Carl Fey

Business Horizons 66(4) s. 505-516 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2022.10.003

In response to the increasing uncertainty and rapid change around them, firms are looking to implement new management methods to become more flexible and less hierarchical. One of the most popular of these methods is agile, which aims for reactiveness, collaboration, decentralized decision-making, and increased autonomy. However, agile was designed to work best with teams where members are co-located, whereas during the COVID-19 pandemic and likely in the post-COVID world, many employees are working remotely from home at least part of the time. We explore how to adapt agile to remote work, drawing from an in-depth case study of OP Financial Group, the largest bank in Finland. We highlight five problems and solutions to implementing agile in a remote setting and discuss the situations and types of teams in which the different aspects of remote agile are likely to work and not work. Our findings provide guidance for companies looking to become agile in “the new normal.”

Journal of International Business Studies 53 s. 1856-1879 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-022-00547-1

Twenty years after the prior survey, the seventh international business curriculum survey was conducted in 2020 under the sponsorship of the Academy of International Business (AIB) and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). This paper reports the survey’s findings and makes relevant comparisons with the results of the two previous curriculum surveys. This study is not only an update but also explores new directions of international business (IB) integration into the business schools’ programs. Although the percentage of matrix structures and separate IB departments is higher in the 2020 survey than earlier, the majority of IB faculty are still scattered across functional departments without IB recognition. Essentially, with few exceptions, we found that European schools are consistently more international than their counterparts elsewhere. Business school deans also consider experiential learning very effective in equipping students with IB knowledge and are generally quite satisfied with the overall progress of their internationalization efforts. The survey findings contribute to understanding how IB is integrated into business schools and offer insights for identifying future opportunities.

Management and Organization Review 18(5) s. 982-999 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2022.19

Chinese business schools have made impressive progress in improving their quality, but there is still room for improvement. However, they have improved largely by copying the traditional American model of business education at a time when this model is coming under increasing critique for good reasons, including placing great effort on producing much rigorously conducted research, which makes little practical impact. Thus, having learned much from foreign business schools, the time has come for Chinese business schools to be bold and pursue their own model. Such a model should focus more on research that pays increased attention to context, including indigenous research, and is of greater practical relevance. Furthermore, given ongoing change inside Chinese business schools and in their external environment, it may be easier to make needed changes in China. Regarding teaching, business schools are encouraged to move beyond a focus on teaching content well to teaching content in ways that it can be readily applied; do more to develop understanding of how to leverage modern technologies like AI, big data, internet of things, and digitalization; focus more on adjusting teaching to the local context; and focus more on developing innovation/creativity and analytical ability, rather than memorization of facts.

Management International Review (MIR) 62 s. 285-323 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-022-00465-2

When small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) enter export markets, they face liabilities of smallness and foreignness. Their chances of success increase if they receive some support. Thus, many governments provide some export support for SMEs having realized that success in exports helps firm success and creates positive spillovers. We test the efficacy of three such support mechanisms: support for strategic export planning, support for trade fair participation and participation in ministerial visits and compare their relative results in various “time dimensions” (Jones & Coviello, J Int Bus Stud 36(3):284–303, 2005). Unlike past studies, we go beyond testing the effect of one support mechanism and compare the effect of the above different support mechanisms. We also show the importance of considering different dimensions of time – chronological “clock” time, “stopwatch” reference time, time sequence, and effect length time. We found evidence for the benefit of receiving multiple support mechanisms and we explored the sequence of receiving multiple support mechanisms. More specifically, our results suggest that exports are best facilitated by first receiving support to attend a trade fair, then developing an export plan; and then participating a ministerial visit abroad. Also, our study suggests that effect length is an important, previously ignored, dimension of time to consider. Empirically, hypotheses are tested on a longitudinal data set of Estonian SMEs receiving different types of government export support during 2009–2017. The data set was constructed from registry data covering the entire population of Estonian firms.