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The cases are used to introduce the concept of collective responsibility and leadership in team situations by applying the concept of Crew Resource Management for teams in a management setting. By drawing from the metaphor of aircrews to corporate scenarios challenges in leadership teams could be discussed in a wider context. Both cases describe the interaction of airline crews who are confronted with a non-routine problem that they have to solve. In the case of United Airlines 173 the crew ceases to function as team and the fully functional plane eventually crashes. As a result of this accident the concept of Crew Resource Management has been developed to optimize teamwork within the hierarchical structure of a cockpit crew. The case of United Airlines 232 complements the first case as it describes an airline crew that was confronted with a severe engine failure making their plane almost uncontrollable (similar prior accidents always resulted in the loss of the aircraft in non-survivable crashes). Using core elements of Crew Resource Management the crew was nevertheless able to achieve a survivable landing of the plane. Both cases cover essentially the last 30 minutes of both flights and focus on the communication of the flight crews.

The cases are used to introduce the concept of collective responsibility and leadership in team situations by applying the concept of Crew Resource Management for teams in a management setting. By drawing from the metaphor of aircrews to corporate scenarios challenges in leadership teams could be discussed in a wider context. Both cases describe the interaction of airline crews who are confronted with a non-routine problem that they have to solve. In the case of United Airlines 173 the crew ceases to function as team and the fully functional plane eventually crashes. As a result of this accident the concept of Crew Resource Management has been developed to optimize teamwork within the hierarchical structure of a cockpit crew. The case of United Airlines 232 complements the first case as it describes an airline crew that was confronted with a severe engine failure making their plane almost uncontrollable (similar prior accidents always resulted in the loss of the aircraft in non-survivable crashes). Using core elements of Crew Resource Management the crew was nevertheless able to achieve a survivable landing of the plane. Both cases cover essentially the last 30 minutes of both flights and focus on the communication of the flight crews.

The article refers to a technology commercialization strategy that was proposed by Teece (1986) and presents a game-theory model that considers complementary assets in the marketing process, strategic alliances, and hybrid contracts. The discussion focuses on: establishing co-promotion and the right to participate in the commercialization of an alliance product; using leverage in negotiations for gaining knowledge from a firm's complementary activities which can be applied to the commercialization of future products; learning in horizontal alliances between firms with complementary technology portfolios; and analyzing the structure of and access to knowledge in vertical arrangements.

We use proprietary data to analyze the importance of retail banking relationships to commercial banks and their depositors when banks underwrite securities. We find lead underwriters' retail customers benefit as they demand and end up with significantly more of the highly underpriced issues. We find it is actual underpricing beyond that predicted by grey markets that drive the differential demand from the lead bank retail clientele, suggesting that banks pass on information about underpriced initial public offerings to their retail depositors. We analyze banks' incentives for such behavior and find evidence of banks benefiting through retail cross-sellingâ€Â"both brokerage accounts and consumer loans increase significantly.

With permission of Elsevier

Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities for the purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption vs. investment trade-off, where investment corresponds to providing capacity for revenue customers, and consumption corresponds to serving mission customers. Exemplary of this approach are the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, where profitable paying hospitals are used to subsidize care at free hospitals. We model this problem as a multi-period stochastic dynamic program. In each period, the organization must decide how much of the current assets should be invested in revenue-customer service capacity, and at what price the service should be sold. We provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal capacity and pricing decisions are of threshold type. Similar results are derived when the selling price is fixed but the banking of assets from one period to the next is allowed. We compare the performance of the optimal threshold policy with heuristics that may be more appealing to managers of nonprofit organizations, and assess the value of banking and of dynamic pricing through numerical experiments.

The immediate motivation of this paper is California Bill AB 394, legislation which mandates fixed nurse-to-patient staffing ratios as a means to address the current crisis in the quality of health care delivery. Modeling medical units as closed queueing systems, we seek to determine whether or not ratio policies are effective at managing nurse workload. Our many-server asymptotic results suggest that ratio policies cannot provide consistently high service quality across medical units of different sizes. As a remedy, we recommend policies that deviate from the restrictive linear nature of ratio policies, employing the 'square root rule' commonly used to staff large service systems. Under some quality of care assumptions, our policies exhibit a type of 'super' pooling effect, in which, for large systems, the requisite workforce is significantly smaller than the nominal patient load.

 

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).

