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The purpose of this paper is to present a personal story about the use of statistics to help protect library services at the Library of the Department of Statistics at Bologna University.

This paper describes the statistics used uncritically by the Centralized Library Services of the University, their inadequacy, and greater utility of the data gathered by the Statistics Library together with those of the University of Ferrara.

The data gathered by the Statistics Library and those of the University of Ferrara provided a richer and more valid image of their services and their value to the user community, than the limited, somewhat old‐fashioned and simplistic metrics of the Centralized Library Services.

This successful approach helped change the mind of senior library management at a time of retrenchment. It is hoped that it will inspire others to challenge simplistic snapshots of services and strengthen their cases with more representative data.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual model that systematically interprets how key governance factors drive the alignment and the rent-extraction effects of executive stock options (SOs) as proxied by plan characteristics.

The authors draw on the review of 202 articles published in international academic journals. They collect data from library databases and by hand-searching and citation-tracking relevant papers on the topic. Moreover, the authors review and classify the studies as related with determinants or proxies of alignment and rent-extraction effects of SOs.

The conceptual model systematically interprets the results of the literature review and identifies the relationships between archetypes, driving factors and proxies of the rent/alignment effect of executive SOs. It highlights that, given ownership archetypes, effective (ineffective) governance practices drive the alignment (rent) aim of SOs as proxied by the optimal (non-optimal) plan design.

This paper supports compensation committees in selecting the SO characteristics that better attract investors and retain executives. Moreover, it guides future policy making interventions aiming at mitigating the rent-extraction effect of SOs.

The paper highlights that the governance determinants of SO aims can be effectively classified as archetypes or drivers of rent-extracting and aligning outcomes of these remuneration tools. Moreover, it offers a useful framework to guide future research efforts by providing a comprehensive interpretation of the relationships between ownership archetypes, driving factors and proxies of SO effects.

Building on the recent capability-based conceptualisation of resilience, this paper aims to explore whether the experience of a previous crisis and entrepreneur resilience are associated with Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') adoption of different anticipation strategies for adversities.

Using original survey data on 959 Italian and German SMEs, the research uses a multinomial logistic regression model in order to test the influence of the prior experience of a crisis and the entrepreneur resilience on the likelihood of adopting different anticipation strategies.

The paper shows that the previous experience of a crisis increases the likelihood of regularly adopting proactive but non-formalised anticipation actions while decreasing the likelihood of adopting a pure reactive strategy to adversities; in addition, entrepreneur resilience is nonlinearly associated with anticipation strategies.

The main originalities rely on eschewing a pure binary view in relation to the organisational choice of adopting a reactive or a proactive approach towards adversities and on considering the entrepreneur resilience as a factor with both “bright” and “dark” side effects in relation to the anticipation of adversities.