Search results

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (RTK) is probably the most popular classical novel in Chinese literature. Of more than 1,000 characters in this extensive, three‐volume novel, Kong Ming in RTK is widely seen by the Chinese as the most remarkable strategist. This paper attempts to develop a cognitive schema of Kong Ming on strategy.

First, the paper reviews broadly the traditionally, four most popular novels within the Chinese classical literature: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West and A Dream of the Red Mansions. After emphasizing the role of the RTK in influencing Chinese strategic thinking, the paper utilizes the methods of textual analyses in research. Focusing on a specific episode of global strategy making and taking (Chapter 38), the methodology is explained.

From textual analysis, the paper presents as its finding a schematically linear, cognitive structure of the strategy process. It also presents the central role of the “Counselor of Strategy” in Chinese strategy making process. From this research, a Kong Ming‐grounded, cognitive model of strategy process is developed. If the RTK (more than say, any MBA program) continues to influence Chinese strategy processes, then fast strategic decision making (as exemplified in our analyses) may be one of the pivotal reasons for the equally fast rise of the Chinese economy in our global economic landscape.

Kong Ming (or Zhuge Liang) had been hailed by the Chinese with such lofty epithets such as the “Divine Strategist”. His exploits during the declining Han dynasty and emergence of the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu (220‐280 CE) are still cited by the Chinese people in their daily conversations on strategy. In this paper, we draw lessons for CEOs through a Kong Ming‐grounded model for strategy.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of graphene, basalt flakes and their synergy on the corrosion resistance of zinc-rich coatings. As the important heavy-duty anticorrosion coatings, zinc-rich coatings provided cathodic protection for the substrate. However, to ensure cathodic protection, a large number of zinc powder made the penetration resistance known as the weakness of zinc-rich coatings. Therefore, graphene and basalt flakes were introduced into zinc-rich coatings to coordinate its cathodic protection and shielding performance.

Three kinds of coatings were prepared; they were graphene modified zinc-rich coatings, basalt flakes modified zinc-rich coatings and graphene-basalt flakes modified zinc-rich coatings. The anticorrosion behavior of painted steel was studied by using the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) technique in chloride solutions. The equivalent circuit methods were used for EIS analysis to obtain the electrode process structure of the coated steel system. Simultaneously, the corrosion resistance of the three coatings was evaluated by water resistance test, salt water resistance test and salt spray test.

The study found that the addition of a small amount of graphene and basalt flakes significantly improved the anticorrosion performance of coatings by enhancing their shielding ability against corrosive media and increasing the resistance of the electrochemical reaction. The modified coatings exhibited higher water resistance, salt water resistance and salt spray resistance. The graphene-basalt flakes modified zinc-rich coatings demonstrated the best anticorrosion effect. The presence of basalt scales and graphene oxide in the coatings significantly reduced the water content and slowed down the water penetration rate in the coatings, thus prolonging the coating life and improving anticorrosion effects. The modification of zinc-rich coatings with graphene and basalt flakes improved the utilization rate of zinc powder and the shielding property of coatings against corrosive media, thus strengthening the protective effect on steel structures and prolonging the service life of anticorrosion coatings.

The significance of developing graphene-basalt flakes modified zinc-rich coatings lies in their potential to offer superior performance in corrosive environments, leading to prolonged service life of metallic structures, reduced maintenance costs and a safer working environment. Furthermore, such coatings can be used in various industrial applications, including bridges, pipelines and offshore structures, among others.

The increasing number of strata property in Malaysia promotes the different usages of development under the integrated development, which comprise the different usages of owner groups. These owner groups may not enjoy all the common properties in the integrated development. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify the important to designate the limited common property for the owners who have the exclusive benefit on it. However, the establishment of the subsidiary management corporation and limited common property is less popular in Malaysia.

Hence, research should be carried out to identify the importance of the establishment of the subsidiary management corporation and enhancement for the establishment of subsidiary management corporation to increase the willingness of the owner to establish the subsidiary management corporation. Collective Action Theory likewise assists to increase the willingness of the owner in the establishment of the subsidiary management corporation. A sum of 100 owners in the integrated development and 187 stratified property professionals are the respondents in this research, by applying the random sampling method.

