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The globalisation of markets, emerging concepts of sustainable development, and circular economy have defined the boundaries within which organisations must compete and address the needs of key stakeholders. As circumstances change, boundaries are often replaced by the relationships between companies and the communities they serve. Consequently, strategy has become a central aspect of sustainable leadership and the foundation for implementing strategic management in a dynamic system of relationships. Every company is born and grows within social and economic ecosystems. Drawing on the metaphor of biology, ecosystems are described as dynamic interconnections among various elements that influence and foster entrepreneurship. Interconnections between players (such as marketplaces, organisations, governments, and universities) create a flow of expertise, abilities, knowledge, experience, and tangible resources. Economic and social ecosystems involve various actors and components that continuously coexist and interact, leading to the creation of numerous mutual relationships. Consequently, it is crucial for managers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the internal and external environments. Various decision-making tools and strategies can be used to achieve this goal. These tools were developed to assist managers, researchers, and consultants in making informed decisions under complex scenarios. This chapter presents several decision-making strategies and tools, including the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, General Electric (GE) matrix, Balanced Scorecard (BSC), PEST, PESTEL analysis, and SWOT analysis.

In implementing strategies to achieve ambitious goals, managers use tools such as performance measurement systems (PMS) for their proven ability to motivate and drive employees’ behaviors. However, many strategies fail during implementation, partly because managers pay insufficient attention to PMS design, tending to devote too little attention to characteristics of the metrics they use to evaluate and provide feedback on their subordinates’ performance. This chapter discusses the management control literature on metrics, the psychology behind the behavioral effects of measurements, typical managerial errors in choosing performance metrics, and previous attempts to define characteristics of good measurements. It suggests that good measurements should exhibit a set of characteristics associated with a novel and easily remembered acronym, STORY, and tests this typology by analyzing empirical data gathered on 1,159 metrics from 293 survey respondents, including characteristics of the people measured (e.g., age, position, and functional department) and the organizations employing them (e.g., firm size, industry, scope, and type of organization).

Social enterprises (SEs), part of the third sector, are hybrid organizations combining the pursuit of social scopes with commercial business solutions. In seeking for social value, they pair for-profit and non-profit features, thereby compensating for shortcomings of both the public sector and the commercial market. Therefore, the performance management of such organizations assumes a crucial relevance. Among the available tools, the balanced scorecard (BSC) aims to capture performance multidimensionality, at the same time fostering legitimacy towards stakeholders.

In general terms, the BSC has the limit to follow a linear and static logic of construction and functioning. For this reason, scholars combine it with system dynamics (SD) to create dynamic balanced scorecards (DBSCs). However, literature seems to devote scarce attention to the adoption of such analytic tools in the third sector, particularly in SEs. This chapter wants to contribute to bridging this gap by proposing a tailored application in the context of a social cooperative, active in the clothing recycle and in the re-integration of disadvantaged social categories. By referring to previous literature about DBSC, two modelling strategies are identified: the BSC-driven and the SD-driven. The latter, based on inductive reasoning, is the one privileged for the study because of its wider flexibility. The modelling outputs consider different perspectives than the ones within traditional BSCs, contain elements of circular causality and show how financial and non-financial performances interplay and co-determine each other. Insights from the proposed model can be useful to support both decision-making and stakeholder engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential utility for higher educational institutions, and in particular libraries, of the balanced scorecard (BSC) performance measurement tool, originally developed by Kaplan and Norton for use in businesses and since adapted for the public and non‐profit sectors.

The relevant literature was reviewed to ascertain key aspects and functionalities of the BSC framework, survey implementations and determine perceptions of the system's effectiveness and weaknesses, and – while the BSC has as yet been put into practice only infrequently in libraries – treat its appropriateness for information service.

The BSC supplements financial accounting with non‐financial leading indicators to link performance drivers and outcome measures in cause and effect relationships that can predict future performance and drive a single organizational strategy. Also intended as a straightforward reporting “dashboard” revealing whether improvements in one area have been at the expense of another, the BSC is considered more effective as an aid in forecasting the overall health of an organization than traditional accounting‐based models. It provides a capacity to monitor obligations to stakeholders and to produce transparent and reliable financial information, and the resulting internal control environment can promote integrity and ethical values.

