Evolving perspectives on business and books: practitioner implications

The research subject of this Portfolio of Essays is my ‘apparatus of thought’ in the context of my professional development. I have examined theory and the application of theory to a professional life. I analyse how my use of theory has changed and enabled my professional development. Each of the three Essays takes a different perspective and applies the theories of adult mental development, business and firm growth as an analytical framework. Using Kegan’s theories of Adult Mental Development as an ‘apparatus of thought’, Essay One is my reflection on my professional development in the light of my training, education, and development. I describe how changes in my ‘apparatus of thought’, my meaning-making system, have enabled me to develop my professional practice. Exposure to the theories of Adult Mental Development have also enabled me to understand how my development has precipitated and necessitated my career changes. In Essay Two, moving from military aviation to book publishing was a major career change for me, enabled by a change in my meaning-making system. In the context of my professional development, I sought to change my practice so that I could make a more meaningful contribution to the firm. To achieve this, I directed my reading towards a deeper understanding of the nature of the firm and the impact of industrial change on the firm. Using the context of my professional environment in Essay Three, I show how my use of theory has developed. I describe how I sought to change working practices in the firm and discuss the impact this initiative had on my professional self. I use the ‘data of my experience’ to examine my theory of the business from a Penrosian perspective. The Penrosian perspective coupled with my exposure to theories of Adult Mental Development and the effects of a transformational education process enabled me to transition to a leadership role with an international online publisher.

Getting to the Real Story: What Vietnamese business people wish foreigners understood about doing business in emerging and transition countries like Vietnam – BEFORE they start

Knowledge sharing typically examines organizational transfer of knowledge, often from headquarters to subsidiaries, from developed country sites to emerging country sites, or from host to local employees. Yes, recent research, such as Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid, raises the question of reverse transfer of knowledge, or whether knowledge could and should be transferred from local sites to home country sites within an organization. As several emerging economies build their capabilities in knowledge, research and development, marketing, and the like, it only makes sense to consider what type of knowledge and how to transfer it in reverse or bi-directional manners. This paper takes one step back in the process. Rather than focusing on what knowledge transfer may make sense within an organization, we consider what types of knowledge are important for foreigners to know at the initial stages of engagement abroad as they consider whether to do business in an emerging country.

Examining Relationships between Culture, Creativity and Business Stage in an Emerging Market: A Categorical Data Analysis of Vietnam’s Data Set

In this article, we offer a new way of exploring relationships between three different dimensions of a business operation, namely the stage of business development, the methods of creativity and the major cultural values. Although separately, each of these has gained enormous attention from the management research community, evidenced by a large volume of research studies, there have been not many studies that attempt to describe the logic that connect these three important aspects of a business; let alone empirical evidences that support any significant relationships among these variables. The paper also provides a data set and an empirical investigation on that data set, using a categorical data analysis, to conclude that examinations of these possible relationships are meaningful and possible for seemingly unquantifiable information. The results also show that the most significant category among all creativity methods employed in Vietnamese enterprises is the “creative disciplines” rule in the “entrepreneurial phase,” while in general creative disciplines have played a critical role in explaining the structure of our data sample, for both stages of development in our consideration.

Innovation in business groups

Using novel data on European firms, this paper investigates the relationship between business groups and innovation. Controlling for various firm characteristics, we find that group affiliates are more innovative than standalones. We examine several hypotheses to explain this finding, focusing on group internal capital markets and knowledge spillovers. We find that group affiliation is particularly important for innovation in industries that rely more on external funding and in groups with more diversified capital sources, consistent with the internal capital markets hypothesis. Our results suggest that knowledge spillovers are not the main driver of innovation in business groups because firms affiliated with the same group do not have a common research focus and are unlikely to cite each other's patents. © 2010 INFORMS.

Pregnancy, alcohol intake, and intimate partner violence among men and women attending drinking establishments in a Cape Town, South Africa township.

The highest rates of fetal alcohol syndrome worldwide can be found in South Africa. Particularly in impoverished townships in the Western Cape, pregnant women live in environments where alcohol intake during pregnancy has become normalized and interpersonal violence (IPV) is reported at high rates. For the current study we sought to examine how pregnancy, for both men and women, is related to alcohol use behaviors and IPV. We surveyed 2,120 men and women attending drinking establishments in a township located in the Western Cape of South Africa. Among women 13.3% reported being pregnant, and among men 12.0% reported their partner pregnant. For pregnant women, 61% reported attending the bar that evening to drink alcohol and 26% reported both alcohol use and currently experiencing IPV. Daily or almost daily binge drinking was reported twice as often among pregnant women than non-pregnant women (8.4% vs. 4.2%). Men with pregnant partners reported the highest rates of hitting sex partners, forcing a partner to have sex, and being forced to have sex. High rates of alcohol frequency, consumption, binge drinking, consumption and binge drinking were reported across the entire sample. In general, experiencing and perpetrating IPV were associated with alcohol use among all participants except for men with pregnant partners. Alcohol use among pregnant women attending shebeens is alarmingly high. Moreover, alcohol use appears to be an important factor in understanding the relationship between IPV and pregnancy. Intensive, targeted, and effective interventions for both men and women are urgently needed to address high rates of drinking alcohol among pregnant women who attend drinking establishments.

New business models for antibiotic innovation.

