Internal Barriers in the Transition of Enterprises from Central Plan to Market

While a number of transition countries have been able to make significant progress with macroeconomic stabilization, little is being done to understand and to address the horrendous difficulties and barriers that attend the process of transition at the level of the enterprise. Not knowing what to change and what to leave in place -either because of its intrinsic value or because of its impenetrable and unyielding nature- exacerbates the complexity of the challenge. The purpose of this paper is to present the insights revealed by our study on the barriers obstructing the transition of enterprises from central plan to market. Stakeholders' fears and institutional uncertainty seem to be the major impediments to the transition of enterprises from central plan to market. It is the fears of "being independent and self responsible, not having the protecting 'umbrella' of the state", of ignorance of markets, of "too many fast changes", of "losing one's own job", of "increased unemployment" and most importantly the fear of "losing power and status". These fears are all derived from a deep suspicion of the consequences of any change. Thus workers fear the loss of job and of the enterprise umbrella, managers fear the loss of power and status and boards fear financial losses and loss of ownership. The insights gained apply to most transition countries. Differences from country to country are a matter of degree. The degree of effectiveness and stability of the market economy to which the system is transforming will greatly depend on the degree of transmutation of local, social value systems to the new values and practices, which market oriented systems will be able to contain and integrate. Efforts to introduce management techniques suited to a market economy will almost certainly fail, unless the techniques chosen from the arsenal of contemporary market oriented management methods, complement and build upon local traditional managerial values. Successful transition might hinge more upon overcoming internal barriers of enterprises, than upon any other single factor of this complex and arduous process. Local as well as western managers and investors should spend time and efforts to understand the concealed logic of the barriers encountered during the implementation of each change. They should address the fears of individual stakeholders (employees, potential partners, clients, suppliers and public officials) with whom they are dealing. They should be mindful of how deeply certain attitudes may be ingrained and should not overlook the value of experience, existing skills and the prevailing managerial behavior that can be usefully built upon; they should expect to work hard and long at change before it really occurs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39634/3/wp248.pd

Interior a posteriori error estimates for time discrete approximations of parabolic problems

a posteriori error estimates for time discrete approximations o

Internal Barriers in the Transition of Enterprises from Central Plan to Market

While a number of transition countries have been able to make significant progress with macroeconomic stabilization, little is being done to understand and to address the horrendous difficulties and barriers that attend the process of transition at the level of the enterprise. Not knowing what to change and what to leave in place -either because of its intrinsic value or because of its impenetrable and unyielding nature- exacerbates the complexity of the challenge. The purpose of this paper is to present the insights revealed by our study on the barriers obstructing the transition of enterprises from central plan to market. Stakeholders' fears and institutional uncertainty seem to be the major impediments to the transition of enterprises from central plan to market. It is the fears of "being independent and self responsible, not having the protecting 'umbrella' of the state", of ignorance of markets, of "too many fast changes", of "losing one's own job", of "increased unemployment" and most importantly the fear of "losing power and status". These fears are all derived from a deep suspicion of the consequences of any change. Thus workers fear the loss of job and of the enterprise umbrella, managers fear the loss of power and status and boards fear financial losses and loss of ownership. The insights gained apply to most transition countries. Differences from country to country are a matter of degree. The degree of effectiveness and stability of the market economy to which the system is transforming will greatly depend on the degree of transmutation of local, social value systems to the new values and practices, which market oriented systems will be able to contain and integrate. Efforts to introduce management techniques suited to a market economy will almost certainly fail, unless the techniques chosen from the arsenal of contemporary market oriented management methods, complement and build upon local traditional managerial values. Successful transition might hinge more upon overcoming internal barriers of enterprises, than upon any other single factor of this complex and arduous process. Local as well as western managers and investors should spend time and efforts to understand the concealed logic of the barriers encountered during the implementation of each change. They should address the fears of individual stakeholders (employees, potential partners, clients, suppliers and public officials) with whom they are dealing. They should be mindful of how deeply certain attitudes may be ingrained and should not overlook the value of experience, existing skills and the prevailing managerial behavior that can be usefully built upon; they should expect to work hard and long at change before it really occurs.barriers, transition, enterprise, communitarianism, resistance

Elliptic reconstruction and a posteriori error estimates for fully discrete linear parabolic problems

We derive a posteriori error estimates for fully discrete approximations to solutions of linear parabolic equations. The space discretization uses finite element spaces that are allowed to change in time. Our main tool is an appropriate adaptation of the elliptic reconstruction technique, introduced by Makridakis and Nochetto. We derive novel a posteriori estimates for the norms of L∞(0, T; L2(Ω)) and the higher order spaces, L∞(0, T;H1(Ω)) and H1(0, T; L2(Ω)), with optimal orders of convergence

An Algorithm for Global Maximization of Secrecy Rates in Gaussian MIMO Wiretap Channels

Optimal signaling for secrecy rate maximization in Gaussian MIMO wiretap channels is considered. While this channel has attracted a significant attention recently and a number of results have been obtained, including the proof of the optimality of Gaussian signalling, an optimal transmit covariance matrix is known for some special cases only and the general case remains an open problem. An iterative custom-made algorithm to find a globally-optimal transmit covariance matrix in the general case is developed in this paper, with guaranteed convergence to a \textit{global} optimum. While the original optimization problem is not convex and hence difficult to solve, its minimax reformulation can be solved via the convex optimization tools, which is exploited here. The proposed algorithm is based on the barrier method extended to deal with a minimax problem at hand. Its convergence to a global optimum is proved for the general case (degraded or not) and a bound for the optimality gap is given for each step of the barrier method. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated via numerical examples. In particular, 20 to 40 Newton steps are already sufficient to solve the sufficient optimality conditions with very high precision (up to the machine precision level), even for large systems. Even fewer steps are required if the secrecy capacity is the only quantity of interest. The algorithm can be significantly simplified for the degraded channel case and can also be adopted to include the per-antenna power constraints (instead or in addition to the total power constraint). It also solves the dual problem of minimizing the total power subject to the secrecy rate constraint.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Communication