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Elucidates the nature, purpose and application of the Merlin Exercise in the context of a middle manager leadership programme conducted by the authors with personnel from the Hoechst Celanese Corporation (HCC). Describes the content of three modules – “Visionary Leadership”, “Strategic Leadership” and “Tactical Leadership” – showing how the future orientation of the exercise provides the link enabling managers to build on the skills acquired in each module in order to fashion strategics to carry the organization forward. Working with a focus on the organization′s envisioned condition a decade hence, managers explore and evaluate essential leadership functions including: creating change; business decision making; new market ventures and potential for diversification; major trends analysis and its importance to securing competitive advantage. Concludes with observations concerning responses of HCC participants to the experience of the Merlin Exercise.

Boards of directors have been pressed over the past decade to improve their monitoring of a company's economic performance. In addition, legal actions are forcing them to become overseers of what management does, both in delivering returns to investors and in obeying the various laws to which corporations are subject. But most importantly, boards are being charged with the long‐term responsiveness of the corporation to its economic environment and society. It is these pressures that require the board to take a more effective role in articulating the mission and strategies of the firm, allocating appropriate resources, and ensuring coherent appraisals of those strategies.

The research presented here contributes to our understanding of strategic planning and its relationship to performance in nonprofit organizations. Based on a sample of 303 nonprofit organizations, the study emphasizes individual and diverse elements of the planning process. Multiple measures of performance highlight a nonprofits need to garner resource contributions from several constituencies. Using factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis, we find a positive association between scope of planning and executive satisfaction and a negative association between administrative informality and volunteer involvement. Our results suggest that two critical resource contributors, executive directors and donors, may not value formalized decision-making and planning to the extent previously assumed.

The report of the Chief Veterinary Officer of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries which records the proceedings taken under the Diseases of Animals Act for the year 1929 has just been issued. It indicates clearly the enormous amount and complexity of the work which devolves on the officers of the Ministry. They may very well say with John Wesley, “ All the world is my parish.” For instance in seven outbreaks of anthrax “ which …. occurred a few years ago,” the cause was found to be infected bone meal used as a manure and imported from an Eastern country (p. 43); another outbreak was traced to beans that had been imported from China (p. 44); again, special measures have been taken, at the instance of His Majesty's Government, by the Governments of Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentine to prevent the introduction of foot‐and‐mouth disease into this country by chilled or frozen meat (p. 46); an outbreak of foot‐and‐mouth disease at Los Angeles, California, led to an embargo being placed on the importation of hay and straw from that State (p. 52); while an outbreak in Southern Sweden led to similar steps being taken (p. 52). It is unnecessary to give further instances, but it is evident that the complexities of modern commerce and the development of rapid means of transport imposes world‐wide duties on the Ministry of a nature that were by no means contemplated when in 1865 the Veterinary Department of the Privy Council—of which the present Ministry is a lineal descendant—was instituted as a result of the outbreak of cattle plague which had ravaged the country. Table I. (p. 94) gives the total number of cattle in Great Britain for the five years 1925–1929 inclusive, each year ending in June. The percentage variation in the number of cattle during that time appears to be four per cent., so that the Ministry is responsible under the Act for about 7¼ millions of cattle, the 1929 return gives 7,190,539. The census and the subsequent co‐ordination of the returns made is in itself a task of no inconsiderable magnitude. In addition to this, however, veterinary skill of a high order is demanded, not only in the interests of a trade whose dimensions are indicated by the figures just given, but in the interests of public health in relation to notifiable cases, under the Act, of bovine tuberculosis. The number of cows and heifers in milk or in calf is given as 3,166,292 or 44 per cent. of the total number of bovine animals. It is of course from these that we derive our supplies of fresh milk, so that on their health our own health to a certain extent depends, and to a greater extent the health of invalids and children to whom milk is a prime necessity. It is therefore scarcely possible to over‐rate the weight of responsibility resting on the Ministry when the relation of its duties to the incidence of bovine tuberculosis is considered. Two important facts, however, demand attention. The first is that the Tuberculosis Order of 1925 was, as the Report points out, neither designed nor expected to eradicate bovine tuberculosis. The disease is widespread, and it is to be feared somewhat firmly established in our herds—an evil legacy from the past. The most that can be done at present is by means of the Order to remove as far as possible the danger to human health from the ingestion of the milk of infected animals and to reduce the number of these animals. Any attempt which might be made to completely eradicate the disease would in our present state of knowledge lead to a serious depletion of our herds throughout the country, and large expenditure in compensation (p. 23). In the second place while the Order of 1925 requires certain forms of the disease to be reported, no steps are at present taken or can be taken to search out the disease. An organisation designed so to do would be costly, as it would in the first place involve “ a considerable extension of periodical veterinary inspection of all dairy cows, coupled with the application of the biological test ” (p. 23). Hence leaving out of consideration our deficient knowledge of the disease, though its effects are horribly evident in our national life, the old conflict of public health versus public pocket is presented to us in an acute form.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

There are techniques available for deciding on initial project viability. Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Modified Internal Rate of Return (MIRR) and other techniques are well known and widely used in an effort to estimate a project's initial profitability and feasibility. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the use of two of these techniques to evaluate in‐progress projects and to measure the financial performance of an entire group of projects in a division over a specified time period. Many managers would like a system that allows them to evaluate on‐going projects and a system that allows them to state, for example, how one entire division performed, on all of its projects, over the 1990–1995 time period. Among other things, this will allow management to evaluate the performance of one division relative to other divisions.

A Survey of the Development of Creep‐resisting Alloys: N. P. Allen (Superintendent of the Metallurgy Division of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington). Official summaries of the papers presented at the Symposium held by the Iron and Steel Institute at the Institution of Civil Engineers on February 21 and 22, 1951. The development of creep‐resisting alloys, both ferritic and austenitic, in the period between the two wars is briefly described, and a rather more detailed account is given of the general trend of the researches undertaken after 1939 in Great Britain, America, and Germany to provide improved materials for use in gas turbines. The properties of alloys that were relied upon in each country are described in terms of the stresses giving plastic deformations of the order of 0.1 per cent in 1,000 hr. (FIGS. 1, 2, 3).

Scientists of the United States National Bureau of Standards have found that some aluminium alloys can resist corrosion in either a marine or inland atmosphere for at least 20 years. These results were obtained in a long‐range study conducted by F. M. Reinhart and G. A. Ellinger, of the Bureau's staff, for the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. Besides determining the corrosion resistance of a large number of aluminium alloys, the study also provides data regarding the effects of heat treatment and protective coatings on corrosion rates.

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