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Review of major policy paper in relation to the ambulance service [in England] efficiency and productivity with reference to observed “unacceptable variation”.

Critical review of ambulance service/EMS policy approach in England.

Lord Carter’s review describes failings in performance of UK ambulance service/EMS. However, the identified failings are essentially a repetition of many almost identical similar findings. There is a tendency of policy in respect of the ambulance service in England, as exemplified by Lord Carter’s report to consider analysis of the problem a more significant task that actually addressing the shortcoming defined.

This viewpoint comment piece is produced as a viewpoint with all the attendant limitations implied in this approach. However, it has been produced from an informed position.

Challenge to current UK ambulance policy. Previous repetitious finding need to be addressed definitively.

The efficiency of UK ambulance services/EMS is seriously impaired, and indeed these findings have been acknowledge previously. However, little by way of active remediation has been attempted. The current approach as exemplified in Lord Carter's recent review appears to ensure that analysis of the long- standing problems that exist is sufficient and possible preferable to active remediation and improvement.

No previous critical review of this type has been attempted (as it would be career-limiting).

Looking back over the scores of thrillers that have cheered my leisure in the past two decades, I cannot recall a solitary example which featured a professional librarian in the rôle either of hero or villain. Many an admirable murder has been committed in a library; if my memory serves me right, Francis Bonnamy has even located two slayings in the hallowed precincts of the Library of Congress. But every time it is the professor, the doctor, the lawyer, the priest—yes, sometimes even the ordinary policeman—who fits the pieces of the puzzle together, and brings the evildoer to justice. It is a sobering reflection that the clever people who write detective stories obviously regard the librarian as being insufficiently agile in mind or in body to cope with homicide. At the same time it is good to know that those same authors see no possible talent for the commission of crime among the ranks of librarians. For all that, it is a trifle humiliating. To be a potential Moriarty, or a Marlowe, a Father Brown, or a Dr. Syn, is something. Even the Watsons, even the Bunters have some distinction. Not so the librarian. Like the postman, the plumber's mate, or the sanitary inspector, he is in the eyes of the thriller writer a nondescript, a familiar object of blameless mediocrity.

Leadership matters in public contexts. It influences employee development and, in turn, the effective delivery of public services. Harmful leadership limits the fulfilment of both these requirements. Although there are many studies of public leadership, few explore aspects of poor leadership focusing on leading people, in the unique public sector context. The purpose of this paper is to explore the public sector environment as one that can enable harmful leadership, and identifies what those aspects of harmful behaviours are. In particular, it focuses on common, day-to-day forms of harmful mediocre leadership rather than more dramatic, but rarer, forms of destructive or toxic leadership.

The study was conducted over three phases. In study one (N=10) interviews using the critical incident technique identified harmful behaviours. Study two (N=10) identified perceived causal processes and outcomes of these processes. Study three was a validation check using two focus groups (n=7) and two further interviews (n=6).

Four dimensions of harmful behaviour were found: micromanagement, managing up but not down, low social and career support and reactive leadership. Several pathways to harm were found, including lessened employee confidence, motivation, collaboration, learning and development.

This research is limited by a small sample and data collected in one public sector system. But its implications are still meaningful. The research identified some ways that harmful leadership can occur, that is missed in existing studies of harmful leadership, which tend to focus on more toxic forms of harm. The role of NPM and other reforms as important shapers of current leadership behaviours are also discussed.

To address these behaviours further investment in leadership development, selection and performance management is recommended.

Social implications include the hindering of effective service delivery and limited ability to deal with increasingly dynamic and complicated problem.

Public sector leadership studies are often rose tinted, or describe what should be. Instead, this paper describes what sometimes is, in terms of day-to-day mediocre but harmful leadership.

Since employees are considered to be one of the most important sources for innovation, the purpose of this study is to create a change management framework for implementing an innovation culture by means of internal communication.

First, an interdisciplinary model was derived from research and existing literature. It was then tested in a case study with qualitative expert interviews and a quantitative online survey among all employees of a sample firm.

Instead of a linear change, as implied by the theoretical model, different identification levels existed simultaneously within the firm's culture. A typology summed up the corresponding perceptions of the innovation culture: innovation culture, innovation pioneers, mediocrity, standstill, and refusal. Significant correlations between identification and internal media (r=0.405), as well as identification and action (r=0.158) underlined the importance of internal communication.

This study only explores the topic from a communication science perspective. However, examining its link to other important factors like organisational structure would provide further insight. Also, research in different countries and fields is needed, since the results of this case study cannot be considered representative.

The goal of communication managers should be to lead employees through the phases of identification by specifically targeting their identification levels and using the appropriate media to address the findings.

