The Stable Core and Dynamic Periphery in Top Management Teams

This study explores how top management teams make strategic decisions. The findings indicate that the top management team performs a variety of monitoring and control functions within most firms, but that a single team with stable composition does not make strategic choices in most organizations. Instead, different groups, with members from multiple organizational levels, form to make various strategic decisions. A stable subset of the top team forms the core of each of these multiple decision‐making bodies. The findings offer a possible explanation for inconsistent findings in the top management team literature, and suggest several new directions for future senior team research

Why Catastrophic Organizational Failures Happen

Excerpt from the introduction: The purpose of this chapter is to examine the major streams of research about catastrophic failures, describing what we have learned about why these failures occur as well as how they can be prevented. The chapter begins by describing the most prominent sociological school of thought with regard to catastrophic failures, namely normal accident theory. That body of thought examines the structure of organizational systems that are most susceptible to catastrophic failures. Then, we turn to several behavioral perspectives on catastrophic failures, assessing a stream of research that has attempted to understand the cognitive, group and organizational processes that develop and unfold over time, leading ultimately to a catastrophic failure. For an understanding of how to prevent such failures, we then assess the literature on high reliability organizations (HRO). These scholars have examined why some complex organizations operating in extremely hazardous conditions manage to remain nearly error free. The chapter closes by assessing how scholars are trying to extend the HRO literature to develop more extensive prescriptions for managers trying to avoid catastrophic failures

From p-branes to fluxbranes and back

In this note we study aspects of the interplay between fluxbranes and p-branes. We describe how a fluxbrane can be physically realized as a limit of a brane-antibrane configuration, in a manner similar to the way a uniform electric field appears in between the plates of a capacitor. We also study the evolution of a fluxbrane after nucleation of p-branes. We find that Kaluza-Klein fluxbranes do relax by forming brane-antibrane pairs or spherical branes, but we also find that for fluxtubes with dilaton coupling in a different range, the field strength does not relax, instead it becomes stronger after each nucleation bounce. We speculate on a possible runaway instability of such fluxtubes an an eventual breakdown of their classical description.Comment: 19 pages, harvmac(b), no figure

Seasonal variation of platelets in a cohort of Italian blood donors: a preliminary report

Massimo Gallerani1*, Roberto Reverberi2, Raffaella Salmi1, Michael H Smolensky3 and Roberto Manfredini4 Author Affiliations 1 Internal Medicine, Azienda Ospedaliera-Universitaria, Ferrara, Italy 2 Immunohematological and Transfusional Service, Azienda Ospedaliera-Universitaria, Ferrara, Italy 3 Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA 4 Clinica Medica, Azienda Ospedaliera-Universitaria, Ferrara, ItalyBackground: Since available data are not univocal, the aim of this study was to explore the existence of a seasonal variation in platelet count. Methods: The study was based on the database of the Italian Association of Blood Volunteers (AVIS), section of Ferrara, Italy, 2001–2010. Hematological data (170,238 exams referring to 16,422 donors) were categorized into seasonal and monthly intervals, and conventional and chronobiological analyses were applied. Results: Platelets and plateletcrit were significantly higher in winter-autumn, with a main peak in December-February (average +3.4% and +4.6%, respectively, P <0.001 for both). Conclusions: Although seasonal variations have been reported for several acute cardiovascular diseases, it is extremely unlikely that such a slight increase in platelet count in winter alone may be considered as a risk factor.Biomedical [email protected]

Diagnostic error reduction in the United States and Italy through the intervention of diagnostic management teams

A major challenge to most countries is the growing cost of healthcare. The cost of laboratory testing is approximately 3% of the total clinical costs. On the other hand, waste from inappropriate admissions to clinical departments is reported to be as high as 15%. A frequently used approach to save dollars in healthcare is the random reduction in the budget for laboratories, with a focus on reduction of the number of unnecessary laboratory tests. The World Health Assembly has approached the problem by publishing a list of essential in vitro diagnostic tests, in order to achieve a global rationalization of the problem. A much more thoughtful strategy to saving healthcare finance is to improve the efficiency of the diagnostic process. This report presents an opportunity to reduce diagnostic error and increase the efficiency of diagnostic testing. Reduction in time to a correct diagnosis provides a major financial as well as a clinical benefit. In addition, reducing both overutilization and underutilization of laboratory tests while achieving the correct diagnosis is a major benefit to challenged healthcare budgets. One approach taken to achieve major savings in healthcare has been the creation of “Diagnostic Management Teams,” composed of experts in specialty areas of medicine who are primarily based in the clinical laboratory to advise physicians on the selection of only necessary tests and the interpretation of complex test results