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Increasingly, managers are harried by rapidly accelerating technological changes, globalization, and new competitors. How can they cope with the mercurial environments their firms are facing today? Should they stop wasting precious time thinking strategically and instead concentrate on action? Should they forget about careful pre‐planning and use their energy to try enough different approaches so some will surely succeed? Has strategizing as we know it become obsolete in today's chaotic environment?

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical review of the work of Tom Peters.

Notes a degree of narrative experimentation in the works of Tom Peters. Offers a narrative typology to describe this narrative change, suggests a number of reasons for this narrative experimentation and outlines topics for future research in this area.

The paper suggests that Peters' narrative experimentation reflects twin frustrations. Namely Peters' frustration with the short‐term orientations and innate conservatism of the US business élite and peripheralization in Corporate America.

The paper proposes an original narrative typology for the examination of Peters' work and suggests directions for future research.

This paper aims to demonstrate that Facebook likes affect outcomes in nonprofit settings. Specifically, Facebook likes influence affinity to nonprofits, which, in turn, affects fundraising outcomes.

The authors report three studies that establish that relationship. To examine social contagion, Study 1 – an auction field study – relies on selling artwork created by underprivileged youth. To isolate signaling, Study 2 manipulates the number of total Facebook likes on a page. To isolate commitment escalation, Study 3 manipulates whether a participant clicks a Facebook like.

The results show that Facebook likes increase willingness to contribute in nonprofit settings and that the process goes through affinity, as well as through Facebook impressions and bidding intensity. The total number of Facebook likes has a direct signaling effect and an indirect social contagion effect.

The effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms is limited to nonprofit settings and only applies to short-term effects.

Facebook likes serve as both a quality signal and a commitment mechanism. The magnitude of commitment escalation is larger, and the relationship is moderated by familiarity with the organization. Managers should target Facebook likes at those less familiar with the organization and should prioritize getting a potential donor to leave a like as a step leading to donation, in essence mapping a donor journey from prospective to active, where Facebook likes play an essential role in the journey. In a charity auction setting, the donor journey involves an additional step of bidder intensity.

The approach the authors study is shown effective in nonprofit settings but does not appear to extend to corporate social responsibility more broadly.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first investigation to map Facebook likes to a seller’s journey through signals and commitment, as well as the only investigation to map Facebook likes to charity auctions and show the effectiveness of this in the field.

Inequality in the creative industries often serves as the starting point for public debates over culture in the UK. Academic literature has long recognised the precarious nature of the fashion industry. This chapter offers a critical review of the relationships of power existing in the support offered to ethnic minorities in disadvantaged communities in the fashion and creative sectors in the UK. In addressing these issues, a Foucauldian perspective is adopted. The chapter focuses on Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) fashion entrepreneurs’ challenges in promoting young designers from disadvantaged communities.

Our findings show that the BAME entrepreneurs are active agents who are essential in identifying and shaping new creative and talented young designers. The chapter contributes to the debate through a critical review of the relationships of power existing in the support offered to ethnic minorities in disadvantaged communities in the fashion and creative sectors in the UK.

For decades, conflict resolution (CR) educators working cross-culturally have struggled with a fundamental dilemma – whether to offer western, evidence-based approaches through a top-down (prescriptive) training process or to use a bottom-up (elicitive) strategy that builds on local cultural knowledge of effective in situ conflict management. This study aims to explore which conditions that prompted experienced CR instructors to use more prescriptive or elicitive approaches to such training in a foreign culture and the implications for training outcomes.

There are two parts to this study. First, the authors conducted a literature review to identify basic conditions that might be conducive to conducting prescriptive or elicitive cross-cultural CR training. The authors then tested the identified conditions in a survey with experienced CR instructors to identify different conditions that afforded prescriptive or elicitive approaches. Exploratory factor analysis and regression were used to assess which conditions determined whether a prescriptive or elicitive approach produced better outcomes.

In general, although prescriptive methods were found to be more efficient, elicitive methods produced more effective, culturally appropriate, sustainable and culturally sensitive training. Results revealed a variety of instructor, participant and contextual factors that influenced whether a prescriptive or elicitive approach was applied and found to be more suitable.

This study used empirical survey data with practicing experts to provide insight and guidance into when to use different approaches to CC-CR training effectively.

An indication is given of recent developments of management training provision in relation to schools and further and higher education in England and Wales. As Local Education Authorities and providing institutions seek to grasp the new opportunities implicit in changed financial arrangements for in‐service training, four issues are identified as being in contention: 1. the relative merits of long award‐bearing courses and more flexible, but less expensive, short courses; 2. the most appropriate target group; 3. the relevance or otherwise of industrial management models; and 4. the evergreen issue of orientation to practice. The discussion is focussed on the situation in England and Wales; the issues may be perceived to be of wider significance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their impact on new product success.

A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success.

Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R&D and NPD, and this study is no exception.

With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision.

NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs.

Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms’ competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R&D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.