This idea arose out of one of my business lectures at university some years ago in which Peters and Waterman’s famed bestseller, In Search of Excellence (1982), was under discussion. As it happened, I was concurrently reading Jan Smuts’ scientific and philosophic treatise, Holism and Evolution (1926) and was struck by the conceptual parallels between the ‘rational mode’ of business which Peters...

This paper examines the value drivers and e-business infrastructures for collaborative commerce across two distinct types of business-to-business governance arrangements in Financial Services, i.e., (a) electronic markets and (b) electronic networks. This paper addresses the changing dynamics underlying global trading communities as they evolve towards greater reach and range of services for th...

E-Learning is increasingly influencing university and workplace education in Europe. The EU/IST FP6 Network of Excellence PROLEARN is focussing on these issues, advancing the state of the art in this area. Some of PROLEARNs key issues are the production, deployment, exchange and brokerage of learning resources as well as their usage for professional training in SMEs and larger companies. Furthe...

This work aims at demonstrating how the integration of the social responsibility in corporate strategy is a factor of competitiveness in the market, achieved through the full involvement of all stakeholders. The corporate social responsibility issue, still very controversial and difficult to univocally define, has been, in the latest years, of a fundamental importance in the business management...

Previous research finds that firm performance is highest when firmsmaintain a singular strategic focus as opposed to a multi-focused strategy. Yet, from an IT perspective, there is still some debate as to whether IT business value or the contribution of IT to firm performance is also maximized when firms maintain a single-focused strategy. Using the notion of value disciplines to model strategi...

The authors present the benefits of collaboration rather than competition in developing educational and training resources for international trade within a geographic region and explore the challenges for business partners, governments and educational institutions. The paper indicates that flexibility in the 21st Century is critical, particularly when striving for virtual implementations of the...

Business-IT alignment can be achieved at various levels of maturity. Supposing that an organization has tried to achieve business-IT alignment, a question to face is: how is that organization going to know the level of maturity of its alignment situation in order to plan future ways of action? That organization will need a guide for determining the maturity of its business-IT alignment, and for...

Safety leadership, defined as “the process of defining the desired state, setting up the team to succeed, and engaging in the discretionary efforts that drive the safety value” (Cooper, 2010a) is widely recognized to be critical (HSE, 2001), especially when the prevailing safety culture is weak (Martínez-Córcoles, Gracia, Ines, et al., 2011). A company’s safety culture is driven by the executiv...

While the field of electronic commerce has often focused on the rise and fall of “dot coms,” a major transformation is under way in many traditional organizations that are investing heavily in Internet technologies in order to improve financial performance. While anecdotes in the business press suggest that some firms have achieved unprecedented benefits by leveraging the Internet, there is no ...