Management Online REview

6 January 2009 | Home

ISSN 1996-3300

Strategy

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Learning Leadership from Barack Obama - a Short Case Study

Simon Western

In a recent case study I asked if America would vote for a Messiah Leader (Management Online REview, Feb 2008), well the answer has been a huge yes. In that case study I argued that it wasn’t enough to be a Messiah leader, that promising hope, being charismatic and a wonderful orator was never going to deliver on its own. So what took Barack Obama to the Whitehouse and what leadership lessons can be learnt from his victory?

Structural Anti-takeover Strategies in Germany

Mehdi Farhadi

George Tovstiga

The authors provide evidence of the interlocking networks of members of Supervisory Boards of Directors (Aufsichtsrat) in Germany, ie., directors who are members of more than one Board. Since the Boards play an active role in corporate mergers and takeovers, and particularly in promoting anti-takeover mechanisms, the extent of such interlocks is important. In addition, cross-shareholdings also contribute to anti-takeover strategies (Schmid and Wahrenburg, 2003), in combination with directors’ social networks. As well as evidence on interlocking networks of directors, the authors identify major members of the network and measure the density of networks in the DAX 30, Germany’s main stock market index.

An Analysis of Sovereign Wealth Funds' Recent Venture in Developed Capital Markets

Surendranath Jory

Mark Perry

Thomas Hemphill

In 2007 and 2008, Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), mostly from Asia and the Middle East, invested billions of dollars in the stocks of major US financial institutions, but prior to these investments, SWFs were relatively unknown in the US. Following major investments by SWFs in the US stock market, both investors and regulators are taking a closer look at them. The cause for concern is that many SWFs disclose very little about their corporate governance, organization structure, investment objectives, and short- and long-term targets, among other issues. These concerns led to fears by some that foreign governments might be using SWFs to acquire strategic assets in the U.S. for geopolitical gains. In this paper, we look at SWFs’ investment objectives, the benefits they bring to target firms, the rising public concern in the U.S. about SWFs, the governance structure of SWFs, their revenue sources and investment preferences, the performance of their U.S. investments, and their regulatory supervision.

Crisis, Finance, and Private Equity: An Update

Jamie Morgan

Since mid-2007 private equity finance activity has undergone significant changes. The nature of these changes is intimately related to the current banking crisis and the underlying causes of the ‘credit crunch’ based on the development of an ‘originate and distribute’ model of lending and based on securitisation. These changes significantly affected risk perceptions in the finance system, which in turn qualitatively changed the environment within which risk had been modelled and considered manageable. Private equity finance can thus be explored as both a contributing factor in the current crisis and then as a set of adaptive practices responding to it. This raises important issues regarding how regulators approach private equity finance from a broader context.

Aesthetics and the Topology of Risk

Matt Statler

Robert Richardson

Recent strategic management research suggests that organizations operating in volatile environments can become more strategically prepared to deal with unexpected change by cultivating practical wisdom among their leaders and decision-makers (Statler & Roos, 2007, Statler, Roos & Victor, 2006, Statler & Roos, 2006). In this paper, we argue that arts-based, ‘aesthetic’ process techniques can be used to help enterprise risk managers become more strategically prepared to deal with unexpected changes of all kinds. We support this argument by 1) reviewing the recent organizational research that clarifies the relevance of arts and aesthetics for organizations; 2) introducing a distinction between the algebraic calculation of probabilities and the topological imagination of potentialities; and 3) reflecting on how aesthetic methods might be used to enhance risk identification and assessment practices, with particular reference to the collapse of global credit markets in 2007 and 2008. Our goal is to show that the insights generated through aesthetic approaches to risk-oriented decision-making are not just generically different from more traditional approaches, but supportive of practically-wise responses to emergent change.

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