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Faced with a fast pace of internal change and a shifting and challenging marketplace, Farm Credit Canada embraced a comprehensive cultural transformation program four years ago. This ongoing program has yielded significant results driven by leadership commitment and accountability.

There are many challenges involved in managing change, but also many opportunities, as the features in this issue convey. The main theme of this issue is mergers and acquisitions and the vital role that HR plays in achieving successful outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an interview with Tom Adams, Chief Executive Officer of Rosetta Stone Inc., one of the world's leading language‐learning solution providers.

This briefing is prepared by an independent interviewer.

Rosetta Stone^® is an interactive software program that uses technology to simulate the way we all learnt our first language as a child. Learners develop language proficiency naturally, by connecting new words with their meaning, in real‐life contexts that are technology enabled. Interactivity makes learning engaging, and the fact this is a computer‐based tool makes it ideal for busy learners that value convenience.

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

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that can have a broader social impact.

Language skills are a vital part of global business, and selling to businesses, organizations and education establishments has become Rosetta Stone's largest growth area over the past few years. The world is learning languages as the world goes global, and language‐learning providers are an extremely important tool in facilitating this globalization.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the experience of being a peer support worker (PSW).

Narrative account of a one to one meeting with a peer written from the perspective of a PSW.

Key reflections centre on the importance of establishing and maintaining boundaries, the role of trust, and a different understanding of what constitutes risk.

While there is a great deal written about the theory of peer support work, little is published about PSWs experience. This paper provides important insights into the nature of peer support work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the rhetorical strategies women use as they debate the efficacy of maternity leave policies in the USA and how these strategies reify the public/private divide.

Using rhetorical analysis, the characteristics of women's discussion are examined in an online forum.

Participants rely on two primary strategies: “public” strategies (e.g. employing facts, logic, statistics) for most of their discussion; and “private” strategies (e.g. relating personal experiences) as a strategy of last resort when the public strategies fail. Further, their personal recountings lack detail and ultimately limit the ability to strengthen the posters' arguments.

While this paper focuses on a US context, the approach lends itself well to examining the cultural assumptions underpinning specific policies and extending the study of the complexities of the assumed public/private divide in additional settings.

The paper suggests that in order to advance arguments for or against change in a cultural climate that so clearly divides the public and the private, women will need to invest more of their personal experiences to argue more effectively the impact of a social policy on their lives.

This study uses online texts as the focus of analysis and in doing so examines the rich, authentic interaction of women from a variety of organizational backgrounds.

This paper investigates the usefulness of textbook and company approaches to developing managerial skills and competencies. It suggests that textbooks, based on an “experiential” approach to skill building, are contradictory in that they ultimately privilege predispositions over training in the practice of behaviours. The development of managerial skills therefore, is restricted by the individual's predispositions towards behaving in a certain way. In addition, the paper argues that the managerial competency approach used by many organizations, and also reflected in textbooks, fails to appreciate the predominance of the situation or context in determining how managers behave. Ultimately, the education of business students and managers, on courses at university and in‐company, dealing with managerial skills are deficient because “skills” cannot be abstracted from either the person or the context. The idea of managerial competence as a fact of being is illusory, managers are always and constantly being competent or incompetent.

Assessment of mental capacity in people with learning disabilities involved in criminal proceedings has been debated, and the introduction of mental capacity legislation in the United Kingdom makes provisions for people who lack the capacity to make decisions about their welfare. However, while the new legislation is designed to protect people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions, it is not clear how this legislation applies in criminal cases where the capacity to consent to sexual relations has been questioned. Until recently there was no clear definition of capacity to consent to sexual relations, and the aim of this paper is to consider the key aspects of this legislation and apply it to a case example. The definitions and assessment procedures involved in assessing ‘mental capacity’ are considered, and practice guidance for mental health professionals working in this field is offered.

This paper aims to focus on the role of line management and learning culture in the development of professional practice for the human resource (HR) practitioner.

Three‐year longitudinal, matched‐pair study involving five participants and their line managers.

Two of the five participants experienced greater career growth and professional development, due to various factors; the roles of line management and learning culture.

Limitations are the nature of the research and small numbers in the study. This paper considers only two of the five categories that emerged and does not include the quantitative data findings.

Greater attention needs to be given to informal learning processes and knowledge‐sharing activities in organisations.

Due to a number of constraints, the longitudinal method used in this research is rare. There are significant benefits to gathering data over a period of time to capture different perspectives of practice and provide deeper understanding.

This study seeks to compare rates of blood lithium monitoring with rates of lithium prescription collection in order to evaluate whether identifying patients with low frequency of monitoring could alert clinicians to poor prescription collection. It examines whether routine monitoring of lithium prescription pick‐up would be likely to reduce admissions to hospital, as a way of identifying those who were poorly adherent with treatment. It also ascertains the frequency of lithium toxicity and its outcomes.

The frequency of monitoring of lithium was assessed through laboratory results of 773 patients. A sub‐sample of 119 patients on lithium was found through general practice records and the rates of medication collection determined. Admission data were examined to assess whether this was related to a failure in blood monitoring or prescription collection.

A total of 87 per cent of the GP group had lithium levels measured at least twice a year and 84 per cent collected more than 80 per cent of prescriptions. It was found that those patients not collecting their prescriptions were a different group from those who did not have their blood levels monitored. Admission rates were not higher in those who were less efficient at picking up prescriptions. Two per cent of the total sample had lithium levels above 1.6 mmol l⁻¹. There were no fatalities associated with high levels.

It is important to assess the real potential benefits of additional monitoring rather than assuming that increased surveillance will improve the outcome.

The lived experience of individuals who experience mental illness should be at the heart of recovery-orientated practice and research. The purpose of this paper is to outline key ethical and practical issues that both respect principles of recovery and are fundamental to establishing and maintaining a research relationship with people with severe mental illness (SMI).

Theoretical frameworks of recovery, discourse ethics and critical reflexivity were used in a 12-month longitudinal community study to construct and build methodology to inform the collection of rich descriptive data through informal discussions, observations and interviews. Detailed field notes and a reflective journal were used to enable critical reflexivity and challenge normative assumptions based on clinical and lay views of SMI.

The paper provides an analysis through three vignettes which demonstrate how the principles of recovery were incorporated in an ethically grounded research relationship.

The study may have been limited by the small sample size of participants.

Aspects of the research methodology may potentially be adopted by researchers working with people who experience SMI or with other hard-to-reach groups.

As more research is undertaken with individuals who experience SMI, stigma around understandings of mental illness can be broken down by supporting individuals to find their voice through recovery orientated discourse ethics.