Possession of strategic assets is a necessary condition for sustained competitive advantage. This condition is, however, not sufficient. Firms require financial management capability to realize the rents present in their strategic assets. The firm-specific nature of strategic assets implies that they be financed primarily through equity; other less specific assets should be financed through deb...

Designing and implementing an approach to managing employees that ensures they are a source of sustainable competitive advantage is the objective of "strategic human resource management". A strategic human resource management system reflects the concerns of multiple stakeholders, is linked to the organization's specific business strategy, represents an integrated and coherent set of HR practice...

Recently, the importance of Information Technology (IT) for effective Knowledge Management (KM) activities has been stated. Effective KM projects alone cannot lead to success without the support of IT, and vice versa. Thus aligning proper IT and KM strategies to fit the business strategy is the key to reducing costs, which in turn leads to higher performance. Drawing on the concept of strategic...

Purchasing has increasingly assumed a pivotal strategic role in supply-chain management. Yet, claims of the strategic role of purchasing have not been fully subjected to rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny. Extant research has remained largely anecdotal and theoretically under-developed. In this paper, we examine the links among strategic purchasing, supply management, and firm performa...

Acute care hospitals have increasingly been forming local strategic hospital alliances (SHAs), which consume considerable resources in forming and may affect the competitiveness of provider markets. This research shows that SHAs and market factors, which have been perceived to be threats to hospitals, are related to hospitals' financial performance. Among the findings are that SHA members have ...

Despite increasing deployment of agent technologies in several business and industry domains, user confidence in fully automated agent driven applications is noticeably lacking. The main reasons for such lack of trust in complete automation are scalability and non-existence of reasonable guarantees in the performance of selfadapting software. In this paper we address the latter issue in the con...

The New Zealand Government is strongly focused on better, smarter, faster public services delivering what the customer needs. Significant change is occurring, including machinery of government changes. To support this, many departments are re-evaluating their strategies and their use of KPIs, benchmarking and the balanced scorecard. These tools, used appropriately, provide insight to track stra...

This paper explores the linkage between strategic grouping and performance of the Indian banking sector. Strategic grouping and performance were identified using published financial information for all public sector banks. Grouping of Indian public sector banks following comparable financial strategy – with similar asset quality, operational efficiency and profitability – was operationalized us...

Most community banks have been unable to increase dramatically the percentage of their revenue coming from non-traditional sources and so remain reliant on the net income generated by traditional intermediation activities. This continued dependence means that the lending strategy chosen by any community bank is a key determinant of its survival. In this study the lending strategies chosen by a ...