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Nonperforming assets in any banking system have stressed the economic health of nations. Resultantly, literature has given considerable impetus to predict failures and bankruptcy. Past studies have focused on the outcome of failures, while, there is a dearth of studies focusing on ongoing firms in bad shape. We plug this gap and attempt to identify underlying communication patterns for firms witnessing prolonged underperformance. Using text mining, we extract and analyze semantic, linguistic, emotional, and sentiment-based features in non-numeric communication channels of these poor-performing firms and their peers. These uncovered patterns highlight the use of vocabulary and tone of communication, in correspondence to their financial well-being. Furthermore, using such patterns, we deploy various Machine Learning algorithms to identify loser firm(s) way ahead in time. We observe promising accuracy over a time window of five years. Such early warning signals can be of critical importance to various stakeholders of a firm. Exploration of writing style-related features for any firm would help its investors, lending agencies to assess the likelihood of future underperformance. Firm management can use them to take suitable precautionary measures and preempt the future possibility of distress. While investors and lenders can be benefitted from this incremental information to identify the likelihood of future failures.

This study describes a series of experiments investigating the upper hot layer temperature profile in a confined space under different ventilation conditions for porosity-controlled wood crib fires for pre-flashover conditions.

Full-scale compartment (4 m × 4 m × 4 m) experiments were carried out for four-door openings, i.e. 100%, 75%, 50% and 25% of the total vent area (2 m × 1 m) with the wood crib as a fuel load. The temperature of the upper hot smoke layers of the compartment was recorded with the help of four layers of thermocouples for varying vent areas.

The effect of ventilation on the properties, i.e. mass loss rate, enclosure temperature, heat release rate and carbon monoxide (CO) gas concentration, has been measured and analyzed. The effect of ventilation on heat flux and flame temperature has also been studied. Compartment gas temperature has been examined by five wood crib burning stages: Ignition, growth, steady burning, recess and collapse.

Findings demonstrate that the influence of vent openings varies for the burning parameters and upper layer temperature of the compartment. The current results are beneficial in analyzing thermal risks concerning compartment fire and fire safety engineering projects.

The purpose of this paper is to present the influence of plastic pyrolysis oil blended with gasoline at 10 per cent with and without ethanol additive at 5 per cent in a three-cylinder petrol engine.

The engine is running at standard working processes. The result of 10PPO is compared with pure petrol and additive-added blend. The outcomes clears that, the engine performance is reduced by using plastic oil blended with petrol and NO_x emission rates are increasing substantially.

To control the emission rate, ethanol is added, and corresponding performance reveals that brake thermal efficiency is 4.52 per cent increase compared to pure petrol and 7.03 per cent increase compared to without additive blend.

Emissions such as CO and NOx are considerably controlled with additive blend.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to use two industrial wastes; waste foundry sands (WFS) and molasses (M) along with lime (L) to improve the strength characteristics of clayey soil.

In the first part of the study, the optimum percentages of materials (WFS, molasses, lime) have been found out by conducting differential free swell (DFS) and consistency limit tests on clayey soil by adding various admixtures. The second and third part of the study investigates the compaction behaviour and unconfined compressive strength (UCS) of clayey soil on addition of optimum amount of various materials alone and in combination with each other. Finally, the micro-structural behaviour of addition of optimum percentages of lime, WFS and molasses using Scanning electron microscopic technique has been discussed.

The laboratory results revealed that the addition of optimum content of lime along with WFS and molasses reduced DFS and plasticity index and increased maximum dry density and UCS values. The microstructural behaviour showed that the presence of lime and molasses filled the voids present in the soil and the addition of WFS helped in providing compact structure, thus improving the strength characteristics.

The study will be helpful in designing low-cost pavement designs for rural roads.

The adverse effect of waste materials on environment may be solved by using them in improving the strength characteristics of clayey soils, thereby providing healthy environment to living beings.

The study will help to provide low-cost methods to improve strength characteristics of clayey soil along with the use of waste materials; the disposal of whose is a challenging task.

