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Organizational energy at first can appear to be an obvious business concept. Any organization you care to pick only has a finite amount of human energy that it can muster to deliver its business goals. Energy, rather than time, is the commodity leaders are realizing they need to value. You could ask, “If the energy were more skillfully channeled in my team, department or whole organization, would business performance improve?”

The purpose of this research is to focus on the serious but under‐examined incidence of fatalities and injuries among rail trackworkers. It identifies the pressures on trackwork, locating them within an analysis of the economic structure of the privatised rail industry and illustrates the consequences of these pressures at the operational level.

A series of semi‐structured interviews was held with management representatives of the infrastructure and maintenance companies, rail safety bodies and officials and representatives of the RMT. These were supplemented by focus‐group style discussions with track maintenance workers in Scotland and the North of England. The paper then relates these qualitative data to the analysis of recent major incidents which have involved fatalities of rail employees.

Within the structure of the post‐privatised industry, improvements to the safety regime are always in danger of being constrained by countervailing economic and organisational pressures. There is a marked discrepancy between the higher level safety structure and the experience of employees at track level.

There is virtually no workforce input into the construction of safety procedures despite the fact that rail workers' commitment to the industry represents a large untapped resource for safety improvement.

The rail industry in general, and trackwork in particular, have been conspicuously under‐researched since privatisation.

In January 2005, Stephen Kelly, BT Global Services’ president of people and organizational change, began leading a major global transformation program ‐ “Connected World”. Here, Kelly shares his experiences during his secondment to the program and describes what lessons HR can learn.

Built upon theories from outside the construction management literature, this study assesses the impact of product diversification on the performance of construction firms in the UK. Performance was measured based on financial ratios of management performance while diversification was measured by the specialisation ratio. The research involved the use of financial data of construction firms covering the period 1995‐2004. The choice of the period is informed by the economic stability during the period and also, by the fact that diversification is a long‐term strategy. The findings indicate that focused firms outperform both moderately and highly diversified firms based on return on total assets (ROTA) and profit margin (PM). However, no performance difference was found between the moderately diversified and highly diversified firms.

Since 1975, physical distribution management in the UK has developed rapidly. Indicative of this is the move by the Centre for Physical Distribution Management (CPDM) to take individual professional members as well as corporate sponsors and the support given to the seminars, conferences and courses run by CPDM and other organisations including, of course, Cranfield.