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The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons why the concept of a “strategic early warning system” (SEWS) has not been widely introduced and why it fails to be implemented successfully in German corporations. The aim of such systems is to detect changes in an organizational environment ahead of time by scanning the environment for “weak signals”, which come in the form of trends.

The questions that arise, particularly because the concept of SEWS is not entirely new, are: What are the pitfalls in implementing these systems, why do they occur, and how can they be overcome? To answer these questions, a single case study was conducted.

The study suggests that the failure of SEWS is due mainly to a lack of participation of potential future users in the implementation phase, a lack of joint understanding of the nature of trends, differing and unrevealed requirements of trends by various interested parties, a broad misconception of the “weak signals” concept and trends, an excessively heavy reliance on alleged “hard data”, a lack of interaction among users, and finally a “missing link” to the strategic functions in an organization.

The results of the study are limited due to the fact that they are derived from a single case study.

The identification of pitfalls contributes to the research on implementing SEWS and this can also be linked to “strategic issue management” and the foresight process.

The purpose of this paper is to address a central question in foresight exercises: how to communicate derived results?

By drawing on an empirical study, this paper presents a framework for using visualizations in foresight and illustrates its application by referring to a case study.

The argument is made that by using a dimensional framework, the effects of visualization can be leveraged for communicating foresight results and creating stronger buy-in.

Although visualizations appear to be a central means of communication and engagement, little is known in the context of foresight on the functions and dimension of visualizations.

The aim of this article is to introduce business wargaming as a tool for ex ante strategy evaluation. Reviewing criticism of other approaches, such as scenarios and computer‐based simulations, this article explores whether business wargaming is a suitable response to this criticism.

This article reviews and discusses the literature on strategy testing and business wargaming.

Business wargaming is capable of responding to criticism of scenarios and computer‐based simulations when applied to the ex ante evaluation of strategy. Business wargaming, which arose from military wargaming, is a strategic simulation that is dynamic and participative, allowing managers to experience how their strategy will compete and endure in their business environment.

Additional research is needed to explore the application of business wargaming in practice as a tool for the testing of strategy.

The article suggests that business wargaming is a valuable tool for testing strategies in a simulation, which is participative and dynamic.

This article fills the research gap on strategy testing and points to a tool – business wargaming – that has been applied intensively in the military field.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the relevance of the inner future of an organization for diagnosing and treating organizational disorders, as it relates to the concept of future‐oriented psychotherapy.

This paper combines the concept of future‐oriented psychotherapy, with the categorization of organizations using the means of psychiatric disorders.

The paper finds that the importance of an organization's future is underlined by evidence from psychiatry. Time distortions in psychiatric illness can cloud the personal future of an individual and distort the view of the future and thereby disrupt goal‐directed behavior. The claim of future‐oriented psychotherapy is that in order to treat mental disorders, the future needs to be brought under self‐control; this process is futuring. It is suggested that in an organizational context, the Scenario technique or Strategic Issue Management can be applied to treat organizational disorders.

Additional research will be needed to explore the implications of future‐oriented psychotherapy for other disorders, besides those discussed here (depression, schizophrenia, paranoia), and which methodologies beside the Scenario technique and Strategic Issue Management can be applied for future‐oriented psychotherapy for organizations.

The paper suggests that how the future is dealt with in an organization, has implications for diagnosing the mental health of an organization and for treating such disorders in an organization.

This paper fills a gap in the research on organizational disorders by highlighting the relevance of the inner future of an organization.

The study aims to expand on the concept of an early warning system (EWS) by introducing weak-signal detection, human-in-the-loop (HIL) verification and response tuning as integral parts of an EWS's design.

The authors bibliographically highlight the evolution of EWS over the last 30+ years, discuss instances of EWSs in various types of organizations and industries and highlight limitations of current systems.

Proposed system to be used in the transforming of weak signals to early warnings and associated weak/strong responses.

The authors contribute to existing literature by presenting (1) novel approaches to dealing with some of the well-known issues associated with contemporary EWS and (2) an event-agnostic heuristic for dealing with weak signals.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2020-0513.

The authors explore how the sentiment expressed by emojis in comments on stocks is associated with the stocks' subsequent returns.

By applying our own analyzer, the authors find a sentiment effect of emojis on stocks returns separately to the plain text-expressed sentiment in Reddit posts about meme stocks such as Gamestop during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The authors document that a one-standard deviation change in emoji sentiment magnitude measured as the quantity of positive emoji sentiment posts over the previous hour is associated with an 0.06% (annualized: 109.2%) one-hour abnormal stock return compared to a mean of 0.03% (annualized: 54.6%). If the stock exhibits a higher intra-hour volatility, a proxy for uninformed noise trading, this relation is more pronounced and even stronger compared to stock return's relation to plain text sentiment.

The authors are not able to show causation that is open to future research. It also remains an open question how emojis impact market price efficiency.

Emojis are positively related to stock returns in addition to plain text-expressed content if they are discussed heavily by retail investors in Internet boards such as Reddit.

Shared emotions expressed by emojis might have an influence on how disconnected individuals make homogeneous decisions. This argument might explain our found relation of emojis and stock returns.

So, the study findings provide empirical evidence that emojis in Reddit posts convey information on future short-term stocks returns distinct from information expressed in plain text, in the case of volatile stocks, with a higher magnitude.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.