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The purpose of this paper is to determine the key success factors (KSFs) of purchasing decision making of overseas importers of Taiwanese products and the Taiwanese exporters; and second, to translate these KSFs into critical problems and formulate strategies to solve them.

The authors use grey theory to identify the KSFs. In the end, 24 KSFs are obtained and changed into 22 critical problems. That is, the authors define what characteristics need to be improved for each critical problem and what characteristics could worsen (deteriorate) when the improved parameters are applied to solve the critical problems. Then, the authors use the TRIZ contradiction matrix to determine inventive principles they relate to and apply them to formulate the strategies for the hand‐tool industry.

The study offers short‐, medium‐ and long‐term improvement strategies for companies in the hand‐tool industry in the area of purchasing decision making.

The paper contributes in four ways. First, in understanding the overseas importers and the Taiwanese exporters' purchasing decision making with reference to the hand‐tool industry in Taiwan. Second, it determines B2B communication tools, which is a theoretical contribution of this paper to the literature. Third, companies in Taiwan and other countries can also apply strategies formulated in this research to solve similar problems. Finally, it simulates the critical problems and its solutions in the operations.

Based on the first part of the service profit chain, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between 11 spiritual management tactics and determinants of turnover intention.

A survey on managers and manufacturing employees is conducted. Later, the grey relational analysis to process the data is used together with the multi‐criteria‐weighted average in the decision‐making process to identify degree of relatedness between spiritual management and determinants of employee turnover intention.

The paper finds that a difference in perception between managers and employees exists with regard to appropriate spiritual management tactics; the former put more emphasis on the tangibles aspects; and the later on the intangibles.

This paper is an exploratory research; so there is lack of other empirical studies in this area, more work needs to be done in regard to reliability and validity of measures of spiritual management. The authors suggest cultural comparison to be studied, to see if those 11 spiritual management tactics has the same effect on employees' turnover in different cultural environments.

The results indicate that conducting appropriate spiritual management will benefit from reducing employee turnover and then increasing the firm performance.

This paper offers some concrete management suggestions both for the academy and the practice, especially in the new era of conceptual age.