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How do managers prepare financial forecasts?

Objectives:

Explores the relevance of the nineteenth century Russian Christian‐mystical philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev, to the contemporary world. Demonstrates that his thought proved a harbinger of many of the concerns of the present. Breaking with the orthodoxies of the nineteenth century, Soloviev explored such questions as ecumenicalism, incarnational/ developmental mysticism, feminism, and social justice. He advocated a reformed, flexible, aesthetically aware Christianity unimagined by his contemporaries. Notes Soloviev′s relationship with Western and Eastern traditionality and his strategy for the reconciliation of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. In essence, argues for the significance of the contribution of Vladimir Soloviev.

Issues, which have negatively impacted a diversity of business stakeholders, suggest that business thinking and leadership behaviors surrounding a desired strategic business focus appear increasingly inadequate. For example, that integration strategies and differentiation strategies are mutually exclusive. Three issues appear to contribute to such circumstances.

First, Western strategic business frameworks are largely based on quantitative foci, and remain largely unchallenged. Second, balance between key leadership team agendas and external stakeholder expectations is usually absent. Third, there is minimal connection between what organizational cultures reward, and how human resource management prescriptions provide support.

To address such concerns and implant a renewed strategic business focus, Porter and Kramer (2006, 2011) have identified the notion of shared value, which seems an appealing means to redress business problems represented by negative multistakeholder relations; moreover, an absence of any contemporary acknowledgment of the social contract. Nevertheless, a number of elements appear to be missing from the how shared value is portrayed by Porter and Kramer (2006, 2011).

Based on Maslow’s notion of Eupsychia, and employing an Ideation approach, a renewed strategic business focus supporting the notion of shared value is presented. The renewed focus seeks to enhance Porter and Kramer’s (2011) framework, by including key features to enhance shared value, including elements of Eastern and Western philosophy, and Western organization theory.

Problematic examples, identifying the absence of shared value, and including research propositions are identified.

In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

Our purpose in this paper is three‐fold. First, we shall briefly describe what is almost a truism— that is, the classical (especially the Greek) intellectual heritage of the Arab‐Islamic scholars upon which the latter, imbued by their young faith, developed their own comprehensive synthesis. Second, as part of that synthesis, we shall explore briefly the economic thought of a few early‐medieval Arab‐Islamic scholastics who extended that heritage and wrote on numerous issues of human concern, including economics. Those discourses took place during what is sometimes called the “golden age” of Islam — a period that coincided roughly with the so‐called Dark Age of Europe. Parenthetically, it might be noted that one of 20th century's most prominent economists, the late Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) had, unfortunately for the continuity and evolution of human intellectual tradition, declared that period as “the Great Gap,” representing “blank centuries,” during which nothing of significance to economics, or for that matter to any field, was said or written anywhere — as though there was a complete lacuna over intellectual evolution throughout the rest of the world (Schumpeter, 52, 74; see Ghazanfar, 1991). And finally, we will provide some evidence as to the historically influential linkages of the Arab‐Islamic thought, including economic thought, with the Latin‐European scholastics‐a phenomenon that facilitated the European intellectual evolution. An underlying theme of this paper is predicated on the premise that the classical tradition (i.e., Greek knowledge, though not exclusively) is part of a long historical continuum that represents the inextricably linked Judeo‐Christian‐and‐Islamic tradition of the West. This theme, though not common appreciated, is amply corroborated through the writings of well‐known scholars from the East and the West (see, for example, Durant, Haskins, Myers, O'Leary, Said, Sarton, Sharif, and others).

This study, using a new method called Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS), aims to examine the most important historic works written in the area of knowledge management (KM).

Preliminary data of this study have been extracted from Web of Science through scientometric methods. The references used in all the papers in the core journals in this field since 1980 to the end of 2014 were studied.

The distribution of resources in the area of KM based on the publication year indicates that this field of study, during time intervals 1900 to 1980, has seen eight major mutations. A considerable influence of such fields as economics, business, social networks analysis, organizational learning and economic sociology on the realm of KM is evident. The association of Polanyi with the mutations of 1958, 1962 and 1967 suggests his obvious influence on the evolution of KM. The ratio of articles to books among the whole documents detected by RPYS was 2-13 which could direct us to the point that the channel for information transformation in KM is more focused on books than on articles.

None of the few studies done by scientometric methods in the realm of KM has been seen through the issue of the historical origins of this area. This piece of research, using a new scientometric method, can be considered the first study in which the origins of KM over time have been studied.