Search results

Last year, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) decided to accept the Justice Department's proposal to break up the Bell System—a 100‐year‐old institution, the largest business in the world, with one million employees and 3 million share owners.

My thoughts are shaped by my experience of the last five years. The job has been to manage a major business in an essential industry during a period of critical policy disputes. Changes, uncertainty, and shocks have been almost continuous and they have occurred against a backdrop of an economy that was wracked by surging inflation and then weakened by prolonged, deep recession.

For many managers the process of conducting a performance appraisal is an uncomfortable experience, one which is often put off to the last minute and then rushed through, simply to get it over with. As a result, not much is gained by the process and very often the employee leaves feeling frustrated. In this article, the author shares his thoughts and experiences on how an appraisal can be a positive experience — one that can challenge associates to accomplish goals and maximise their productivity.

President Richard M. Nixon's historic trip to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1972 established a relationship between the United States and the PRC which was formalized when President Nixon signed the Shanghai Communique. This treaty proclaimed China's willingness to accept foreign investment and its movement toward becoming a more “open door” nation. With the normalization of full diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1978, U.S. investments in the PRC and the interest of world marketers has gained momentum. Today there is intense interest in the potential of the PRC market among U.S. consumer goods manufacturers, of both consumer durables and nondurables. U.S. consumer goods companies are starting to produce their products for and in China.

Developing a performance measure and reporting the results to support decision making at an individual level has yielded poor results in many health systems. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the factors associated with the dissemination of performance information that generate and support continuous improvement in health organizations.

A systematic data collection strategy that includes empirical and theoretical research published from 1980 to 2010, both qualitative and quantitative, was performed on Web of Science, Current Contents, EMBASE and MEDLINE. A narrative synthesis method was used to iteratively detail explicative processes that underlie the intervention. A classification and synthesis framework was developed, drawing on knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) literature. The sample consisted of 114 articles, including seven systematic or exhaustive reviews.

Results showed that dissemination in itself is not enough to produce improvement initiatives. Successful dissemination depends on various factors, which influence the way collective actors react to performance information such as the clarity of objectives, the relationships between stakeholders, the system's governance and the available incentives.

This review was limited to the process of knowledge dissemination in health systems and its utilization by users at the health organization level. Issues related to improvement initiatives deserve more attention.

Knowledge dissemination goes beyond better communication and should be considered as carefully as the measurement of performance. Choices pertaining to intervention should be continuously prompted by the concern to support organizational action.

While considerable attention was paid to the public reporting of performance information, this review sheds some light on a more promising avenue for changes and improvements, notably in public health systems.

Explains how tangibility can be a useful concept for the services marketer, enabling a firm to identify its position relative to competition by measuring tangibility at various levels such as product class, brand, segment and thus develop specific strategies for improvement. Provides a scale, based on three empirical studies, for measuring tangibility and shows how the results can be used strategically.

The effective and ingenious tapping of people resources has become an important long‐range strategic concern. But as we witness company after company and union after union announce its new people‐based programs, most often using the quality‐of‐work‐life (QWL) label, we have begun to see alarmingly consistent signs of superficiality in what is being said, urged and done.

How the chief executives of two major corporations are dealing with changes in their industry.