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In this interview, Alvin Toffler, Tom Johnson, and Larry Bennigson talk about the forces driving change and how business leaders can stay abreast of the threats and opportunities arising out of these changes. The biggest strategic threat to many successful businesses will come from the external environment that tends to be outside the peripheral vision of corporate leadership. Culture, religion, politics, environment, and ethics are all going to interpenetrate one another to an extent never before seen. They will, in turn, penetrate business in all sorts of strange new ways.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/13666282200800007. When citing the article, please cite: Anne McCrudden, Tom Wilson, Robin Johnson, (2008), “Supporting strengths: the work of Julian Housing”, A Life in the Day, Vol. 12 Iss: 1, pp. 24 - 28.

Executive courage is an important cultural variable that influences the survival of a business organization in an increasingly competitive global business environment. This study presents the results of an empirical cross‐cultural investigation of executive courage. Forty American and 29 Arab executives participated in the study. Nine hypotheses were tested. Results indicated that the two samples exhibited significant differences with regard to their perceptions of the dimensions of executive courage, the role of executive courage in today's business organization, the relative importance of personal growth and personal courage, and the interaction between executive courage and the organizational reward system. It is concluded that executive courage is a positive cross‐cultural force, deserving careful consideration by researchers and practitioners. It is also concluded that business organizations can best serve their need for survival by rewarding those who seek to do the right things, rather than those who do the expected things right.

This paper aims to offer a commentary on Psychologically Informed Services: A Good Practice Guide, a recently published operational guidance document on developing psychologically informed environments (PIEs) in services for homeless people.

The paper is an invited opinion piece and comment, based on the specialist experience and viewpoint of the author as a rehabilitation psychiatrist, a medical historian of the therapeutic community movement, and a member of the “enabling environments” development group.

The new operational guidance is welcomed, with some provisos. Specifically, the author is concerned that, in the prevailing commissioning culture, and the individual pathology‐based presumptions of the “medical model”, a focus on the “psychological” may be taken to mean a stress on individual psychology and therapeutic techniques derived from individual therapy. This may distract attention from the need to work with the whole social environment, with peer support and with recognition of the importance of informal interactions, as opportunities for growth, if services are to work with the whole person.

Services that wish to develop as PIEs need to take care to work with the whole person, and their social selves, and to develop enabling environments that recognise and work with the importance of all relationships.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.

[1981 was proclaimed by the United Nations as the International Year of Disabled Persons. With the theme “Full Participation and Equality,” the IYDP sought both to promote total participation of disabled persons in all aspects of life and to encourage society to help them function as integrated members of their communities. One purpose of proclaiming such a year, and one means of achieving its goals, is to inform and sensitize the public. The following bibliographies are presented with those purposes in mind.

A tax based on land value is in many ways ideal, but many economists dismiss it by assuming it could not raise enough revenue. Standard sources of data omit much of the potential tax base, and undervalue what they do measure. The purpose of this paper is to present more comprehensive and accurate measures of land rents and values, and several modes of raising revenues from them besides the conventional property tax.

The paper identifies 16 elements of land's taxable capacity that received authorities either trivialize or omit. These 16 elements come in four groups.

In Group A, Elements 1‐4 correct for the downward bias in standard sources. In Group B, Elements 5‐10 broaden the concepts of land and rent beyond the conventional narrow perception, while Elements 11‐12 estimate rents to be gained by abating other kinds of taxes. In Group C, Elements 13‐14 explain how using the land tax, since it has no excess burden, uncaps feasible tax rates. In Group D, Elements 15‐16 define some moot possibilities that may warrant further exploration.

This paper shows how previous estimates of rent and land values have been narrowly limited to a fraction of the whole, thus giving a false impression that the tax capacity is low. The paper adds 14 elements to the traditional narrow “single tax” base, plus two moot elements advanced for future consideration. Any one of these 16 elements indicates a much higher land tax base than economists commonly recognize today. Taken together they are overwhelming, and cast an entirely new light on this subject.

There is growing concern about the apparent widespread failure of information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) to deliver real organisational and business benefits. Several high profile computer system failures in the public domain have highlighted this problem. A lack of understanding about the impact of IS and IT on employees and organisations has compounded the problem. Historically, the majority of IS have been developed using a predominantly technical perspective. IS developers have attempted to minimise the complexity surrounding organisational change by concentrating primarily on a technical agenda. This paper attempts to show that the majority of current IS development methodologies focus on only a sub‐set of the organisational problems that can be created by information systems. It then continues by highlighting the need for development methodologies to take a more “business‐led” perspective when information systems are being introduced into organisations.

A recent meeting involved co‐operation with the organisers of the Canadian High Technology Show and the local Chapter of the SMTA. The programme included an inspiring keynote address by Mr Frank J. Pipp, Xerox Corporation. The topic of the address was ‘Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Control and the Evaluation of Total Quality Control in Xerox Corporation.’

“While we were once perceived as simply providing services, selling products, and employing people, business now shares in much of the responsibility for our global quality of life. Successful companies will handle this heightened sense of responsibility quite naturally, if not always immediately. I see a future in which the institutions with the most influence by and large will be businesses.” These are the words of the late Robert Goizueta, chairman of the Coca‐Cola Company. They were quoted in an article by Theo Lippman Jr in The Baltimore Sun on July 5, 1998. This quote and the remaining article triggered my thinking about the need to bring this strategic concern to the fore in Strategy & Leadership.