Blue ocean strategy

Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue 22-fold over the last ten years by reinventing the circus. Rather than competing within the confines of the existing industry or trying to steal customers from rivals, Cirque developed uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. Cirque created what the authors call a blue ocean, a previously unknown market space. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In red oceans--that is, in all the industries already existing--companies compete by grabbing for a greater share of limited demand. As the market space gets more crowded, prospects for profits and growth decline. Products turn into commodities, and increasing competition turns the water bloody. There are two ways to create blue oceans. One is to launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions. But it's much more common for a blue ocean to be created from within a red ocean when a company expands the boundaries of an existing industry. In studying more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries, the authors observed that the traditional units of strategic analysis--company and industry--are of limited use in explaining how and why blue oceans are created. The most appropriate unit of analysis is the strategic move, the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering. Creating blue oceans builds brands. So powerful is blue ocean strategy, in fact, that a blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades.     

Ethical Values of Executive Search Consultants

The present research was designed to investigate the absolute and relative levels of ethical convictions of executive search consultants, or "headhunters", in regard of their search practices. Executive search consultants were defined as trained specialists who helped client organizations identify and evaluate the suitability of job candidates for top, senior, and middle-level management and executive positions. Despite frequent reports of unethical search practices in the media, results based on a sample of 184 headhunters and non-headhunter executives showed that headhunters were inclined to adhere stringently to a selected set of ethical values, both in absolute terms and in comparison with the expectations of non-headhunter executives. The differences had implications not only for the integrity and continued existence of the headhunting profession, but also for the ethical development of new executive search consultants. Future research directions were suggested.     

DIVERGENT EXPECTATIONS AND THE ASIAN FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 1997

An important question concerning integration of global financial markets is whether local investors in an equity market react differently from international investors, particularly during periods of financial crisis. Considering local investors are closer to information, they might turn pessimistic before foreign investors before a crisis. We examine whether local investors in each of the six Asian stock markets—Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand—reacted differently from international investors during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Our empirical results indicate that, in general, closed‐end country fund share prices (mainly driven by foreign investors) Granger‐cause the respective net asset values (NAVs, mainly driven by local investors). Moreover, this one‐way Granger‐causality effect from share prices to NAVs becomes much stronger during the crisis period after controlling for U.S. stock returns. Our results suggest international investors turned pessimistic before local investors. JEL classification: G15     

Fee pressure and audit quality

This study investigates the association of audit fee pressure with an inverse measure of audit quality, misstatements in audited data, during the recent recession. Fee pressure in a year is measured as the difference between benchmark “normal” audit fees and actual audit fees. We find fee pressure is positively and significantly associated with accounting misstatements in 2008, the center of the recession. Our results suggest that auditors made fee concessions to some clients in 2008, and that fee pressure was associated with reduced audit quality in that year.     

Asian Corporate Governance—and the Case of Dual‐Class Shares: CARE Conference | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | June 9, 2014

The case of the Alibaba IPO illustrates the divergence of corporate governance standards between the United States and many other markets, and reopens the debate on the one‐share one‐vote principle. Since corporate governance standards develop in ways that reflect the history and legal and political environments of different countries, we should not expect to see a global convergence of these standards—nor is it generally desirable to transplant policies from one market to another without understanding their historical backgrounds. Nevertheless, the U.S. approach to regulation raises the concern that competition among exchanges will cause issuers to “shop around” and tempt the exchanges to relax their standards in a race to the bottom. While market participants and regulators outside of the U.S. debate whether and how to modify the one‐share, one‐vote rule, they face challenges in coming up with new rules that strike the right balance between effective corporate governance and market development.     

Public agricultural R&D over the past half century: an emerging new world order

Recent trends in farm productivity and food prices raise concerns about whether the era of global agricultural abundance is over. Agricultural R&D is a crucial determinant of agricultural productivity and production, and therefore food prices and poverty. In this article, we present entirely new evidence on investments in public agricultural R&D worldwide as an indicator of the prospects for agricultural productivity growth over the coming decades. The agricultural R&D world is changing, and in ways that will definitely affect future global patterns of poverty, hunger, and other outcomes. The overall picture is one in which the middle‐income countries are growing in relative importance as producers of agricultural innovations through investments in R&D, and have consequently better prospects as producers of agricultural products.     

Motivating Blue-Collar Employees: A Case Study of the Chinese Workforce

The Katz and Kahn (1978) Katz, R. and Kahn, D. 1978. The social psychology of organisations, 2nd, Toronto, , Canada: John Wiley &; Sons.  [Google Scholar] motivational framework is an open system management theory that underscores the importance of self-regulation while stressing the significance of using continuous feedback to adapt in a rapidly changing environment. This study aims to examine Katz and Kahn's prepositions that the implementation of a system of rule compliance, external rewards, and internalized motivation can decrease employee turnover, increase quantitative and qualitative standards of performance, and enhance cooperation and creativeness. The results among 233 Chinese employees (96.6% response rate) indicated partial support for Katz and Kahn's motivational framework. The implication for improving the Chinese workforce, in particular blue-collar occupations, is discussed.