Entrepreneurial Marketing Skills and Small-Scale Business Performance: The Case of Ghana

The development of SMEs serves as a tool for creating employment opportunities in developing countries. SME growth can be attributed to how owners and managers use entrepreneurial marketing skills in their day-to-day operations. A quantitative study was used to gain an understanding of the application of marketing skills in SMEs and the development of SMEs in Ghana. Findings indicate that entrepreneurs acquire marketing skills during their years of operation, however, these skills are not in tune with modern business trends and market competition. Establishing marketing departments and equipping business owners with marketing skills enables their ability to deal with volatile consumer demands. Likewise, requisite marketing skills enable market understanding, new marketing approaches, and the design of demand driven products and services

TQM and HRM: An Integrated Approach to Organizational Success

In the past, most managers considered total quality management (TQM) philosophy very different from human resource management (HRM) philosophy because TQM focused on incremental improvements from the bottom up, whereas the HRM functions were based on a top-down approach in the organization’s hierarchy. Their understanding of the word “TQM” not only depended on process management but also on managing the process itself as in statistical process control (SPC). Therefore, the very few managers who did pay attention to quality implemented it on the floor-level of HRM activities where the core functions of the organizations were performed. The emerging thinking of HRM, however, is that TQM complements HRM functions and provides long-term competitive advantages to organizations. Supporting these ideas, this paper reflects on the past, examines the present, and proposes an integrated framework for organizations’ overall success.

Issues and Challenges of African Small and Medium Sized Manufacturing Enterprises: The case of Benin

These days, doing business in Africa is a necessity. But in view of the difficulties involved, knowing and understanding the current factors that govern Africa’s business environment and impact firms’ behaviour becomes an imperative for businesses to succeed on the continent. This study is therefore useful as it sheds light on those factors, in order to identify the available contours and technicalities, thereby providing information that can help in coming up with viable strategies for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

An Examination of Business Applications and Implications of Emerging Technologies

This paper aims at offering a review and assessment of various emerging technologies and their business applications and implications. The study focuses on nineteen emerging technologies categorized under five major themes: (1) automation and robotics; (2) data and connectivity; (3) interfaces and visualization; (4) materials; (5) energy and resources. For each theme, the associated technologies are examined, their business applications and implications are assessed, and some examples are provided. In the end, an integrative table of nineteen emerging technologies is offered, and some avenues for future research are discussed.

Asymmetric Volatility in the Nepalese Stock Market

This paper investigates the asymmetric volatility behavior of the Nepalese stock market including spillover effects from the US and Indian equity markets. I modeled asymmetric volatility within a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskdasticy framework using comprehensive data for the Nepal stock market index. The results reveal a very different asymmetry compared to the results in other international equity markets: positive shocks increase volatility by more than negative shocks. The results further suggest that uninformed investors play a significant role in the Nepalese stock market. The spillover effect from the Indian stock market to the Nepalese stock market is negative. Overall, I conclude that a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) of noise traders as well as the deployment of pump and dump schemes are inherent features of the Nepalese stock market. The findings are very useful to policy makers and investors alike.

Globally Trading Firms in Canada: Productivity and Global Value Chains

Using firm-level data in Canada from 2002 to 2008, I compare the economic performance of three types of firms: those that both export and import (called globally trading firms—GTFs), exporters-only, and importers-only. The results show that GTFs are more productive, larger, more capital intensive, pay higher wages, trade more goods, and trade with more countries than both types of one-way traders. These premia for GTFs were found even before they turned into GTFs (self-selection). Moreover, even after turning into GTFs, the productivity growth of a subset of them was faster than that of one-way traders. The higher the involvement in global value chains (GVCs), the higher was the performance of the “learning-by-turning GTFs”. The GTFs with higher productivity growth were the ones that imported from multiple countries, not those that imported only from China. By another measure, they were both-in-both GTFs—those that traded both final and intermediate goods, and in both directions (exports and imports). Even though they employed only 10% of Canada’s business sector workforce, they contributed 60% of its labour productivity growth.

