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John Williams, senior director of marketing for Microsoft's .NET, was trying to build the .NET brand, a comprehensive family of next-generation connectivity software products. Highlights the challenges of branding and positioning a complex technology offering. The first challenge facing Microsoft was to develop a common definition of .NET, which had been in flux over the prior two years. The second challenge was to choose between an umbrella branding strategy, a sub-branding strategy, and an ingredient branding strategy. The third challenge was to create a value proposition that would appeal to three very different target audiences: business decision makers, IT professionals, and developers.

To analyze the branding and positioning of a complex new technology offering: by defining a new product offering for public understanding and comprehension; evaluating brand strategies for optimal effect, considering possible hurdles to implementation of each strategy; and developing a value proposition attractive to differing audiences.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of performance measurement systems in organisational effectiveness in the context of the financial services sector within a developing country.

Using the mail survey method data were collected from 69 financial institutions operating in Nepal. Multivariate analysis, in particular multiple regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that non-financial measures and feedback are tightly intertwined with organisational effectiveness. While institutions are focused on using the performance measures concerning internal business process perspective, less emphasis is placed on using customer and employee-related performance measures because they are considered less significant to organisational effectiveness. The findings also reveal that strategy-related feedback is considered more critical by management, as opposed to performance and staff. The study also provides evidence that 40.58 per cent of the financial institutions in Nepal had implemented the Balanced Scorecard, which is considered to be high when compared with other developing countries.

The findings provide managers with valuable insights pertaining to the role of non-financial performance measures and the importance of feedback in improving organisational effectiveness, which could assist them in (re) aligning their performance measurement practices.

The findings of this study contributes to the limited management accounting literature on performance measurement and the impact on organisational effectiveness by providing evidence from the financial services sector within the context of a developing country.

Sisaye and Birnberg (2010a, 2010b) have described the extent and scope of the innovations dimensions as the degree to which learning has affected the organizational structures and processes of the organization. Within this framework, extent has been defined as the degree to which the innovation affects the organization's management accounting administrative structures, systems, and behaviors of members or units within the organization. Extent is synonymous with the two types of learning identified by Argyris and Schon (1978) discussed earlier. Thus, the learning in the extent dimension varies from a technical change within an existing system (single loop) to the adoption of an entirely new administrative system (double loop). While this continuum extends from technical changes that affect a single process or task to administrative changes that affect organization-wide systems and structures, we will treat them as though they are dichotomous. As indicated earlier (Chapter 2), extent is associated with two types of learning: single loop (technical change within an existing system, i.e., gradual-incremental) and double loop (the adoption of an entirely new system, i.e., radical-transformational) (Argyris & Schon, 1978, 1996).

The paper extends the organizational learning framework: Structural-Functional (SF)-single-loop or Conflictual-Radical (CR)-double-loop learning to the management accounting literature. The sociological approach of organizational learning is utilized to understand those contingent factors that can explain why management accounting innovations succeed or fail in organizations.

We view learning as enhancing an organization’s strategic competitive advantage by making it better able to adopt and diffuse innovation in respond to changes in its environment in order to manage improved performance. The success of management accounting innovations is contingent upon whether its learning process involves SF-single-loop or CR-double-loop learning to adopt and diffuse process innovation.

The paper suggests that the learning strategy that the organization chooses is the reason why some management accounting innovations are more successfully adopted than others and why some innovations are easily diffused in some organizations but not in others. We propose that the sociological approaches to learning provide an alternative framework with which to better understand the adoption and diffusion of process innovations in management accounting systems.

It has become evident that management accounting researchers need to pay particular attention to an organization’s approach to adoption and diffusion of innovation strategies, particularly when they are designing and implementing process innovation programs for an organization. According to Schulz (2001), there are two interrelated stages of the learning that can shape the outcome of the innovation process in an organization. The first stage is related to the acquisition/production (adoption) of knowledge that results in gathering information, codification, and exploration. This is followed by the second stage which is the distribution or dissemination (diffusion) processes. When these two stages – adoption and diffusion – are applied within an accounting context, they address issues that are commonly associated with the successes and/or failures of management accounting innovations.

Although innovation involves learning, the nature of the learning process does not completely describe the manner in which an innovation affects the organization. Accordingly, we suggest that the two interrelated organizational sociological dimensions of innovations processes, namely, (1) the adoption and diffusion theories of Rogers (1971 and 1995), to approach organizational learning, and (2) the SF (single loop) and CR (double loop) approaches to learning be used simultaneously to describe management accounting innovations.

When an innovation is implemented, it initially can be introduced as an incremental change, one that can be limited in both in its scope and its breadth of administrative changes. This means that situations which are most likely to benefit from its initiation can serve as the prototype for its adoption by the organization. If successful, this can be followed by systemic accounting innovations to instituting broader administrative changes within the existing accounting reporting and control systems.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of competitive strategy and performance measurement in the Malaysian context by applying a modified version of Conant et al's generic strategy scale and categorizing Malaysian firms along the Miles and Snow business strategy typology.

Competitive strategy and performance measurement were assessed via survey. A total of 975 firms were randomly selected from the directory of Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) as listed in 2003. Overall, 133 surveys were returned, 120 of which were usable for analysis.

Results suggest that Malaysian firms view competitive strategy differently and are more likely than their Western counterparts to emphasize the use of financial measures of organizational performance. Findings also highlight the difficulties faced when Western measurement scales are employed in non‐Western emerging nations.

Because greater emphasis was placed on financial rather than non‐financial measures, results indicate a statistically significant different improvement only in sales growth and ROI performance among the three strategy categories. Strategy researchers should focus their attention to the use of multiple performance measures in assessing firm's performance as shown by the significant different in the use of customer satisfaction and loyalty measures, as well as employee satisfaction and training measures.

These findings hold relevance for executives responsible for the formulation and implementation of business strategy. A better understanding of the relationship between business strategy and performance measures using the BSC perspectives of measures has been provided. The study provides some useful insights into the role of performance measures. In addition, this study conveys the message to top managers and designers of performance measurement tools–most notably the balanced scorecard– should pay particular attention to non‐financial performance measures in implementing their organization's strategy.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

According to a report just issued by Dr. ARTHUR NEWSHOLME, the Principal Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, it appears that a majority of the staff of the Medical Department of the Board have been engaged in assisting to establish as favourable sanitary conditions as possible at the training centres for the new troops so that the risks associated with the concentration and feeding of large numbers of men under temporary conditions should be reduced to a minimum.

Although the term interpersonal leadership has been well established within the literature, there remains a dearth of theoretically derived models that specifically address the comprehensive nature of the underlying leader behaviors and activities. The intent of the present article is to attempt to synthesize the existent leadership models, behaviors, and factors to arrive at a coherent conceptual model of interpersonal leadership that can inform efficient and effective leadership education programs. The resulting model included 13 primary factors integrated within a hierarchical framework. Leadership educators are recommended to adopt or adapt the proposed model while developing educational curriculum and interventions.