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This paper aims to examine how previous innovation failures hindered subsequent related innovation at Sun Microsystems. It also aims to concentrate on the human resource management aspects.

The paper traces the development of the Sun Microsystems Sun Ray offering, which followed its failed JavaStation product. It describes how the Sun Ray endeavour encountered the classic “innovator's dilemma” problems, well known to those who attempt to champion disruptive innovations.

Reveals that, despite its many strong competitive advantages, the Sun Ray computer has struggled to catch hold with customers, largely because of the company's inability to learn from its earlier JavaStation failure and to recover from the trauma of that failure.

Presents management practices to prevent major trauma and consequent innovation paralysis.

Contends that Sun Ray was too closely associated with the earlier, highly traumatic and publicized failure of JavaStation and never really got a chance to prove its mettle. Overcoming such innovation trauma is a critical but under‐appreciated aspect of innovation management in companies that depend on continuous innovation for their competitiveness.

Until now there has been little attention paid to the emotional costs of innovation failures, and in particular, how prior innovation failures hinder subsequent new, related innovation. The saga of Sun Microsystems' Sun Ray computer illustrates the devastating impact of institutional innovation failure trauma. This paper aims to investigate its development.

The authors trace the development of Sun Microsystem's Sun Ray offering, which replaced its failed JavaStation product. As it was launched, the Sun Ray endeavor encountered the classic “innovator's dilemma” problems that are well known to those who attempt to champion disruptive innovations.

But despite its many strong competitive advantages, the Sun Ray computer has unsuccessfully struggled to catch hold with customers. To a large degree the causes are Sun Microsystems' inability to learn from its earlier innovative JavaStation failure and to recover from the trauma of that failure.

To understand Sun Ray's story, the authors interviewed nearly 40 key people and compiled nearly 300 documents, from internal memos to market analyses to press releases to meeting minutes.

Companies can develop proactive management practices to prevent major trauma and consequent innovation paralysis. Six ways to do so are offered.

This is a study of a radical innovation that could have changed computing history. But Sun Ray, Sun's computing innovation was too closely associated with an earlier, highly traumatic and publicized failure of JavaStation and never really got a chance to prove its mettle. Overcoming such innovation trauma is a critical but underappreciated aspect of innovation management in companies such as Sun Microsystems that depend on continuous innovation for their competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the growth of the early ski market and the marketing strategies that the Union Pacific Railroad took in promoting Sun Valley ski resort, one of the most popular early destination ski resorts in the USA.

The paper uses primary and secondary source material, including ski periodicals, national magazines and the manuscript collection of W. Averell Harriman, the Chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad during the creation of Sun Valley.

This paper finds that Sun Valley pioneered the western ski vacation by conducting careful market research into not only the snow and weather conditions of western mountains, but also into the habits and economic potential of skiers and winter tourists.

Scholarly work on skiing has primarily looked at the sport from the social and cultural perspective of skiers. Work on entrepreneurial objectives of ski resort designers has largely focused on the period after the Second World War. This is among the first works to analyze entrepreneurial activities and marketing strategies in the ski industry before the Second World War. As a result, the paper challenges the idea that big business only began to shape the ski industry during the Cold War. Instead, this paper shows that large corporations like the Union Pacific Railroad were influential in growing the ski market by building resorts that illustrated the importance of market segmentation to the success of ski areas. In this way, the paper challenges the popular idea that Sun Valley was merely a media sensation and shows that it was a carefully designed business that exhibited a nuanced approach to changes in the ski market.

In currently facing dynamic environments, the tools of strategic management appear to be more and more important in improving the quality of decision‐making. Among the great Chinese wisdoms, Sun Tzu's, The Art of War, is probably the oldest military book in Chinese with principles which Sun Tzu advocated, still very valuable in business operations today. Thus, this study tends to evaluate the relationships among Sun Tzu's principles of situation appraisal, strategy implementation, and strategic control through an empirical study. Furthermore, how the levels of adoption on Sun Tzu's principles of situation appraisal, strategy implementation, and strategic control impact on a firm acquiring its key success factors is also verified. The results show that the adoption levels of Sun Tzu's principles on situation appraisal, strategy implementation, and strategic control are highly interrelated. The adoption levels are positively related to the firm acquiring its key success factors, as well.

