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Employee attitude has often been neglected in most quality endeavors. Both consultants and management hurry to get the project done and omit to measure and manage the soft aspects of the event. The task‐orientation approach should be augmented by the people elements. This article illustrates how a company in Hong Kong applied a longitudinal employee attitude survey as a monitoring tool in its journey towards acquiring the ISO certificate. Quality success drivers were found to be the key determinants for the perceived strengths of the company.

This paper outlines the action learning approach in adult education. To begin, it cites some definitions of action learning and describes the characteristics of this andragogical model through contrasting the common barriers and the benefits. The concept of questioning insight is dealt with in the learning equation. The social aspects of learning from each other in a set environment have been emphasized. With the advent of new technology, the future of action learning is highly promising to the learners, their employers, the education providers and the society. Some useful Web sites are included for those who want to approach learning more about the action learning approach.

This paper attempts to deploy a systematic and structural approach to examine Macau's strengths and weaknesses and to scan its external opportunities and threats. A fresh way to quantify the extent of perceived opportunities and threats is introduced here. This is adopted and modified from the quality management tool box, i.e. the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and success mode and effects analysis (SMEA).

The internal factors, i.e. its strengths and weaknesses are systematically and structurally gauged using a Likert scale of 0 to 10 (i.e. 0 representing least important or least well performed … to 10 representing most important and best performed).

Following the matching of internal factors with the external factors in the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, a list of meaningful responses is identified as possible strategies for the Macau SAR Government. The SWOT analysis is simple to use yet powerful and flexible in responding to changes in the external environment and should be useful to organizations both in the commercial sector and government machinery.

This innovative and structured strategic formulation approach is useful to both business practitioners and management consultants.

Researches staff attitudes during the introduction of an ISO certification quality programme. The company was a listed public property investment and development company. The technique employed was a self‐completed anonymous questionnaire on a longitudinal basis. Explores the perceived benefits of ISO certification; the possible drawbacks; the difficulties in introduction; and the prerequisites for success. Finds that ISO certification is perceived to improve performance but that top management support and commitment had fallen. Significant improvements after certification were seen to exist in management ability; quality systems; servicing; training of employees; business reputation and personnel management.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the accurate cause and effect relationships among strategic objectives and also to demonstrate how decision makers can be guided in the process of defining quantitative strategic target values in the framework of balanced scorecard (BSC) and performance measurement system.

Based on the proposed method in this research, after determining strategic objectives and developing an initial strategy map according to decision makers’ opinions, simultaneous equations system (SES) was used to determine the significance of the relationships among strategic objectives in higher perspectives of the BSC and corresponding strategic objectives in lower perspectives. Afterward, desirable values for performance measures were determined based on the equations and relationships obtained through SES and were optimized by goal programming method.

By applying the proposed method, a clearer picture of the associations among strategic objectives is obtained and the influence of strategic objectives on one another is determined. Afterward, optimal values for strategic objectives are determined to achieve the organization’s goals.

This paper proposes a framework for constructing a strategy map and setting quantitative targets in the framework of BSC. Indeed, this paper presents a case study to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach. However, SES technique requires a greater amount of data to generate more accurate results. Although the advent of the Information Age has forced organizations’ decision makers to provide sufficient information and data for business analysis, the data requirements are met.

The presented quantitative approach is a supporting approach for improving decision makers’ opinions and enabling them to reach a more accurate picture of the relationships, valuing strategic objectives and achieving strategic goals. This research also presents a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The application and implication of the proposed method in banking services show that the contributions of the paper are not only theoretical, but also practical.

The proposed method provides a novel approach for determining the most appropriate targets and applies a comprehensive and scientific model together with decision makers’ opinions and experiences and has two main contributions: first, the associations among strategic objectives are investigated and obtained in an effective way by conducting the SES for the first time in the framework of BSC. Second, quantitative targets have been determined to help in achieving the long-term goals. This task has been accomplished through a combination of SES, the three-stage least squares regression analysis and optimization by using weighted goal programming method.

