Corporate planning for a town—a case history

Corporate planning is relatively new in U.K. local government. This article suggests the reasons behind this late development, and outlines the particular problems in local government and the approach adopted in one authority. The author's philosophy is that there is no blueprint for introducing corporate planning and that any approach must be evolutionary, reflecting local circumstances. The article covers the period from 1971 outlining the four main stages of development and includes the effects of local government reorganization in 1974. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the borough.     

Waste paper—a case for government action

In this article, the author outlines many implications of waste paper management. He discusses supply and demand, current and potential usage and relates these to planning needs. In the final section, Mr. Whiting puts forward a personal view of the action which he considers necessary from the national viewpoint.     

Planning for a new international economic order?

Many a familiar planning instrument seems buried in the hot desert of the Persian Gulf: extrapolations, forecasts and projections. The corporate planner is now highly environmentally oriented. If he has recovered from the energy crisis, is conversant with the food emergency, and resigned to persistent inflation—he is about to face a new and unfamiliar phenomenon. It is ambitiously called “the new international economic order” (for the sake of brevity: NIEO).     

Veteran's health care: time for a change?

The Department of Veterans Affairs' mission is "to care for him who are shall have borne the battle for his widow and orphan." The Veterans Health Administration comprises 172 hospitals that are the hub of the health care delivery system. It is the largest provider of graduate medical education, and one of the major research organizations in the United States. The medical care budget exceeds $17 billion annually. Most of the persons cared for are not legally entitled to this health care based on service connected disability. The utilization of acute care hospital beds appears excessive when compared to that obtainable with managed care for Medicare or commercial insurance beneficiaries--the cost per member per month is three times higher. There may also be exploitation of the Veterans Administration hospitals by university medical schools. The Veterans Health Administration is a very expensive way to deliver care to entitled service connected veterans. Therefore, it is suggested that privatization be considered as an alternative vehicle for delivering health care.     

How Long Should a Customer Wait for Service?

A major concern for service managers is the determination of how long a customer should wait to be served. Services, due to the customer's direct interaction with the process, must face a trade-off between minimizing the cost of having a customer wait and the cost of providing good service. A total cost model is presented for determining how long a customer should wait when these two conflicting cost components are considered. An integral part of this model includes a measure of customer satisfaction with waiting time which is used to develop a waiting cost function. The model is then applied to a major fast food chain, using data collected at several locations. Analysis of the data reveals that the “ideal” waiting time for this firm is significantly less than the current corporate waiting time policy. Thus, as indicated by the model, a corporate policy change is recommended to provide much faster service. The adoption of such a policy would result in increased labor costs, and would simultaneously increase the firm's overall profits. Although appearing contradictory, increases in current labor costs and long-term profits are both possible when management takes the long-range perspective suggested in this paper.     

A polynomial time approximation scheme for?embedding a directed hypergraph on a weighted ring

Given a directed hypergraph H=(V,E _H ), we consider the problem of embedding all directed hyperedges on a weighted ring. The objective is to minimize the maximum congestion which is equal to the maximum product of the weight of a link and the number of times that the link is passed by the embedding. In this paper, we design a polynomial time approximation scheme for this problem.     

A short proof of a result on a Vizing-like problem for integer total domination

In this note, we provide a short proof of a recent result on a Vizing-like problem for integer total domination in graphs given by Li and Hou (J. Comb. Optim., 2008).     

Digital Futures — An Agenda for a Sustainable Digital Economy

Despite the death of the dot-coms, there's no doubt that the digital revolution is reshaping the way we do business and relate to each other. Some would argue that this is happening with precious little thought for the environment or society at large, yet others say it has real potential to benefit both. Over the past year, Forum for the Future's Digital Futures project has examined the sustainability opportunities of e-business and the project's findings are summarised in this article.¹     

Accountability and value for money: a theoretical framework for the relationship in public–private partnerships

There is an implicit assumption in the UK Treasury’s publications on public-private partnerships (PPP)—also more commonly known in the United Kingdom as private finance initiative (PFI)—that accountability and value for money (VFM) are related concepts. While recent academic studies on PPP/PFI (from now on as PFI) have focused on VFM, there is a notable absence of studies exploring the ‘presumed’ relationships between accountability and VFM. Drawing on Dubnick’s (Dubnick and Romzek in American public administration, politics and the management of expectations. Macmillan, New York, 1991, Research in public administration. JAI, Greenwich, 1993; Dubnick in Public service ethics and the cultures of blame, 1996, Public sector ethics: finding and implementing values. Routledge, London, 1998, Int J Org Theory Behav 6(3):405–441, 2003, Public Perform Manage Rev 28(3):376–417, 2005; Dubnick and Justice in But can you trust them to be ethical, 2002) framework for accountability and PFI literature, we develop a research framework for exploring potential relationships between accountability and VFM in PFI projects by proposing alternative accountability cultures, processes and mechanisms for PFI. The PFI accountability model is then exposed to four criteria—warrantability, tractability, measurability and feasibility. Our preliminary interviews provide us guidance in identifying some of the cultures, processes and mechanisms indicated in our model which should enable future researchers to test not only the UK Government’s claimed relationships between accountability and VFM using more specific PFI empirical data, but also a potential relationship between accountability and performance in general.     

Is health care ready for a full menu of prices?

Examine the emerging trend of price transparency in health care and learn what some states are doing to make prices widely available on the Web.     

