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In early 2014, the family leadership of Bush Brothers & Company, a leading player in canned vegetables (its Bush's Best line dominated the canned-beans market), faced questions about the family's vision for the future in light of an imminent leadership transition: third-generation member, longtime board chair, and, until recently, CEO Jim Ethier planned to leave his role as early as 2015. The family was into its sixth generation, with nearly sixty family shareholders spread across four branches. On the business side, the first non-family CEO was overseeing development of a growth strategy, including ongoing ventures into competitive new markets such as Hispanic foods. Its fourth-generation leaders including Drew Everett (vice president of human resources and shareholder relations, and likely board chair successor), Sarah (chair of the family senate), and Tony (chair of the family's private trust company) faced questions about whom to involve in developing a future vision, how to formulate the vision effectively, and what vision would best serve business and family interests. These questions represented underlying strategic dilemmas, such as whether to have a select group of leaders craft the vision or to solicit input from a wider range of shareholders, and how much to allow the business vision to drive the ‘people’ vision all framed by recent unsuccessful attempts to develop a shared vision. Resolving these dilemmas successfully would help the family frame and advance its established traditions of leadership, governance, and culture within a truly shared vision that boosted unity and long-term commitment. Students working on the case will gain insights into the framework, process, and challenges associated with developing a shared vision for a complex, multigeneration family enterprise.

On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government (White House, 2009a) committing his Administration to create an unprecedented level of openness in government and indicating his belief that government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This chapter examines the Obama Administration through June 2010, and looks at how closely the administration is hewing to its promises, in the context of the legacy of secrecy it inherited.

Several reasons are frequently offered to explain (or to justify) failure to implement strategy. Some are valid but many have merely gained credibility from being repeated often. By discrediting the myths, we can more clearly look at a number of approaches that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of strategy implementation. There are seven key reasons for strategy failure. Unanticipated market changes – strategies can fail because the market conditions change before the strategy can take hold. Three preventative actions are cited: (1) effective competitor responses to strategy – to out‐perform the competition, competitive intelligence is a must; (2) too little investment – if insufficient resources are applied, the strategy will fail. Modeling will aid the executive to make smarter deployment of limited resources; and (3) failure of buy‐in – insufficient buy‐in to or understanding of the strategy among those who need to implement it will cause failure. Good strategic management is a function of people actively considering the strategy as they make day‐to‐day decisions in an ever‐changing world. Lack of focus – resources are wastefully dissipated if priorities are unclear. Put the strategy on one page: focus to execute. Poorly conceived business models – sometimes strategies are simply bad.

“What went wrong?” This was the question no doubt asked by the Bush campaign and the Republican Party after the 3 November 1992 presidential election.

This chapter investigates the use of prospective (i.e., future oriented) narratives as rhetorical devices in public discourse. Drawing on recent narrative research and Northrop Frye's discussion of generic narrative forms in literature, I contrast the classic Romantic Narrative of America's occupation of Iraq presented in President Bush's State of the Union Addresses (SUAs) over the last 6 years of his presidency with the alternative narrative projected in the Democratic Party's formal responses to those addresses. My analysis demonstrates how Bush's story of America's actions in Iraq was constructed through the course of those speeches – by exploiting both narrative form and temporality – and how it constrained the articulation of counter narratives by the Democrats. The results support the general thesis that, by virtue of a neo-rhetoric centered around strategic frames and culturally resonant narratives, the Bush Administration in particular and conservatives in general successfully dictated public discourse on important national issues.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.

Purpose – This study demonstrates that serious episodes of presidential ill health can have positive impacts on role performance.

Design/methodology – The author utilizes both primary source materials (personal interviews with White House physicians and several other physicians who treated Reagan at the hospital, and the writings of key Reagan aides and family members) and secondary source materials (writings of political scientists, historians, and journalists).

Findings – Reagan was at first in critical condition. It was then that his Secretary of State appeared to make a bold grab for power, an act that contributed materially to the end of his political career. Additionally, the administration’s failure to invoke the presidential disability amendment allowed the official chain of command to be in doubt. Finally, the significant increase in Reagan’s popularity that flowed from his light-hearted demeanor after he was shot is examined here in terms of the President’s subsequent legislative successes.

Originality/value – This study suggests strongly that Reagan’s impressive legislative achievements in mid-1981 were due significantly to his heroic response to having been shot.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.