Components of Ethical Leadership and Their Importance in Sustaining Organizations Over the Long Term

This article identifies components of ethical leadership and then aligns them with the style of leadership that includes them. The importance of such an article comes at a time when ethical practices or lack thereof seems to be increasingly prevalent in many organizations’ execution of their business practices. These organizations quite often have an ethics statement outlining required behavior of employees and tout their commitment to employees, society, and the customer, yet we continue to see major infractions of these codes of ethics. All this comes at a high financial cost to organizations. In order to avoid such fines, and damage to brand equity we propose ethical components which must permeate the organization to ensure appropriate behavior which neither breaks legal requirements, disengages the employee, or alienates the customer

Evangelii Gaudium: A European Perspective

In order to understand the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, we have to analyze the strategic roots of this Pope, a shepherd who lived his life with the smell of the sheep. Only if we recognize the “great enemy” we can fully understand all the Papal “No’s” of the Encyclical: no to an economy of exclusion, no to the new idolatry of money, no to a financial system which rules rather than serves, and no to the inequality which spawns violence. We believe that Pope Francis, with his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, has updated most of the Franciscan reflections on the role of economy in the world

¿Es necesario humanizar las empresas?

En épocas como las que estamos viendo, cuando todas las herramientas de gestión empresarial han fracasado, o se ha demostrado que no eran tan útiles como cuando se anunciaron, ¿es, de verdad necesario hablar de humanización de la empresa?. Respondiendo con una sola palabra a esta pregunta, diría: Si. No solo es necesario humanizar la empresa sino indispensable, siempre que las empresas quieran seguir siendo competitiva

Los posibles beneficios de la conciliación

• A principios de este nuevo siglo, uno de los retos más importantes de las sociedades económicamente más avanzadas es la conciliación de la vida laboral con la familia. De hecho, los enormes cambios socio-demográfico- económicos de los últimos años han comportado la necesidad de reorganizar la estructura de las relaciones trabajo-familia. La integración de la conciliación de la vida laboral y familiar en la cultura empresarial responde no sólo a razones de carácter legal, sino sobre todo a razones de carácter organizativo/empresarial, presentándose como una seria y potente inversión en el capital humano. El objetivo de este trabajo es reflexionar sobre los posibles beneficios, tanto para las empresas como para las personas, de la introducción de medidas de conciliación en el ámbito de la cultura empresarial, ya que con las herramientas del management tradicional sólo se puede forzar a los individuos a ser obedientes y diligentes, pero no se Resumen puede conseguir que sean creativos, comprometidos, ilusionados y, sobre todo, leales y fieles al proyecto empresarial. Por tanto, la conciliación trabajo-familia podría representar el necesario esfuerzo hacía una tipología de humanismo empresarial en el cual la persona –en su totalidad– se transforme en elemento central y crucial de la actividad económica.   • At the turn of the new century, one of the most important challenges in more economically advanced societies is reconciling work and family life. In fact, the enormous socioeconomic and demographic changes of recent years have led to a need to reorganise the structure of workfamily relationships. Integrating reconciliation of an individual’s working and family life in business culture responds not only to reasons of a legal nature, but above all to reasons of an organisational/entrepreneurial nature, and is held to be a serious and powerful investment in human capital. The aim of this study is to reflect on the potential benefits, both for businesses and individuals, of introducing reconciliation measures where corporate culture is concerned, since traditional management tools do nothing more than force individuals to be obedient and diligent, without getting them to be creative, committed, excited and above all, loyal and faithful to the business project. Therefore, reconciling work and family might represent the necessary effort towards achieving a type of corporate humanitarianism in which the individual is fully transformed into the crucial and central focus of economic activity

Fintech strategy: E-Reputation

Digital media use applied to professional atmosphere is increasing its relevance in the companies of the 21st century. As a consequence, organisations should bear this fact in mind and adapt their corporate strategies to the new market demands. Online social networks offer customers the possibility to bring attention to issues they believe need to be addresses by organisations. Added to this, e-reputation plays a pivotal role in determining a company's competitive advantage. This paper studies the role of e-communications in an organisation's strategy and how analytics and modelling techniques are used to take advantage of the digital media content. It discusses the historical reputational challenged experienced by banks and how can the current fintech industry take advantage of past errors. Finally, an overview of effective mechanisms to improve e-reputation is presented

