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A recognition that pockets of business and process excellence existed alongside mediocrity led Texas Instruments to establish a Best Practice Sharing programme under the direction of the Office of Best Practices. The Office of Best Practices, launched in 1994, is a dedicated unit which helps Texas Instruments’ worldwide businesses to identify, access and transfer best practices. TI’s Best Practice Sharing initiative was implemented to provide a mechanism for dialogue between TI leadership and TI employees and to facilitate collaboration based on the company’s strengths and business gaps. The goal is to provide a quicker path to achieving business excellence. In addition to providing these solutions, the Best Practice Sharing project has provided TI employees with a greater sense of the synergies possible across the company and a greater feeling of shared vision. This paper reviews the TI‐BEST programme, the Best Practice Sharing initiative, and examines the lessons learnt and benefits gained from best practices knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine commonly relied upon product sampling strategies, direct‐to‐consumer sampling and event sampling, to determine which method can deliver the greatest return on investment in a variety of situations.

The paper explores information and data collected via case studies in actual programs presented to brands. The trial, sample, and purchase numbers were actual averages from sampling effectiveness studies for these types of programs.

The paper identifies and segments different types of products and the method by which the products are most effectively implemented into trial and sampling programs. ICOM reveals hard statistics on the return on investment of programs utilizing multiple methods of sampling including point‐of‐use, direct mail and event sampling.

Marketers should follow the STEPS outlined in this study to apply the best brand sampling strategy for a given product. Knowledge of targeted consumer base along with careful pre‐event analysis will deliver the best return on investment for a trial campaign.

The paper reveals reasons for a growing shift in corporate budgeted marketing dollars from event marketing to direct consumer product sampling. While event sampling is not always an ineffective or inferior marketing method,the reader can discover methods for a pre‐event return on investment analysis that will reveal the sampling strategy sure to deliver the most “bang” for the marketing “buck”.

According to a survey carried out on a total of 756 CEOs in 2002 by The Center for Creative Leadership and Chief Executive Magazine, leadership development has been hailed as a critical component of competitive advantage. While this may not come as much of a shock to some organizations, the surprising fact is that despite widespread acceptance of the importance of nurturing leadership talent amongst today’s business leaders, many admit to having a poor strategy for making it happen. This is undoubtedly a major problem, for as businesses continue to be challenged by developments in technology, customer demographics, market conditions and environmental threats, an organization’s fortunes will increasingly rest on the abilities of its leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to share anecdotally how the pandemic is affecting children, families and some of the frontline local services that support them across three continents.

Three members of Family for Every Child across three continents detail some of the day-to-day challenges they are facing in their work with children and families as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Social distancing and fear of the virus are hampering front line organisations in Africa, Europe and South America, bringing additional challenges to keeping children safe.

These three case studies give a snapshot of the issues faced by three non-governmental children’s organisations over three continents during July 2020.

This chapter documents how the process of grassroots community organizing through a family-focused model of local contestation liberates participants, mainly Black and immigrant Latina mothers in Chicago, from the constraints of individualization. While much philanthropic and academic interest focuses on the policy and quantitative “impacts” and “outcomes” of local social movements, the current study looks to local organizers to better understand their experiences and how they construct meaning through their participation. In-depth interviews and participant observations show how leaders gained collective purpose and voice through family-focused collective action. Community Organizing and Family Issues, a non-profit organizing institution, supported and propelled participants (leaders) to organize locally to create change in their communities, while it also facilitated conversions in self-perceptions. Leaders often discovered a sense of capacity, which contested gendered, raced, and classed oppression and self-doubt. Through the process of community organizing, leaders exercised power and dignity, facets that for the women in this study, were often ignored and devalued in society. These understudied social effects of collective action help us to better understand how marginalized women experience local social movements that cannot be quantified to fit narrow measures of movement “impacts” and “outcomes.”

Ms. Cindi Bigelow, COO and third generation in her family to head the R.C. Bigelow Tea Company, located in Fairfield, CT, believed one strategy to move her business forward would be to attract a younger audience for her product line. Hot tea appeals primarily to women 45+ who typically drink the beverage for its soothing effects. A test market, designed to make hot tea more appealing to a college-age audience, was conducted at a nearby university by a Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) team drawn from the chapter's membership. Key words: Target audience, market segmentation, demographics, market research, promotion mix, advertising, copy development, media selection.

Much of the information for this case was taken from interviews by the first and second authors with Cindy and John Buell at Mexicali Fresh, taken directly from the Buell’s Mexicali Fresh Business Plan, and updated information from their blog posted on http://mexigrill.blogspot.com. In addition, background for this case was provided by Stowers (2005).

The need to improve performance and productivity causes conflict when a blind typist comes under scrutiny. Although not intentionally singled out, she felt threatened. This is a sensitive issue that needs to be handled with tact and professionalism. Because of the personalities involved, there is no easy solution to this case, a characteristic that makes “performance shock” a valuable learning tool.

The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look like to continue to be “playful” in teaching and teacher education?

To examine how teacher educators may design for teachers’ critical playful literacies, the authors offer three “worked examples” (Gee, 2009) of preservice teachers’ playful practices in an English literacies teacher education course.

The authors highlight instructional design elements pertinent to co-designing for teachers’ play and playful literacies in teacher education: generative constraints to practice everyday ingenuity, figuring it out to foster teacher agency and debriefs to interrupt the teaching’s perpetual performance.

The term “playful,” as a descriptor of practice and qualifier of activity appears frequently in educational literature across domains. The relationship of play to critical literacies – and, more specifically, educators’ literacies and learning – is less frequently explored.