The principles of war applied to business

The search for excellence in business is not enough. First a company has to survive before it can become excellent. Competition in the marketplace is a form of warfare. Twenty centuries of military history have produced principles of warfare that business executives can adapt for use in today's competitive environment. The Chinese have a “Society for the Study of Ancient Management Thinking.” Japan's success after World War II, they explain “a little bitterly”, owes much to its study of ancient Chinese wisdom, particularly Sun Tzu'sThe Art of War, which the Japanese use as a treatise on market strategy. Businessmen must use all the tools available to them to survive and prosper.     

Business planning in successful small firms

Strategic planning has been widely publicized during the last decade, but what has been accomplished by this management activity in smaller, high-growth firms? Business plans have been widely recommended for start-up funding, but we have noted additional uses for business plans in pratice. This article reports methods and results of strategic planning and written business plans in high-growth ‘INC. 500’ firms. In spite of a variety of obstacles, over half of the firms conduct strategic planning on a regular basis. Results of this study show that fast-growth firms develop written business plans as a product of strategic planning, mainly by five key management personnel. Written business plans are used more for internal management purposes than for start-up funding. Finally, the completion of strategic planning is positively associated with a firm's profitability. Based on survey and interview data, this article describes a four-phase model to help ensure effective integration of strategic planning processes and the resulting written business plans.     

The Dynamics of Employee Dissent: Whistleblowers and Organizational Jiu-Jitsu

Whistleblowing is a form of organizational dissent that is rarely successful, instead usually leading to disaster for the whistleblower. Organizational theorists seldom have addressed the question of how to improve whistleblowers strategies. A useful general perspective for doing this is to conceive of bureaucracies as authoritarian political systems. The concept of political jiu-jitsu, from the theory of nonviolent action, is adapted to organizational contexts and used to assess a range of tactics used by organizational elites against dissidents. The resulting implications for whistleblower strategies are assessed by comparison with standard recommendations offered by experienced whistleblower advisers.     

Segregation of minorities in the metropolis: two decades of change

Data from Census 2000 show that black-white segregation declined modestly at the national level after 1980, while Hispanic and Asian segregation rose in most metropolitan areas. Changes that may have produced greater changes for blacks proved to have insignificant effects: there was no net shift of the black population toward less-segregated areas, segregation at the metropolitan level did not decline more in areas where the incomes of blacks came closer to the incomes of whites over time, and the emergence of more multiethnic metropolises had no impact. As in the past, declines were centered in the South and West and in areas with smaller black populations. Increases in Hispanic and Asian segregation in individual metropolitan areas were counterbalanced by a net movement of these two groups toward areas of lower segregation. These increases were associated especially with the more rapid growth in the Hispanic and Asian populations. Hispanic segregation increased more in regions where group members had declining incomes relative to the incomes of whites and included a growing share of immigrants.     

The determinants of organizations’ usage of employee dismissal: Evidence from Australia

Substantial variation exists across organizations in their use of dismissal. While it has been suggested that this variation reflects organizational-level factors relating to disciplinary issues, little evidence exists regarding the effect of these factors. Using data from 1,596 workplaces in the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, we examine how organizational-level factors that reflect the incidence of disciplinary problems as well as the expected costs and benefits of dismissal are related to dismissal usage. For each organization, data were collected on organizational characteristics and practices in interviews with the employee relations manager and the senior line manager. Data were also collected on whether or not dismissal was used by the firm and on the number of employees dismissed. Using both logistic regression and tobit analysis, our results suggest that dismissal is affected by procedural and institutional restrictions on the use of discipline, interactions among those restrictions, compensation level, labor market factors, workforce human capital, operating capacity, work group influence, the use of incentive pay, workforce size, and industry classification. Copies of the AWIRS Data set are available for purchase from the Australian Government Publishing Service, Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, Canaberra, Australia. The authors thank Alan Morris and Lindsay Turner for their assistance in managing the AWIRS data set. Michelle Brown is now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI 53201.     

Where do i fit in? factors influencing women's participation in rural communities

Participation in community life has been a topic of interest for many researchers and theorists. In rural areas, in particular, women play a major role in their communities, participating in a voluntary network which contributes countless hours to maintain important community services. However, little research has been undertaken which addresses women's social involvement and the factors which may inhibit or facilitate participation. This is of particular interest, owing to the lack of women's participation in committees and boards relating to resource management at state and national levels in Australia. In the present study, women across six rural shires in the south of Western Australia were asked to comment on their participation in personal and community networks and on their individual and family histories. These structured interviews were designed to allow women to define participation in their own terms, and identify factors that limit or facilitate their involvement in their respective communities. Detailed qualitative analysis revealed that in order to determine a woman's degree of involvement in her community, it is inappropriate to focus solely upon formal membership in community organisations. Participation within a rural context is not unidimensional, involving participation in family life, the farm, personal business and the community. Furthermore, participation was influenced by a number of factors which enhanced or inhibited involvement such as family status, lack of privacy, distance and the rural economy. These findings are discussed in relation to the literature on participation and community structure.     

Nonverbal intimacy,sex, and compliance: A field study

The present study was designed to explore further the effects of nonverbal behaviors and sex on compliance. Male and female subjects who had just found a dime in a phone booth were approached by a male or female experimenter and were asked to return the dime that the experimenter had supposedly just lost. In the Eye Contact condition, the experimenter gazed at the subject as the request was made, whereas in the No-Eye Contact condition he/she did not. In addition, the experimenter lightly touched half of the subjects while making his/her request, but did not touch the other half. Replicating previous findings, it was found that both eye contact (significantly) and touching (marginally) produced increased rates of compliance. Extending prior results, these effects were obtained for male experimenters. Furthermore, a Sex of experimenter times Sex of subject interaction effect was obtained, such that subjects were much more willing to comply with the request of an opposite, rather than same sex experimenter. Questionnaire data suggested that: 1) subjects were aware of the touch, but not of the eye contact variable, and 2) the requesters were perceived as much more attractive when they were of the opposite, rather than the same sex as the subjects.     

Surface Estimation, Variable Selection, and the Nonparametric Oracle Property

Variable selection for multivariate nonparametric regression is an important, yet challenging, problem due, in part, to the infinite dimensionality of the function space. An ideal selection procedure should be automatic, stable, easy to use, and have desirable asymptotic properties. In particular, we define a selection procedure to be nonparametric oracle (np-oracle) if it consistently selects the correct subset of predictors and at the same time estimates the smooth surface at the optimal nonparametric rate, as the sample size goes to infinity. In this paper, we propose a model selection procedure for nonparametric models, and explore the conditions under which the new method enjoys the aforementioned properties. Developed in the framework of smoothing spline ANOVA, our estimator is obtained via solving a regularization problem with a novel adaptive penalty on the sum of functional component norms. Theoretical properties of the new estimator are established. Additionally, numerous simulated and real examples further demonstrate that the new approach substantially outperforms other existing methods in the finite sample setting.