Industrial Data Systems, Inc.

Industrial Date Systems Corporation (IDS) is a Houston-based general engineering and services firm targeted toward the energy industry. Founded in 1985, the company has grown to annual revenues of $17 million in FY2000, sixty-three percent from engineering and the remainder from its manufacturing and air handling divisions. Recently, IDS has acquired Petrocon Engineering, a much larger oilfield engineering and services from with FY2000 revenues of$68 million. Together, they potentially will be able to fully meet client need for both upstream and downstream engineering and services support in the oil/gas, refining, chemicals, and petrochemicals industries. Now they must make it work. (Contact author for a copy of the complete report.)Small Business Mgmt

The Demise of Rhonda

The case involves a long-term, highly productive employee who has become increasingly less productive and disruptive of the workplace. Because of the strength and quality of her past contributions, her employers have been reluctant to confront the issue directly. The situation continues to deteriorate as the employee seeks to change employment, while deceiving her employers regarding her interest in strengthening her contributions to the firm. Falsification of a recommendation letter leads to the employee’s termination. The issue presented to the firm’s owners is how to rebuild the management of their agency and address some of the motivational issues in their environment for the future. (Contact author for a copy of the complete report.)Personnel, morale, Small Busn Mgmt

The Blackstone Group: A Case Study

The Blackstone Group, Inc., located in Beaumont, Texas, is a full-service advertising agency providing design, media, and marketing support for clients in southeast Texas and the Lake Charles, Louisiana, area. The agency was founded April 15, 1978, with its first offices above owners Lawrence and Samantha’s garage. They began with three accounts. Prior to beginning their agency, Lawrence worked for two other agencies, serving five years as Art Director of the first agency, and four years as Creative Director for the second agency. Samantha was employed as a bookkeeper in a third agency. Lawrence began as a freelance designer, doing project work. Shortly thereafter, Samantha joined him in the business. They moved out of the garage, and established an upscale business address located quite near their major clients. Once they became an agency, they “pitched” every opportunity. As a result, they captured a wide variety of accounts, requiring that they become knowledgeable in every aspect of the business. Whatever it took – media buys, copywriting, radio scripts, design, television sport, photography – they did it, and learned as they went. Currently, employing five people plus the principals, the agency is the market leader in the Beaumont area with an estimated 25% market share in those service markets in which they compete. They are recognized as the quality leader in their market, and have garnered an impressive collection of local, regional and national awards for design in both print and other media. Gross billings in 1998 were $3.9 million. Capital billings, the measure used in the industry to report agency size, approximated$4.7 million. (Contact author for a copy of the complete report.)Entrepreneurship

The Content of Implicit Leadership Theories: an Investigation of Achievement Orientation, Task Orientation, and Relationships Orientation Under Varied Task Difficulty and Achievement Conditions.

This study of cognitive categorization explores the content of the schema emergent leader. Three variables, each with two levels, are rotated to form eight leader profiles. These variables are achievement, task, and relationships orientations. Each profile is evaluated by subjects on two dependent measures, leader qualifications and leader acceptance. Profiles are rank-ordered based on ratings given, establishing the schema structures for qualified leader and acceptable leader, which in turn establish minimal conditions for leader emergence. The emergent leader is defined as one who is both qualified and acceptable to group members. Level of task difficulty and the perceiver\u27s achievement motivation are proposed as moderating variables influencing candidate leadership ratings. High task orientation dominates the schemata for leader qualifications and acceptance. It is a necessary factor in order to form a perception of the candidate as qualified and to be accepted. Alone, it is sufficient to form the perception of a minimally qualified leader. This is true for the overall schema and for the low achiever\u27s schema. In the high achiever\u27s schema, however, task orientation alone is not sufficient to be perceived as a qualified leader. Personal achievement and relationships orientations are supplementary to task orientation in forming perceptions of leadership. Alone or in combination, they are insufficient to form a leadership perception. The difference in contribution each makes to strengthening the perception of a qualified leader is not significant. However, for leader acceptance, relationships orientation enhances leader perceptions significantly more than personal achievement orientation. A hierarchical model of schema structure is suggested. Achievement motivation of the subject and task difficulty moderate qualifications and acceptance ratings. Where moderators operate, they alter leadership ratings but do not notably alter schema structures. Minimal criteria for leaders to emerge require a task orientation supplemented by a least one of the other personality factors studied, personal achievement or relationships orientation. The candidate demonstrating all three attributes received significantly higher qualifications ratings than any other candidate. Finally, the study sought to determine whether we prefer leaders who are like ourselves. Due to operationalization problems, the findings are inconclusive

Association of the clinical components in the distal interphalangeal joint synovio-entheseal complex and subsequent response to ixekizumab or adalimumab in psoriatic arthritis.

