Publication records

Germany has embarked on a journey to fundamentally transform its energy supply system: the energy turnaround, or “Energiewende” as it is known. But the country that kick-started the PV movement around a decade ago has since been superseded by even more ambitious nations. So can Germany become a game-changer once more?

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the role of family in managers’ career decision making. Specifically, we offer an empirical elaboration on a recently proposed concept of the “family-relatedness of work decisions” (FRWD) by illuminating the role of the spouse in managers’ career sensemaking. Eighty-eight managers who were in the final stage of their EMBA program took part in the study. The data were gathered through a personal career inventory. The findings revealed that next to family-career salience and parent role identification, spouses also play an important role in shaping managers’ family-related career sensemaking. Future research should examine the supportive role of spouses in contexts other than that of an international EMBA. Moreover, researchers should examine the role of managers’ boundary management styles in shaping the degree of their family-related career sensemaking. Our paper suggests that when designing and implementing developmental initiatives, organizations should consider that managers’ decisions about their next career steps may be guided by family-related concerns, and the spouse may play a specific role. This paper offers the first empirical exploration and a refinement of the nascent theory of the “family-relatedness of work decisions”. It also introduces a new construct into the theory – spousal career support – that opens new avenues for future research.

With permission of Emerald

The case describes an innovative public service conceived and operated by a private company. The case examines how a public-private partnership, and its underlying political stakes, affect the way the service is designed and operated.

Case A, the subject of this particular teaching note, traces Gazi’s personal and business journey, and contains ample material to evaluate Gazi as a person, as an entrepreneur, and as a leader. Ostensibly, the case issue is the degree to which Gazi should now scale up from the approx. €10 millionof current revenues, but this issue is best set aside until the B case discussion. In fact, the B case includes substantial bottom-up information from each of Gazi’s key managers allowing this scale-up question to be tackled from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. The A case raises much more the question what does it take to be a successful and exemplary entrepreneur, and how, when, and from where such capacities are acquired. The case lends itself not only to a detailed discussion of Gazi’s entrepreneurial capacities and their origins, but also prompts participants to ask themselves to which degree they themselves exhibit such capacities, and whether they can and should embark on an entrepreneurial career.

The question that the A case ostensibly poses, namely to what degree Gazi and his team should now scale up the overall business, and in which areas, is best left to the B case discussion for reasons outlined in the abstract. The A case discussion should therefore be mainly backward-looking focusing on Gazi as an individual, as an entrepreneur and as a leader. The A case discussion should also include a critical analysis of the strategy that Gazi has employed so far to grow the business—essentially diversification by pursuing new market opportunities.