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Governance & Management : Science Daily Mar. 25, 2013 — Women's abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders, researchers have found. A survey of more than 600 board directors showed that women are more likely to consider the rights of others and to take a cooperative approach to decision-making. This approach translates into better performance for their companies. The study, which was published this week in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, was conducted by Chris Bart, professor of strategic management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and Gregory McQueen, a McMaster graduate and senior executive associate dean at A.T. Still University's School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona. "We've known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results," explains Bart. "Our findings show that having women on the board ...

Scanning through a science report data base, I came across the results of a study that concludes something experienced business owners surely would agree on:  " While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run." ". . .failure is a far better teacher." This according to Vinit Desai, assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School in a study published in the Academy of Management Journal back in 2010.  Working with Peter Madsen, assistant professor at BYU School of Management, Desai found that organizations not only learned more from failure than success, they retained that knowledge longer. "Whenever you have a failure it causes a company to search for solutions and when you search for solutions it puts you as an executive in a different mindset, a more open mindset," said Desai.  Neophyte entrepreneurs ...

Source: onemansblog As long as we’re considering rude behavior, how do we treat customers who are behaving rudely?  You probably have an idea.  You might think that all humans react in the same way to rudeness from a customer.   But according to our friends at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, customer service employees - read waiters, hotel desk clerks, salespeople - born and raised in North America will actively sabotage a customer who is rude to them, while customer service representatives from China withdraw and lose enthusiasm for their jobs. "In North America, employees tend to retaliate against offensive customers -- doing things like giving bad directions or serving cold food ,” says UBC Sauder School of Business Professor Daniel Skarlicki, a co-author of the study.   “ In China, workers are more likely to reduce the general quality of service they provide to all customers -- nasty or nice...

  Want a customer service employee who will drive you completely stark-raving nuts with their rude behavior?   Go with the candidate with the best credit score. Really.   That is the conclusion of Jeremy Bernerth; LSU Assistant Professor in the E. J. Ourso College of Business Daniel Whitman; Shannon Taylor of Northern Illinois University; and H. Jack Walker of Texas Tech University in a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. You want a jerk of a customer service rep who will drive away customers?    Hire the guy or gal with a great credit score.    Want an effective, warm communicator whom your customers will love?  You got it.  The one with the so-so credit score. Here’s what led the researchers to this conclusion:   " With regards to personality and credit -- it makes sense that conscientiousness is related to good credit, but what was really interesting was that agreeableness was negatively related to your cre...

There is no one right way to start a business, But there are definitely some wrong ways. Take, for example, two successful fish mongers And what happens when they decide to expand their small business. . . Towed in a Hole

Photo source:  http://www.123rf.com What is a small business?  Well, everyone knows that, don’t they?  Well, don’t we??? Actually, there is no widely accepted definition of a small business that I can find.  If you own a business with 100 employees, and I own one in the same industry with just two, your business looks pretty big to me.  Yet you consider yourself small because just down the road is another business with 10,000 employees. To the Better Business Bureau a small business is any company with fewer that 100 employees.   To the Small Business Administration, it’s whatever size congress specifies, including corporations as large as American Motors some years ago.  According the IRS, a small business is any for-profit enterprise with fewer than 500 employees, a definition which makes 99+% of all U.S. businesses small businesses.   According to this standard, less than 1% of the businesses in our economy ar...

Photo by: David Rosen, West Seattle Herald   The West Seattle Washington Farmers Market held each Sunday throughout the year. The idea of truck farming has been around for years.  A local farmer grows vegetables and other crops, harvests them then sells them directly in a local market which can be a village, town or city.  This is the way the business of agriculture operated for the ten thousand years or so that have passed since humans moved from a hunter-gatherer economy and settled in fixed places.  Large agri-business companies changed this pattern between the end of the 19th century and now which has made it possible for a small percentage of the world’s population to feed the rest of us but tends to separate the local buyer from food producers. The local food movement of the past decade demonstrates that there is a market for farmers and other food producers to locally grown vegetables and other farm products.  A new study published earlier in March 2013...