Cultural intelligence

In an increasingly diverse business environment, managers must be able to navigate through the thicket of habits, gestures, and assumptions that define their coworkers' differences. Foreign cultures are everywhere--in other countries, certainly, but also in corporations, vocations, and regions. Interacting with individuals within them demands perceptiveness and adaptability. And the people who have those traits in abundance aren't necessarily the ones who enjoy the greatest social success in familiar settings. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and then blend in. It has three components--the cognitive, the physical, and the emotional/motivational. While it shares many of the properties of emotional intelligence, CQ goes one step further by equipping a person to distinguish behaviors produced by the culture in question from behaviors that are peculiar to particular individuals and those found in all human beings. In their surveys of 2,000 managers in 60 countries, the authors found that most managers are not equally strong in all three of these areas of cultural intelligence. The authors have devised tools that show how to identify one's strengths, and they have developed training techniques to help people overcome weaknesses. They conclude that anyone reasonably alert, motivated, and poised can attain an acceptable CQ.     

Essential health care: affordable for all?

Access to affordable health care has become a national crisis. The uninsured have many faces and many reasons for being uninsured. The nation cannot afford to sustain this broken system; not in terms of resources, nor in terms of the deteriorating health of the public. Universal coverage could offer a promising opportunity to begin to ameliorate the unsustainable use of expensive illness care now substituting for effective low-cost prevention and early detection. A proposal for essential health care coverage, a balance between cost and choice to maximize use of beneficial care, is presented.     

The effect of case management on U.S. hospitals

This quantitative research study assesses the organizational characteristics, market factors, and profitability of U.S. hospitals operating with a case management model. These results have managerial implications associated with individual hospital performance, implications for nursing leadership, and policy implications on resource allocation.     

中国经济增长的统计分析

经验表明,伴随深层的结构改革的进行,要使经济恢复其增长势头,得假以时日。在许多事例中,改革的最初的冲击是产量的急剧下降。在东欧的经济转轨过程中,就曾发生此种情况。中国的经历是独一无二的,因为中国在改革的背景下,在从严格的中央计划体制向日益开放的市场经济体制转轨的过程中,     

受泥沙威胁水库的模拟管理—印度河塔贝拉大坝实例分析

巴基斯坦印度河塔贝拉大坝有沙洲向引水洞不断靠近，使水库使用寿命受到威胁；引水洞与电站相连，并用于灌溉，介绍塔贝拉大坝模拟系统，及相关的下游加齐巴罗沙水电站和上游巴沙大坝的规划建设。该研究产生了一种创新方法，从开发，运行及不同时间阶段，分析了该流域供需关系。计算机软件包Hybro用于执行塔贝拉大坝和印度河上游流域系统模拟模型，所得结果用于模拟及比较塔贝拉大坝将要实施的几项运行策略的经济效益。运用相关泥沙模拟的结果，设计蓄水容量／水位库容曲线预测未来60a中水库的灌溉和发电效益，最后得出结论最有效的补偿措施是修建水下潜坝，以保护引水洞及低位冲沙设施。     

Prior health expenditures and risk sharing with insurers competing on quality

Insurers can exploit the heterogeneity within risk-adjustment classes to select the good risks because they have more information than the regulator on the expected expenditures of individual insurees. To counteract this cream skimming, mixed systems combining capitation and cost-based payments have been adopted that do not, however, generally use the past expenditures of insurees as a risk adjuster. In this article, two symmetric insurers compete for clients by differentiating the quality of service offered to them according to some private information about their risk. In our setting it is always welfare improving to use prior expenditures as a risk adjuster.     

What's wrong with executive compensation? A roundtable moderated by Charles Elson

The value that many superpaid CEO superstars supposedly created has largely disappeared, and the likelihood that it will be recovered anytime soon seems remote. On top of that, a good number of top executives treated their companies like ATMs, awarding themselves millions of dollars in corporate perks. It's hard to dispute the idea that executives were corrupted by the sums of money dangled in front of them. What's wrong with executive compensation, and what can we do about it? HBR and the University of Delaware's Center for Corporate Governance convened a round-table of compensation experts last October on the university's campus in Newark, Delaware. The 12 panelists, from CEOs to investors, from the professionals who advise them to a chief justice who rules on their disputes, provided an extraordinary diversity of viewpoints. The panelist began by debating ways to align the interests of the senior executives with the long-term interests of the company-weighing the relative benefits of stock options versus stock grants, for instance. But the discussion expanded to cover broader questions of corporate governance and company values. "The main reason compensation increases every year is that most boards want their CEO to be in the top half of the CEO peer group," said Ed Woolard,Jr., a former CEO of DuPont. And compensation lawyer Joe Bachelder pointed out the danger of structuring pay in such a way that it dampens risk taking among executives. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion of one business's most pressing issues.