How venture capital works

The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Today's venture capitalists are more like conservative bankers than the risk takers of days past. They have carved out a specialized niche in the capital markets, filling a void that other institutions cannot serve. They are the linch-pins in an efficient system for meeting the needs of institutional investors looking for high returns, of entrepreneurs seeking funding, and of investment bankers looking for companies to sell. Venture capitalists must earn a consistently superior return on investments in inherently risky businesses. The myth is that they do so by investing in good ideas and good plans. In reality, they invest in good industries--that is, industries that are more competitively forgiving than the market as a whole. And they structure their deals in a way that minimizes their risk and maximizes their returns. Although many entrepreneurs expect venture capitalists to provide them with sage guidance as well as capital, that expectation is unrealistic. Given a typical portfolio of ten companies and a 2,000-hour work year, a venture capital partner spends on average less than two hours per week on any given company. In addition to analyzing the current venture-capital system, the author offers practical advice to entrepreneurs thinking about venture funding.     

How the Baldrige Award really works

"How the Baldrige Award Really Works" by David A. Garvin draws on a series of in-depth discussions with Baldrige Award judges and senior examiners to give the first clear account of the real purpose and operation of the prestigious--and contentious--award. Accompanying the article is "An Open Letter on TQM," a call from James D. Robinson III, Harold A. Poling, John F. Akers, Robert W. Galvin, Edwin L. Artzt, and Paul A. Allaire for closer cooperation between business and universities to promote quality.     

How does digital inclusive finance affect economic resilience: Evidence from 285 cities in China

Digital inclusive finance can provide effective financial services to consumers and enterprises that are excluded from traditional finance, thereby improving the vitality and resilience of the economy. Using panel data from 285 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2020, this study explores the mechanism of the impact of digital inclusive finance on economic resilience. We also empirically test the direct effect of digital inclusive finance on economic resilience, the moderating effect of the market environment, and the transmission path of mediating variables. The study shows that improving the level of digital inclusive finance has a positive impact on economic resilience, which mainly stems from the deepening of the coverage breadth and use depth of digital inclusive finance and gradually increases over time. In the heterogeneity analysis, we find that the enhanced effect of digital inclusive finance on economic resilience is more significant in the central and eastern regions and in cities with larger economies in China. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the better the financial market environment and business environment are, the stronger the role of digital inclusion finance in promoting economic resilience. In addition, the increase in innovative technology and the growth of the consumption level are two important mediating variables for digital inclusive finance to actively contribute to economic resilience.     

Building resilience

Failure is a familiar trauma in life, but its effects on people differ widely. Some reel, recover, and move on with their lives; others get bogged down by anxiety, depression, and fear of the future. Seligman, who is known as the father of positive psychology, has spent three decades researching failure, helplessness, and optimism. He created a program at the University of Pennsylvania to help young adults and children overcome anxiety and depression, and has worked with colleagues from around the world to develop a program for teaching resilience. That program is being tested by the U.S. Army, an organization of 1.1 million people where trauma is more common and more severe than in any corporate setting. Nevertheless, businesspeo-ple can draw lessons from resilience training, particularly in times of failure and stagnation. The program is called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, and it has three components: the Global Assessment Tool, a test for psychological fitness (administered to more than 900,000 soldiers to date); self-improvement courses following the test; and "master resilience training" (MRT) for drill sergeants. MRT focuses on enhancing mental toughness, highlighting and honing strengths, and fostering strong relationships-core competencies for any successful manager.     

What really works

When it comes to improving business performance, managers have no shortage of tools and techniques to choose from. But what really works? What's critical, and what's optional? Two business professors and a former McKinsey consultant set out to answer those questions. In a ground-breaking, five-year study that involved more than 50 academics and consultants, the authors analyzed 200 management techniques as they were employed by 160 companies over ten years. Their findings at a high level? Business basics really matter. In this article, the authors outline the management practices that are imperative for sustained superior financial performance--their "4+2 formula" for business success. They provide examples of companies that achieved varying degrees of success depending on whether they applied the formula, and they suggest ways that other companies can achieve excellence. The 160 companies in their study--called the Evergreen Project--were divided into 40 quads, each comprising four companies in a narrowly defined industry. Based on its performance between 1986 and 1996, each company in each quad was classified as either a winner (for instance, Dollar General), a loser (Kmart), a climber (Target), or a tumbler (the Limited). Without exception, the companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled in what the authors call the four primary management practices: strategy, execution, culture, and structure. And they supplemented their great skill in those areas with a mastery of any two of four secondary management practices: talent, leadership, innovation, and mergers and partnerships. A company that consistently follows this 4+2 formula has a better than 90% chance of sustaining superior performance, according to the authors.     