This study aims to explore how some organizational leaders are making successful attempts toward making “social contributions” toward the underprivileged or needy stakeholders in the society. This study suggests empirical themes about behavioral patterns of such organizational leaders and illustrates the need to transcend erstwhile “avoid harm” socially responsible leadership.

Data were collected on 52 Indian organizational leaders and were analyzed following the guidelines of constructionist grounded theory.

Findings suggested that organizational leaders who facilitated some form of social contributions in the life of different stakeholders had “unconditional adherence to social contributions,” they were “pertinacious about going the extra mile” to facilitate social contributions and at times their “existence as an enthusiastically innovative change agent” also facilitated social contributions to the lives of different stakeholders.

This study might initiate discussion around the behavioral patterns of organizational leaders who are attempting to make society a better place by leading or facilitating social contributions. Identified exemplary behavioral patterns might encourage more exploratory studies directed toward the identification of other forms of socially contributive leadership attributes.

Emphasis on investigating corporate social responsibility (CSR) from individual-level perspective advocated the importance of the psychological foundation of CSR. This study empirically identifies behavioral patterns that characterize organizational leaders who had a strong commitment to make social contributions to society. Patterns identified corresponded to cognitive and behavioral approaches of organizational leaders that were instrumental in actualizing social contributions to the Indian society.

The research methodology used for this case study follows a comprehensive approach, combining both primary and secondary sources to ensure a well-rounded understanding of the subject. Primary sources include in-depth interviews with the founders of the company, providing valuable firsthand insights into their experiences and decision-making processes. Multiple company visits were also conducted, enabling a closer examination of the operational aspects and allowing for a more holistic perspective on the case. Complementing these primary sources, secondary sources were used, consisting of a diverse array of articles from leading journals, newspapers, magazines and other reputable sources. These secondary sources offer a broader context and perspective, enriching the case study’s content and ensuring a robust foundation for classroom discussion and analysis.

True Elements was a clean health food brand that emerged from the vision of Mr Sreejith Moolayil and co-founder, Mr Puru Gupta, who recognized the potential of promoting healthy foods in India inspired by the health-conscious lifestyle that they observed during their work tenure in China. The co-founders began their entrepreneurial journey in 2011 with “Healthy World” kiosks inside IT company campuses in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune. However, early challenges surfaced as the target market narrowed. Undeterred, the founders sought innovative solutions to expand their reach and created “True Elements” – a brand that resonated with health-conscious consumers given its positioning as a clean and minimally processed food brand devoid of chemicals, preservatives and added sugars. True Elements excelled in the online market and catered to a few offline markets. To sustain and augment their success, the entrepreneurs sought a strategic partnership and succeeded with Marico Ltd. However, challenges remained on the horizon. One was the need to appeal to a new target group: the 25–45 age group with a lower monthly income of INR 30,000. Another pressing question was exploring the entry into the modern trade sector.

This case can be taught in undergraduate and post-graduate business management programs for marketing, strategy and innovation and entrepreneurship related courses. Apart from that, this case can also be discussed in incubator programs as cases highlighting entrepreneurship can facilitate discussions among early-stage founders, providing practical insights and lessons for their ventures. This case also can be discussed very effectively in management classes for working executives.

Transformation and involvement from every organizational function are essential in creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. The paper explores the role of training and development (T&D) interventions in building a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Through the review of existing research studies, the authors report and discuss how T&D function supports fostering a diversity and inclusion (D&I) mindset in the workplace and propose an organizational schema that facilitates the systematic design and implementation of T&D interventions for D&I.

Based on the literature an organizational schema was developed which indicated that to foster a D&I mindset in the workplace, it is important that diversity training is designed after considering established diversity theories. Further diversity training can be conducted in two phases, where phase 1 would focus on awareness training and phase 2 on skill training. This would lead to an increase in employee competency development including knowledge, skills, behavior, and a positive attitude toward a D&I mindset.

HR and training managers can benefit from the paper indicating that for achieving effective results from diversity training, it must draw insights from established diversity theories. Through the organizational schema discussed in the paper, organizations can minimize the negative attitude and behavior that emerge from social categorization with the help of systematic T&D where employees are made self-aware of their prejudice and discrimination and further equipped with relevant skills to manage diversity.

