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An interview with Daniel Magid, president and CEO of Aldon and a recognized authority on enterprise software configuration and change management.

This briefing is prepared by an independent interviewer.

Answers are provided on a range of topics including: business strategies, outsourcing operations and software development.

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.

This paper examines application lifecycle management (ALM) and how it can benefit the outsourcing of application development.

This is a viewpoint paper.

ALM products address the critical development needs of developers, IT managers, and CIOs by allowing all to function in a cohesive distributed environment with outsourced components.

The paper will be of interest to managers involved in the outsourcing of application development.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the benchmarking literature by examining the historical emergence and evolution of benchmarking using the management fashion perspective as a theoretical lens.

The research approach followed in this paper can be characterized as explorative and theoretical. Insights from different data sources have been combined to provide a rich description of the emergence and evolution of benchmarking.

This analysis casts new light on several aspects of benchmarking’s emergence and evolution pattern. The characteristics of the benchmarking idea give it potential as a fashionable management tool. The widespread popularity and longevity of benchmarking can to a large extent be explained by the efforts of various actors to turn benchmarking into an institution.

The paper is explorative and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources.

Although some researchers have noted that benchmarking could be viewed as a management fashion, management fashion theory has, only to a very limited extent, been used as a theoretical lens in the context of benchmarking. This research paper demonstrates that management fashion theory can provide valuable insights for research on benchmarking.

In this paper we consider the design of a power system stabiliser using the least‐integral‐square‐error algorithm. Describing function technique is employed to take the nonlinearity of exciter saturation into account. Results, obtained from the digital simulation of a sample power system, show that the proposed power system stabiliser can greatly improve the dynamic stability of the power system.

Popular soup kitchens multiplied rapidly during 2020 in Latin America in the Covid-19 context, seeking that those who do not have guaranteed food access achieve some predictability in their daily food intake. Managing these kitchens requires specific practices, such as organising goods, resources, services and actions that make food, health and personal hygiene viable, as well as the management and emotional care associated with care. The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the emotions associated with food in soup kitchens as a care practice that is configured as an interstitial practice and an affirmation of love and hope. For this, a virtual ethnography and virtual interviews were carried out with people participating in the organisation of soup kitchens in Latin America during the second half of 2020. We will focus on two aspects of our records: the registered groups' names and ‘logos’ and the photos of six countries that appear as ‘identifiers’ of the groups reported there.

To achieve this objective, the argument is structured as follows: (1) The relationship between love, interstitial practices and food is conceptually defined, (2) the methodological strategy used and a vision about bodies/emotions are synthesised, (3) the results of the empirical information are presented and (4) some traces of the emotions surveyed and their connection with love are outlined. It ends by emphasising it is necessary to continue investigating how the set of collective practices that elaborate day-by-day love.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

This chapter focusses on ‘emotions’ as one of the most crucial elements of customer experience. Emotions form the basis of experience as well as the basis for assessing, interpreting, understanding and responding to situations, brands, events and organisations as a customer interacts with the organisation or any of the touchpoints throughout their purchase journey. We discuss the psychological context of emotions, the role emotions play in judgement and decision-making in general and more specifically consumer decision-making. In this chapter, we review the extensive literature and theory in psychology and customer experience to explain how customers perceive bundles of cues, selectively perceive and retain information, and how memories keep reinforcing experiences. We discuss the practical implications for business leaders focussing on understanding customers' emotions and utilising the knowledge to create and capture value through customer experience.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and under what condition does affective orientation (AO) drive salesperson performance (SP) and whether there is a tradeoff between affective orientation and the need for cognition (NFC). Using career stage theory, this research proposes that emotion is important and that the relationship between AO and SP is conditional and mediated.

The hypothesized model is tested using survey data that were collected from 611 attendees at a Midwest regional sales meeting of a national direct selling organization. The model was estimated using 5,000 bootstrapped samples drawn to assess the conditional and indirect effects.

The findings reveal that AO increases SP when mediated through motivation to work (MW), but only during the salesperson’s initial stage of their career – their first year. In subsequent career stages, AO’s impact on SP diminishes, while NFC’s impact on SP remains significant regardless of career stage.

The data were collected from a single selling organization.

This study increases the understanding of the relationship between salesperson emotion (AO) and SP. This informs sales managers that new salespeople interpret information both emotionally and cognitively, which impacts the management of early career salespeople.

Sales research rarely investigates the role of emotion. This research finds that emotion can be an asset to new salespeople. However, the need for emotion (AO) decreases with experience and no longer has a significant impact on performance after the initial stage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between spirituality and corporate social responsibility (CSR) from a Buddhist perspective. The paper addresses critical issues in CSR and highlights how the concept of Buddhist skilful means can be applied to tackle such issues. Skilful means is highlighted among various Buddhist concepts because it represents a context-sensitive and practical approach that can be effectively applied in CSR practice.

The paper reviews scholarly conversations on the challenges faced by CSR in contemporary business management and justifies the application of Buddhist principles, especially skilful means, to tackle such issues. The paper draws upon a wide range of Buddhist teachings and Sutras to propose a Buddhist skilful means approach to CSR.

Studies show that CSR is a highly contextualised term. Its definition and implementation differ in various contexts. Buddhism is set apart from other religions by its flexibility in practice and contextualisation. Further, the non-attachment that sits at the heart of the skilful means allows the exploration of different CSR practices to respond effectively to local contexts.

The paper proposes practical means for CSR practices adopted from a number of Buddhist qualities and principles in response to challenges for the practice of CSR.

Buddhist concepts have yet to be discovered or included in major scholarly conversations because of their contradiction of some well-known Western concepts and theories. Skilful means, including the principle of non-attachment, is a Buddhist approach. This paper argues that skilful means is a good fit with CSR as it has practical applications that can address issues identified in relation to CSR and organisational management practices.