The increase in antibiotic resistance and the dearth of novel antibiotics have become a growing concern among policy-makers. A combination of financial, scientific, and regulatory challenges poses barriers to antibiotic innovation. However, each of these three challenges provides an opportunity to develop pathways for new business models to bring novel antibiotics to market. Pull-incentives that pay for the outputs of research and development (R&D) and push-incentives that pay for the inputs of R&D can be used to increase innovation for antibiotics. Financial incentives might be structured to promote delinkage of a company's return on investment from revenues of antibiotics. This delinkage strategy might not only increase innovation, but also reinforce rational use of antibiotics. Regulatory approval, however, should not and need not compromise safety and efficacy standards to bring antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action to market. Instead regulatory agencies could encourage development of companion diagnostics, test antibiotic combinations in parallel, and pool and make transparent clinical trial data to lower R&D costs. A tax on non-human use of antibiotics might also create a disincentive for non-therapeutic use of these drugs. Finally, the new business model for antibiotic innovation should apply the 3Rs strategy for encouraging collaborative approaches to R&D in innovating novel antibiotics: sharing resources, risks, and rewards.

PIANO AS A PARTNER IN TWENTIETH­ CENTURY ART SONG REPERTOIRE: A RECORDING PROJECT

The piano's role in art song repertoire has evolved from a modest one during its formative years to the versatility, complexity and creativity found in the twentieth-century. The art song repertoire of the twentieth century is vast and has secured the reputation for being the most diverse, innovative, illustrative, atmospheric and colorful in all of art song literature. Within this time period, there are compositions that reach back to the romantic works of nineteenth century, others which combine old and new traditions, and finally those which adopt new means and new ends. In choosing the material for this project, I have focused on compositions with uniquely challenging and unusual piano accompaniments in order to achieve a balance between well- known and rarely performed works, as well as those pieces that combine various languages and styles. Selections range from Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, Francis Poulenc, Fernando Obradors, and Joaquin Rodrigo to composers such as Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Dominick Argento, William Bolcom, and John Duke, including arrangements of traditional spirituals by Harry T. Burleigh and Florence B. Price, all of which helped to establish the American Art Song. My objective is to trace the development of the twentieth-century art song from the late Romantic Period through nationalistitrends to works which show the influences of jazz and folk elements. The two CD's for this dissertation recording project are available on compact discs which can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). The performers were Daniel Armstrong, baritone, Giles Herman, baritone, Thomas Glenn, tenor, Valerie Yinzant, soprano, Aaron Odom, tenor, Jennifer Royal, soprano, Kenneth Harmon, tenor, Karen Sorenson, soprano and Maxim Ivanov, baritone.

A design pattern for integration of business process management systems

A cross-domain workflow application may be constructed using a standard reference model such as the one by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [7] but the requirements for this type of application are inherently different from one organization to another. The existing models and systems built around them meet some but not all the requirements from all the organizations involved in a collaborative process. Furthermore the requirements change over time. This makes the applications difficult to develop and distribute. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based approaches such as the BPET (Business Process Execution Language) intend to provide a solution but fail to address the problems sufficiently, especially in the situations where the expectations and level of skills of the users (e.g. the participants of the processes) in different organisations are likely to be different. In this paper, we discuss a design pattern that provides a novel approach towards a solution. In the solution, business users can design the applications at a high level of abstraction: the use cases and user interactions; the designs are documented and used, together with the data and events captured later that represents the user interactions with the systems, to feed an intermediate component local to the users -the IFM (InterFace Mapper) -which bridges the gaps between the users and the systems. We discuss the main issues faced in the design and prototyping. The approach alleviates the need for re-programming with the APIs to any back-end service thus easing the development and distribution of the applications

Areva and EDF: business prospects and risks in nuclear energy

This report examines the financial position of EDF and Areva and analyses what the impact of their nuclear ambitions will be on this.

ENEL: business prospects and risks in nuclear energy

This report examines the level of debt of ENEL and how that will be impacted by its plans for new nuclear power plants.

Investigation into a modular rule-based testing method for testing business rules in scheduling applications

Rule testing in transport scheduling is a complex and potentially costly business problem. This paper proposes an automated method for the rule-based testing of business rules using the extensible Markup Language for rule representation and transportation. A compiled approach to rule execution is also proposed for performance-critical scheduling systems.

Learning and practising supply chain management strategies from a business simulation game: a comprehensive supply chain simulation

An Internet based supply chain simulation game (ISCS) is introduced and demonstrated in this paper. Different from other games and extended from the Beer Game, a comprehensive set of supply chain (SC) management strategies can be tested in the game, and these strategies can be evaluated and appraised based on the built-in Management Information System (MIS). The key functionalities of ISCS are designed to increase players SC awareness, facilitate understanding on various SC strategies and challenges, foster collaboration between partners, and improve problem solving skills. It is concluded that an ISCS can be used as an efficient and effective teaching tool as well as a research tool in operations research and management science. Problems and obstacles have been observed while engaging in the SC business scenario game. The actions proposed and implemented to solve these problems have resulted in improved SC performance.

The determinants of business performance of estate agency in England and Wales

Purpose: This paper seeks to investigate the factors influencing the business performance of estate agency in England and Wales. Design/methodology/approach: The paper investigates the effect of housing market, company size and pricing policy on business performance in the estate agency sector in England and Wales. The analysis uses the survey data of Woolwich Cost of Moving Survey (a survey of transactions costs sponsored by the Woolwich/Barclays Bank) from 2003 to 2005 to test the hypothesis that the business performance of estate agency is affected by industry characteristics and firm factors. Findings: The empirical analysis indicates that the business performance of estate agency is subject to market environment volatility such as market uncertainty, housing market liquidity and house price changes. The firm factors such as firm size and the level of agency fee have no explanatory power in explaining business performance. The level of agency fee is positively associated with firm size, market environment and liquidity. Research limitations/implications: The research is limited to the data received and is based on a research project on transaction costs designed prior to this analysis. Originality/value: There is little other research that investigates the factors determining the business performance of estate agency, using consecutive data of three years across England and Wales. The findings are useful for practitioners and/or managers to allocate resources and adjust their business strategy to enhance business performance in the estate agency sector.