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With the current financial and economic crises and expectations or reality of a recession companies are looking at ways of optimizing the use of their resources and reconsidering their investments. Efforts at developing management talent and leadership capacities of company employees are often associated with significant costs and may, therefore, be among the first to undergo scrutiny in terms of feasibility and expected effectiveness. On the other hand, underinvestment in preparing people for leadership and management roles and tasks may come at a cost for the organization's survival, competitiveness, and future success. Although leadership development can take many forms, executive education courses and programs traditionally play a large role in the process, and constitute a major part of leadership development costs. This business brief outlines a number of issues that need to be taken into account when designing, developing, and delivering leadership and management development programs under the conditions of scarce financial resources.

A pdf file of this working paper may be available at INSEAD.

In 2010 the legal barriers for international, intramodal competition in long-haul passenger transport in the railway sector will be abolished. This report analyzes the extent to which effective competition will arise in long-haul passenger transport after liberalization-from 2010 onward-and how co-operative agreements between European rail operators may impact the liberalization process. The study also provides an overview of the existing literature related to entry and intramodal competition in the rail sector, as well as intermodal competition between aviation and rail. In addition, it provides a review of the legal and regulatory environment of the sector at a European level and evaluates current organizations operating in it. The following are the main conclusions:- We find robust evidence for effective competition between low cost airlines (LCAs) and rail operators. A rail operator loses at least 7% of its passengers and 8% of its passenger kilometers due to entry by LCAs. We also find evidence of negative price effects of strategic LCA entry in both first class and second class. This demonstrates that LCAs are a significant competitive constraint for rail operators.- Based on a revenue & cost model ('R&C model'), only a minority of long distance origins and destinations (O&Ds) are profitable with respect to both operating profitability and total profitability from a pre-entry perspective - that is before entry by competing rail operators. This result does not change drastically even under optimistic but reasonable assumptions regarding future changes in demand, costs, and degree of intermodal competition.- An analysis of various entry strategies identifies the most profitable strategy as entry by an independent entrant with inferior technology. However, such a strategy is specifically vulnerable to legal and strategic limitations on exploitation of network effects (e.g. by imposing national levies or incompatibilities in ticketing or train schedules).- Overall, we find very limited evidence for intramodal competition arising on international O&Ds for long distance passenger travel after 2010, while past experience from airline alliances - although in a different competitive setting - promises significant efficiency gains as a result of international alliances.

The case opens with a brief overview of the successful past of "Bayern", introduces the main players in Bayern Munich's leadership team, gives an insight into the club leadership's aspirations for European Champions League title, and illustrates the club's indispensable demand for short term success. The case continuous reporting the many changes that Klinsmann introduced to club and team after taking over his new responsibilities before it then gives an account of the season 2008/2009. The case culminates in Klinsmann getting fired and the club management's return to the exact same philosophies that were valid before Klinsmann's arrival.

This paper questions the notion that expatriates should adjust to their host country, by showing that adjustment and its consequences are affected by cosmopolitanism and expected assignment duration. A study of 260 expatriates in the U.S. reveals that cosmopolitans expecting shorter (longer) assignments adjust more (less) to both work and non-work aspects of their host country, and that this is associated with increased well-being. In contrast, for non-cosmopolitans, more well-being occurs when longer (shorter) expected assignments are accompanied by increased (decreased) work and non-work adjustment. Further, from the findings emerges a clash between two aspects of successful expatriation - well-being and professional success: while non-work adjustment is not always associated with well-being, work adjustment is positively related to assignment performance across conditions and subjects.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

In this article we report on the design, prototyping and results of a research effort aimed at identifying if and how trust affects the creativity of a partnership between two economic agents. The methodology combines an experiment and two questionnaires. The purpose of the research is to increase our understanding of trust and its impact on the outcome of cooperation, and to derive some guidance for economic actors, namely R&D managers and executives who want to build trustful innovation oriented relationships with their business partners. Specifically, we investigate the effect of trust on partners' creativity and willingness to invest financially in a joint development. Our results show that more trustful partners invest higher amounts in the alliance, while there seems to be an optimum amount of mutual trust between partners to maximize their joint creativity; if the level of mutual trust is below or above this threshold; their joint creativity seems to decrease.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).