Organizational politics: did you hear?

How do you define organizational politics? The underground system of communication, the grapevine, what's really going on in the organization, rumors, knowing who really has the power? However you define it, all sources agree you'd better not ignore it. According to one physician executive: "Organizational politics is how things really get done, who really has the power, how decisions get made. Things are not always what they appear to be on the organizational chart." Presented here are some thoughts about organizational politics from physician executives and their stories of when it helped or hurt their careers or prevented them from accomplishing something in their organizations.     

Your direct reports loathe you. Does it matter?

Chalk it up to the labor shortage or to growing worker independence, but today almost everyone agrees that management effectiveness rests heavily on grass roots support. Why do subordinates despise a superior? Indecisiveness, non-support, expense account abuse, and arrogance are some of the documented reasons. Your direct reports can cause you to fail and their perfidy will never be detected. They can question your competence and decisions often-through the grapevine-bombarding top management with derogatory information it ultimately can't or won't ignore. Moreover, the movement of workers from organization to organization means that negative gossip will be repeated in dozens of grapevines. What is the worst thing disgruntled workers do to a manager's career? Not only will victims protest and flack your sins in the grapevine, they'll vote with their feet. Worker shortages mean that turnover is watched as closely as salary expenses. Explored herein are some signs that should cause a manager to examine how he or she stands with the troops.     

Head for open space

Is it possible that the herd mentality, the "Follow The Other Guy" idea is not the golden road to transformation? In fact, the three questions that are most helpful in deciding your path, as a person or an organization, lie almost completely in the other direction: (1) "What am I really good at?" (2) "What am I afraid of?" and (3) "What is no one else doing?" Heading for the open space means looking for the hole in the market, searching for what no one else is doing. Only by going toward open space can you or your organization stay ahead of the pack in a turbulent health care environment. Get out in front of the pack, either as a leader or quarry, and you have a measure of control. How does the quarry control the pack that is hunting it? By choosing the terrain, choosing the ground on which the chase will take place.     

I can't believe they think I'd...

Many physician executives experience a personal jolt as they move to work in a very different relationship with their colleagues. What happens? How can we understand this phenomenon? What can we do to minimize the personal toll so often exacted by the transition to leadership? This paper will focus on these essential questions. The inevitable discomfort encountered during this learning curve, which can last from two months to two years, often comes as a surprise. Many physicians who have been elevated to leadership positions because of their success and interpersonal acceptance, have not had to struggle with this sense of being "a fish out of water" since very early in their professional careers. Unless there is someone in place to reassure and mentor, the resulting confusion can be quite unnerving, resulting in reflex defensiveness.     

中国人的脸面观及其对消费者解读奢侈品广告的影响研究

本研究从心理学视角的面子定义出发,通过运用探索性因子分析、验证性因子分析开发了面子需要量表并探索了其内涵。研究发现,面子需要包涵了以道德型面子需要为主的"脸需要",以及涵盖了能力、地位和社会关系等意义更为广泛的"面需要"。在此基础上,本研究比较了在加入不同面子需要内涵之后的三种广告情境下奢侈品购买意向的差异。结果发现,在广告中加入品牌的正面道德信息,会提高消费者购买该品牌的意向。此外,本研究运用ANOVA分析发现,与"脸需要"相比,"面需要"与奢侈品购买意向的关系表现得更为复杂。在管理启示中,本研究讨论了西方国家奢侈品道德化消费趋势的出现及其对中国市场的启示。     

The new breed

Structural changes within the health system--particularly in the organization and financing of services--have made new and different opportunities available to physicians interested in management. What types of physicians are currently going into management? How do they compare to others who have been in management for a longer period of time and to the "traditional" portrait of the physician executive? The author profiles the emerging, contemporary physician executive and explores the implications for the viability of the field of medical management as a whole.     

市场化进程、产权配置与上市公司资产剥离业绩——基于同属管辖交易视角的研究

本文以2004-2005年沪深A股上市公司资产剥离事件为研究对象,基于同属管辖交易的独特视角,从市场化进程差异、资产剥离同属管辖交易以及企业产权配置三个方面探讨对上市公司资产剥离业绩改进的影响.研究发现,市场化程度越高、地方政府干预越少,上市公司资产剥离后的业绩越好.但是,如果资产剥离交易双方同属地方政府管辖,则对上市公司的业绩具有显著的负面影响.进一步的研究发现,地方政府控制的产权生质对上市公司资产剥离后业绩改进产生负面影响,非政府控制的产权性质则有显著的正面促进作用.     

The coming alliance revolution in health care

Like it or not, the health care profession is being "shifted" into a revolutionary new world. The question is not will it change but rather how will it change? Who will determine its fate? What form will these changes take? What are the best alternatives for physicians, institutions, health care workers, insurers, employers, and, most importantly, patients? Some of the changes will come from government mandate, others from market forces. To understand what the future might bring, we should look at both the driving forces behind the changes and how other industries have responded to similar forces. An important consideration for health care professionals will be how, if at all, the concepts of collaboration and cooperation that are inherent in networking and alliances will guide their planning.     

Negotiating. Biases physicians bring to the table

What are some of the obstacles that physicians face as they seek to become more effective at the bargaining table? The author's thesis, based on experience in both the classroom and the front lines of medical practice, is that physicians face a set of systematic "biases" derived from physician training and professional culture that make negotiation especially difficult for them. They outline the biases they have observed, explore some possible explanations, and suggest solutions for physicians who wish to negotiate more effectively.     