A positive mindset incorporated by employees at a workplace with reference to Diversity & Inclusion through structured D& I training can percolate beneficially to the society as a whole.

The study is a rare one that explores the impact of T&D on D&I. The novelty of the research lies in the organizational schema presented in the study exploring how HR practitioners must systematically design T&D for D&I combining both theory and practice to achieve long-term organizational diversity management objectives.

The aim of the paper is to investigate several aspects of bankruptcy prediction within both theoretical and empirical frameworks. In particular, it has focused on the comparison of different techniques used to forecast failure through a balanced sample of companies within a geographical area (the Campania region) located in the south of Italy.

Business failure has been one of the most investigated topics within corporate finance and the empirical approach to bankruptcy prediction has recently gained further attention from financial institutions. The aim of corporate failure prediction is to have a methodological approach which discriminates firms with a high probability of future failure from those which are considered to be healthy. Starting from the seminal paper of Altman (1968), many other significant contributions have been subsequently made to this field (Ravi Kumar and Ravi, 2007). This paper's approach is to compare different statistical techniques based on the analysis of financial data for the prediction and diagnosis of the risk of bankruptcy.

The paper investigates the determinants of bankruptcy in a specific geographical area (Campania region). Empirical evidence on a data‐set of the annual reports of a balanced sample of companies for a given time period has been analyzed. These findings aim to make a contribution to current literature as well as to contribute to the elaboration of efficient prevention and recovery strategies.

Researchers have tended to restrict the scope of their analysis due to the problems related to the collection and storage of financial data. This study focuses on financial information relating to the area of interest in order to provide a comparative analysis of different forecasting techniques.

This study aims to propose and empirically test new improved customer-based brand equity (CBBE) creation framework, which advocates marketing activities create CBBE through customer experience (CE). The proposed framework is in contrast to extant literature suggesting marketing activities directly create CBBE.

Qualitative interviews with patients, followed by interaction with respondents using a structured questionnaire, were used to collect the data.

The results suggest that CE is the focal mediating variable for the relationship between marketing activities and CBBE. Out of 15 marketing activities, 8 positively impacted CBBE through CE and 2 negatively affected CBBE through CE. Among the remaining five, three had only a direct positive impact on CBBE and two neither directly nor indirectly impacted CBBE.

The effects of only individual marketing activity, and not of the interaction among marketing activities, were assessed.

The study provides insights into the importance of CE in building CBBE for credence-dominant services (e.g. healthcare). This work will help managers in implementing experiential marketing by designing suitable activities for creating service CBBE.

The study outlines service CBBE creation through CE, offering specific insights for the healthcare market.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new data dissemination model in order to improve the performance of transmission in VANET. It proposes a protocol named Epidemic and Transmission-Segment-based Geographic Routing (ETSGR) and outlining the issues due to high mobility of nodes and uncertain physical topologies in the network. The proposed ETSGR is mainly used to analyze the vehicle state, direction, distance, traffic density and link quality of the network.

This research work based on ETSGR protocol mainly uses epidemic algorithm in order to find the vehicle state based on susceptible, infected and recovered (SIR) model. Furthermore, the vehicle position and finding the head node in the network is utilized using the transmission segment protocol based on geographic routing and analyses each node to form the segments and find the destination to transmit the data in timely manner.

The paper provides the enhancement of the performance based on some metrics such as end-to-end delay that obtained 0.62%, data throughput as 32.3%, packet delivery ratio as 67% and one-hop communication as 13%. The proposed ETSGR protocol analyzes the state of the vehicle correctly and each node segmented to transmit the data with the timely manner and obtaining reliable performance even with high mobility of nodes in the network.

The proposed ETSGR protocol may have some limitation when considering the timing which should improve even in increasing many number of vehicles and different road segments.

This paper includes some suggestions for the practical deployment of the approach in which a real-time traffic analysis can be evaluated for taking prior actions during an emergency situation and proper dissemination of data in timely manner can help utilize the guidance of proper planning of roads.

This research fulfills an enhanced protocol to improve the performance of data dissemination.