Insights from research

Citation

Bourne, M. and Kennerley, M. (2006), "Insights from research", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 10 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2006.26710baa.001

Insights from research

In this issue, two papers provide insight from research. Garry Crilley and Colin Sharp’s paper reports research in the leisure industry that investigates the link between managerial qualities and operational performance in that industry. His research results in a model which indicates which of the managerial qualities lead to superior performance. The focus specifically on the leisure sector in Australia enables conclusions about the influence of each factor on performance to be drawn but also raises interesting questions about broader generalisability.

Johannes Freiesleben takes an interesting conceptual look at the issue that has long been of interest – that of the benefits of quality approaches such as six sigma. His paper moves on from the initial discussions of the cost of quality to provide a general logic for the benefits, including cost and revenue perspectives, that enables the economic impacts of quality initiatives to be communicated to senior managers

Insights from practice

Three papers provide insights from different practical perspectives. In the first, Richard Barrett and Jeremy Hope present the latest findings from their annual study into re-forecasting practices in the UK. The paper reflects the common dissatisfaction with traditional budgeting and forecasting practices, and that managers remain dissatisfied with their ability to re-forecast quickly. The study suggests that managers want to improve the speed and frequency of re-forecasting, identifying many of the factors preventing improvement in this regards.

Conrad Sebego reports on the performance measurement implications of a government initiative in South Africa which aimed improving industry competitiveness as the country re-enters global markets. His paper suggests that the lack alignment between measures at strategic and operational levels is acting as a barrier to exploiting opportunities.

Dianna Woodburn focuses on measurement of performance in the Marketing area. She reflects on the difficulty that marketers have had measuring and demonstrating the return on investment of their activities and expenditure. She reports work undertaken with marketing practitioners to develop a conceptual framework and tools to help measure the return on marketing investment.

Focus on the balanced scorecard

This issue of the journal is concluded with a collection of papers focused around the popular management framework, the balanced scorecard. Teoh and Koh review literature from different academic disciplines, and reflect on case study work and interviews with senior managers to provide insights in to the application of the balances scorecard. The papers by Seraphim and by Chytas et al. both present individual cases which reflect the practicalities of implementing a balanced scorecard in practice. Illustrating how, to work in practice, approaches and methodologies need to be adapted to the context, integrated into existing management systems and revisited to reflect changing organizational circumstances.

Mike Bourne, Mike Kennerley