Extremal coloring for the anti-Ramsey problem of matchings in complete graphs

Given a graph G, the anti-Ramsey number \(AR(K_n,G)\) is defined to be the maximum number of colors in an edge-coloring of \(K_n\) which does not contain any rainbow G (i.e., all the edges of G have distinct colors). The anti-Ramsey number was introduced by Erd?s et al. (Infinite and finite sets, pp 657–665, 1973) and so far it has been determined for several special graph classes. Another related interesting problem posed by Erd?s et al. is the uniqueness of the extremal coloring for the anti-Ramsey number. Contrary to the anti-Ramsey number, there are few results about the extremal coloring. In this paper, we show the uniqueness of such extremal coloring for the anti-Ramsey number of matchings in the complete graph.     

Improve clinical processes in three meetings

Many health care organizations have developed methodologies to improve their processes of care. Most have outputs, such as clinical paths and/or algorithms, that require dozens of meetings over many months to design. Morton Plant Health System has taken a "SWAT team" approach and created a multi-hospital, multi-disciplinary team that develops recommendations and process changes after only three meetings of the entire team over two to three months. The organization has been highly successful, with process changes resulting in improve outcomes and savings in charges (1995 compared to 1994) of more than $22 million. What was the evolution of this process, what is the "SWAT" team approach and how does it work, and why has Morton Plant Health System been so successful in its efforts?     

Continuity of care: some experiences and thoughts

Continuity of health care is a goal to be achieved. Most are for it. Many claim to provide it. But how do we know we have it? What are the key features of continuity? While dictionaries do not define the phrase "continuity of health care," we do find definitions of "continuity." The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, includes in its definitions: "the state or quality of being uninterrupted in sequence or succession, or in essence or idea; connectedness, coherence, unbroken..." Stedman's Medical Dictionary includes: "absence of interruption, a succession of parts intimately united..." These definitions stress an uninterrupted succession and include the concept that there needs to be a connection to the parts. Without that connection, continuity, in health care delivery or elsewhere, does not exist.     

What Does it Mean to be Enterprising?

The last ten years in the U.K. have witnessed an acceleration of interest in enterprise education. The aims of enterprise education initiatives include helping people to start businesses; promoting awareness of enterprise; and creating the educational conditions for people to become more enterprising (Jamieson, 1984). This diversity of aims implies that enterprise is perceived differently by educationalists involved in enterprise education. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of enterprise by exploring some key questions:

• 1 Why is enterprise considered important?
• 2 What insights are offered by enterprise education initiatives on the meaning of enterprise?
• 3 How useful is a study of entrepreneurs for a study of enterprise?

These questions dictate a need for further research to explore and clarify the meaning of enterprise. This is crucial for educationalists who wish to educate and assess enterprise as well as decide on the educational value of enterprise education. The relationship between enterprise competencies and small business owner management and employee competencies would be also clarified with an understanding of what it means to be enterprising.     

基金交易行为与市场波动——基于小波与互谱分析的数据挖掘

本文选取2007～2009年基金十大重仓股数据进行小波分析,研究重仓股在不同阶段波动率的特征———微观层面基金行为对这种波动率的直接动量冲击的影响以及金融市场层面沪深300指数对此波动率的联动性的影响。实证结果发现,基金增仓和持股可以减小股票波动率,但减仓会加大股票波动率,呈现出非对称稳定市场的特性。在金融市场层面分析上,论文应用溢出效应检验互谱分析方法,发现这种波动率主要是由基金持股组合调整造成的,市场波动对个股波动率影响不大,即股票波动率主要是由基金交易行为造成所引致。     

Running toward the roar

How do you embrace paradox, changing and growing without losing your sense of who you are? We talked last time about the paradox of reaching for the new, without losing your ground in the old. Paradox is the place of insight. Accepting paradox, not as a momentary distraction but as a place to live, lies at the heart of dealing successfully with change. We can see this most clearly if we ask ourselves, "What business am I in? What am I about?" In health care, this did not used to be a meaningful question. Today, it is a critical one. But to really develop, we have to seek out the situations that are the most difficult for us, work them through, hang out with them long enough to begin to be at home in the paradoxical, ambiguous, and strange circumstance.     

Reconstruction of hidden graphs and threshold group testing

Classical group testing is a search paradigm where the goal is the identification of individual positive elements in a large collection of elements by asking queries of the form “Does a set of elements contain a positive one?”. A graph reconstruction problem that generalizes the classical group testing problem is to reconstruct a hidden graph from a given family of graphs by asking queries of the form “Whether a set of vertices induces an edge”. Reconstruction problems on families of Hamiltonian cycles, matchings, stars and cliques on n vertices have been studied where algorithms of using at most 2nlg?n,(1+o(1))(nlg?n),2n and 2n queries were proposed, respectively. In this paper we improve them to \((1+o(1))(n\lg n),(1+o(1))(\frac{n\lg n}{2}),n+2\lg n\) and n+lg?n, respectively. Threshold group testing is another generalization of group testing which is to identify the individual positive elements in a collection of elements under a more general setting, in which there are two fixed thresholds ? and u, with ?<u, and the response to a query is positive if the tested subset of elements contains at least u positive elements, negative if it contains at most ? positive elements, and it is arbitrarily given otherwise. For the threshold group testing problem with ?=u?1, we show that p positive elements among n given elements can be determined by using O(plg?n) queries, with a matching lower bound.     

A personal formula for motivation.

Have you ever wondered why some colleagues or subordinates are outstanding in their work while others are less so? Training and experience are extremely important factors but, by themselves, they will not ensure outstanding performance. The pivotal factor that activates all others is motivation. And underlying motivation is the fact that we all have needs that we desire to have fulfilled and that we make choices regarding the course of action or strategy to fulfill these needs. As managers, we do not typically create the "products" of the organization but rather must rely on subordinates. It is incumbent upon us to obtain from our employees desired behavior that will fulfill organizational goals. Indeed, it has been asserted that "one of the most basic responsibilities of the health service organization manager [is] motivating constructive participation of other organization members."