Business Commons^™

The Balanced Scorecard At Futura Industries, Andra Gumbus, Susan D. Johnson

WCBT Faculty Publications

Most companies use the balanced scorecard (BSC) to focus on the financial aspects or the operational metrics required by ISO quality certification. But that is not all one unique company uses the BSC for. At Futura Industries, President Susan Johnson built the enterprise's success over the past 3 years on the BSC's foundational level - the learning, innovation, and growth dimension. This dimension provides the building blocks that generate success in the remaining 3 quadrants: customer service, financial, and internal operations. And the results have followed: a 50% increase in revenue without adding personnel from 1996 to 1999. This organization …

Temporal Spans In Talk: Doing Consistency To Construct Fair Organization, Jeanie M. Forray, Jill Woodilla

WCBT Faculty Publications

It is generally understood that time, among its other aspects, is a resource in organizational life. In this paper, we take an interpretive perspective to this notion by considering temporality as a verbal resource in the work of organizing. We introduce the concept of 'temporal span' and discuss the ways in which temporal spans serve to establish consistency as an ongoing attribute of organizational reality. Empirical examples drawn from an ethnomethodological study of human resource managers demonstrate interactions during which these managers invoke temporal spans to construct 'fair organization'. We discuss the use of temporality as a verbal resource with …

The Changing Context Of Practice, Stephen M. Brown

WCBT Faculty Publications

Environmental and organizational changes are putting new demands on training. Training must change to support new organizational structures within a complex and changing business and social environment.

Evaluation of training must be multilevel, customer focused, and support continuous improvement of training.The challenge is to provide meaningful data that enables assessment of customer satisfaction, business impact, and return on investment.

The Organizational Action Research Model, Morton Elfenbein, Stephen M. Brown, Kim H. Knight

WCBT Faculty Publications

This chapter proposes a paradigm, which empowers practitioners to practice research to meet their needs and to advance the profession to which they belong. It proposes the integration of practitioner and researcher role as an alternative to the fragmented model that currently exists. In doing so, it draws much from the past tradition of the action researchers as well as the science approach espoused by others. In this way, the needs of individual managers to evaluate their espoused theories and their theories-in-use can be undertaken so that their organizations can function more realistically and can respond more effectively to the …

Strategic Human Resource Management (Book Review), John Chalykoff

WCBT Faculty Publications

Book review by John B. Chalykoff.

Fombrun, Charles J., Noel M. Tichy, Mary Anne Devanna. Strategic Human Resource Management. New York: Wiley, 1984.

ISBN 9780471810797

Making Sense Of Wage And Salary Surveys, Leonard N. Persson

WCBT Faculty Publications

This article provides the reader with guidance on the effective selection and use of wage and salary surveys to assure the availability of accurate data to which the firm's rates of pay can be compared. This paper has concentrated on the need for and method of careful selection of survey data, with the intent of assuring the greatest possible degree of comparability and accuracy in the data, prior to statistical analysis. The method of selection is important because even the most careful analysis of bad data produces only more bad data.