Uncertainty in competitive bidding – a framework for product–service systems

Owing to servitisation, manufacturing companies are increasingly required to compete through the provision of services around their products. The contracts for these services are often allocated through competitive bidding where the potential suppliers submit a price bid to the customer. The pricing decision is influenced by various uncertainties. This article proposes a conceptual framework depicting these influencing uncertainties on the bidding strategy. This framework is based on three empirical studies with industry investigating different viewpoints on the decision-making process. The intention is to support the pricing decision when competitively bidding for a service contract. The framework can be applied to specific competitive bidding situations to identify the influencing uncertainties, model them and depict their influences on the pricing decision.     

ISO 9000—a marketing tool for U.S. agribusiness

The relevance of the ISO 9000 series of quality management systems (QMS) for U.S. agribusiness is analyzed. Certified firms from several industries were surveyed to determine their before (ex ante) and after (ex post) perspectives of the QMS. Results for the agribusiness subsample are compared to those for firms from other industries to determine if they behave differently. Anticipated marketing advantages (increasing market share and providing access to new markets) of the QMS were critical factors that encouraged the pursuit of the certificate. The average cost to attain certification was $101.400 and to maintain certification was an additional $26,500 per year.     

South Korean women leaders’ struggles for a work and family balance

The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experience of women in leadership in Korea and to identify challenges and opportunities that they face in the process of balancing work and family life and developing leadership as women in the uniquely challenging Korean workplace where they face organizational and cultural constraints. Critical to this investigation was the understanding of concepts frequently represented in the previous literature about women in leadership: work–family life balance, women’s leadership development, and the cultural context. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 women leaders selected through a purposeful and snowball sampling method. A thematic analysis of the interview data generated six themes including: (a) commitment to work, (b) struggles for a balance, (c) defining success, (d) gender identity, (e) being a role model, and (f) need for support. Based on the findings, we provide implications for research and practice.     

Nordhaus–Gaddum type result for the matching number of a graph

For a graph G, \(\alpha '(G)\) is the matching number of G. Let \(k\ge 2\) be an integer, \(K_{n}\) be the complete graph of order n. Assume that \(G_{1}, G_{2}, \ldots , G_{k}\) is a k-decomposition of \(K_{n}\). In this paper, we show that (1)

$$\begin{aligned} \left\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor \le \sum _{i=1}^{k} \alpha '(G_{i})\le k\left\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor . \end{aligned}$$

(2) If each \(G_{i}\) is non-empty for \(i = 1, \ldots , k\), then for \(n\ge 6k\),

$$\begin{aligned} \sum _{i=1}^{k} \alpha '(G_{i})\ge \left\lfloor \frac{n+k-1}{2}\right\rfloor . \end{aligned}$$

(3) If \(G_{i}\) has no isolated vertices for \(i = 1, \ldots , k\), then for \(n\ge 8k\),

$$\begin{aligned} \sum _{i=1}^{k} \alpha '(G_{i})\ge \left\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor +k. \end{aligned}$$

The bounds in (1), (2) and (3) are sharp. (4) When \(k= 2\), we characterize all the extremal graphs which attain the lower bounds in (1), (2) and (3), respectively.

     

What Management Style is Considered Best for a Team-Based Organization and Why?

The paper reviews various styles of management that are commonly employed for managing team-based programs and projects in many manufacturing industries. It analyzes the characteristics of each style with respect to the needs for decomposing the goals into smaller chunks in a team-based organization or in a program. Three styles of management were considered at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for this analysis. Based on the experiences of applying each style during various team-based programs at EDS, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Unigraphics Solutions accounts and from the varying degree of success achieved then, the paper points out which management style is well suited for managing this decomposed set of goals and why. It then analyzes which style is best suited for managing a team-based organization. As W. Edward Deming said in his book The New Economics, setting a particular numerical goal accomplishes nothing. Setting a method to achieve a common set of consistent goals is important. Clear and consistent set of decomposed goals provides a `constancy-of-purpose.' Without a common subset of consistent goals identified for each concurrent team (decomposed from its original sets), the product development teams do not know what is expected from each other and how to accomplish the tasks concurrently. Finally, the paper discusses why a management style, which is based on a set of constancy-of-purpose (governing) principles, is considered superior for managing a team-based organization.     

The emergent ‘coaching industry’: a wake-up call for HRD professionals

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of an emergent ‘coaching industry’ in many countries with some scholars calling for the development of a ‘coaching profession’ replete with its own clear identity, clear boundaries and unique body of knowledge. Yet, at the same time, coaching has also been conceived as a necessary area of expertise and skill set among contemporary HRD professionals. Therefore, this article reports the results of a comparative study of the different conceptualizations and definitions of ‘coaching’ and contemporary HRD as reported in the literature. Results suggest that the intended purposes and processes associated with both fields of practice are virtually the same. The challenge and dilemma posed by these results are described from both a coaching and HRD perspective, and are discussed in terms of seeing the findings of this comparative study as a wake-up call for HRD professionals.     

Erdős–Gallai-type results for colorful monochromatic connectivity of a graph

A path in an edge-colored graph is called a monochromatic path if all the edges on the path are colored with one same color. An edge-coloring of G is a monochromatic connection coloring (MC-coloring, for short) if there is a monochromatic path joining any two vertices in G. For a connected graph G, the monochromatic connection number of G, denoted by mc(G), is defined to be the maximum number of colors used in an MC-coloring of G. These concepts were introduced by Caro and Yuster, and they got some nice results. In this paper, we study two kinds of Erd?s–Gallai-type problems for mc(G), and completely solve them.