The hybrid of the balanced scorecard, SWOT analysis and quality function deployment creates a pragmatic approach for managerial and consultant practitioners to translate vague strategy into action. Sun Tzu's Art of War is further incorporated to develop a more structured strategic formulation framework. Nevertheless, many modern practitioners are, in fact, unfamiliar with this profound principle of strategy that was written some 2,400 years back. Despite the establishment of a theoretical framework, so far there have not been many published papers about the pragmatic implementation and holistic strategy development. Thus, a case study, in the form of a strategy workshop of a professional institute in Hong Kong, has been used to delineate the aforesaid translation of strategy.

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, both educators and students adapted to course delivery modes no longer centered on in-person interactions. Resiliency and self-regulation are key to success in online contexts, but the rapid transition to remote learning left many students without the necessary support to develop these skills. Much of the existing literature on self-regulation and resiliency focuses on cognitive processes and strategies such as goal orientation, time management, and mindset. However, the added stress and trauma of learning in the context of a global pandemic highlighted the many other factors relevant to students’ development of these skills. Drawing from the literature, the authors explore evidence-informed teaching practices to foster self-regulation and resiliency, highlight the power and privilege of being able to be resilient, advocate for the development of pedagogies of kindness, and emphasize the “how” of implementing techniques to best support students. The authors provide evidence-informed suggestions with the goal of assisting instructors and students during times of high stress, while acknowledging their limitations in addressing structural inequalities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the authors argue that evidence-informed techniques and compassionate pedagogies adopted during a period of upheaval remain applicable to future in-person and online pedagogies.

Conjoint analysis has emerged as a contemporary research technique to reveal consumers’ preference towards choosing a particular restaurant. Through some focus group discussions, a list of restaurant attributes was identified as important for restaurant‐goers in deciding where to dine. While the research was based on Hong Kong experience, the research technique can be generalised to restaurant choices in other countries. It is possible to segment the restaurant market by different meal purposes (i.e. family meal, business meal and tourists) and employee groups (i.e. service sector, hotels and floating restaurants). The concept of decentring was applied in the study to help reveal restaurant preferences as perceived by the respondents standing in the shoes of others.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the perceptions of visitors in terms of multiple aspects of smart cities to allow wise decisions to be made about smart tourist destinations by municipal governments and tourism authorities.

This study takes a sample of inbound visitors (n=205) from Hong Kong as an empirical questionnaire-based survey on visitors’ perceptions of these smart city attributes, which are collected from literature, and framed in Cohen’s Smart City Wheel.

This paper identifies the distinctive factors for branding Hong Kong as a smart city. The results from the factor analysis identify four factors for determining what a smart city is from the perspective of visitors, namely, the quality of a smart society: energy consumption in an urban environment, smart city governance and smart city livelihood. The first two factors further become the determinants of a successful smart city brand considered by visitors, which contribute to their locational decisions and thus the strategies and policies of smart destination branding.

The results obtained can serve as insights for tourism policy makers and destination marketers when considering significant information and communication technology, or other smart and sustainable attributes for city branding (e.g. Buhalis and Amaranggana, 2014; Marine-Roig and Anton Clavé, 2015), as well as common investment and resource allocation for shared benefits in similar metropolises.

The smartness factors represent important dimensions of urban smartness as prioritized areas for further development, innovation and marketing of tourism industries and enterprises in Hong Kong, as a mature urban destination incorporating the branding of a proposed smart district as a strategy of urban development.

Smart urban development and tourism development have increasingly become inseparable, especially when visitors utilize cities as tourist destinations but share other urban resources and spaces with local citizens. Unlike the development of smart tourist attractions, smart tourist destinations should have a wider scope of smartness. A smart tourist destination may carry similar and overlapping characteristics of smart cities, which may be interpreted by visitors and may eventually affect their perceived image of a city.