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Purpose: This chapter considers talent management in ‘situ’, at a time of unprecedented disruption, and identifies implications for practice and study.

Methodology/approach: We compare normative advice from the talent management literature with publicly available accounts of talent management strategies employed during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also include perceptions of employees from publicly available reviews (Glassdoor, 2020a), and a brief personal account.

Findings: Hospitality and tourism organisations are encountering unprecedented pressures for change, primarily due to Covid-19 as well as the sustainability and social justice movements. We identify three organisational responses to the pandemic – closing/contracting operations, consolidating around areas of strength, and creatively pivoting in new directions. Innovations in talent management were found to vary accordingly, including: humane downsizing and pay cuts; training and development (for managers and front-line employees, including in emotional intelligence, resilience, and delivering service excellence online); new talent acquisition, through new programmes, structures, roles, and partnerships; an enhanced employee value proposition, including safe and fun work environments, as well as improved pay and benefits; commitments to social equity and sustainability; courageous, creative, and resilient leadership; and effective communication. Despite these innovations, employee reviews suggest that top performing organisations continue to fall short on work–life balance, un-social working hours, inadequate compensation, and poor-quality managers.

Practical implications: Ever increasing business complexity requires skilled senior managers in multiple domains, and empowered, decentralised unit-level managerial and owner competence (with skills in emotional intelligence, collaboration, and negotiation). Front-line employees, capable of delivering excellence in customer service (despite disrupted circumstances), are more essential than ever. Successful enterprises, both now and in the future, will undoubtedly be those that prioritise talent, throughout all levels of organisation.

Research limitations/implications: Future research should undertake a more comprehensive investigation of talent management strategies employed (including from small business owners), as well as employee perceptions of their effectiveness (considering socio-economic differences as well as gender and race). Research is also needed with respect to the perceived value of organisational commitments to sustainability and social justice initiatives.

Originality/value: This chapter uniquely considers talent management at a time of crisis. Methodologically, it uses publicly available data of employee perceptions of their employers.

This article aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

The briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The article finds that innovation and knowledge management (KM) are inextricably linked, not least because KM involves an element of sharing. Organizations must pool their resources in order to most effectively harness the potential of new ideas and the commercial opportunities that they offer.

The article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and discuss a definition and a classification scheme for direct writing (DW) technologies.

Both the definition and the classification are developed based on the perspectives of the growing DW community in the UK, through consultation with members, workshops and a survey across the community. In addition, current DW technologies and literature on classification techniques are reviewed.

The classification is structured in order to encompass current technologies, but also to be expandable to accommodate new ones that could be identified in the future as belonging to the DW remit. It is developed considering three dimensions related to DW: “Technology” to encompass all the processes, apparatuses, principles and tools which allow DW manufacturing; “Applications” to consider all the “types of manufactured goods” which could be produced with the DW technologies; and “Materials” which could be employed in DW manufacturing. The classification scheme is visualised into navigation maps and used as the basis of a software tool which can allow the community to exchange information on DW.

The paper proposes a classification as a tool for knowledge exchange and to support knowledge organisation and retrieval. However, the classification proposed in this paper might not be the only possible solution.

The definitional framework is proposed to the DW community as a language tool to help communication among members with different perspectives and to be used to support the creation of information databases. It is embodied in a software tool through which they could file personal profiles (i.e. their expertise and interests) and hence map the community.

It is evident that, due to the heterogeneity of the community of scientists and practitioners interested in these technologies, many perspectives coexisted and that a communication platform is required. The authors decide to develop a classification which could be flexible enough to encompass new emerging technologies as the use of classifications as tools for supporting communication across the scientific community is well known and as the authors could not identify in literature any other DW technology classification which could satisfy these requirements.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Erick Wilson and Richard Hyche, managers of Hughes Family Furniture Store in Charlotte N.C. are exploring new ways to motivate their sales force to sell more of one of their most profitable items, a Furniture Protection Plan. They are considering a new compensation plan but are concerned about how this new change might affect their sales force.