Skin cancer is the world’s most prevalent form of cancer, yet it is one of the most preventable. Examines the challenge of communicating the “sun‐safety” health education message to teenagers. Teenagers represent a key audience, because skin‐cancer risks are strongly linked to sun‐exposure behaviour and experiences during adolescence. Focus groups involving those concerned with child sun‐safety were conducted in both Australia and the UK. In‐depth interviews with UK teenagers were used to explore their experience of the Internet and their opinions on its potential as a channel for promoting sun‐safety. Both Australian and UK teenagers felt that they lacked information on sun‐safety. Interviews showed that teenagers thought that a good Web site should have speed of access, ease of reading and navigation, good links, audio‐visual effects and interactivity. They saw the Internet as potentially useful in providing information about sun‐safety, suggesting the use of celebrities, prizes with competitions, and teenage‐ rather than health‐oriented sites. The evidence from this research suggests that sun‐safety is a health education issue on which the particular communication characteristics of the Internet can be utilised to good effect. The results suggest considerable synergy between the Internet as a medium, sun‐safety as a message and teenagers as an audience.

To review one of the earliest Chinese debates on socialism, highlighting the consequent changes in outlook by Sun Yat‐sen and Liang Qichao; and to demonstrate the influence of Western economic writers especially Richard T. Ely, Henry George, and German Bismarckian socialists.

Textual analysis of original Chinese‐language materials with extensive direct quotations (in translation).

Sun initially gave primary attention to land policy, using a (somewhat inconsistent) combination of George's “single tax” and a very different idea of land nationalization. As a result of the debate, however, Sun gave more attention to economic growth, capital formation, and import restriction. Liang initially favored Bismarckian socialism, but moved during the debate to increasing skepticism about a major economic role for government, recognizing the need for entrepreneurship and capital formation.

Existing literature fails to perceive the radical shifts in viewpoint which developed for both Sun and Liang. This is particularly important for Sun, whose later ideas had a major influence on Chinese economic policy after 1927.

The recent growth of interests in applying the Chinese art of warfare to complement the Western style of management process suggested that an integrated business model that combined the Western scientific management and ancient Chinese wisdom could be an effective tool for gaining strategic advantages, especially for companies that want to share the newly opened markets in mainland China. Among all, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been widely adopted and applied in various business areas. However, there are few presentations with strategic models. Moreover, works on his successor, Sun Pin, are limited particularly to the area of applying his art of warfare in gaining strategic advantages and transforming business crisis into opportunities. While various business and quality management models at national level have been established by various countries to emphasise their differences in economic development and culture, models of similar type that make use of the ancient Chinese wisdom are not available either in Hong Kong or in China. As China has become a member of the WTO, a national model that framed both the Chinese management philosophy and Western management wisdom would certainly help in driving local and international enterprises for business competitiveness. This paper is therefore a first attempt to investigate the applicability of Sun Pin’s The Art of Warfare for business management strategies by amalgamating the Western wisdom and the Chinese art of warfare.

Describes the evolution of a draw and write research project to investigate children’s perceptions of sun exposure and skin cancer in five northern European countries. Analysis of the findings showed that primary school children acknowledged a need to protect themselves, but thought that the main way to do this was to use sun creams. There was little mention of protective clothing or the value of shade. A comparison with children in Australia and New Zealand showed much less approval of sun tans and greater awareness of strategies such as wearing hats and keeping in the shade. Concludes that European countries need to mount coherent sun protection programmes in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the organizing practices of a Lakota Sun Dance, and to contribute to the literature on rituals and ceremonies in organizational culture.

The researcher acted as participant-as-observer during this extended ceremony. Fieldnotes capturing observations and informal interviews with Lakota elders were the source of data as recording devices were not permitted on the Sun Dance grounds. Observations were conducted for approximately 45 hours over the course of five days.

The Lakota Sun Dance can be understood through organizational theory, particularly through a unique integration of the concepts of agency, loosely coupled systems, and just-in-time organizing. The current research highlights the role of agency in organizational ceremonies.

This research offers a thick description of the organizing practices of an extended Lakota ceremony. The integration of traditional Lakota organizing principles with modern organizational theory is absent from the literature, and offers a unique perspective on organizing from a non-Western perspective.

Although much has been written about the challenges facing businesses in the 21st century, perhaps most daunting is the notion that if a company is to excel, it needs to continuously develop and nurture its knowledge‐based workforce. To do so, the company's fundamental work resources — information technologies, organizational policies and practices, and places of work — need to be fully synchronized to incent and support the knowledge work specific to the company's vision and goals. As technology and the forces of a global economy have changed the way business is done, so has the very nature of work changed. New work realities have created a new environment in which people and processes succeed only when barriers of time and distance are overcome. When a company's employees, customers, and facilities are widespread, establishing a reliable, cost effective support infrastructure that keeps people connected to needed resources and to colleagues and customers is essential. Real estate continues to play a key role in this new work environment, but an effective infrastructure design must integrate all of the key people, place and technology aspects. To do this, a true “systems”approach for providing work infrastructure is required.