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This paper, based on a publication entitled Facing up to the Learning Organisation Challenge, published in April 2003, provides an overview of the main questions emerging from recent European research projects related to the topic of the learning organisation. The rationale for focusing on this topic is the belief that the European Union goals related to “lifelong learning” and the creation of a “knowledge‐based society” can only be attained if the organisations in which people work are also organisations in which they learn. Work organisations must become, at the same time, learning organisations. This paper has four main messages. The first is that, in order to build learning organisations, one has to ensure that: there is coherence between the “tangible” (formal/objective) and the “intangible” (informal/subjective) dimensions of an organisation; and that the organisation's learning goals are reconciled with individuals’ learning needs. The complexity involved in ensuring the right balance between these different dimensions, means that in the final analysis one cannot realistically expect more than incomplete or imperfect learning organisations. However, this does not in any way negate the validity of the quest to reconcile these competing but “real” interests. The second message is that challenging or developmental work is a prerequisite for implementing a learning organisation. One of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it promotes human development. The third message is that the provision of support and guidance is essential to ensure that developmental work does in fact provide opportunities for developmental learning. The fourth message is that to address organisational learning there is a need for boundary‐crossing and interdisciplinary partnerships between the vocational education and training and human resource development communities.

Information technology (IT) makes business process reengineering possible—and makes it worthwhile. For example, PC and network technologies facilitate simplified processes, promote decentralized decision making, and empower front line employees. So IT and reengineering should be seen as Siamese twins—don't expect to get far with one without paying close attention to the other.

This model integrates proven management tools such as Total Quality Management, benchmarking, customer‐satisfaction measurement, and cross‐functional team building into an innovative process reengineering program.

This paper aims to explore the role of organisational leaders and leaders within the professions in ensuring that society is well served by its professionals.

This paper draws on the authors own observations over 25 years of educating and developing clinical leaders.

This paper explores the particular challenges of leading professionals in fields such as, law, education or healthcare, where relationships can often be fraught and combative rather than constructive and effective. The paper concludes that if leaders insist on managing professionals as part of a connected hierarchy it will simply continue to provoke resistance.

This paper explores the particular challenges of leading professionals in fields such as, law, education or healthcare, where relationships can often be fraught and combative rather than constructive and effective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ policy with regard to employees’ social media use. Specifically, the authors examine the extent to which employers allow the use of social media in the workplace, what opportunities can be related to employees’ social media use and how social media guidelines are implemented within organizations.

In-depth interviews were conducted with HR and communication managers of 16 European companies from different sectors and of varying size.

Some organizations believe that social media should be accessible to employees while others ban them from the workplace. Most respondents believe that organizations can benefit from employees sharing work-related content with their own network. However, they encourage the sharing and retweeting of official corporate messages rather than employees developing their own messages. This fear regarding employees’ messages on social media is reflected in the broad adoption of social media guidelines.

Future research should chart the nature of existing social media guidelines (restrictive vs incentive). Accordingly, the perceived sense and nonsense of social media guidelines in companies should be investigated, not only among the managers but also among employees.

Organizations should remain in dialogue with employees with regard to social media. Managers seem overly concerned with potential risks and forget the opportunities that can arise when employees operate as ambassadors.

The use of in-depth interviews allowed the authors to assess the rationale behind social media guidelines within organizations in depth and formulate suggestions to organizations and communication managers.

Symmetric communication and relationship building are core principles of public relations, which have been highlighted for CSR communication. The purpose of this paper is to develop three different communication strategies for CSR communication in Twitter, of which each contributes differently to the ideals of symmetric communication and relationship building. The framework is then applied to analyze how companies use the micro-blogging service Twitter for CSR communication.

Social network analysis is used to identify the 30 most central corporate accounts in a CSR Twitter network.

From the social network analysis 40,000 tweets are extracted and manually coded. Anova is applied to investigate differences in the weighting of CSR topics between the different strategies.

So far not much is known about how social media, such as Twitter, contribute to the core principles of public relations, if companies use social media to foster symmetric communication and relationship management, or which CSR topics they address.

This study is dedicated to universities' strategic social media communication and focuses on the fan engagement triggered by Facebook postings. The study contributes to a growing body of knowledge that addresses the strategic communication of universities that have thus far hardly dealt with questions of resonance and evaluation of their social media messages.

Using the Facebook Graph API, the authors collected posts from the official Facebook fan pages of the universities listed on Shanghai Ranking's Top 50 of 2015. Specifically, the authors retrieved all posts in a three-year range from October 2012 to September 2015. After downloading the Facebook posts, the authors used tools for automated content analysis to investigate the features of the post messages.

Overall, the median number of likes per 10,000 fans was 4.6, while the number of comments (MD = 0.12) and shares (MD = 0.40) were considerably lower. The average Facebook Like Ratio of universities per 10,000 fans was 17.93%, the average Comment Ratio (CR) was 0.56% and the average Share Ratio (SR) was 2.82%. If we compare the average Like Ratios (17.93%) and Share Ratios (2.82%) of the universities with the respective Like Ratios (5.90%) and Share Ratios (0.45%) of global brands per 10,000 fans, we may find that universities are three times (likes) and six times (shares) as successful as are global brands in triggering engagement among their fan bases.

The content analysis was solely based on the publicly observable Facebook communication of the Top 50 Shanghai Ranking universities. Furthermore, the content analysis was limited to universities listed on the Shanghai Ranking's Top 50. Also, the Facebook posts have been sampled between 2012 and September 2015. Moreover, the authors solely focused on one social media channel (i.e., Facebook), which might restrict the generalizability of the study findings. The limitations notwithstanding, university communicators are invited to take advantage of the study's insights to become more successful in generating fan engagement.

First, posts published on the weekend generate significantly more engagement than those published on workdays. Second, the findings suggest that posts published in the evening generate more engagement than those published during other times of day. Third, research-related posts trigger a certain number of shares, but at the same time these posts tend to lower engagement with regard to liking and commenting.

To the authors’ best knowledge, the automated content analysis of 72,044 Facebook posts of universities listed in the Top 50 of the Shanghai Ranking is the first large scale longitudinal investigation of a social media channel of higher education institutions.

A systematic and repeatable process – Isolate and SEAL – can enable strategists to identify such potentially game-changing operational actions that will support significant business model innovations.

The end-to-end Isolate and SEAL process can be demonstrated using a historical review of the emergent strategy that produced the highly successful business model of Southwest Airlines.

Instead of trying to decide “what to do” to create an operational advantage, businesses attempting to innovate should first identify the core objective that operationalizes the winning profit logic.

Southwest fortuitously discovered its innovative profit logic when … Kelleher’ had to exhort his team to figure out how to deliver a four-plane schedule with three planes.

The potenrially game-changing two-step process: 10; Step 1 – Isolate: split the value chain’s elements into its component parts. 10; Step 2 – SEAL: Reconstruct the value chain using the four actions that effectively deliver the core objectives (Shift in space and time, Eliminate, Alter/Add, Leverage). 10;