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Against the backdrop of the fledgling entrepreneurship development and the imperatives of risk management to mitigate failure, this chapter discusses the impact of risk management practice on the development of African businesses. It also considers how best to align the practice of risk management in order to achieve business continuity. More than ever before, global competitiveness and the need to trade‐out of declining profits are currently driving businesses into risk management efficiencies in order to continue achieving increased returns on assets employed/equities for their shareholders. The attainment of these growth objectives can often be affected by several types of business risk (financial and operational) coupled with unpredicted movements in prices. These movements especially in times of high volatilities impact materially on profit growth potentials regardless of how well a business is managed. This chapter suggests how African business executives can evolve their business management styles to imbed risk management at all stages.

Yair Aharoni is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University. He received his DBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. His doctoral dissertation – The Foreign Investment Decision Process – was published in a book version and was translated to Spanish and Japanese. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business. During his long and distinguished academic career, Aharoni was the Daniel and Grace Ross Professor of International Business and later the Issachar Haimovic Professor of Business Policy – both at Tel Aviv University. He was the Thomas Henry Caroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1978–1979). He was also the J. Paul Stitch Visiting Professor of International Business at Duke University (1987–1995) and the director of CIBER (Center of International Business Education and Research) (1992–1995). He published several dozens books and monographs in Hebrew and in English, more than 100 papers and chapters in books and more than 150 cases. For his academic achievements he was awarded both Landau Prize (2007) and Israel Prize in management science (2010).

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities that exist in the realm of management and business education. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the history and development of management education, highlighting the changes and evolution that have occurred over time. Furthermore, the author discusses the dominant paradigm that has shaped management education and the issues that have arisen as a result. Specifically, the author identifies the problems that have contributed to financial crises and business failures, demonstrating the inadequacies of the current approach. Finally, the author argues for the need to revolutionize the current management education system. This involves a significant departure from the traditional methods of teaching and learning, and instead emphasizes the development of critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities and adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape. This chapter challenges the current state of management education and offers a compelling call to action for reform. By addressing the issues that have plagued the field and proposing innovative solutions, the author aims to pave the way for a more responsible management education system.

Business process management has received much attention in the industrial engineering and management literature, and its benefits are well known. Much less has been written in the public sector management literature, and what has been written has been very general. Hence, there is confusion among public managers about how business process management concepts should be implemented. How should public organizations reorganize to accommodate business process management? How are existing or new enterprise systems aligned with business process management methodologies? This paper addresses these issues, and concludes that public organizations will have to change their organizational structures radically as well as their enterprise systems in order to implement business process management concepts successfully. The paper also discusses the benefits of public sector process management, and focuses in some detail on two of the reasons that public organizations have incentive to implement business process management methodologies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive framework that identifies thematic clusters and their interconnections within Global Talent Management (GTM), global careers and talent management (TM).

In this paper, this study conducted a co-citation analysis using bibliographic data to unveil the intellectual connections and relationships among thematic articles related to GTM sourced from the Web of Science.

This review highlights three key research themes: experiences working abroad, TM approaches and the complex nature of GTM as a living system.

The main limitation of this research is the sample itself. Content analysis based on the co-citation method resulted in some more recent releases being omitted.

The practical implications of the paper include providing a structured framework for understanding the complexities of GTM.

Research into the academic literature in this area is divided into various clusters, empirically demonstrating how GTM and global mobility are intertwined, revealing the need for us to more thoroughly comprehend the social ramifications of GTM practices and activities and the need to further analyse the influencing social aspects in a GTM strategy, like diversity, increased mobility and virtual reality.

The analysis revealed the emergence of three distinct thematic groups: (1) global work experiences, (2) TM approaches and (3) GTM.

The focus of the research was to provide a business perspective to the role of real estate assets in supporting the fulfilment of corporate business plans. Based on a comprehensive survey of published literature and a series of in‐depth interviews of corporate real estate/facilities managers, an integrating resource management framework was developed to model the nature of interactions between strategic business planning and operational asset management in an organisational setting. The study supports the view that research efforts aimed at improving management effectiveness of the operational real estate asset base must be channelled to provide frameworks or models that promote understanding to all parties involved in the process, from a knowledge base that aims to define better: the operational requirements of core business(es); the key real estate and facilities service attributes; and options evaluation to meet dynamic changes.

The issue dealt with in this chapter is the role of management in developing and maintaining business relationships among companies. Interdependent business network structures result from interactions in dyads between single actors and interactions among all involved actors collectively. Managers as ‘architects and constructors’ of business relationships, involved directly in developing the relationships between customers and suppliers, are mostly middle-management positions rather than top management. Purchasing managers, sales managers and technical managers are fundamental for the development of business relationships as they create value in business relationships. Relationships between companies cannot be developed unilaterally; they have to be developed jointly. Since value creation requires involvement of others, motivating other actors and mediating are fundamental in developing relationships and creating value. The effective development of business relationships of value hinges on the capability and skills of management to work with and through others, to relate to others and to cope with interdependencies that arise in relationships. However, the capability of a company to interact and create value in business relationships is not simply a sum of individual managerial skills; it is an issue of organising the interfaces in relationships to other business.

Sharing services increasingly extends beyond intraorganizational concentration of service delivery. Organizations have started to promote cooperation across their boundaries to deal with strategic tensions in their value ecosystem, moving beyond traditional outsourcing. This chapter addresses two research questions geared to the challenge of interorganizational shared services (ISS): why would organizations want to get and remain involved in ISS? And: what are the implications of ISS for (inter)organizational value creation?

The conceptual chapter reviews literature pertaining to ISS from public, commercial, and nongovernmental sectors. ISS is understood as a multistakeholder organizational innovation. In order to analyze ISS and conduct empirical research, we developed a taxonomy and research framework.

The chapter shows how ISS can be positioned in value chains, distinguishing vertical, horizontal, and hybrid ISS. It outlines ISS implications for developing business models, structures, and relationships. Success factors and barriers are presented that epitomize the dynamic interplay of organizational autonomy and interorganizational dependence.

The research framework offers conceptual ideas for theoretical and empirical work. Researchers involved in ISS studies may adopt strategic, strategic innovation, and organizational innovation perspectives.

ISS phases are distinguished to focus innovation management — initiation, enactment, and evaluation. Furthermore, insights are provided into processes and interventions aimed at making ISS a success for participating organizations.

Cross-sectoral perspective on ISS; taxonomy of ISS; research framework built on organization and strategic management literature.