Who Succeeds In The Murky Middle?

This exploratory study examines technically educated middle managers performing ad hoc projects in flat organizations and develops a typology for examining the behavioral patterns associated with their effectiveness. Initial findings indicate the greatest success was achieved by “Type 1” managers (the Leaders) who were able to integrate collaborative selling skills and technical expertise within a web of both formal and informal interactions. Moderate success accrued to “Type 2” managers (the Learners) who used collaborative selling skills to develop social networks that allowed them to expand their own technical expertise. “Type 3” managers (the Leapers) primarily relied upon technical expertise as the tool for interacting with others and enjoyed only modest success. Although “Type 4” managers (the Laggards) had the requisite technical knowledge base, they were the least successful because their lack of collaborative selling skills made it difficult to utilize a compensatory social network. Suggestions are provided for leaders seeking to leverage and direct the abilities of key staff

Morton Electronics: The Collapse Of High-Performance, Self-Managed Work Teams

It was clear that top management was seriously pondering the long-term viability of Robert Mitchell’s manufacturing group…at least as it was currently structured.  Robert sat at his desk wondering what he could do to keep his job as manager and maintain control of the group. He concluded that he needed to do more than develop some kind of cost savings plan.  He needed to think outside the box and come up with something more spectacular to impress top management.  He would take the lemons and make lemonade

Quantum entanglement between a nonlinear nanomechanical resonator and a microwave field

We consider a theoretical model for a nonlinear nanomechanical resonator coupled to a superconducting microwave resonator. The nanomechanical resonator is driven parametrically at twice its resonance frequency, while the superconducting microwave resonator is driven with two tones that differ in frequency by an amount equal to the parametric driving frequency. We show that the semi-classical approximation of this system has an interesting fixed point bifurcation structure. In the semi-classical dynamics a transition from stable fixed points to limit cycles is observed as one moves from positive to negative detuning. We show that signatures of this bifurcation structure are also present in the full dissipative quantum system and further show that it leads to mixed state entanglement between the nanomechanical resonator and the microwave cavity in the dissipative quantum system that is a maximum close to the semi-classical bifurcation. Quantum signatures of the semi-classical limit-cycles are presented.Comment: 36 pages, 18 figure

Optimal strategies for a game on amenable semigroups

The semigroup game is a two-person zero-sum game defined on a semigroup S as follows: Players 1 and 2 choose elements x and y in S, respectively, and player 1 receives a payoff f(xy) defined by a function f from S to [-1,1]. If the semigroup is amenable in the sense of Day and von Neumann, one can extend the set of classical strategies, namely countably additive probability measures on S, to include some finitely additive measures in a natural way. This extended game has a value and the players have optimal strategies. This theorem extends previous results for the multiplication game on a compact group or on the positive integers with a specific payoff. We also prove that the procedure of extending the set of allowed strategies preserves classical solutions: if a semigroup game has a classical solution, this solution solves also the extended game.Comment: 17 pages. To appear in International Journal of Game Theor

Graph Treewidth and Geometric Thickness Parameters

Consider a drawing of a graph $G$ in the plane such that crossing edges are coloured differently. The minimum number of colours, taken over all drawings of $G$, is the classical graph parameter "thickness". By restricting the edges to be straight, we obtain the "geometric thickness". By further restricting the vertices to be in convex position, we obtain the "book thickness". This paper studies the relationship between these parameters and treewidth. Our first main result states that for graphs of treewidth $k$, the maximum thickness and the maximum geometric thickness both equal $\lceil{k/2}\rceil$. This says that the lower bound for thickness can be matched by an upper bound, even in the more restrictive geometric setting. Our second main result states that for graphs of treewidth $k$, the maximum book thickness equals $k$ if $k \leq 2$ and equals $k+1$ if $k \geq 3$. This refutes a conjecture of Ganley and Heath [Discrete Appl. Math. 109(3):215-221, 2001]. Analogous results are proved for outerthickness, arboricity, and star-arboricity.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the "Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Graph Drawing" (GD '05), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3843:129-140, Springer, 2006. The full version was published in Discrete & Computational Geometry 37(4):641-670, 2007. That version contained a false conjecture, which is corrected on page 26 of this versio

Complexity of Gaussian Radial-Basis Networks Approximating Smooth Functions

AbstractComplexity of Gaussian-radial-basis-function networks, with varying widths, is investigated. Upper bounds on rates of decrease of approximation errors with increasing number of hidden units are derived. Bounds are in terms of norms measuring smoothness (Bessel and Sobolev norms) multiplied by explicitly given functions a(r,d) of the number of variables d and degree of smoothness r. Estimates are proven using suitable integral representations in the form of networks with continua of hidden units computing scaled Gaussians and translated Bessel potentials. Consequences on tractability of approximation by Gaussian-radial-basis function networks are discussed