The European Business Review

By Antonio Argandoña
Why should managers put Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into practice? The so-called legal, ethical, social and business cases provide several reasons. In this paper we discuss these arguments, and we add new reasons that make up the ‘management case.’ By exploring why CSR is good management, this paper explains why CSR make the [...]

By Shlomo Ben-Hur & Nik Kinley
Corporate Learning functions are under pressure to deliver like never before. Yet studies have repeatedly shown that business leaders’ satisfaction with the work of their learning functions has remained as low as 20% for the past decade. For an industry worth over $200 billion per year globally, that is a [...]

By Suzanne Heywood & Roni Katz
The matrix structure is here to stay, but its complexity can be minimized, and companies can get more value from it
The way a company organizes itself—how it allocates responsibilities, how it organizes support services, and how it groups products, brands, or services—can have a substantial impact on its effectiveness. Global [...]

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Established in 1996 as a part of the Dubai Government’s strategic plan to be an investment driven economy, DAFZA is one of the fastest growing premium free zones in the region. The free zone is currently home to over 1,600 companies from various industry sectors, including aviation, freight and logistics, IT and telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, engineering, [...]

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By Nikos Avlonas
2012 introduced several significant developments in sustainability, most notably around the issues of climate change, risk management, and supply chain ethics.
June’s Rio+20 United Nations Conference for Sustainable Development dominated the year’s discussion, reinforcing the need for corporations to play a larger role in attaining sustainable development goals. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Low Carbon Economy Index publication1 [...]

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By Karin Bursa
To succeed in a business economy shaped by uncertain demand and rapid market changes, companies must be able to sense and adapt quickly. Today, the supply chain is seen as a key enabler of this flexibility. To face this challenge your supply chain must forecast correctly and then modify the plan as new [...]

By Stefan Thomke
There is a downside to businesses that focus heavily on standardization, optimization, and driving out variability: Such organizations leave themselves vulnerable to underinvesting in experimentation and variation, which are the lifeblood of innovation. Good experimentation helps firms better manage myriad sources of uncertainty (such as, does the product work as intended and does [...]

By Tobias Klatt & Klaus Moeller
Environmental turbulence has be- come a key challenge for companies’ strategic planning. Planning results remain arbitrary and risky, and lack deep knowledge of relevant factors and trends. Traditional instruments such as key performance indicator concepts, strategy maps, and balanced scorecards become increasingly opaque under these conditions, especially owing to their [...]

By Andrew Campbell, Sven Kunisch & Günter Müller-Stewens
The corporate office consists of the CEO and the corporate functions. It is the main vehicle for delivering corporate added value. Yet corporate functions often underperform and corporate offices often fail to add value. We argue that this is because CEOs focus most of their attention on portfolio [...]

By Francesca Gino
The Ducati motorcycle racing team, Ducati Corse, decided to compete in a motorcycle racing circuit, the MotoGP, for the first time in 2003. The team had accumulated years of experience and success in other motorcycle racing circuits, but the MotoGP had different rules and required a different type of motorcycle. Consequently, team members [...]