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This paper aims to explore hidden wellsprings of risk-taking in family firms.

The high tolerance for risk shown repeatedly by the famous family firm Hipp of Germany is documented. Three major risk-taking episodes at Hipp are examined.

Counterintuitively, conservative values were actually a major facilitator of risk-taking at Hipp.

The ramifications for other family firms, especially in Germany’s so-called Mittelstand, are examined. An open question is whether the relevant scope of the foregoing analysis may be confined to national contexts like German Mittelstand with its highly developed sector of family firms.

Contrary to received wisdom, family firms with conservative values may actually have certain advantages in their capacity not only to assume certain types of risks but also to mitigate such risks. Especially the communitarian embeddedness of such values may provide a layer of risk mitigation.

At least in some countries, such as Germany, family firms are indeed willing to engage in substantial risk-taking. With their approach of combining conservative values and risk-taking, they contribute to considerable wealth and societal development.

Conservatism in management and risk-taking propensity are usually thought of as antipodes. However, it is necessary to distinguish between conservatism (which usually equates to risk aversion) and conservative values (which, as shown, may be highly compatible with a willingness to engage and succeed in risky undertakings).

The purpose of this paper is to develop the hitherto unexplored concept of strategic discipline.

Three fairly iconic firms of the Germanic Mittelstand (ALDI, Stihl and Hipp) are examined. The meaning and relevance of strategic discipline is derived.

Intuitively, strategic discipline may seem like the antipode to the much-discussed concept of pivoting. In fact, strategic discipline is shown to be the natural corollary of strategic pivoting as a successive phase in a company’s development.

In fast-moving or fast-changing environments, strategic discipline may be inappropriate. Furthermore, the exercise of strategic discipline can restrain growth. Once firms have attained a certain size and saturation of the market, the desire for further growth may entail a willingness to loosen the hold of strategic discipline.

Strategic discipline can enable firms to avoid falling into common strategic pitfalls. From this paper, the authors distill three basic dimensions of strategic discipline: cultivating simplicity, resisting short-term temptations and focusing on implementability.

The success of firms depends as much on the strategic choices they make as upon the strategic choices they decide not to make. Most prior research has focused on the visible strategy choices companies have made a lot more than on the practically invisible history of strategic choices that firms have not made. This contribution does the opposite, filling an evident gap.

The purpose of the feature was to examine how technology can help the recruitment industry in overcoming some, if not all, diversity challenges.

It is a byline paper written by Charles Hipps, CEO of WCN, who touches upon personal knowledge, organisational information and previous industry findings to create the most well-rounded paper possible.

The paper concludes that for companies who view the diversity challenge as an opportunity, the use of modern technology to enable staff and the analysis of all of the data available has real potential to improve business performance. The challenge is on for organisations to scrutinise the technological software solutions available to them and pull them together to create an overall picture that looks right for itself and its candidates. After all, the war for diverse talent is on, and recruitment and processes of human resources must keep up with the challenge to win hearts and minds – and ultimately business prosperity.

Within the paper, there are personal findings, research conducted by others (which is added as an endnote) and general individual views from a thought-leader. Whenever statistics were used that do not belong to WCN, it was fully stated and attributed accordingly.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize activities being undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe to prevent and control COVID-19 in and beyond prisons, activities specifically designed to increase information sharing and to support Member States, to comment on potential impacts of these initiatives at country-level responses and to underline the need for a rights-based approach to managing the pandemic, including the right to vaccination.

The Health in Prisons Programme (HIPP) of the WHO Regional Office for Europe worked with partner organizations to review regularly the evidence on best practices in prison health and use it to inform policy recommendations at the global level. HIPP issued overarching guidance and specific tools to support implementation of measures to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 in prisons and other custodial settings. Moreover, to monitor the emergence of outbreaks, the HIPP developed a minimum data set for countries voluntarily to report COVID-19 cases and identify situations in need of direct support.

Since May 2020, the WHO has periodically received data from Member States, leading to the development of country-specific bulletins to support countries and, whenever appropriate, to organize virtual missions to further support ministries and public health bodies responsible for managing COVID-19 in prisons.

The development of a specific set of indicators for prisons enables exploring data in a disaggregated manner. Monitoring response measures developed in prison enables judging their appropriateness to minimize the spread of SARS-CoV2 in prisons and alignment with guidance issued by the WHO.

