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Indicates ways in which contact styles can significantly enhance and interrupt learning. Claims there is considerable benefit to be obtained by everyone assessing their contact style tendencies and then moderating them so that they become more helpful in maintaining contact and learning. Discusses six contact styles that impact on our contact and engagement with people and ideas.

The ability to listen is very important and for facilitators even more so Gives six situations‐monologue, dialogue, conversation, discussion, debate and argument to show how facilitators can choose their level of listening. Goes on, with listed examples, to clarify all the facets of listening and their pros and cons.

There is no doubt that the key resources of any organisation are the knowledge and skills of its people, particularly the knowledge and skill to identify and meet the needs of the market. The knowledge and skill is not acquired by magic; it is, however all too often acquired from outside the organisation instead of tapping the latent talent from within. The key to finding and developing the talent is training.

In the current economic climate, it is becoming increasingly common to hear of companies — both large and small — who are indulging in dramatic cost reduction schemes and cost‐cutting surveys. But few of these companies realise that cost reduction should not be an unplanned panic exercise to be carried out every time management notices that profits are falling, but a consistent and creative service designed to improve productivity at all levels of the organisation. Few organisations have such a service; author Bentley explains why they should, and how they can set it up.

When groups meet, people form assumptions about the roles of various participants within that group. Examines what these assumptions are using three different approaches: restructured non‐directed interaction; exploration of reasons for being there; self‐introduction of group and discussion of group roles. Discusses the role of facilitator in a group, and defines facilitation as opposed to leadership, finding facilitation is about empowering people to take control and responsibility for their own efforts. Illustrates how to become a good facilitator using fictional characters from a facilitation skills workshop. Ends by revealing how an individual′s potential can be released.

THIS being the beginning of a New Year, we are apt to reminisce. We search our memory for past happenings that might just possibly be a pointer for the future.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) has evolved over the past 30 years to become more theory based and to exhibit greater empirical rigor. However, much has changed in the external environment that makes the existing theories, approaches, and methodologies inappropriate for addressing the questions that organizations face in managing their human resources today. In this chapter we discuss a number of environmental changes impacting organizations and identify tensions that researchers have faced in exploring how firms seek to manage their people as a source of competitive advantage. We argue that past research has focused on only one side of the tension at a time, thus limiting the usefulness of the answers that research provides. We advocate for research that simultaneously addresses both sides of the tensions in a way that can revolutionize research in SHRM.

WHEN A FRIEND OF MINE retired he had been like most businessmen, a reader of the lighter kind of book—thrillers, 'tecs, westerns—for evenings and weekends. Now he had most of the day for it, too, and I could see he was becoming surfeited with it.

Introduces a way to design geographically distributed virtual prototyping, a new Internet technology, in order to facilitate designer‐customer communication in the product development of small electronic devices, such as mobile telephones. First, we will present our research in the concept design domain with a set of requirements focusing on communication between the designer and the customer. Second, a technique called “smart virtual prototyping” will be presented to elaborate on the virtual prototyping techniques to be used over the World Wide Web. Third, we will present the main ideas, architecture and selected software techniques of WebShaman, which is an application built to demonstrate how a distributed virtual prototyping system could support geographically distant designer‐customer communication. Finally, we discuss the possible impact of the distributed virtual prototyping approach on the WWW community.