Quicker, Higher, Stronger: A couple of years ago, the Russian branch of a global professional services firm published its annual partner promotion announcement in a leading Russian business journal, giving the names and pictures of the newly appointed partners. To the readers' surprise, most of these partners looked like a fresh-faced class of new university graduates. In some countries people of this age have not even graduated yet: the youngest partner was 26 years old. Just four years previously he had joined a competing professional organization as an intern, combining his last academic year's study with on-the-job training. With the growth of market opportunities and lack of more senior staff, he was quickly put on assignments with increasing complexity and responsibility and then made responsible for developing new business and delivering it successfully. A combination of personal qualities, learning opportunities and luck (or perhaps because the employer had no other choice) eventually led to his becoming a partner very early in life...

With permission of Elsevier

Russian firebird: After a decade of a spectacular retreat, Russia is re-emerging as an active player on the world scene, and for the first time in its modern history is becoming a serious factor in the global economy. With its $1000 billion economy set to grow at 5-7% over the next two decades, 27% of world gas and 6% of world oil reserves, the largest territory in the world and the largest population in Europe, the country is once again attracting the attention of the West and the rest of the world. While politicians and intellectuals warn of Russia's increasing assertiveness and criticize its government for suppressing democracy, business people vote with their dollars and Euros-in 2007, Russia received a record $87 billion in foreign investments, more than double the amount of the previous year. It is a market no serious global company can ignore. Domestic consumption has been growing at double-digit numbers for the last 3 years, real estate prices in Moscow have reached London levels, and in 2007 Russians bought more cars than any other European nation except Germany. Disposable income for a large segment of the population has been increasing steadily, allowing the purchase of luxury goods and foreign travel-28 million Russians traveled abroad in 2007. The foundation has been set for a property-owning middle class. Thanks to its oil-fueled economy, Moscow can now count itself as the city with the largest number of billionaires in the world. In its turn, Russian business has started to expand internationally, with deals such as Evraz Group S.A.'s purchase of Oregon Steel Mills for $2.3 billion and Gazprom's acquisition of the Serbian gas monopoly. In short, in 2007, Russia invested $54 billion outside its borders...

With permission of Elsevier

In all the literature on the theory and practice of negotiation, the governing metaphor remains consistently one of war or fighting. This is true not only for tactical schools of power-based negotiation, but even for more constructive, interest-based approaches. Our language is infused with talk of tactics, flanks, concessions, gaining ground and winning. This article explores the possible consequences of abandoning this picture in favor of the far too little explored metaphor of the dance. We will see that both the content and the process of negotiation can change dramatically once when we think of bargaining as an aesthetic activity which provides intrinsic joy as well as extrinsic benefits. In such a dance, there is plenty of room for competition as well as cooperation, as movements can be spirited and confrontational as well as smooth and harmonious. We identify many forms of dance in negotiation, and explore three: the dance of positioning, where passions and presentations interact proudly; the dance of empathy, when the partners come to better understand each other; and then the dance of concessions, where the deal is struck and the music comes to an end. Finally, we will try to show how the dance can be employed pedagogically, in teaching and training negotiation and mediation. In particular, the Brazilian dance of capoeira illustrates holistically and experientially how movement and rhythm can be interpreted both as fight and as a dance and how we can come to see a process as both aesthetic and purposeful at the same time. First feeling, then thinking and finally speaking, we can use this medium to explore the dynamics of confrontation and cooperation in a negotiation setting.

 

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).

How do firms cope with the challenges of disruptive change in their industry? Numerous studies have highlighted that success with any prior technology creates a negative legacy effect for the next radical technological shift. We question the overly pessimistic view of such legacy effects and ask how quickly firms embrace echnological breakthroughs by radically innovating and who wins in the longer term? In this paper, we argue that legacy is a multi-faceted construct whose diverse aspects could simultaneously have different effects on innovation speed and market performance. We identify three main types of legacy related to echnology, organizational, and country-level influences. Previous research tends to focus on technological or market effects in isolation, whereas we seek to study the effects of both firm and country legacy simultaneously on speed to radical innovation and market performance over time. Based on a conceptual framework we develop six hypotheses concerning the legacy effects on initial speed radical innovation and subsequent market performance. We chose the European retail banking industry and the focal innovation of transactional Internet banking as a suitable empirical context to employ quantitative hypothesis testing. Detailed and longitudinal (1996-2001) data were collected for a sample of 123 banks from six European countries: United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. We specified a model and used threestage least squares (3SLS) as a method to estimate simultaneous regression equations due to endogeneity of a key variable. We show that the prevailing negative view of legacies is likely to be overstated.

 

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).