The quest for resilience

In less turbulent times, executives had the luxury of assuming that business models were more or less immortal. Companies always had to work to get better, but they seldom had to get different--not at their core, not in their essence. Today, getting different is the imperative. It's the challenge facing Coca-Cola as it struggles to raise its "share of throat" in noncarbonated beverages. It's the task that bedevils McDonald's as it tries to restart its growth in a burger-weary world. It's the hurdle for Sun Microsystems as it searches for ways to protect its high-margin server business from the Linux onslaught. Continued success no longer hinges on momentum. Rather, it rides on resilience-on the ability to dynamically reinvent business models and strategies as circumstances change. Strategic resilience is not about responding to a onetime crisis or rebounding from a setback. It's about continually anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the earning power of a core business. It's about having the capacity to change even before the case for change becomes obvious. To thrive in turbulent times, companies must become as efficient at renewal as they are at producing today's products and services. To achieve strategic resilience, companies will have to overcome the cognitive challenge of eliminating denial, nostalgia, and arrogance; the strategic challenge of learning how to create a wealth of small tactical experiments; the political challenge of reallocating financial and human resources to where they can earn the best returns; and the ideological challenge of learning that strategic renewal is as important as optimization.     

Risk,resilience, and Shariah-compliance

Despite the popularity of Islamic Finance, the effects of Shariah-compliance on non-financial firm operations have never been studied. Shariah-compliance requirements presents unique conditions to examine how firms perform under restricted conditions. This paper seeks to examine the effects of Shariah-compliance on the risk and resilience of non-financial firms. Using a dynamic panel system GMM and a host of firm-specific attributes, and a global sample of 2,160 firms across six geographic regions, the results suggest that Shariah-compliant firms have lower firm risk as measured by total and idiosyncratic risk, and greater firm resilience as measured by the percent deviation from the maximum values of sales, cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and share price. These effects are more profound in the years following the U.S. subprime crisis. Results also show socio-cultural norms to have a moderating effect. Further testing shows firms face stiff penalties for losing their Shariah-compliance status. This paper is the first to study the effects of Shariah-compliance on non-financial firm operations on a global scale. This paper also contributes to the capital structure and corporate governance literature as it provides evidence that suggest resource restraints may be beneficial for a firm. The findings of this paper also provide significant value to firms looking to capitalize on the 1.8 billion-strong Muslim market with further insight on the intricacies of Shariah-compliance.     

Motivating salespeople: what really works

No sales force consists entirely of stars; sales staffs are usually made up mainly of solid perfomers, with smaller groups of laggards and rainmakers. Though most compensation plans approach these three groups as if they were the same, research shows that each is motivated by something different. By accounting for those differences in their incentive programs, companies can coax better performance from all their salespeople. As the largest cadre, core performers typically represent the greatest opportunity, but they're often ignored by incentive plans. Contests with prizes that vary in nature and value (and don't all go to stars) will inspire them to ramp up their efforts, and tiered targets will guide them up the performance curve. Laggards need quarterly bonuses to stay on track; when they have only annual bonuses, their revenues will drop 10%, studies show. This group is also motivated by social pressure-especially from new talent on the sales bench. Stars tend to get the most attention in comp plans, but companies often go astray by capping their commissions to control costs. If firms instead remove commission ceilings and pay extra for overachievement, they'll see the sales needle really jump. The key is to treat sales compensation not as an expense to rein in but as a portfolio of investments to manage. Companies that do this will be rewarded with much higher returns.     

