Business & Economics

In 2010 IAP released Change (Transformation) in Government Organizations, edited by Ronald R. Sims. This well-received volume described how organizational change methods can be used effectively to make government organizations more effective and efficient and better equipped to serve a demanding citizenry. The 2010 book brought together contributions by managers, practitioners, academics, and consultants in the study of international, federal, state, and local government efforts to respond to increased calls for change (transformation) in public sector organizations.

Since the release of the 2010 volume, calls for government transformation have continued and intensified, and a number of fresh ideas and examples have been generated from the field. The time is now ripe for a follow-up volume laying out innovative, successful ideas for transforming government. Transforming Government Organizations: Fresh Ideas and Examples from the Field is that follow-up volume. A collection of fresh contributions such as those included in this book will add to the growing knowledge base of what does—and what does not—work when transformation efforts are attempted in government organizations.

The contributors to this new volume are experts with extensive experience as change agents in government and other organizations. They provide analyses and discussions of specific cases and issues as well as practical tools, ideas, and lessons learned intended to guide those responsible for similar efforts in the years to come. The audience for the book are government managers, scholars, and others interested in undertaking or learning about such efforts.

We have been deploying Lean Six Sigma in various large and medium size companies for many years and have realized excellent results in most instances. We found that while Lean Six Sigma does a great job addressing the primary concerns of manufacturing and service, we felt that there was something missing in the deployment of Lean Six Sigma programs at many companies. Something that could help foster sustainable breakthroughs; something to realize durable performance and sustainable quality enhancement based on a happy and engaged workforce, something to create a real learning organization in which people are working smarter, are committed and improve themselves continuously. We found that the results could be enhanced if the importance of Human Capital is considered as an integral part of the process. We learned that Lean Six Sigma, in itself, does not sufficiently address Human Capital at many companies. While expected results from Lean Six Sigma alone will be good, we believe that adding the human component to Lean Six Sigma has the potential to realize sustainable, long-term growth and produce a transformation into a lean, learning, prosperous organization.

That’s why we are launching a revolutionary, holistic concept in this book called TPS-Lean Six Sigma. Combining these complimentary processes actively brings human involvement into Lean Six Sigma in a manner that not only stimulates commitment, integrity, work-life balance, and passion, enjoyment at work and employee engagement but also stimulates individual and team learning in order to develop a happy workforce and sustainable performance improvement and quality enhancement for the organization.

TPS-Lean Six Sigma is a continuous voyage of discovery involving continuous personal and organizational improvement, development, and learning. The starting point in this concept is a journey to understand personal goals and ambitions of the workforce. Then we take the organizations goals and ambitions and marry them with the workforce, and find the best people for the job. Using our structured approach for aligning the personal scorecards with the organization’s scorecard, we are able to create a symbiotic relationship between employees and organizational desires through the establishment of Lean Six Sigma project teams that will enthusiastically drive positive results. TPS-Lean Six Sigma is like a ‘turbo-charged’ Lean Six Sigma program. All of the proven, sound methodologies of traditional Lean Six Sigma are charged with highly motivated team members. The result is a powerful people driven Lean Six Sigma program called TPSLean Six Sigma that leads to a High Performance Culture and allows employees to realize their full potential and contribute creatively while the organization benefits from increased profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction.

Toward Assessing Business Ethics Education, edited by Diane L. Swanson and Dann G. Fisher of Kansas State University, is a sequel to their book Advancing Business Ethics Education in the Ethics in Practice IAP book series. The focus on assessment in this second book is a timely response to the urgent search among business schools for ways to teach and assess ethics at a time when the public’s faith in corporations and business schools has been undermined greatly by the failure of both to respond to widespread corruption and scandals in the business sector. Although no one expects business education alone to resolve these problems, the distinguished scholars represented in this book advocate that business schools should at least do their part by exposing their students to decision models that incorporate ethical dimensions on behalf of corporate stakeholders and society at large. As the book’s title conveys, it is then important to assess key learning objectives to insure that business students graduate knowing ethics fundamentals and armed with the ability to recognize ethical dilemmas and possible solutions during the course of their careers.