Though KIBS constitute only a small proportion of all services, researchers frequently accord them a significance beyond that indicated by their share in employment or value added (Tether & Hipp, 2002; Gallouj, 2002). For example, KIBS are held to play ‘an increasingly dynamic and pivotal role in ‘new’ knowledge-based economies’ (Howells, 2000, p. 4), as sources of important new technologies, high-quality, high-wage employment and wealth creation (Tether, 2004). Unfortunately, while much of the rhetoric seems intuitively reasonable, one inevitably encounters definitional difficulties in delimiting the specifics of innovation in KIBS, with a variety of, more or less operational, working definitions employed by the academic literature (Wong & He, 2005).

For firms that depend on personalized management as a key element of their competitive advantage, maintaining personalized management in the face of sustained growth presents a particular challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms in the Germanic Mittelstand have endeavored to “scale up” personalization.

Different ways of scaling up personalization are explained with examples.

The concept of personalization need not just concern customers, in contrast to conventional treatments of personalization. Mittelstand firms illustrate the scaling up of personalization to target stakeholder groups other than just customers.

In recent years, personalization has come to refer to the customization of products to the preferences of individual customers. In contrast, a neglected but important topic is personalization of and within firms. Personalization refers to imbuing a firm with the personal qualities of individual personalities indissociable from management of the company.

Methods for scaling up personalization need to be truly scalable to be effective. Methods that only enable a one-time enlargement in the scope of the personalized business are liable to fail in the longer run.

By examining personalization as an important characteristic of small to medium-sized firms that they wish to maintain as they grow larger, this study highlights a little noticed dimension of Mittelstand growth strategies – and endeavors to bring personality back into research on “personalization.”

Change is no longer an event in HR. Competition is tougher than ever, and this battle for top talent is a vicious cycle that doesn't stop but reinvents itself all the time. The recruitment market needs to be more responsive to the continuous cycle of innovation and recognise the increasingly competitive marketplace that is rapidity getting tighter.

With more than 20 years as the founder of a leading recruitment technology vendor, the detail and content supplied in the feature are all of the author’s own thoughts and experiences, drawn from his own expertise and learning from others he has met en route.

More often than not, recruitment teams are doing what they have always done – seeing the same candidates and visiting the same events. Change, or more specifically in this case, technology, actually has the ability to speed up the process, enhance the candidate experience and give time back to recruiters to spend with the candidates.

It is widely known that talented people have higher expectations and opportunities than ever before. That makes it crucial for companies to reach them, deliver a highly engaging candidate experience and nurture a relationship well ahead of open opportunities.

Profiting from service innovations can be challenging. It is not only a question of pricing and marketing the services appropriately, but also of keeping competitors from imitating them. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how service innovation differs from technology/product innovation in terms of protection, and how this shows in collaborative innovation activities.

The paper offers a literature review combining discussion related to service research and strategic management. Empirical evidence is provided in the form of a multifaceted case study illustrating some of the aspects of collaborative service innovation.

The results indicate that characteristics separating service innovations from product or process innovations influence the efficacy of protection. This, in turn, may make or break the subsequent value appropriation. Furthermore, as service innovation typically includes collaborative activities, there is another twist to protection: companies must protect knowledge that brings them competitive advantage, but on the other hand they need to foster knowledge sharing, which may be in conflict with protective measures. As a result, service innovators cannot rely solely on intellectual property right strategies, as their counterparts working with products might do, but the service element requires taking a wider look around, and utilizing means such as human resource management, lead time, and contracting.

The novelty of this paper lies in its analysis of two very recent trends: collaboration (and coopetition) in innovation, and the tendency to introduce business models that bring service innovations to the core of the offering. Augmenting prior knowledge, the paper brings forth issues that need to be acknowledged when service innovations are created, protected, and appropriated.

Residential segregation based on race/ethnicity is associated with higher crime rates. However, when there is greater diversity within a neighbourhood, there may be less clustering of crime. One sign of such diversity beyond direct measures of racial similarity may be the proportion of minority officers employed by municipal police departments. As such, the purpose of this paper is to test the effect of the proportion of minority police officers on violent crime within minority communities, controlling for residential segregation.

Multi-level modelling of 91 American cities from the 2000 National Neighbourhood Crime Study was used.

It was found that as minority populations within census tracts increase, violent crime also increases; and crime is associated with an increase in segregation. However, racial composition of police departments can moderate the impact that community racial composition has on violent crime.

The current findings point to crime control strategies relevant to municipalities which focus on creating neighbourhoods of racial heterogeneity and more diverse police agencies.