Guest editorial

Citation

McManus, T., Holtzman, Y. and Lazarus, H. (2008), "Guest editorial", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 27 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2008.02627jaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Management Development, Volume 27, Issue 10

About the Guest EditorsTom McManus is the Founder and President of McManus Consulting, dedicated to helping organizations create sustainable value through corporate social opportunity. He specializes in information and knowledge as a source of shared value creation, assisting organizations achieve market excellence through openness and dialogue with stakeholders, transparency, and collaboration. A market and business strategy consultant in the information technology industry for over 20 years, and an attorney, he brings an integrated approach to compliance, corporate social responsibility, and corporate social opportunity, combining strategic, legal and regulatory, and information technology expertise and perspective. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Management Teaching Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility in the MBA program at the Frank G. Zarb School of Business. He is a long-time Research Affiliate of the Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy, where his work has focused on marketing, and competitive uses of regulation. He is also a Research Partner with the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, an organization specializing in helping companies market and sell services. Prior to founding his own firm, he was a Director of market and business strategy consulting with Gartner Consulting, and was the knowledge management practice leader. His business career began in corporate planning and development and acquisitions at Bell Regional Ameritech, where he provided industry and competitive analysis in information services and electronic publishing. He started his career as an attorney with the US Department of Justice as an honors program appointee where his focus was political asylum. He is admitted to the Bar in New York and New Jersey. He has a BA in history and philosophy from Boston College, and a JD from The Vermont Law School.

Yair Holtzman is a Tax Manager at Deloitte Tax LLP in the Research and Development tax services group. He has over 15 years of experience as a management and tax consultant. Prior to joining Deloitte, he worked at Ernst & Young, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath as a Consultant in the Chemicals Practice, at A.T. Kearney in the Operations Practice, and at Plating Control Systems as a chemist and founder/president of this research and development consulting firm. He has successfully performed many engagements in the area of accelerating new product development. His areas of interest and expertise include operations management consulting, process reengineering, and optimizing the research and development cycle. He has guided clients in the chemicals, pharmaceutical, medical, electronics, and automotive industries in unlocking the potential of process and product development. He has facilitated their understanding in achieving and creating new enhanced production and research and development capabilities over time. He earned his BA in chemistry, with High Honors, from Brandeis University and completed the doctoral coursework in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Master of Science in Accounting with Distinction from Hofstra University’s Zarb Graduate School of Business. He earned his MBA degree from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management with concentrations in Operations Management/Manufacturing and Marketing. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant in the States of New York, New Jersey, Illinois and New Hampshire. He has served as a consultant to the pharmaceutical, chemicals, medical, industrial textiles, electronics and automotive industries since 1994.

Harold Lazarus is the Mel Weitz Distinguished Professor of Management at Hofstra University’s Frank G. Zarb School of Business. Hal was the Dean of that business school for seven years, and for the previous ten years was professor of management at New York University’s Graduate School of Businesss. He also taught at Columbia University’s School of Business and at the Harvard Business School. His MS and PhD degrees are from the Business School at Columbia University. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Management, President of the North American Management Council, Past President of the Eastern Academy of Management and a former president of the Middle Atlantic Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. Hal has lectured on management subjects to business and governmental organizations on four continents and served on many corporate boards of directors. He is a founder of Transparency Associates.

Welcome to our special issue: “Value creation and innovation for strategic decision makers.” We hope that this special issue of the Journal of Management Development will present readers with take-away value that our readers will be able to apply in their own industry situations.

In his article, “Assessing leadership in a Chinese company: a case study” Vince Conte an expert in the field discusses how do business leaders in China face up to the challenge of globalization? Globalization has intertwined economies east and west through cross-ocean investment, monetary exchange and a flow of raw material, goods and services in every direction possible. As western organizations rush to include Chinese capability and goods into their supply chain, many investors and would-be partners are searching for accurate and cost-effective ways to size up their Chinese counterparts.

Chinese leaders are realizing the need to credential themselves for suitors and shore up gaps in their own development. Warren Buffet, “dean” of the investment community has made it clear that investors value effective leadership practices. Assessing the effectiveness of leaders in any geographic location can take us into a broad range of issues which include: effectiveness in building brand, ability to attract and retain top-notch employees, and skills in launching and implementing innovative strategies.

This article, co-authored by Daniel Novello, presents one approach to assessing leadership capability, using a composite case based on several consulting engagements conducted with Chinese companies to illustrate. The following pages also serve to point out some of the key problems encountered when western trained consultants (which include some ethnically Chinese consultants) evaluate leaders in China using a toolkit and consulting process derived from largely Anglo-American leadership theory and HR consulting practice. Finally, we suggest a more adaptive model for doing this type of leadership assessment in China, which we believe can provide a more culturally acceptable, useful and bias-free process to serve those, within and outside of China who need to understand and improve Chinese leadership.

In their article, “Product development and innovation for developing countries: potential and challenges” Chandra and Neelankavil discuss the lack of incentives for larger international companies and the lack of resources of the local companies the majority of the people in less developed countries never benefit from new products. International companies generally offer modified product offerings to consumers in developing countries. To date, their attempts to penetrate the developing country markets have not been successful. The reasons for this failure in their attempts to succeed in these markets include the prohibitive cost of developing entirely new products for this market and the low-income levels of the families in these countries. To succeed in developing countries, international companies have to observe and study their customers’ needs and uncover the problem areas. There are many approaches available to accomplish this process including systematic innovation and the seven R’s. Each approach focuses on the consumer and suggests a radical approach to developing new products.

