of a scale that only large enterprises could attempt. IBM, for instance, has created a nonprofit partnership, World Community Grid, through which any organization or individual can donate unused computing power to research projects and see what is being done with the donation in real time. IBM has gained an inspiring showcase for its new technology, helped business partners connect with the company in a positive way, and offered individuals all over the globe the chance to contribute to something big.     

转变农村金融发展模式

国际金融公司(IFC)是世界银行的一部分,是一个发展机构,我们希望能够带来一些社会影响,同时我们还是一个商业性机构,国际金融公司也需要一定程度的金融回报、财务回报,这是我们在这个领域经营的一个宗旨.     

换牌子更要换机制--金维虹谈北京农村商业银行发展

2005年10月19日,北京农村商业银行成立大会在人民 大会堂隆重举行。作为拥有注册资本50多亿元、股权结构多元化、国 内资本金最大的农村商业银行,将会以何种姿态立足于中国银行业之 林,将以何种精神来面对北京城乡客户,为此,本刊记者采访了北京 农村商业银行首任行长金维虹。虽然他来北京农村信用联社只有半年 多,虽然一直忙于农村商业银行筹建方面的事务性工作,但这位曾在 央行工作、刚从深圳城市商业银行行长位置上卸任的学者型行长,谈 起北京农商行的未来发展自然成竹在胸。     

Transforming policy through local wisdom

The powerful forces of technology, the global economy, and demographic changes are reshaping how people live and how communities function all around the world. Many observers are concerned about the impact of these forces on the quality of life in communities and people's ability to mitigate the negative impacts associated with rapid social and economic transformation. Indeed, confidence has waned in the ability of established institutions and governments to respond to these challenges. Local communities are meeting these future challenges by tapping the wisdom and energy of their neighbors and together, forging relationships and building upon the assets in their environments. In short, they are building community. Their work pushes government and more established institutions to think differently about how to create opportunities, achieve equity and improve lives. This essay illustrates how inserting the community building approach into policymaking can produce better policies that reflect the wisdom, experience and voice of local constituencies and proposes a strategy for improving policymaking by transforming the policy process itself into one that builds community.     

Shifting risk to the frontline: case studies in different contract working environments

An extensive body of safety literature and research discusses the integral role of rules and procedures in managing workplace hazards, ensuring worker safety, and safeguarding the environment. Nevertheless, organizational accidents and workplace injuries continue to occur, and individual employees often bear the brunt of responsibility. This paper examines how risk becomes shifted to individuals at the bottom of supply chains, focusing on two different groups of contract workers. Specifically, it draws on case studies conducted in Australia – one on civil contractors working around hazardous infrastructure and one on athletes who are subject to anti-doping requirements. A comparison of the two cases and their distinctive elements illuminates the ways in which structural pressures, organizational dynamics, and context-specific conditions influence the risks shouldered by individuals. Our analysis shows that, in both cases, adverse outcomes are widely seen as the responsibility of contract workers, prompting other actors to judge them as blameworthy. In doing so, risk in various forms (e.g. safety, financial, reputational) becomes shifted onto workers who are constrained by contracts and away from away from higher level actors and organizations that are generally in more powerful positions than frontline workers. This finding suggests that the burden of accountability and potentially liability is borne primarily by frontline workers. Because of this focus, it is easy to lose sight of organizational and structural conditions that contribute to the risks revealed at the individual level. Through an analysis of 57 interviews across both sectors, complemented by participant observations and a media review, this paper underscores the importance of critically considering not only individual worker actions, but also how regulation can support the diversion of risk, responsibility, and liability onto frontline workers.     

以经营转型应对资本约束困境--2005年腾冲联席会议述评

今年的全国股份制商业银行行长联席会议于9月初在云南腾冲召开,12家股份制商业银行的行长们共同讨论和应对15年来最棘手的一个难题——资本约束困境。会议的进展如何,最终达到一个什么样的共识,本刊就此将作一介绍。     

Transforming labor-management practices through real-time analytics

Catholic Health Partners (CHP) decentralized productivity management, giving its regional executives greater control over their productivity tools and data. CHP retained centralized management of its benchmarking and analytics and created an enterprise database with standardized information. CHP's stakeholders shared accountability and accepted greater responsibility for labor-management decisions.     

Transforming rural lives through decentralized green power

India has been pursuing non-conventional sources of energy for various applications for a long time now. Several technologies—solar heating, solar photovoltaic, biomass, wind—have been demonstrated over the years. Currently, renewable sources of energy make up for about 5% of grid electricity produced in the country. This is impressive growth compared to 2.7% that is contributed by nuclear energy despite huge investments made in that sector. Despite the growing contribution of renewables to the national power kitty, about 125,000 or 21% villages remain in dark and not all households have power in the villages electrified. While the government efforts continue to spread solar and biomass based lighting, heating and power systems in villages, efforts in the non-governmental sector have shown that decentralized, off-grid power generation through biomass-based gasifiers and solar photovoltaics offers a viable, long-term solution to rural electrification. Though government policies now recognize decentralized power generation, they do not see it as a preferred mode of rural electrification nor do they foresee a major role for voluntary agencies and people's organizations in decentralized power generation through renewable sources. While technology has shown the way, right policy initiatives and enabling environment are lacking to use decentralized power generation through renewables as an input in overall development process.     

Transforming Local Government: Innovation and Modernization

This article is based on research investigating why local authorities innovate and what happens when they do. The authors show how local authorities have responded to the current normative climate for innovation, and explore the interaction between central policy and local action. The article demonstrates the importance of the policy climate set by central government in fostering—or constraining—innovation at a local level.     

Transforming the structure of a health system

In starting the planning process for an organization's transformation or restructuring, healthcare finance leaders should: Identify strategic imperatives for the organization and physicians, Remember the organization's core area of business, Define the starting point and create clear objectives, Develop a strategy that engages front-line employees to change the culture of the organization.