Business Leaders (business + leader)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP AND URBAN PROBLEM SOLVING: THE CHANGING CIVIC ROLE OF BUSINESS LEADERS IN AMERICAN CITIES

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2010
ROYCE HANSON
ABSTRACT:,Our concern in this article is corporate civic elite organizations and their role in social production and urban policy in the United States. Recent urban literature has suggested that the power and influence of CEO organizations has declined and that there has been some disengagement of corporate elites from civic efforts in many urban areas. Yet while these trends and their likely consequences are generally acknowledged, relatively little empirical research has been conducted on the nature and extent of the shifts in corporate civic leadership and on how these shifts have affected the civic agendas of central cities and metropolitan regions. In this study we obtain data from 19 large metropolitan areas in order to more systematically examine shifts in corporate civic leadership and their consequences. Our results suggest that the institutional autonomy, time, and personal connections to the central cities of many CEOs have diminished and that the civic organizations though which CEOs work appear to have experienced lowered capacity for sustained action. These trends suggest that while many CEOs and their firms will continue to commit their time and their firms' slack resources to civic enterprises, the problems they address will differ from those tackled in the past. We discuss the important implications these shifts have for the future of corporate civic engagement in urban problem solving and for the practice of urban governance. [source]


The Importance of Stakeholders According to Business Leaders

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2001
Michelle Greenwood
First page of article [source]


Innovate or Die: Is that a Fact?

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2003
Isaac Getz
,Innovate or die'. This mantra has been repeated so many times , by the media, governments, business leaders, business professors, consultants and management gurus , that people have come to assume it is actually true. This article explores why have business leaders been so prone to fall for such a naïve message, and shows how it has caused them to overlook the true sources of long-term high performance. [source]


Writing the "Show,Me" Standards: Teacher Professionalism and Political Control in U.S. State Curriculum Policy

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2002
Margaret Placier
This qualitative case study analyzes the process of writing academic standards in one U.S. state, Missouri. The researchers took a critical pragmatic approach, which entailed close examination of the intentions and interactions of various participants in the writing process (teachers, politicians, business leaders, the public), in order to understand the text that was finally produced. School reform legislation delegated responsibility for writing the standards to a teacher work group, but the teachers found that their "professional" status and their intention to write standards that reflected a "constructivist" view of knowledge would meet with opposition. Politicians, who held different assumptions about the audience, organization, and content of the standards, exercised their greater power to control the outcome of the process. As the researchers analyzed public records and documents generated during the writing process, they constructed a chronological narrative detailing points of tension among political actors. From the narrative, they identified four conflicts that significantly influenced the final wording of the standards. They argue that as a consequence of these conflicts, Missouri's standards are characterized by a dichotomous view of content and process; bland, seemingly value,neutral language; and lack of specificity. Such conflicts and outcomes are not limited to this context. A comparative, international perspective shows that they seem to occur when groups in societies marked by political conflicts over education attempt to codify what "all students should know." [source]


Dow's novel approach to managing the human element of mergers and acquisitions

GLOBAL BUSINESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE, Issue 4 2007
Randolph M. Croyle
The human element in mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures is too critical to be left until late in the process. Dow's HR Center for M&As is on the scene early to uncover factors that could influence the viability and value of a deal, and then helps the business leaders plan and execute the implementation strategy. Having developed tried-and-true approaches, tools, and integrated HR solutions, along with practices for capturing key learnings from every deal, the center has become a repository of HR know-how essential to a corporate growth strategy centered on M&As. © 2007 Dow Chemical Company [source]


Talentship, talent segmentation, and sustainability: A new HR decision science paradigm for a new strategy definition

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2005
John W. Boudreau
Two paradigm shifts are discussed here: talentship and sustainability. First, the traditional service-oriented HR focus must be extended to a "decision science" that enhances decisions about human capital. We call this decision science talentship. It includes talent segmentation, or identifying pivotal talent pools where the quality and/or availability of human capital makes the biggest difference to strategic success. Second, HR and business leaders increasingly define organizational effectiveness beyond traditional financial outcomes to encompass sustainability,achieving success today without compromising the needs of the future. A common strategic human capital decision science can reveal pivotal talent under both traditional and sustainability-based definitions, and thus uncover important insights about the talent implications of the shifting definition of strategic success. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]


