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This paper empirically examines the impact of corporate governance reforms on the financial performance of Indian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for the period 2003–2011.

The findings indicate that the various corporate governance reforms collectively exhibited a statistically significant positive impact on performance when a difference in difference estimation process is used. However, the performance of SOEs is less than that of publicly listed companies, which is consistent with prior research. When the SOEs are compared with a matched pairing of publicly listed companies of similar size and same industry, their performance was comparable and in many instances superior. This is indicative of the regulatory constraints on competitors and preferential access to resources and markets given to the SOEs. As SOEs move towards a more mixed ownership model with more of them listed on the stock exchange and greater public ownership of shares the corporate governance issues will increase in importance.

The controlled sell down of shares in SOEs presents a need for continuing governance reforms and ongoing research to track progress.

The most striking observation from the study is that changes that were introduced as a corporate governance reform, such greater professionalism in boards, did not gain traction and enhance performance, rather the process of director selection and the concentrated bureaucratic and political interference stymied what was asserted to be conceptually sound reforms.

As the world struggled to come to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic, over twenty scholars, practitioners, and global leaders wrote brief essays for this curated chapter on the role of global leadership in this extreme example of a global crisis. Their thoughts span helpful theoretical breakthroughs to essential, pragmatic adaptations by companies.

Operating as a promising regional university well into the 1960s, Stanford witnessed a “great leap forward” in the 1970s and 1980s. Guided by the visionary leadership of its president, Wallace Sterling, and provost, Frederick Terman, Stanford began its meteoric climb into the ranks of the nation's top tier universities. This more general history has been told and retold in numerous publications (e.g., Lowen, 1997; Gillmor, 2004) and need not be recounted here.

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.

Leadership is basically about influence and ability to cultivate followership. This chapter examined the nature of indigenous socio-political leadership in Africa using Zimbabwe, Sudan and Nigeria as caselets and compared this with the post-colonial or modern-day leadership realities. A survey was conducted among senior executives at Lagos Business School, Nigeria, with a sample size of 200 persons, to find out their perception of the African indigenous leadership system. An overwhelming 90% believe that culture plays a big role in shaping African leadership style. However, two-thirds of the respondents agreed that Africa lacks proper institutional structures to support good leadership, thus encouraging corruption (97% of the respondents) and non-accountability among the leaders. Also, only 5% thought cultural orientation was the reason why the African followers do not hold their leaders accountable. In other words, it is not in the African culture not to hold leaders accountable for their actions. So, what went wrong? We attempted a deeper look at the effect of colonial rule and the attendant militarisation of the African continent. Our conclusion is that the colonisation of the continent by Europe brought significant distortion to the traditional African indigenous leadership institutions and the psyche of the African leader and the followers alike. Post-colonial Africa has witnessed 133 recorded coups d’etat between 1952 and 2016. This chapter is recommended to all those who seek a deeper understanding of the nature of the African indigenous leadership practices and the factors that have shaped these over the years.