Results indicate the problems that occur in the integrated development is the complexity management in integrated development, followed by the usages of the common property. Therefore, Collective Action Theory could ensure the effectiveness of the establishment of the subsidiary management corporation in the aspect of social rights, resources, governance groups and participants.

This paper provided an overview of the management circumstance in the integrated development of Malaysia and discussed some effective enhancements to promote the sustainable formation of the subsidiary management corporation or two-tier management corporations.

The DC‐DC converters which convert one level of electrical voltage to the desired level are widely used in many electrical peripherals. During the past two decade, many different control laws have been developed. The proportional‐integral (PI) control and sliding‐mode control have been carried out for the DC‐DC converters since they are simple to implement and easy to design. However, its performance using PI control and sliding‐mode control is obviously quite limited. The purpose of this paper is to a self‐tuning nonlinear function control (STNFC) propose for the DC‐DC converters. The adaptation laws of the proposed STNFC system are derived in the sense of Lyapunov function, thus not only the controller parameters can be online tuned itself, but also the system's stability can be guaranteed.

In general, the accurate mathematical models of the DC‐DC converters are difficult to derive. This paper proposes a model‐free STNFC design method. Since the proposed STNFC uses a simple fuzzy system with three fuzzy rules base to implement the control law, the computational loading of the fuzzy inference mechanism is slight. So the proposed STNFC system is suitable for the real‐time practical applications. The controller parameters of the proposed STNFC system can online tune in the Lyapunov sense, thus the stability of closed‐loop system can be guaranteed.

The proposed STNFC system is applied to a DC‐DC converter based on a field‐programmable gate array chip. The experimental results are provided to demonstrate the proposed STNFC system can cope with the input voltage and load resistance variations to ensure the stability while providing fast transient response.

The proposed STNFC approach is interesting for the design of an intelligent control scheme. The main contributions of this paper are: the successful development of STNFC system without heavy computational loading. The parameter‐learning algorithm is design based on the Lyapunov stability theorem to guarantee the system stability; the successful applications of the STNFC system to control the forward DC‐DC converter. And, the proposed STNFC methodology can be easily extended to other DC‐DC converters.

The solution quality of a comprehensive machine/part grouping problem, where the processing times, lot sizes and machine capacities are considered, may not be properly evaluated using a binary performance measure. This paper suggests a generalized grouping efficacy index which has been compared favorably with two binary performance measures. A genetic algorithm using the generalized performance measure as the objective is developed to solve the comprehensive grouping problems. The algorithm has been tested using a number of reference problems with processing times being randomly assigned to all operations. The effects of three major genetic parameters (population size, mutation rate and the number of crossover points) have also been examined. The results indicate that, when the computational time is fixed, larger population size and lower mutation rate tend to improve solution quality while the number of crossover points has no significant impact on the final solution.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the growth behaviours of intermetallic compound (IMC) layers in solid‐liquid interfacial reactions of Sn1.5Cu/Cu in various intensities of high‐magnetic field.

Sn1.5Cu solder was prepared and melted in a vacuum furnace at 873 K and cast into solder bars. Samples were mounted using resin and etched after being carefully polished. Then the IMC layers were observed by using scanning electron microscopy.

The results show that the growth of IMC layers has been accelerated by high‐magnetic field through the comparison of growth kinetics of IMC layers among 0‐2.5 T magnetic filed. IMC grains in high‐magnetic field are much bigger than that in 0 T. By the analyzing of X‐ray diffractometer patterns of IMC layers, it can be found that the orientations of IMC have been changed by magnetic field.

This paper investigates the growth behaviour of IMC layers during the solid‐liquid interfacial reactions of Sn1.5Cu/Cu in a high magnetic field.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the concept of system usage and identify determinants at the organizational level that are attributable to the extent of system usage in the post‐adoptive and compulsory milieu.

The paper intends to examine the organizational intervention on system usage extent. Unlike previous studies, this research adopts a feature‐centered approach to examine the construct of system usage extent, and proposes that organizational supports such as management support and technical support impact the individual system usage extent.

Results show that technical support from the organization, specifically technical assistance and technical consulting channels, have a positive impact on system usage extent; however, management support does not show a significant effect. A post hoc analysis is conducted in an attempt to explicate the relationships between organization interventions and the feature usage of particular systems.