The developed framework helps as a management tool for assessing how employees perceive messages of an innovation philosophy and internal media. By linking the internal, innovation, and change communication, it identifies new essential aspects for creating a communication mix and specifically communicating with the target‐group.

A recognition that pockets of business and process excellence existed alongside mediocrity led Texas Instruments to establish a Best Practice Sharing programme under the direction of the Office of Best Practices. The Office of Best Practices, launched in 1994, is a dedicated unit which helps Texas Instruments’ worldwide businesses to identify, access and transfer best practices. TI’s Best Practice Sharing initiative was implemented to provide a mechanism for dialogue between TI leadership and TI employees and to facilitate collaboration based on the company’s strengths and business gaps. The goal is to provide a quicker path to achieving business excellence. In addition to providing these solutions, the Best Practice Sharing project has provided TI employees with a greater sense of the synergies possible across the company and a greater feeling of shared vision. This paper reviews the TI‐BEST programme, the Best Practice Sharing initiative, and examines the lessons learnt and benefits gained from best practices knowledge sharing.

‘THE WORLD is becoming so complex that if a man stops his education when he leaves school, college or even professional school he is doomed to educational mediocrity.’ James B Conant, President, Harvard University.

For many exporting firms, success in foreign markets hinges to a large extent on the performance of their foreign intermediaries (Albaum, Strandskov, & Duerr, 2002; Ellis, 2000; Root, 1987). In spite of the key role played by intermediaries in foreign markets – i.e. sales agents and independent distributors (Solberg & Nes, 2002) – exporters often regard them as temporary arrangements and second-best alternatives to conducting foreign marketing, sales, and service activities in-house. The typical assumption is that foreign intermediaries are low-control entry modes (Hill, 2003; Root, 1987) that do not have the potential of exploiting the full sales potential of export markets. In other words, foreign intermediary arrangements could have inherent limitations that foster mediocre rather than excellent market performance. Several studies report that exporters generally distrust foreign intermediaries and suspect them of shirking at any given occasion (Beeth, 1990; Nicholas, 1986; Petersen, Benito, & Pedersen, 2000). Poor performance is sometimes expected. On the other hand, foreign intermediaries often find that exporters put in place incentive structures that do not induce them to achieve excellent performance. Hence, it is asserted that foreign intermediaries may deliberately seek mediocrity rather than very poor or outstanding performance.

This paper focuses on an important innovative development in new generation corporate university management. It addresses the thematic area of visual learning that is captured in the term “The Art of Minds‐eye Management”. It reflects upon experiences with groups of managers in enhancing perceptive competencies using visual awareness learning systems. The envisioning medium being reviewed and explored takes the form of narrative imagery. This is a form of quantitative and qualitative envisioning which is currently being applied by groups of managers in many different formats to articulate and add new levels of learning and value to developmental themes. This paper reflects upon the mediocrity of traditional flatland representations of classic management concepts and models and explores the potential for delimiting conceptual design and the use of pictorial display of data and information as a means of communication, managing personal performance and accelerating organisational development.

It is good that librarians are most critical of their better work. Complacency is insidious. But it is always necessary to approach closely to efficiency to become really aware of deficiency. Probably in no other activity has the average public library reached so acceptable a standard as in the provision of books for children, yet in the eyes of the honest librarian, that standard is, on the whole, no more than one of comparative mediocrity. Even so, we tend too much to underestimate the good influence of our children's libraries over the last half century, for no other agency has accomplished anything like so much in encouraging reading habits in the formative years. In spite of modern developments in education, which so often appear to forget the individual in the building of an impressive administrative structure, no other agency, even today, has quite the same potentiality. The alert librarian, however, has noticed that the changing pattern of elementary education is beginning to call for some modification of traditional library policy, and he is not a little disturbed by some of the implications.

The Office for National Statistics revealed that in 2001 Wales had the lowest number of businesses with access to the Internet compared with the rest of the UK, whilst the number of businesses in Wales using e‐commerce was well exceeded by other regions. But is it time for Aesop to take another bow? According to the Interactive Bureau many of the FTSE‐100’s Web sites are “wallowing in mediocrity”, more than half “have serious problems that need fixing” and a further 16 “should be taken down” and “rebuilt from scratch”. Seeks to widen the policy debate, from one that concentrates solely on the adoption of e‐commerce by Welsh firms, to one that includes reflection on usability research world‐wide and promotes such research regionally to obtain and retain sustainable competitiveness. The current state of the Welsh economy in terms of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution is examined, as is the scope and detail of the present policies that promote adoption and growth of e‐commerce by firms.