This book will speak to all who are interested in accountability for business ethics education, especially business school deans, university administrators, faculty members, students, and prospective employers. This audience will find that the enterprise of assessing business ethics education is advanced in three ways. First, the book functions as a venue for distinguished scholars to share the innovative ways that they are assessing ethics coverage in courses and degree programs. Second, these authors identify what needs to be assessed and the means for doing so. Third, the book serves not only as a guide to assessment, but also as a platform for expanding and improving ethics coverage in business schools. Moreover, an important take away for readers is the provision of a simple formula, first advocated by Diane L. Swanson and William C. Frederick (University of Pittsburgh) in 2005, for delivering ethics education that minimizes assessment errors. By following this formula, business schools can provide assurances that ethics will not be assessed as being sufficient when it is woefully inadequate or even missing in the curriculum and that it cannot be distorted, diluted, or trivialized by uninformed coverage and still pass inspection. Avoiding these assessment errors is critical in an educational environment in which weak accrediting standards for ethics go hand in hand with spotty, uniformed coverage that would not be tolerated for other business disciplines.

The reprint of Henri Savall’s classic Work and People, originally published in French in 1974, is part of the Research in Management Consulting series effort to look backward as well as forward in examining trends, perspectives, and insights – especially from different countries and cultures – into the world of management consulting. Savall’s insights into the complexity of organizational life were groundbreaking, articulating the need to examine both economic and social factors as part of the same analysis, assessing technical and behavioral patterns through the lens of an integrated framework. As he has argued, there is a double-loop interaction between “the quality of functioning and economic performance,” and underestimating this socio-economic “tension” leads inevitably to reduced performance and losses, which he refers to as “hidden costs.”

This approach, referred to as the socio-economic approach to management (SEAM), has significant potential for our thinking about organizational diagnosis and intervention. As Savall emphasizes, the North American tendency to cast people as human “resources” misses the essential point that human beings cannot be considered as simply another resource at the organization’s disposal. People are free to give or withhold their energy as they desire, depending on the quality of formal and informal contracts and interactions they have with their organizations. As such, the SEAM approach focuses on human “potential,” underscoring the need for managers and their organizations to create the conditions under which people will want to maximize their talents on behalf of the organization.

Work and People focuses on the ramifications of this reality, as dysfunctions – the difference between planned and emergent activities and functions – can quickly lead to a series of costs that are “hidden” from an organization’s formal information systems (e.g., income statements, balance sheets, budgets). As his insightful work underscores, as organizations begin to accumulate dysfunction upon dysfunction, they inadvertently undermine their performance and create excessive operating costs, with lower productivity and less efficiency than they could achieve. As readers will discover, the frameworks, tools and ways of thinking about organizations, people and management in this volume – in essence the background to the socio-economic approach to organizational diagnosis and intervention – continue to hold great promise for our attempts to create truly integrative approaches to management and organizational improvement efforts.

Until recently, research in family business has been confined to a sub-group of entrepreneurship scholars, labor economists, and sociologists. Family business employment is often the only economic option available to migrants, the first entrepreneurial experience for young people, and a source of an economy's new business creation activities. These issues are typically framed in terms of the generational transfer of wealth, management succession, or the interplay between the economic system of a family and its sociopolitical system. The phenomenon is clearly widespread but for some reason continues to be poorly understood.

We believe that progress on the empirical front has been hampered by a lack of accepted theoretical frameworks. For example, attempts to employ agency theory, geographic agglomeration and spill overs, social networks, sense making, bargaining and other frameworks have been scattered. In our view, the extant research has not created the theoretic ballast that can withstand repeated empirical verification. More fundamentally, researchers are beginning to ask, "Is family business theoretically distinctive or a convenient phenomenon for exploiting familiar theories with new data?"

We believe the time is ripe for a focused look at the theoretical history and prospects of family business research. Review articles grounded in economics, sociology, psychology and political economy and that offer multidisciplinary implications are especially sought. Theory based empirical papers are also welcomed. We believe that there are exciting opportunities for theory development and so encourage authors to focus on this in their submissions. In sum, the focus of this volume is on showcasing and advancing the latest research in family business.

The leadership landscape has begun to shift. Researchers have started to realize that previous conceptualizations of leadership that focus only on the positive aspects of leadership are too narrow and may represent a romantic notion of leadership. A growing body of inquiry has emerged with a focus on the darker side of leadership. Allowing for the possibility that leaders can also do harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, broadens the scope of leadership studies and serves to increase the practical implications of leadership research. This book brings together contributions by scholars from several different countries addressing topics such as narcissistic and destructive leadership, ethical leadership and leader errors.