The paper has the following implications. First, this study discusses system usage extent from a feature‐centered perspective and develops a method to assess the degree of system usage. Second, the scheme for evaluating system usage extent developed in our study can be used to measure the actual system usage. Lastly, an ad hoc correlation analysis was performed to provide a detailed understanding of the relationship between organizational initiatives.

Boredom is believed to be the common cause of workers' absenteeism, accidents, job dissatisfaction, and performance variations in manufacturing environments with repetitive jobs. Effectively measuring and possibly predicting job boredom is the key to the design and implementation of appropriate strategies to deal with such undesirable emotional state. The purpose of this paper is to present new methodologies to measure and predict human boredom at work.

Two series of mathematical formulations, linear and nonlinear, to describe the variation of human boredom at work are first presented. Given the complexity of human emotions, the authors also present a probabilistic framework based on state‐of‐the‐art Bayesian networks to model employees' boredom at work.

The proposed methods centre on the prediction and measurement of human boredom at work. They enable managers to take proactive actions to deal with human boredom at work. Examples of such actions are task rotation and job redesign.

The proposed methods are verified using a number of cases describing a set of phenomena that may occur in the real world. However, further research is required to demonstrate the validity of the models using real world data.

According to accessible literature, human boredom is being measured by self reporting scales thus far. This study describes and demonstrates analytical approaches to model human boredom at work.

In the early industrial age which with high intensity of machine and labor, using financial measurement index was good enough to tie in company’s mechanization and philosophy of management and been in efficiency. But being comply with “New Economic age,” a new economic environment is full of knowledge and information, the enterprise competition had changed from tangible assets, plants to intangible innovation ability of knowledge. As recognizing the new tendency by enterprise, they value gradually the growth and influence from learning. Practice of organization learning not only needs firm structure and be in coordination with both hardware and software, but also needs an affect measurement model to offer enterprise to estimate learning performance. It’s a good instrument of financial performance measure mold in the past years, But it’s for measuring the past, couldn’t formulate enterprise trend to future, hard to estimate investment for future, such as development of products, organization learning, knowledge management etc, as which intangible assets and knowledge ability just the key factors of being win around competition environment in the future. In 1992, Kaplan and Norton brought up Balance Scorecard (BSC) on Harvard Business Review, as an instrument helping enterprise to measure performance, which is being considered to be a most influence management instrument. It added non‐financial index such as customer, internal process and learning growth besides traditional financial index, as offering enterprise an index to measure and manage intangible assets and intellectual property. As being aware of organization learning is hard to be ignored in the new economic age, this research is based on learning and growth of BSC, and citing one national material company try to let the most difficult measurement performance of organization learning, to be estimate through BSC, analyze of factor and individual case, to discuss the company how to make the related strategy and vision of organization learning to develop learning and growth of the structure of BSC, subject the matter of out put factors to be discussed, and measure the outcomes as a result of research. The research affect offers (1) the base implement procedure of carrying out BSC; (2) the reference of formulating measurement index while enterprise using BSC to estimate performance of organization learning; (3) the possibility bottleneck maybe forcing while carrying out BSC, to be an improvement or preventive for enterprise.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between supportive leadership and employee voice behavior by examining the mediating role of employee advocacy, and the moderating role of proactive personality.

The model was tested by using data that were collected from 402 supervisors, and 87 subordinates who were working in 6 firms belonging to the stone and Glass sector, in the Tenth Ramadan city, Egypt. The employees and their immediate supervisors provided data on separated questionnaires, and different occasions. Then, an identification number was used by the author to match each employee questionnaire with the response of his/ her immediate supervisor.

The results revealed that employee advocacy fully mediated the positive relationship between supportive leadership and employee voice behavior. Also, it also found that proactive personality moderated the relationship between supportive leadership and employee voice behavior, such that the relationship was stronger for people lower rather than higher in proactive personality.

This empirical paper provides preliminary evidence of the mediating effect of employee advocacy in the positive relationship between supportive leadership and employee voice behavior. The model extends the existing results by adding substantive moderate proactive personality to explain how the effect of supportive leadership on employee voice behavior.