Opportunities to work at home in the context of work-life balance

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, Issue 1 2002
Alan Felstead
Discussion of ,work-life balance' and ,family-friendly' employment is much in vogue among politicians and business leaders. Often, but not always, working at home is included within such practices. However, the concepts of work-life balance and family-friendly are commonly left ill-defined by researchers and policymakers alike. In this article we outline formal definitions of these terms, which place spatial issues - and hence working at home - at the heart of the debate. This leads us on to examine working at home through the theoretical lens offered by attempts to explain the rise of work-life balance arrangements. Twelve hypotheses emerge from the literature and are tested on the management data contained in the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey or WERS98. Many of these hypotheses pass weak statistical tests but fail on stronger logistic regression tests. The article shows that the option to work at home is more likely to be available in the public sector, large establishments and work environments in which individuals are responsible for the quality of their own output. These workplaces are typically less unionised but not especially feminised. [source]


Ethical Attitudes in Small Businesses and Large Corporations: Theory and Empirical Findings from a Tracking Study Spanning Three Decades

JOURNAL OF SMALL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2006
Justin G. Longenecker
This study offers a theoretical framework of ethical behavior and a comparative analysis of ethical perceptions of managers of large, mostly publicly traded corporations (those with 1,000 or more employees) and the owners and managers of smaller companies (those with fewer than 100 employees) across 17 years. The primary research provides basic data on the changing standards of ethics as perceived by leaders of large and small businesses where the cultures frequently fall into sharp contrast. Our findings reveal the extent to which the message of business integrity is gaining or losing ground within large and small companies. It does this by means of respondents' judgments of acceptable responses to 16 scenarios profiling common business situations with questionable ethical dimensions. Based on responses from over 5,000 managers and employees (from firms of all sizes) to our scenarios at three points in time (1985, 1993, 2001), we tested two research questions. First, for firms of all sizes, have business ethics improved or declined between the years 1985 and 2001? Second, comparing responses of large and small firm executives across the 1985,2001 time frame, is there a discernible difference in their ethical standards? Our results suggest that business leaders are making somewhat more ethical decisions in recent years. We also found that small business owner,managers offered less ethical responses to scenarios in 1993 but that no significant differences existed with large firm managers in 1985 and 2001. Implications of our findings are discussed. [source]


Nagano Shigeo: Business Leadership in the Asia Pacific Region and the Formation of the Pacific Basin Economic Council

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2001
Takashi Terada
The Pacific Basin Economic Council (PBEC) was established in 1968 through the initiatives taken by the Japanese and Australian business leaders. This article focuses on the ideas and activities of the Japanese and Australian business leaders in the establishment of PBEC, especially those of Nagano Shigeo and W.R.C. Anderson, both of whom devoted themselves to the establishment of PBEC, while cooperating with each other. The central questions posed are: how and why Nagano and Anderson came to consider it desirable to establish an economic institution in the Asia Pacific region in the mid-1960s; how and why those ideas were refined and transformed into the establishment of PBEC; what approaches business leaders in other countries took towards Pacific cooperation and how the Japanese and Australians adjusted different interests of people in other countries in organising PBEC. Finally, the article assesses the role played by PBEC in the development of economic cooperation in Asia and the Pacific and insists that it should help set up foundations for the subsequent organisations of regional economic institutions such as the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC) and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. [source]


The sustainability spectrum and the sciences of sustainability

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 7 2008
Thomas P. Seager
Abstract Understanding sustainability requires integrating multiple perspectives and investigative methods to explain multidimensional concepts. However, the traditional approach to research and education is organized along disciplinary lines that tend to exclude awareness of contributions in one field that may inform problems in another. This presents a serious obstacle to advancing an understanding of sustainability, which is focused on the interactions between industrial and ecological systems, rather than examining each system independently. This paper offers a broad description of different perspectives with regard to sustainability including security, reliability, resilience and renewal, and briefly describes the emerging sciences essential to understanding sustainability: ecological economics, industrial ecology, ecosystem health, and sustainable decision making, policy and design. In the latter, the challenges have yet to find an academic locus. Nonetheless, it is in this area that knowledge of sustainability science must be applied and it is consequently most proximate to business leaders, policy makers and designers. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]