Academic libraries may find the BSC a useful approach in determining service value, in demonstrating fiscal responsibility, and – through metrics focused on organizational goals and strategy – in validating their role, as knowledge‐based and networked environments, in the delivery of a quality educational product to their customers.

This paper seeks to examine the mainstream theories of corporate governance in an attempt to suggest that their underlying assumptions and ideologies are misplaced and ought to give way to an emerging pluralistic view of the governing process in order to understand any governance contribution to the dynamics of the business environment.

The paper engages with the traditional literature and views on governance models from law, business and organisational studies perspectives. It then considers the environment and changes in the environment and how those challenge the relevance of the traditional approach, drawing upon the impacts on the fluidity of management and governance perspectives and practices in the global economy.

The reflections and analysis confirm the view that the underlying assumptions of existing models and regulatory frameworks for governance are misplaced and it is suggested, with reason, that a pluralistic view and framework are better than the current dualistic approach to provide a better understanding of corporate governance in today's dynamic business environments.

The paper develops a new model and framework for governance practice and regulation and seeks to persuade policy makers and commentators that the global business environment needs to recognise and engage with this new model and validate its assumptions.

According to Revans, for an organization to be successful in today’s rapidly changing environment, its capacity to learn must exceed the rate of change imposed on it. Through an examination of the processes by which individuals in organizations learn, develops a learning process model to facilitate continuous improvement and innovation in business processes. Draws on relevant theories which provide an understanding of how and why people learn, barriers which prevent learning, and the role managers need to play in the learning process. Provides a vision of what may be achieved by the systematic implementation of the learning process model. Deming’s system of profound knowledge provides a focus for learning activity. The model has been developed in a way which will be of practical use to managers working in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic and technological factors that determine the quality of European telecommunications services. The paper test whether the privatisation, the efficiency and the labour factor of telecommunications operators are determinants of service quality and whether competition, technology and infrastructure investment in the telecommunications sector influence that quality.

The paper use the panel data methodology to analyse the factors that determine the quality of service of telecommunications.

The results indicate that the more efficient the company is, the more quality it will deliver. However, the paper finds no evidence that the privatisation and the restructuring of the labour force of the main telecommunications operators, or the competition, technology and investments in the sector, lead to greater quality.

In order to foster higher quality, effective market competitiveness has to be established to avoid benefitting the incumbent company and to make the development of competition possible in the long run.

Although previous literature assumes a positive relationship between the performance of privatised companies and quality, this study shows that the privatisation and liberalisation processes do not bring about quality improvements by themselves. The research finds that the efficiency of privatised companies is the primary source of quality.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on understanding of stakeholder attributes and attitudes towards privatisation. It examines the stakeholder attributes through the framework provided by Mitchell et al. (1997). By combining it with the concept of issue salience proposed by Bundy et al. (2013), it addresses the current gap in research on how stakeholders influence the process of privatisation.

This research uses a process research approach to examine the privatisation process in New Zealand’s electricity industry in order to explore contexts, content and process of change. By collecting real-time data during the period of privatisation, utilising a process approach provided the authors a view of the historical path and associated events which lead to identification of stakeholder attributes and attitudes towards privatisation.

The research offers a unique insight into stakeholder attributes exhibited by different groups during privatisation. The authors identified that during privatisation the government is the ultimate stakeholder who sets the rules of the game of privatisation by exhibiting the attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency. The attributes exhibited by other stakeholders were transitory and were impacted by issue salience. The authors also identified that stakeholders exhibiting all three attributes (the government) chose a non-response approach to deal with any conflicting issues raised by other stakeholders.

The research examined the new public management emphasis on the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vis-à-vis stakeholder groups, utilising the complementary concepts of stakeholder salience and issue salience. This research makes a contribution to stakeholder management theory in the public sector by identifying how various stakeholders influence the process of privatisation of SOEs.