Editorial

In recent years, global society has faced a range of technical, environmental, economic, and social sustainability challenges. Sustainable development in this ever-changing business environment is one of the biggest issues for any economy, and it is influenced by the interaction between the key actors of the socio-economic syste

Independent Manipulation of Heat and Electrical Current via Bifunctional Metamaterials

Spatial tailoring of the material constitutive properties is a well-known strategy to mold the local flow of given observables in different physical domains. Coordinate-transformation-based methods (e.g., transformation optics) offer a powerful and systematic approach to design anisotropic, spatially-inhomogeneous artificial materials ("metamaterials") capable of precisely manipulating wave-based (electromagnetic, acoustic, elastic) as well as diffusion-based (heat) phenomena in a desired fashion. However versatile these approaches have been, most designs have so far been limited to serving single-target functionalities in a given physical domain. Here we present a step towards a "transformation multiphysics" framework that allows independent and simultaneous manipulation of multiple physical phenomena. As a proof of principle of this new scheme, we design and synthesize (in terms of realistic material constituents) a metamaterial shell that simultaneously behaves as a thermal concentrator and an electrical "invisibility cloak". Our numerical results open up intriguing possibilities in the largely unexplored phase space of multi-functional metadevices, with a wide variety of potential applications to electrical, magnetic, acoustic, and thermal scenarios.Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Comparing chains versus independent hotels based on international sales: an exploratory study

The globalization of tourism has recently increased the importance of foreign demand for most European destinations. Hotel chains have been long investigated from several perspectives. However, no research has verified the alleged ability of chains to attract foreign demand, while this information is highly sought after by hotel investors and owners when evaluating affiliation opportunities. The present study covers Italy. It is based on a survey of 148 branded hotels for 21 destinations and 22 brands. Adopting a new metric to compare the ability of hotels to sell abroad (Foreign market Per Available Room; FmPAR), it has been found that chain-affiliated hotels perform better than independent hotels in attracting foreign demand. This is particularly true for international chains compared to domestic ones. On the other hand, the effect is stronger in three-star hotels than in four and five-star ones, in destinations where chain penetration is low

Valproic Acid Synergizes With Cisplatin and Cetuximab in vitro and in vivo in Head and Neck Cancer by Targeting the Mechanisms of Resistance

Recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (R/M HNSCC) is a devastating malignancy with a poor prognosis. The combination of cisplatin (CDDP) plus cetuximab (CX) is one of the standard first-line treatments in this disease. However, this therapeutic regimen is often associated with high toxicity and resistance, suggesting that new combinatorial strategies are needed to improve its therapeutic index. In our study, we evaluated the antitumor effects of valproic acid (VPA), a well-known antiepileptic agent with histone deacetylase inhibitory activity, in combination with CDDP/CX doublet in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) models. We demonstrated, in HNSCC cell lines, but not in normal human fibroblasts, that simultaneous exposure to equitoxic doses of VPA plus CDDP/CX resulted in a clear synergistic antiproliferative and pro-apoptotic effects. The synergistic antitumor effect was confirmed in four different 3D-self-assembled spheroid models, suggesting the ability of the combined approach to affect also the cancer stem cells compartment. Mechanistically, VPA enhanced DNA damage in combination treatment by reducing the mRNA expression of ERCC Excision Repair 1, a critical player in DNA repair, and by increasing CDDP intracellular concentration via upregulation at transcriptional level of CDDP influx channel copper transporter 1 and downregulation of the ATPAse ATP7B involved in CDDP-export. Valproic acid also induced a dose-dependent downregulation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression and of MAPK and AKT downstream signaling pathways and prevent CDDP- and/or CX-induced EGFR nuclear translocation, a well-known mechanism of resistance to chemotherapy. Indeed, VPA impaired the transcription of genes induced by non-canonical activity of nuclear EGFR, such as cyclin D1 and thymidylate synthase. Finally, we confirmed the synergistic antitumor effect also in vivo in both heterotopic and orthotopic models, demonstrating that the combined treatment completely blocked HNSCC xenograft tumors growth in nude mice. Overall, the introduction of a safe and generic drug such as VPA into the conventional treatment for R/M HNSCC represents an innovative and feasible antitumor strategy that warrants further clinical evaluation. A phase II clinical trial exploring the combination of VPA and CDDP/CX in R/M HNSCC patients is currently ongoing in our institute