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Major Companies (major + company)
Selected AbstractsOversight and Delegation in Corporate Governance: deciding what the board should decideCORPORATE GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2006Michael Useem American boards of directors increasingly treat their delegation of authority to management as a careful and self-conscious decision. Numerically dominated by non-executives, boards recognize that they cannot run the company, and many are now seeking to provide stronger oversight of the company without crossing the line into management. Based on interviews with informants at 31 major companies, we find that annual calendars and written protocols are often used to allocate decision rights between the board and management. Written protocols vary widely, ranging from detailed and comprehensive to skeletal and limited in scope. While useful, such calendars and protocols do not negate the need for executives to make frequent judgement calls on what issues should go to the board and what should remain within management. Executives still set much of the board's decision-making agenda, and despite increasingly asserting their sovereignty in recent years, directors remain substantially dependent upon the executives' judgement on what should come to the board. At the same time, a norm is emerging among directors and executives that the latter must be mindful of what directors want to hear and believe they should decide. [source] Industry sponsorship and selection of comparators in randomized clinical trialsEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CLINICAL INVESTIGATION, Issue 2 2010D. N. Lathyris Eur J Clin Invest 2010; 40 (2): 172,182 Abstract Background, Most clinical trials on medical interventions are sponsored by the industry. The choice of comparators shapes the accumulated evidence. We aimed to assess how often major companies sponsor trials that involve only their own products. Methods, Studies were identified by searching ClinicalTrials.gov for trials registered in 2006. We focused on randomized trials involving the 15 companies that had sponsored the largest number of registered trials in ClinicalTrials.gov in that period. Results, Overall, 577 randomized trials were eligible for analysis and 82% had a single industry sponsor [89% (166/187) of the placebo-control trials, 87% (91/105) of trials comparing different doses or ways of administration of the same intervention, and 78% (221/285) of other active control trials]. The compared intervention(s) belonged to a single company in 67% of the trials (89%, 81% and 47% in the three categories respectively). All 15 companies strongly preferred to run trials where they were the only industry sponsor or even the only owner of the assessed interventions. Co-sponsorship typically reflected co-ownership of the same intervention by both companies. Head-to-head comparison of different active interventions developed by different companies occurred in only 18 trials with two or more industry sponsors. Conclusions, Each company generates a clinical research agenda that is strongly focused on its own products, while comparisons involving different interventions from different companies are uncommon. This diminishes the ability to understand the relative merits of different interventions for the same condition. [source] 2020 foresight: What the HR world may look like thenGLOBAL BUSINESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE, Issue 1 2003Richard A. Beaumont Looking back, one can laboriously trace how a current event or situation happened. Looking forward, however, it is never so easy to discern trends out of current events, and correctly guess where they may lead. This article is a well-informed leap ahead to the year 2020 by an HR leader and innovator who looks backward from there to imagine the direction that many current trends in the human resource management of major companies may have taken, as a result of their own and societal actions. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] SIVs: Could you survive a financial collapse?JOURNAL OF CORPORATE ACCOUNTING & FINANCE, Issue 4 2008Michael Ehrlich The newspapers are suddenly full of worries about structured investment vehicles (SIVs). These are huge, risky investment instruments used by large banks and hedge funds. But fund managers of major companies have invested in money markets, which in turn,unknown to the company fund managers,have invested in the risky SIVs. Any major collapse of the SIVs could spread financial panic. So what are corporate managers to do? Are there strategies to avoid financial disaster? And what questions should auditors ask right now? © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Packaging handling evaluation methods in the grocery retail industryPACKAGING TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, Issue 1 2001Mazen Saghir Abstract The grocery retail industry, with its large product volumes, low margins and fierce competition, is constantly seeking efficiency improvements in its supply chain. The grocery retail industry uses an immense amount of packaging and is directly affected by packaging logistics activities. There is, therefore, a potential for efficiency improvements in the grocery retail supply chain through the integration and development of new systems of packaging and logistics. Packaging handling is identified as one of the main activities that has a strong impact on the overall logistical cost of a grocery chain. This research article investigates packaging handling evaluation methods and discusses how these are employed to benefit the industry. Case studies, involving six major companies from the Swedish grocery retail industry, have been used to evaluate packaging and logistics activities. This work, together with a literature review, was used to identify the need for evaluative methods and the present availability of such methods. The results indicated a lack of sufficient and usable packaging handling evaluation methods in today's grocery and packaging industry especially from a logistical point of view. The paper also highlights the lack of systematization among the few methods used and discusses how these can be used to build a systematic and multifunctional evaluation model in order to utilize the information from different studies to build a knowledge base for the future. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Field Reliability Prediction in Consumer Electronics Using Warranty DataQUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, Issue 4 2007Roxana A. Ion Abstract In innovative fast product development processes, such as consumer electronics, it is necessary to check as quickly as possible, using field data, whether the product reliability is at the right level. In consumer electronics, some major companies use the Warranty Call Rate (WCR) for this purpose. This paper discusses extensively the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the WCR. Subsequently, it is demonstrated, using a Weibull failure distribution, that only a few months after product launch, say three months, the warranty data offer the opportunity to estimate the parameters of the failure distribution. Of course, this requires that the warranty data are available in the quality department. Unfortunately, for some companies the field feedback information process from the repair centres to the quality department causes a delay of several months. These companies have to speed up their field feedback information process before they can fully take advantage of the proposed estimation procedure. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | |||||||||||||