A survival guide for leaders

Let's face it, to lead is to live dangerously. While leadership is often viewed as an exciting and glamorous endeavor, one in which you inspire others to follow you through good times and bad, such a portrayal ignores leadership's dark side: the inevitable attempts to take you out of the game. This is particularly true when a leader must steer an organization through difficult change. When the status quo is upset, people feel a sense of profound loss and dashed expectations. They may need to undergo a period of feeling incompetent or disloyal. It's no wonder they resist the change and often try to eliminate its visible agent. This "survival guide" offers a number of techniques--relatively straightforward in concept but difficult to execute--for protecting yourself as you lead such a change initiative. Adapted from the book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), the article has two main parts. The first looks outward, offering tactical advice about relating to your organization and the people in it. It is designed to protect you from those who would push you aside before you complete your initiatives. The second looks inward, focusing on your own needs and vulnerabilities. It is designed to keep you from bringing yourself down. The hard truth is that it is not possible to experience the rewards and joys of leadership without experiencing the pain as well. But staying in the game and bearing that pain is worth it, not only for the positive changes you can make in the lives of others but also for the meaning it gives your own.     

EFFECTS ON FARM INCOMES AND RURAL LABOUR OF A RELATIVE INCREASE IN WAGES*

We use the concept of the elasticity of farm incomes with respect to changes in input prices to analyse the effects of a large increase in relative wages on selected measures of farm incomes. In order to estimate the elasticity of farm incomes we have to estimate elasticities and cross-elasticities of demand and supply for farm labour and capital. The estimates of elasticity of demand for operator and hired labour allow us to calculate the impact of a rise in wages on numbers of farmers and hired labour employed in agriculture.     

Buffer stocks,exchange rates and deviations from purchasing power parity

In this paper an extension of the Monetary Approach to the Exchange Rate reduced form is presented and estimated for four bilateral exchange rates with data from the recent floating experience. The extension incorporates two features: a more sophisticated modelling of money demand, using theCarr andDarby money demand specification, and allowing for deviations from purchasing power parity. The estimated results are supportive of our extended specification and we conclude by arguing that care should be taken in specifying the underlying structural relationships in asset reduced form exchange rate equations.     

Human resource management practices to improve quality: A case example of human resource management intervention in government

This article describes the quality approach to management in government and contrasts it with the classic, often more bureaucratic, approach. It places particular focus on Project Pacer Share, a government total quality management effort underway at McClellan Air Force Base where, using quality tools and techniques, major reforms in the United States Civil Service System and human resource management are being tested. Specific human resource management initiatives that need to be undertaken to support organizationwide quality performance are presented.     

MARKET BEHAVIOR OF GRAINS EXPORTERS

This article develops and tests several models of market behaviorover the 1965–81 period to identify the market behaviorof each of the five largest grain exporters in rice, wheat,and coarse grains. The results show that the United States hasexerted price leadership in the rice and coarse grains markets.The remaining major exporters in these markets have behavedin a manner consistent with a small-country exporter model inwhich their market demand is perceived to be perfectly elasticat the world price set by the dominant exporter. The resultsfor wheat suggest a shared dominance between the United States,Canada, and Australia, with the European Community and Argentinabehaving as small-country exporters. The short-run export supply curves for the five largest exportersappear to be very unresponsive to price. For rice, only Japan'sexports were found to have a significant and positive responseto an increase in the world export price. For wheat and coarsegrains, only the United States' exports were estimated to bepositively and significantly related to the export price. An important implication of the current market behavior of themajor exporters is that the opportunity exists for all otherexporters to sell all they can at the world price. However,a significant risk exists that the United States will stop supportingthe world price through its loan rate mechanism. A provisionfor such a change, the crop marketing loan provision, was includedin the Food Security Act of 1985 for wheat and coarse grainsand has already been implemented for rice.