Objectives: To assess the frequency of simultaneous distal interphalangeal (DIP) joint disease and adjacent nail psoriasis (finger unit) among patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and compare the efficacy of the IL-17A antagonist ixekizumab (IXE) and the TNF-α inhibitor adalimumab (ADA). Methods: This post hoc analysis evaluated the simultaneous occurrence of DIP joint involvement (tenderness and/or swelling) and adjacent nail psoriasis among patients with PsA from the SPIRIT-H2H (NCT03151551) trial comparing IXE to ADA. Among patients with simultaneous DIP joint involvement and adjacent nail psoriasis in ≥1 digit at baseline, treatment effects were assessed through week 52 for each affected finger unit; ‘finger unit’ defines the connected DIP joint and adjacent nail of an individual digit. Results: A total of 354 patients had simultaneous DIP joint involvement and adjacent nail psoriasis in ≥1 finger unit at baseline. Among them, 1309 (IXE: 639; ADA: 670) finger units had baseline DIP joint tenderness and/or swelling and adjacent nail psoriasis. Proportions of affected finger units achieving complete resolution were significantly higher with IXE vs ADA as early as week 12 (38.8% vs 28.4%, P < 0.0001) and at all post-baseline assessments through week 52 (64.9% vs 57.5%, P = 0.0055). Conclusion: In this study cohort, patients with DIP joint involvement almost always had adjacent nail psoriasis. Greater resolution of DIP joint tenderness, swelling and adjacent nail psoriasis was achieved at all time points over 52 weeks through targeting IL-17A with IXE than TNF-α with ADA, which is noteworthy given prior comparable musculoskeletal outcomes for both drug classes

Recombination Hotspots Flank the Cryptococcus Mating-Type Locus: Implications for the Evolution of a Fungal Sex Chromosome

Recombination increases dramatically during meiosis to promote genetic exchange and generate recombinant progeny. Interestingly, meiotic recombination is unevenly distributed throughout genomes, and, as a consequence, genetic and physical map distances do not have a simple linear relationship. Recombination hotspots and coldspots have been described in many organisms and often reflect global features of chromosome structure. In particular, recombination frequencies are often distorted within or outside sex-determining regions of the genome. Here, we report that recombination is elevated adjacent to the mating-type locus (MAT) in the pathogenic basidiomycete Cryptococcus neoformans. Among fungi, C. neoformans has an unusually large MAT locus, and recombination is suppressed between the two >100-kilobase mating-type specific alleles. When genetic markers were introduced at defined physical distances from MAT, we found the meiotic recombination frequency to be ~20% between MAT and a flanking marker at 5, 10, 50, or 100 kilobases from the right border. As a result, the physical/genetic map ratio in the regions adjacent to MAT is distorted ~10- to 50-fold compared to the genome-wide average. Moreover, recombination frequently occurred on both sides of MAT and negative interference between crossovers was observed. MAT heterozygosity was not required for enhanced recombination, implying that this process is not due to a physical distortion from the two non-paired alleles and could also occur during same-sex mating. Sequence analysis revealed a correlation between high G + C content and these hotspot regions. We hypothesize that the presence of recombinational activators may have driven several key events during the assembly and reshaping of the MAT locus and may have played similar roles in the origins of both metabolic and biosynthetic gene clusters. Our findings suggest that during meiosis the MAT locus may be exchanged onto different genetic backgrounds and therefore have broad evolutionary implications with respect to mating-type switching in both model and pathogenic yeasts

The evolution and nomenclature of GnRH-type and corazonin-type neuropeptide signaling systems

The work of the authors reported in this review was supported by grants from the BBSRC (BB/M001644/1; BB/M001032/1), the Leverhulme Trust (RGP-2013-351) and the China Scholarship Council