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During years 2014-2016, Veterans Health Administration National Surgery Office conducted a surgical flow improvement initiative (SFII) to assist low-performing surgery programs to improve their operating room efficiency (ORE). The initiative was co-sponsored by VHA National Surgery Office and VHA Office of Systems Redesign and Improvement. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

An SFII algorithm, based on first-time-start (FTS), cancellation rate (CR), lag time (LT) and OR utilization, assigned an ORE performance Level (1-low to 4-high) to each VA Medical Center (VAMC). In total, 15 VAMCs with low-performance surgery programs participated in SFII to assess the current state of their surgical flow processes and used redesign methods to focus on improvement objectives.

At the end of the project, 14 VSAs, 40 RPIWs, 45 “90-day projects” and 73 Just-Do-It’s were completed with 65 percent (158/243) improvement actions and 86 percent sites improving/sustaining all four ORE metrics. There was a statistically significant difference in improvement across the three stages (baseline, improvement, sustain) for FTS (45.6-68.7 percent; F=44.74; p<0.000); CR (16.1-9.5 percent; F=34.46; p<0.000); LT (63.1-36.3 percent; F=92.00; p<0.000); OR utilization (43.4-57.7 percent; F=6.92; p<0.001) and VAMC level (1.7-3.65; F=80.11; p<0.000). The majority developed “fair to excellent” sustainment (91 percent) and spread (82 percent) plans. The projected annual estimated return-on-investment was $27,949,966.

The SFII successfully leveraged a small number of faculty, coaches, and industrial engineers to produce significant improvement in ORE across a large national integrated health care network. This strategy can serve healthcare leaders in managing complex healthcare issues in their facilities.

The emergence of the platform economy is reorganizing work, employment, and value creation. The authors argue that the digital platforms are fracturing work itself as the places and types of work are being reorganized into a myriad of platform organized work arrangements with workplaces being potentially anywhere with Internet connectivity. The authors differ from most traditional narratives that focus solely upon either work displacement, a single type of platform-organized value-creating activity, or David Weil’s concentration solely upon the workplace. The authors recognize that even as some work is replaced, other work is being transformed; new work and old work in new arrangements is being created and recreated. The taxonomy begins with the workers employed directly by the platform and its contractors. The authors then introduce the category, platform-mediated work, which we divide into three groups: marketplaces such as Amazon; in-person service provision such as Uber and Airbnb; and remote service provision such as Upwork. The next category, “platform-mediated content creation,” is complex. The authors identify three groups of activities: consignment content creators that include services such as the app stores, YouTube, and Amazon Self-Publishing; non-platform organization content producers, which refers to the enormous number of workers occupied with creating and maintaining websites; and user-generated content which is the non-compensated value creation that ranges from content uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, etc. to reviews on sites such as Yelp. It is only when work and value creation is considered in all of these platform-based manifestations that we can understand the ultimate dimensions of the platform economy and comprehensively understand its implications for work.

This paper advocates an innovative approach to help leadership students analyze, capture, and remember the nature of their authentic leadership. This developmental activity was inspired by the Japanese film, Wandâfuru raifu (After Life) (Kore-Eda, Sato, & Shigenobu, 1998), in which the recently deceased are asked to recall and relate a memory that symbolizes all that is important to them. After this memory is replayed to them the recently deceased move on to the afterlife and keep the memory prominent in their minds for eternity. This activity is applied to authentic leadership by asking leadership students to recall their family, personal, and work histories as they relate to their leadership. To bring this activity up to date and into the real world, the students are asked to tell their story directly to a camera in front of a green screen. In postproduction, images related to the students’ stories are keyed in to replace the green screen thereby creating powerful memories of the factors influencing the students’ authentic leadership. This new technique is proposed as an integrative and memorable activity that captures and synthesizes insights from other authentic leadership exercises while focusing on the actionable lessons. Viewing of the film prior to the teaching event offers the additional benefit of creating an atmosphere of quiet contemplation and reflection in students’ minds.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is entwined in the cultural practice of popular music. Particular attention is paid to how the accountant is constricted by artists in art and the role(s) the accountant plays in the artistic narrative. In effect this explores the notion that there is a tension between the notion of the bourgeois world of “the accountant” and the world of “art for art's sake”.

This paper draws on the cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu to understand how the character of the accountant is constructed and used by the artist. Particular attention is paid in this respect to the biography and lyrics of the Beatles.

Accounting and accountants play both the hero and the villain. By rejecting the “accountant villain”, the artist identifies with and reinforces artistic purity and credibility. However, in order to achieve the economic benefits and maintain the balance between the “art” and the “money”, the economic prudence of the bourgeois accountant is required (although it might be resented).

The analysis focuses on a relatively small range of musicians and is dominated by the biography of the Beatles. A further range of musicians and artists would extend this work. Further research could also be constructed to more fully consider the consumption, rather than just the production, of art and cultural products and performances.

This paper is a novel consideration of how accounting stereotypes are constructed and used in the field of artistic creation

BEGINNING with our July issue, which is the first Number of Volume XXXV, we have decided to change the format of The Library World and enlarge the size of the page. It is hoped by this means to give increased reading matter and to be of greater service to the Profession. We are proud of the fact that The Library World has been published continuously since 1898, and that during this long record our policy has been one of continued progress.

This study aims to examine the levels of interim financial reporting (IR) disclosure by listed firms in the Asia-Pacific region and factors influencing these disclosure levels.

Drawing on a sample of 700 interim reports issued in 2012 by the top 100 listed firms in seven Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), the author constructed a disclosure index consisting of disclosure items commonly required across the sample countries. Using this index, the study measures the extent to which listed firms in the Asia-Pacific Region comply with IR disclosure requirements. The study performs ordinary least square regression to investigate the influence of the four country-level factors including international financial reporting standard (IFRS) adoption, audit review, reporting frequency and reporting lag.

This research documents that IR disclosure varies significantly across the region. The IR disclosure levels are positively associated with IFRS adoption, audit review and mandatory of quarterly reporting, but negatively associated with reporting lag.

IR regulation varies across the Asia-Pacific region, but there is no existing research on the country-level factors influencing IR disclosure practices. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper providing some insights into IR disclosure levels by listed firms in the region. It also contributes to the disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence on the country-level factors influencing these disclosure levels. Deriving from the findings, the authors offer recommendations for regulators, investors and listed firms on the issue of reviewing the regulation, using information and preparing IR.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence that two variables related to human resources (HR) have on employee creativity – namely, knowledge management (KM) and motivation management (MM).

The linear regression analyses are based on a sample of 306 employees from 11 Spanish companies belonging to three innovative clusters. In addition, “creativity” is considered an antecedent of technological innovation.

KM and intrinsic MM are shown to inform creativity, whereas extrinsic MM has no such effect.

Although this study is based on cross-sectional data, the findings might induce researchers to investigate the effects of other HR variables, such as the types of relations between employees and their long-term impact on creativity. Management should encourage KM and intrinsic MM across employees, as the results indicate that tacit KM, explicit KM and intrinsic MM encourage a positive attitude toward creativity among employees.

The main contribution is new empirical evidence on the joint influence of aptitudes (KM) and attitudes (MM) on employee creativity. In addition, the study includes a key measure of employee creativity. The evidence reveals the types of KM and MM that encourage or inhibit creative employee behavior. The results show that once employees have reached a medium-high level of extrinsic MM, creativity will be affected solely by intrinsic MM.