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Scenarios that offer peeks at the future are intriguing, but critics complain that often they aren't much help in sorting out current decisions. The authors offer an alternative process that starts with a rough sketch of the main elements of several likely macroeconomic futures and then involves managers in the development of scenarios that focus on decision making. The intent is to clarify the options for operating decisions. In this case, a Latin American oil producer decides whether to buy a small and somewhat inefficient U. S. refinery.

This study examines the relationship between board composition and firm value, and the extent to which this relationship may be affected by a company’s investment opportunity set. There is little research that examines this issue, particularly for the New Zealand market. Of the research that exists, and generally for the research that examines how board composition affects firm performance, the findings have been mixed. Using a randomly chosen sample, which improves the external validity of results from prior studies, we find that board composition of high growth option firms is positively related to firm value, and this relationship is maintained when more refined measures that proxy the characteristics of outside directors (such as tenure of outside directors, the level of outside director equity ownership, the number of other board positions held by outside directors, and the total proportion of non‐executive directors, including grey directors) are recognised.

Children experience toxic stress if there is pronounced activation of their stress-response systems, in situations in which they do not have stable caregiving. Due to their exposure to multiple poverty-related risks, African American children may be more susceptible to exposure to toxic stress. Toxic stress affects young children’s brain and neurophysiologic functioning, which leads to a wide range of deleterious health, developmental, and mental health outcomes. Given the benefits of early care and education (ECE) for African American young children, ECE may represent a compensating experience for this group of children, and promote their positive development.

The purpose of this chapter is to review how well walking interventions have increased and sustained walking, and to provide suggestions for improving future walking interventions. A scoping review was conducted of walking interventions for adults that emphasised walking as a primary intervention strategy and/or included a walking outcome measure. Interventions conducted at the individual, community, and policy levels between 1990 and 2015 were included, with greater emphasis on recent interventions. Walking tends to increase early in interventions and then gradually declines. Results suggest that increased walking, and environmental-change activities to support walking are more likely to be sustained when they are immediately followed by greater economic benefits/time-savings, social approval, and/or physical/emotional well-being. Adaptive interventions that adjust intervention procedures to match dynamically changing environmental circumstances also hold promise for sustaining increased walking. Interventions that incorporate automated technology, durable built environment changes, and civic engagement, may increase cost-efficiency. Variations in outcome measures, study duration, seasons, participant characteristics, and possible measurement reactivity preclude causal inferences about the differential effectiveness of specific intervention procedures for increasing and sustaining walking. This review synthesises the effects of diverse walking interventions on increasing and sustaining walking over a 25-year period. Suggestions are provided to guide future development of more effective, sustainable walking interventions at the population level.

Working as a consultant in the field of team development, I frequently find myself at odds with people who have different perceptions about the nature of the work. This confusion was actually expressed in print when in 1980, following the publication of my article on team problem diagnosis, another consultant wrote of his “simpler” method. This turned out to be the “LIFO” system. Again, similar misunderstanding arose in 1982, within a large client organisation in the public sector. The client had undergone major reorganisation, and it had been decided to create an internal consultancy role, a central function of which was to be team development. I was engaged to train those appointed to the role, with emphasis on the skills required by internal consultants. It came as some surprise therefore to be told during a seminar with some of the organisation's directors, that “team building” had recently been conducted in the area concerned. I had not yet trained the internal consultants. It emerged of course that their “team building” and my “team development” were entirely different processes. Impatient to “get things moving”, the organisation had initiated a programme of “team‐building” activity based on packaged exercises, mainly concerned with the analysis of management style.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.