In their article, “The real work of the leader,” Cangemi et al. discuss what is the real work of a leader. No one would argue that leaders have a myriad of significant responsibilities. Using a premise the authors support – leadership is a people business – they utilized their more than 100 years combined leadership to answer the question what, then, is the real work of the leader?

Innovation in R&D: tool of strategic growth

Mr Holtzman has over 15 years of experience in the area of research and development and new product development. In his article, “Innovation in R&D,” Yair Holtzman discusses his findings during the past four years, based upon discussions and interviews with C-suite individuals and engineers and other research and development personnel. This article is based upon discussions with several C-level individuals, including chief executive officers, chief technology officers as well as chief innovation officers of small- ($150m-$250 m) and mid-sized ($300m-$750 m in sales) companies in the USA, Canada, England and Israel over the past four years. These executives emphasized the importance and criticality of organic growth and innovation as a major business concern and opportunity for their companies’ future success. While strategies including acquisitions and continuous process improvement have proven successful but very difficult to sustain, expensive and risky to integrate, “Innovation, and innovation in research and development” in particular, can provide the advantage that world class organizations need to create the sustainable growth year after year. Innovation in research and development can be a strategic weapon in which top companies employ definable strategies and practices to catalyze high levels of organic growth, support above average margins even in mature businesses, and separate themselves from the competition. This article examines what some of the key elements in R&D innovation are and why some companies are so successful in implementing these strategic growth strategies while others continuously fail.

Subjective well-being in rich and poor countries

Dr Mamdouh Farid is the Chairperson of the Department of Management, Entrepreneurship, and General Business at Hofstra University, and a Former Member of the Egypt Presidency Staff. With the assistance of Dr Lazarus, he identifies and discusses important predictors of subjective well-being (SWB) that are relevant to explain well-being as experienced by individuals in developing countries. The paper uses Egypt, the largest country in Africa and Middle East, as an example of a country where SWB is particularly relevant to policy, an emerging economy in transition to the free market, struggling to achieve political stability and economic prosperity. What makes people happy? Managers of almost all organizations grapple with that question in many contexts. This article makes the very important observation that happiness and well-being are subjective, not objective, and that, since measurements of national progress by means of GDP and per capita income may not be comprehensive enough, individual subjective satisfaction or SWB may be useful in addition to economic measurements as a more encompassing framework for quality of life factors. The factors of absolute income, relative income and economic justice, freedom, human rights, social capital, and population density help to explain national SWB in developing countries and the SWB differences between rich and poor countries. Based on the literature findings that well-being enhances work productivity; this paper strongly argues that managers in developing and in transition to free market countries should adopt the value of enhancing well-being and happiness among their workers. Managers should create the appropriate conditions and work design and should also turn their attention to understand and monitor well-being indicators.

The business strategy/corporate social responsibility “mash-up”

Tom McManus is a management consultant and attorney dedicated to helping organizations create sustainable value through corporate social opportunity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the “mash-up” of business strategy and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In popular music, a mash-up is a file of digitally combined musical sources. Song A is played simultaneously with Song B, and in various other combinations. There are often elements of dissonance, and even cacophony, to the form – but the sum of the parts often surpasses the originals. CSR is a management innovation like the idea of business strategy itself. Each is also a metaphor representing alternative visions and approaches to corporate value creation. Business strategists are talking, writing, and meeting about CSR, and CSR is increasingly intersecting, integrating, converging, with business strategy. The trend is described within as a “mash-up.” But what is the significance of this trend? How serious should companies be about it? Is CSR going to become a part of standard business theory and practice? How long will it take? What should organizations do to respond and participate? The paper concludes that the impact the two ideas will have on each other and society is fundamentally unpredictable, but that CSR is a highly significant trend, and well-managed companies are already taking it very seriously. CSR may become a part of standard business theory and practice, but not without evolving through adoption patterns that will necessarily involve some disillusionment. Leaders will guide their company through this period by focusing on how to make CSR “real” for their organization by embracing the business strategy/CSR mash-up and driving growth and innovation within the new parameters.

Role of transparency in managing outcome successes: causes and end use/least cost as decision guides

This is the third in a series of articles authored by Dr Russell Jaffe, an MD distinguished in the fields of biochemistry and clinical immunology, a group of equally distinguished physicians, and Dr Harold Lazarus, former Dean of the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University. Healthcare is both the largest and the most rapidly growing segment of the US economy. The cost of healthcare has become an issue of national importance, and perhaps even crisis. This article focuses on solutions, on outcome successes that illustrate application of a previously reported health equation. The health equation allows an organized and more transparent assessment of healthcare outcomes. This article is for consumers and businesses, managers and administrators, professionals and allied health professionals. The successes described herein illustrate fundamental opportunities driving change and innovation within healthcare and in our society. The approach includes “end use/least cost” techniques that identifies healthful care as a big unmet need and equally attractive business opportunity in identifying health promotion that improves outcome at lower net costs. Opportunity exists to reduce costs while also reducing adverse events, healthcare morbidity and morality. Transparency is essential to find what works more effectively to yield desired outcomes. Attention is called to opportunity areas that can fund out of savings the transition from our current “sickness care” system to a healthful care, proactive prevention approach to delivering care. Novel application of transparency and end use/least cost can help guide choices to achieve healthier outcomes.

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors would particularly like to thank Michael Kochen, an MBA candidate at the Frank G. Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University, for his assistance with this special issue.

Tom McManus, Yair Holtzman, Harold Lazarus