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“No one can predict the extent or nature of the disruptions that Y2K will cause. Yet the list of potential consequences from the failure of computers and embedded microprocessors to deal with the calendar shift to a four‐digit year only keeps growing.”

Why do so many people in organizations feel discouraged and fearful about the future? Why does despair only increase as the fads fly by, shorter in duration, more costly in each attempt to improve? Why have the best efforts to create significant and enduring organizational change resulted in so many failures? We, and our organizations, exist in a world of constant evolutionary activity. Why has change become so unnatural in human organizations?

Draws on a consultancy project designed to reduce accident rates in four Danish sugar factories. Presents examples of metaphor use in the project and documents a steady decline in numbers and severity of accidents over time. Hypothesises that the use of metaphors is part of the explanation. Following a multi‐disciplinary review of the literature on metaphors, suggests that they can be harnessed in three ways: as tools for conscious, creative analysis; as ways of creating emotions; and as ways of fostering unconscious learning processes. Suggests that the effect in the sugar project is due to unconscious learning. Explains how this can happen and stresses the most important. Proposes that consultants use images, stories, narratives, and fairy tales to a larger degree and put less weight on formal conceptual learning when change is the issue.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Performance Management can support the use of reflective work practices by affecting and guiding the human behavior in an organization. In this study, five roles of PM are emphasized to support reflective practices at work: making reflective work practices visible, supporting reflective dialogue, creating a favorable measurement culture, clarifying the goals at all organizational levels and motivating employees to use reflective work practices by means of compensation and rewards.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Uses Kant’s moral philosophy to provide a normative theory of leadership. First shows how Kant’s philosophy would reject instrumental theories of leadership and most charismatic theories of leadership. Perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, it questions some of the assumptions of servant leadership and puts constraints on transformational leadership and the leader as educator. The central concept of Kant’s moral philosophy is the dignity given to autonomy. Thus a good leader ought to respect and enrich the autonomy of followers. The Kantian leader turns followers into leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the position of sport management education (SME) in relation to employment in the sport fitness industry and if a shift towards a greater emphasis on business and management module teaching is justified or conversely a greater utilisation of the rich data being generated by sport management researchers can be applied to the vocational development of sport management students.

The study was conducted in two parts. Part 1 consisted of interviews with the author by an interviewer to explore their industry experiences, the author’s experience of entrepreneurial sport industry business and intrapreneurial sport teaching. The resultant data have been distilled into a series of paradigms, including employing sport industry staff and teaching sport management. Part 2 triangulates part 1 with the managerial experience of sports and leisure centre managers to develop a qualitative study. Sports and leisure centre managers were interviewed regarding candidate and employee competences judged as extreme examples of sport management knowledge and understanding.

Four themes emerged, such as alignment, underpinning subject-specific knowledge, a voice from the sport industry in developing SME and postgraduate opportunities for work-based learning.

A small-scale study that requires further research in each of the three areas: sport spectator, sport participation and elite performer management.

The sport centre interview instrument, with some refinements, could form the basis of an improved system to gain rich data from industry members of higher education business advisory groups. The developed data collection tool could increase the effective collection of data from a wider cohort.

The approach has produced an adapted category of pedagogy. Employability inspired teaching (EiT) is an original terminology describing the subject-specific content that leads to improved opportunities for subject (sport) industry employment.

Leadership scholar Margaret Wheatley (2006) observed that “Each of us seeks to discover a meaning to our life that is wholly and uniquely our own. We experience a deepening confidence that purpose has shaped our lives even as it moved invisibly in us. Whether we believe that we create this meaning for ourselves in a senseless world, or that it is offered to us by a purposeful universe, it is, after all, only meaning that we seek” (p. 134). At a small, private liberal arts institution in the southeast, educators attempt to traverse the complexities of chaos and meaning by integrating film into many facets of the curricular and co-curricular leadership learning process. This article highlights the background, pedagogy, and impacts of this integration and the bridge thus created between the in- and out-of-class experiences for students.

We issue a double Souvenir number of The Library World in connection with the Library Association Conference at Birmingham, in which we have pleasure in including a special article, “Libraries in Birmingham,” by Mr. Walter Powell, Chief Librarian of Birmingham Public Libraries. He has endeavoured to combine in it the subject of Special Library collections, and libraries other than the Municipal Libraries in the City. Another article entitled “Some Memories of Birmingham” is by Mr. Richard W. Mould, Chief Librarian and Curator of Southwark Public Libraries and Cuming Museum. We understand that a very full programme has been arranged for the Conference, and we have already published such details as are now available in our July number.

Twenty years ago, Senge's, 1990 pioneering article, ”The learning organization,” published in MIT's Sloan Management Review, received center‐stage attention. The concept received much support and was followed with articles by prominent writers and educators, Margaret Wheatley amongst them. Only ten years later, however, another prominent writer and educator, David Garvin, remarked, “Learning organizations have been embraced in theory but are still surprisingly rare.” The purpose of this paper is to argue and present support for a perspective that learning organizations have existed for over 100 years. Linking this concept to the past versus arguing that learning organizations are new will better pave the way for learning organizations to achieve a status of being more than simply “embraced in theory.”

Three objectives were presented. The first developed an historical link, with the goal of showing that learning organizations have had a rich history and did not simply appear in 1990. The approach to the second was based on drawing implications from literature about the learning process. The very heart of competitiveness depends on how firm members experience the learning process. The process is a function of the use of tools (T) within a learning climate (C) and their interaction (T x C). The approach to the third objective was to conceptualize learning climate dimensions, old compared to new learning organizations.

First, the idea that learning is always a competitiveness issue has not been consistently advanced in the literature, if hardly at all. Second, the internal learning climates within firms are what is at the heart of other cultures' successes. Much time has been spent studying the tools used in these firms, for instance quality circles, but little time with the climate learning dimension. The climate dimension has been the reason for their success.

The paper presents a tools/climate learning dimensions matrix (a 2x2 matrix) and develops the understanding that all learning stems from two learning dimensions, tools, and the learning dimension, climate, within which the tools are employed. Within this discussion, the authors present the idea of the competitive advantage of cultures; this advantage appearing in a firm as a consequence of the “climate learning dimension” of various cultures. The concluding section of the paper presents five climate dimensions; those of yesterday compared with those of today. These well known management perspectives (e.g. single loop learning/double loop learning, independence/interdependence) are linked to the learning process with a special focus on the climate dimension of the process. It is there that the degree of the firm's competitiveness is enhanced.