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Although much is known about inequalities in the prevalence of CHD, less is known about the barriers experienced in self-managing it. Questionnaires, focus groups, and Internet forums were analyzed to explore obstacles in self-managing CHD. Most people found it difficult and costly to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Gender inequalities included women being more likely to live on their own and with a lower income. Marital status was an issue as several were either caring for an ill spouse or were coping with their recent death. Socio-demographic factors played a key role in influencing people's ability to manage their CHD.

Relationships are socially constructed by companies in interaction. This study explains the dynamic character of business-to-business relationships with the aid of rules theory, a theory borrowed from the communications field. Two forms of rules are identified: constitutive rules guide the interpretation of the other's acts, and regulative rules guide the appropriate response to the interpreted act. Rules theory asserts that companies act as if applying these rules. Relationships provide not only the context in which the parties’ acts are performed but are also the result of such acts. Thus, relationships are potentially reshaped each time one party performs an act and the other party gives meaning to that act and reacts.

In the light of the financial crisis and the radically changed conditions in the market place, international leadership development is facing new demands. The Danish-based International Leadership Institute Mannaz has researched the new conditions in collaboration with the Institute of Executive Development in the United States.

The research, conducted in 2008 and 2009, combines, in an innovative way, quantitative and qualitative inputs, from both current and future perspectives, from some 111 senior Corporate Executives, Heads of Human Resources and of Learning and Organisational Development in large international corporations headquartered in Europe and the United States; together with the thoughts of some 50 experienced practitioners involved in executive coaching as well as in designing, developing and facilitating leadership development programmes. Also we include a section summarising the key findings from recently published research from other leadership development surveys. Conclusions reveal that the crisis has propelled a long-awaited decline of the traditional classroom-based educational approach to leadership development. Instead, effective leadership development is suggested to build on experiential learning approaches rooted in real life, real time and allowing for more immediate impact and providing for considerably higher relevance and motivation. Coaching, leaders teaching leaders, stretch assignments, action learning, peer networking, customer insights and selective use of technology are seen as important contributors to the leadership development process going forward.

In this chapter, six cases are presented, four from Poland and two from Hungary. The Polish cases are Partec Rockwool, PLM, Bulten Tools, and Vattenfall, while Svedala and Getinge belong to Hungary.

The cases have been described in different phases following the conceptual framework, developed in chapter six. All cases we present in three phases except Svedala where there are two phases. In the later case, neither the alliance nor the partners could be traced. Among the cases, level of performance varied. Getinge is the only case where the partners continued with the same alliance and the ownership structure remained unchanged. In Partec, the foreign partner acquired the local shares to establish a wholly owned subsidiary, and in Bulten Tool, the foreign partner became the major owner to have control over the company. Partec Rockwool and Vattenfall had been sold to other companies after amicable settlement between the partners.

This paper explores what differentiates success from failure in post-acquisition integration. It seeks to overcome some of the limitations of previous research by adopting a more holistic and dynamic examination of the process and by focusing on aspects that can be readily applied in practice. Four cases of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the global automobile industry are examined using secondary data and taking a grounded theory approach. The four cases comprise two pairs of successes and two pairs of failures. Two of the pairs comprise established multinational companies, while two others comprise emerging multinational companies’ acquisitions of Korean automakers; in each case, there was one successful M&A and one failure. It is inducted that what differentiates the successful cases from the failures is their different approaches to two common tensions in post-acquisition integration, namely, their approaches to integration strategy and people issues. A two-level framework is proposed in which post-integration is managed simultaneously and dynamically at the strategic and people levels. These inductive findings, if verified by a more broadly based empirical examination, will extend M&A theory by providing a more integrated and dynamic approach to post-acquisition integration, in which strategic and people perspectives are jointly taken into account and interact with each other, thereby creating value for both acquiring and acquired firms.