Making Performance Real: Six Paths to Training That Matters

Training matters not only for business growth but also for talent acquisition and employee retention. Many experts and researchers highlight the importance and benefits of employee learning and development (Salas et al., 2012). The ATD (Association of Talent Development) 2019 State of the Industry and Training Magazine’s 2019 Training Industry Report indicates that billions of dollars and a tremendous amount of time are being spent on training. Many companies are concerned about the value of their current training programs, especially their leadership development programs (Deloitte, 2018; Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2018; Beer et al., 2016; Bernal & Schuller, 2016). As we are experiencing a rapid digital transformation and tough economic times, companies are questioning the effectiveness of their leadership development models. This paper, first, aims to examine seven issues in the learning industry that lead to ineffective training from a practitioner’s point of a view. Then it discusses the Peterson, Song, and Udell (PSU) Training Model, an organizational talent development framework consisting of six specific, focused paths. We also focus on our 4E Training Design Model that resolves issues and makes performance real based on evidence from scientific research and insights from our experiences.

Three Identity Principles at the Core of Comparative Economic Development Management: Lessons for Emerging African Nations

The aim of this article is to investigate the role of national or social identity at different stages of the industrialized nations’ economic development models in order to draw some actionable lessons for emerging markets and developing African economies. The main assumption is that social identity is at the core of the economic management process industrialized nations implement with regard to achieving sustainable development goals. In order to detect actionable information with practical or methodological relevance, national identity was identified as the independent variable, and economic development as the dependent variable. Although the concept of identity is diversely defined in scholarly literature, it is commonly understood as the lens through which an individual perceives himself/herself or how a group of individuals perceive themselves, and their role in finding a way to cope with environmental challenges. Therefore, there is a double level of identity: at the individual level, and collectively as a nation. This identity is at the core of social reflexivity, which is used to envision, manage, and structure the institutional actions that are conducive to economic development. National and international development agencies have been experimenting with different models to achieve economic development in the emerging countries since the creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions at the end of the Second World War. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the United Nations remain the last major multilateral management framework in a series of trial-and-errors over the last sixty years. Using an exploratory and descriptive approach, this article systematically compares the core of the economic development models of the Western nations and that of the newly emerging countries. The results of this analysis show that to achieve their economic development goals, industrialized and emerging countries built the managerial core of their development models on three major foundations: a political system that stems from their own idiosyncrasies, a belief system that comes from their own history and traditions, and a unique but non-exclusive mode of production and resource allocation. These three pillars form a tryptic management principle of sustainable economic development ready for adaptation and adoption.

Use of Social Media Platforms for Purchasing Fashion Items: A Comparison of US and Chinese Consumers

This paper develops a conceptual connection between the Revised Technology Acceptance Model and Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions in explicating the adoption by customers of a social media platform in the fashion industry in the context of the US and China. This study shows that the trustworthiness of Facebook is positively related to US customers’ intention to purchase fashion items and the trustworthiness of WeChat is positively related to Chinese customers’ intention to purchase fashion items. Also, US customers’ perceived usefulness is not positively related to the intention of using Facebook to buy fashion items. However, their Chinese counterparts had the opposite result. The findings enhance our understanding of the factors that influence customers’ adoption of social media platforms for purchasing fashion items and provides suggestions for marketing managers as to how they can utilize social media platforms to market fashion items. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future research in this field.

The Secret of Successful Leadership—The Critical Match Between the Characteristics of Leaders, the Attributes of Subordinates, and the Circumstances of the Situation

Seldom has so much been written on such an important topic that has produced so little agreement and so much controversy. It starts with “what is leadership and how does it differ from managership?” It continues with the development of competing big, mid-range, and small leadership theories (Muczyk & Adler, 2002). Most recently, scholars are preoccupied with attempting to develop a leadership theory or model by creating a critical match between leader characteristics, subordinate attributes, and the circumstances of the situation. More and more, the influence of national cultures in this global economic village is taken into consideration. This effort is also an attempt at creating such a match in a cultural context that is perceived to be useful by practitioners, is based on reason, and factors in important variables identified in the accepted leadership theories or models.