Congress is now debating legislation that would give independent physicians the right to bargain collectively with managed care organizations. Proponents argue that this legislation is needed to counterbalance the market power of managed care organizations; opponents argue that physicians can already gain leverage and negotiating strength by forming group practices or through joint ventures wit...

Executive Overview Competition in the 21 century’s global economy will be complex, challenging, and filled with competitive opportunities and threats. Effective strategic leadership practices can help firms enhance performance while competing in turbulent and unpredictable environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe six components of effective strategic leadership. When the activitie...

The Society for Information Management's (SIM) Advanced Practices Council (APC) is an exclusive forum for senior IT executives who value directing and applying pragmatic research; exploring emerging IT issues in-depth; and hearing different, global perspectives from colleagues in other industries. Executive Summary With rising economic pressures and frustration with existing information systems...

The nature of emerging business technologies, such automatic identification, and data capture innovations, such as smart cards, touch memory, and RFID, proves to be a difficult process to implement and achieve, despite recent efforts, even as implementation continues to lessen. The economy of scales associated with bar codes is a difficult barrier to overcome. Two Pittsburgh-based companies are...

Manufacturers increasingly implement what has been defined a servitization strategy, to develop competitive advantages. Product-service offerings, in fact, have a high competitive potential: however, they also bring challenges and risks. This paper, through the analysis of the relationship between installed base information management practices and the level of service orientation of capital go...

Within academia there has been similar growing awareness of this need. Although this awareness is being articulated in several ways, one of the most frequent involves the conceptualization and investigation of the relationship between business strategy and the personal characteristics of top managers.^ Here, particular manager characteristics such as personality, skills, abilities, values, and ...

The presented research has investigated empirically the current practices of how organizations are using CI today, and in particular what role collaboration and networking plays in such CI work processes. In particular, the investigation has examined what forms of collaborations and organizational networks are currently used in the CI work process. Four organizations have been examined as explo...

This study investigated the prevalence, magnitude, and methods of rap-id weight loss among male and female Taekwondo athletes from all competitive levels. A questionnaire was administered to 72 men (regional/state level, n=31; national/international level, n=41) and 44 women (regional/state level, n=9; national/international, n=35). Among the male athletes, 77.4% of the regional/state level and...

Competitive intelligence (CI) as a strategic management tool is essential for organisations in developing countries. This article provides an overview of the current state of CI in Brazil. A questionnaire survey methodology was used where questionnaires were administered to CI professionals in organisations in Brazil. Only 46.1 per cent of the organisations indicated that they cope above averag...