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Under high turbulence conditions, a company's periodic planning cycle needs to be supplemented with a dynamic, real‐time, strategic‐issue‐management system. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

A case study of a prominent Australian healthcare organization shows the eight steps for how its management used the strategic issue management (SIM) process to identify, rank and address strategic issues in a rapidly changing business environment.

The paper finds that, for companies entering a period of turbulence, the tracking, monitoring, and management of strategic issues become s imperative so that the corporate, strategy, and capability do not fall out of alignment.

The company's survival may well depend on having a well‐developed process for decision‐makers to rapidly put forth critical rebalancing responses.

In the SIM approach, external issues are manifest as opportunities and threats, and internal issues as strengths and weaknesses. Issues are viewed in the context of the environment, strategy, and capability (E‐S‐C) framework. A 3×3 strategic issue priority matrix is used to map the level of urgency and potential impact of each issue.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Before the economic storm which has created such unprecedented turbulence throughout the world, organizations might have been content to formulate a strategic plan for their future and pay it less frequent attention than they ought to have done. Not any more. The times when inertia might have been a tempting position for a successful company to adopt are gone now that survival has become the main focus.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to show how technology has dramatically altered the way businesses operate in a business‐to‐business (B2B) context and has had profound influences on services, altering the way services are delivered. It is believed that the increased use of self‐service technologies (SSTs) impacts on B2B relationships. The paper seeks to explore the impact of the use of internet banking on business relationships.

The paper reviews the results and implications of recent exploratory research conducted with a small sample of Australian business bank customers.

It was expected that perceptions of technology would impact on the relationship. However, it was the perception of the relationship which led respondents to develop a perception of the technology. Further research is recommended.

Banks are encouraging internet banking to reduce service delivery costs and improve service quality for customers. However, a greater understanding of the impact of this on relationships is essential.

The importance of developing and fostering relationships with customers has long been regarded as important within services marketing and also within B2B relationships. However, there is little discussion of the impact of self‐service technologies on business relationships.

The purpose of this article is to build on the original Dunphy, Griffiths and Benn (2007) model by proposing a new model of organisational sustainability which includes the economic dimension. There is a growing level of interest by senior executives in the role and potential impact that sustainability will have on their organisation’s future strategy and structure. Although management is keenly aware that sustainability is important in their future planning, there is much uncertainty about what level of involvement and commitment they should make towards sustainability endeavours.

This article reviews the existing organisational sustainability change model while building a case to have the important economic strand added to the original change dimensions relating to the human and the environmental strands.

This conceptual paper builds on previous work of sustainability organisational change theorists to produce an enhanced sustainability change model thus proposing a more comprehensive and integrated sustainability stage model that can guide managers in their quest to evolve effective and more sustainable organisations.

This is a conceptual paper that builds on previous work of sustainability organisational change theorists to introduce an enhanced sustainability change model that includes the important economic dimension to the widely accepted social and environmental dimensions, thus proposing a comprehensive and integrated sustainability stage model that can guide managers in their quest to evolve effective and more sustainable organisations.

This paper aims to examine how some leading companies are integrating sustainability into their planning of future direction and growth. Readers will have a strong interest in sustainability and how it should be managed within organizations. Creating and maintaining sustainable organizations is of high priority to companies planning their future in a turbulent and difficult-to-predict operating environment. Readers will learn how sustainability may be better integrated into the strategic thinking and management processes. This article will be cited in the future for its early discussion on the importance of integrating sustainability discussion and planning into mainstream strategic management.

This paper draws on secondary data from seven international organizations to show how they are beginning to embrace sustainability issues into mainstream strategic management. This background is used to propose a process that integrates business and sustainability strategy processes that will deal with issues that emerge in more turbulent operating environments.

Secondary research findings suggest that it would be timely to embrace sustainability issue processing with mainstream strategic management processes.

Information collected in this paper is based upon a small sample of seven international organizations; hence, observations and recommendations are not representative of the wider business community.

Recommendations presented in this paper will be useful to senior practicing managers as they seek to integrate sustainability management into mainstream strategic management processes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the work roles of the Royal Malaysia Police Volunteer Reserve officers.

A grounded theory approach was utilized for the generation and analysis of the data. Data were collected through interviews, observations and follow-ups. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 male and female volunteer reserve officers and 5 regular police officers aged between 24 and 58 years of mixed socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities and ranking in the Royal Malaysia Police force. Two civilian respondents (spouses of the Police Volunteer Reserve officers) were also interviewed for this study for the purpose of theory sampling.

The data were analyzed qualitatively resulting in a model of Royal Malaysia Police Volunteer Reserve officer roles consisting of four orientations.

Study outcomes are discussed theoretically and administratively. The four role orientations identified will assist researchers studying police reserve volunteerism.

Study outcomes allow administrators to utilize and deploy police reservists in consonance with the four role orientations identified.

This study provides insight into how police reservists conceive of and execute their roles as they negotiate them in relation to the regular police officers they work with and the public from which they are drawn.

This is the first study of police volunteerism in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to adapt the traditional corporate portfolio management approach to the strategic management of multi-business portfolios in the public sector.

The approach presented in this paper is based on a research project conducted within the Defence Science and Technology Group, Australian Department of Defence. It was developed iteratively and incrementally over the course of one year with a reference group comprising 15 middle management representatives and several members of the senior management team.

The approach developed comprises a multi-stage process and an assessment framework designed to capture the complexity of the problem space, build a strategic narrative, and facilitate senior leadership decision-making. The process is aimed at eliciting the required information, promoting contestability of the results, ensuring appropriate consultation, and ultimately achieving senior leadership consensus on priorities. The assessment framework is used to assess and visualize the balance of organizational capabilities.

By synthesizing and visualizing information on past performance and future potential, the approach presented in this paper may be used to facilitate strategic decision-making by senior management in the public sector.

The Milk and Cream Standards Committee, of which Lord WENLOCK is Chairman, have commenced to take evidence, and at the outset have been met by the difficulty which must necessarily attach to the fixing of a legal standard for most food products. The problem, which is applicable also to other food materials, is to fix a standard for milk, cream and butter which shall be fair and just both to the producer and the consumer. The variation in the composition of these and other food products is well known to be such that, while standards may be arrived at which will make for the protection of the public against the supply of grossly‐adulterated articles, standards which shall insure the supply of articles of good quality cannot possibly be established by legal enactments. If the Committee has not yet arrived at this conclusion we can safely predict that they will be compelled to do so. A legal standard must necessarily be the lowest which can possibly be established, in order to avoid doing injustice to producers and vendors. The labours of the Committee will no doubt have a good effect in certain directions, but they cannot result in affording protection and support to the vendor of superior products as against the vendor of inferior ones and as against the vendor of products which are brought down by adulteration to the lowest legal limits. Neither the labours of this committee nor of any similar committee appointed in the future can result in the establishment of standards which will give a guarantee to the consumer that he is receiving a product which has not been tampered with and which is of high, or even of fair, quality.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.