网络化时代下的思想政治教育工作

二十一世纪是网络时代,计算机互联网络对社会生产方式,人们的生活方式,乃至对整个社会产生了巨大的影响。通过探讨网络文化的四个特点以及文化时代高校思想政治教育面临的机遇和挑战,从四个方面提出充分发挥网络文化的作用,加强和促进高校思想政治教育。本文着重研究网络化对思想政治教育的影响,以及如何运用技术,实现思想政治教育的创新。     

A multilevel framework to enhance organizational resilience

Abstract

Organizational resilience is a capacity that emerges at multiple levels. Although the multilevel character of organizations has been generally acknowledged in existing organizational studies, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical studies that address how it affects organizational resilience. To adress this gap, this article offers a multilevel framework applicable to enhance organizational resilience and presents an empirical study to probe the impact of multilevel elements on organization's capacity for responding to critical situations. More specifically, the new framework will help an organization to enhance its resilience through a process of self-assessment on crisis preparedness and response capacity. This process will allow the organization to identify and remedy potential vulnerabilities in the interaction between its organs as well as environment. We argue that crisis management and organizational resilience are mutually shaped across multiple levels, from individual, organizational, to environmental. These multiple levels are operationalized operationalization in four phases: (1) reviewing and monitoring context, (2) testing preparedness, (3) analysing and assessing responses, and (4) strengthening capabilities. In these phases, we underline that resilience management requires continuous embracing of the dynamic processes within an organizational system and its environment. To validate the framework, we present an empirical study on a security organization, and describe the results to demonstrate how to utilise the tool in practice. In conclusion, we discuss how the multilevel framework can be further applied towards building stronger resilience management.     

The expectations theory works for monetary policy shocks

In practice, the expectations theory of the term structure is employed extensively in monetary policy analysis despite its empirical failure. This paper performs a conditional test of the theory that is directly relevant to monetary theory and policy. It finds that the theory holds quite well conditional on identified monetary policy shocks, but fails conditional on aggregate supply shocks that prompt an immediate jump in prices. It also finds that policy responses to movements in the term structure play an important role in uncovering evidence for the theory as predicted by McCallum [1994. Monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates. NBER Working Paper Series, no. 4938].     

Co-evolutionary policy processes: Understanding innovative economies and future resilience

The great debates of most fields associated with economic development rest on emergence versus intention and the interplay between the two. The ‘residual’ of unexplained divergence between goal and outcome, in this sense, can be ascribed in part to the interplay, or co-evolution, between policies (intention) and self-organizing (emergent) development. Do public policy and economic development co-evolve in technologically innovative economies, and if so, how? This paper discusses the basic premise that the gap between economic development strategies and their poor implementation cannot simply be removed by creating better-intended strategies, tools or institutions. The analysis uses evolutionary thinking for an analysis of economic development, and ends with some postulates for future study on innovative regions and the concept of resilience.     

Geographic dispersion and corporate resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study demonstrates the positive role of geographic dispersion in corporate resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of China. This association is more pronounced when firms are highly dependent on the domestic market, less likely to obtain enough financing, highly apply digital technology, and have low customer concentration. This association is attributable to the following three channels: a diversified portfolio, the maintenance of business relationships, and access to non-local resources. Overall, our findings provide a more nuanced picture of the potential impacts of corporate diversification on corporate resilience.     

雕塑名家尚晓风作品欣赏

尚晓风毕业于中央美术学院,赴澳洲进修与创作多年之后,辗转回到他的母校中央美术学院任教,并多次参与重要的雕塑展览。拥有科班出生的艺术家又兼具雕塑教师双重身份的尚晓风,对雕塑本体的探讨与雕塑传统的创新,别具使命感。他批判中国当代艺术的功利主义现象,标举艺术之形而上层面的精神价值,将为艺术而艺术作为自己创作的理念。旅居澳洲期间的抽象雕塑实验,引领尚晓风形塑时自我观看雕塑的不同视角。他跳脱视觉再     

The value of bank capital buffers in maintaining financial system resilience

There is a current controversy concerning the appropriate size of banks’ capital requirements, and the trade-off between the costs and benefits of implementing higher capital requirements. We quantify the size of capital buffers required to reduce system-wide losses using confidential regulatory data for Australian banks from 2002 to 2014 and annual public accounts from 1978 to 2014. We find that a moderate increase in bank capital buffers is sufficient to maintain financial system resilience, even after taking economic downturns into consideration. Furthermore, while banks benefit from paying a lower cost of debt when they have a higher capital buffer, lending volumes are lower indicating that credit supply may be hampered if bank capital levels are too high within a financial system.