Coaching Practices and Prospects: The Flexible Leadership Awards Program in Context

Reviews trends in coaching in leadership development and examines how Flexible Leadership Awards program participants are using coaching and to what effect. Outlines elements of success, including clear, measurable goals linking leaders and organizations

The Irrelevance of Trade Union Recognition? A Comparison of Two Matched Companies

Two UK business services companies are compared both to each other and to their common state-owned industry background in order to assess the implications of trade union recognition and changed bargaining structure. Union recognition had been abandoned by one company under the agenda of "individualization" and "personal contracts" but retained by the other under the agenda of "partnership". Changes in the level at which employment relationships are regulated occurred at both companies relative to their ancestral public enterprises. The similarity of the companies in terms of products, technologies and institutional history provides an approximation to a natural experiment. The evidence suggests only secondary effects from union presence upon operational attributes and economic performance, but major effects from the decentralization of employment relations, which formed part of a wider and more radical set of changes in the relevant markets, technologies, ownership structures and labour law

An Experiment in Scaling Impact: Assessing the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot

This report presents an assessment of the Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot. It was commissioned by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, founder and lead investor of the grantmaking initiative.Starting in 2000, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (Clark) adopted an investment approach to grantmaking that focused on providing growth capital to youth-serving organizations with demonstrated commitments to evaluation and measurable outcomes. For grantees, the strategy meant larger, longer-term, unrestricted investments, complemented by extensive access to consulting and technical assistance to strengthen their organizations.This approach helped Clark grantees across the portfolio increase the numbers of youth they served (for example, by 18 percent between 2005 and 2006) and achieve annual revenue gains (averaging 19 percent over the four years prior to the founding of GCAP). At the same time, the Foundation concluded that more capital would be required if its grantees and other promising youth-serving organizations were to realize their ultimate scale and sustainability potential

An Analysis of Retail and Service Sector Count Data: Identification of Market Potential for Wisconsin Counties

The objective of this applied research project is to use Wisconsin county sales tax data to identify the strengths and weaknesses of selected retail and service sectors. Using "count" data on the number of businesses that report taxable sales we apply regression analysis to develop an estimate of the expected number of firms in the county. By comparing the observed and expected number of firms we can identify strengths and weaknesses. Through the regression analysis we can also identify which socioeconomic characteristics are associated with which types of retail and service firms. The method that we offer we refer to as Firm Count Analysis (FCA) and can be viewed as a complement to Trade Area Analysis (TAA) and the analysis of sales data.

Design of two-dimensional particle assemblies using isotropic pair interactions with an attractive well

Using ground-state and relative-entropy based inverse design strategies, isotropic interactions with an attractive well are determined to stabilize and promote as- sembly of particles into two-dimensional square, honeycomb, and kagome lattices. The design rules inferred from these results are discussed and validated in the dis- covery of interactions that favor assembly of the highly open truncated-square and truncated-hexagonal lattices.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures and supplemental materia