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Amid the current global crisis, biodiversity remains a topic that is often relegated to a few disciplines. Many issues related to the relationship between organizations and the ecosystem remain unexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the characteristics of the interrelationship between these two complex and dynamic systems.

This research is conducted using a constructivist approach, with an interpretivist perspective and a case study methodology. Through this research perspective and an exploratory multiple case study (holistic), the authors assess the implications related to the concept of biodiversity and the impacts that organizational choices could have on the consideration and management of this complex concept.

The desire of these entrepreneurs to change their ways of doing things and try to produce in a way that respects the ecosystem and enhances natural genetic diversity, while simultaneously drawing value from it in a healthy and sustainable manner, is evident. The orientation toward a sustainable and ecologically innovative business brings the concept of profit into the background on several occasions, leading these bakery entrepreneurs to be visionary green entrepreneurs (or ecopreneurs). The desire to be sustainable and to change the ways of “business as usual” makes these companies and their entrepreneurs an example of “sustainability-as-flourishing.”

By adopting the systems thinking approach and multiple case studies, this study examines the interrelation between some innovative small companies (bakeries) and biodiversity, their motivations to actively engage in biodiversity protection and their roles in protecting agrobiodiversity as well as the natural wealth of the ecosystem.

This study aims to compare linear programming and stable marriage approaches to the personnel assignment problem under conditions of uncertainty. Robust solutions should exhibit reduced variability of solutions in the presence of one or more additional constraints or problem perturbations added to some baseline problems.

Several variations of each approach are compared with respect to solution speed, solution quality as measured by officer-to-assignment preferences and solution robustness as measured by the number of assignment changes required after inducing a set of representative perturbations or constraints to an assignment instance. These side constraints represent the realistic assignment categorical priorities and limitations encountered by army assignment managers who solve this problem semiannually, and thus the synthetic instances considered herein emulate typical problem instances.

The results provide insight regarding the trade-offs between traditional optimization and heuristic-based solution approaches.

The results indicate the viability of using the stable marriage algorithm for talent management via the talent marketplace currently used by both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force for personnel assignments.

An interview with Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy. His new book is the articulation of key leadership principles for the next era of capitalism, and how to put them into practice, in both the best and hardest of times.

Joly believes “Work is a quest for meaning. Maximizing profit does not answer that quest.” His “purpose first” approach enabled the acclaimed turnaround of the company during his 2012-to-2019 tenure

Best Buy’s purpose was ‘to enrich our customers’ lives through technology.

According to Joly, “When we ask Best Buy employees what drives them, no one ever says ‘shareholder value.’”

Joly is a CEO who believes in and practices the approach that it is critical for leaders to understand what drives the individuals around them–and how it connects to the purpose of the organization. He believes business is fundamentally about purpose, people and human relationships. When common purpose aligns with individual searches for meaning, it can unleash a kind of human magic that results in outstanding performance.

The history of academic inquiry into leadership as a discipline has yielded the unintended consequence of compounding confusion and perpetuating the myth of leadership as mystical. This paper takes that acknowledgement and inquires into the past and future of leadership theory development from a systemic perspective to define the concept, propose an initial framework in which literature and inquiry may be framed, and offer a curriculum for leader(ship) training and development. Three aspects are proposed – requisite, fantasy, and requisite fantasy. This paper suggests the latter is the most appropriate and defines leadership as a binding strange attractor to social patterns. Upon this definition, this paper proposes an initial framework of six elements and six relationships for assimilating and re-organizing the literature, prescriptions, and speculations surrounding the discipline. Lastly, this framework serves to propose a curriculum for advancing the practice of leadership through training, development, and education.

The purpose of this paper is to address gaps in the knowledge about human resource (HR) professional involvement in strategic decision-making in China compared with that in Australia.

First, the authors compare the strategic involvement of Chinese and Australian HR professionals. Second, based on the upper echelon theory, the authors compare the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) and top management team (TMT) between both countries on HR involvement in strategic decision-making. Data were collected from matched pairs of HR and TMT executives in China (n = 168) and in Australia (n = 102).

Results indicate a difference, despite of no statistical significance, in HR involvement in strategic decision-making between Chinese and Australian samples. TMT behavioural integration was positively related to HR involvement in strategic decision-making in a collectivistic culture (i.e. in China), but not in an individualistic culture (i.e. in Australia). However, CEO support for HRM was positively related to HR involvement in strategic decision-making in Australia, whereas it is not related in China.

The paper conducts a comparative study and practical, and research implications are discussed at the end.