Adrian Woods

Entrepreneurial action, innovation and business performance: the small independent business

Using a sample of some 300 small independent businesses, drawn from Central London, the paper examines how entrepreneurial behaviour affects business performance. It is argued that small businesses motivated by a desire to grow in terms of sales and/or employees and to survive in a dynamic and competitive environment need to be innovative. However, to what extent they will innovate successfully depends on their capacity to plan ahead, their capacity to innovate and their willingness to take risk. It is shown that entrepreneurial businesses are characterised by these competencies that allow them to innovate and thus develop and grow successfully. Not surprisingly, not all small businesses are equipped with these three competencies owing to their diverse array of strengths and weaknesses arising from the diversity in the managerial motives and aspirations of entrepreneurship. These results highlight the importance of the capacity to innovate and the capacity to plan ahead as strong predictors of small busin...

Owner-Managers and the Practice of Strategic Management

The distinction between management of operational effectiveness and strategic management has been a core belief of much management literature. Operational management is concerned with the ongoing activities of the business in relation to existing products or services and in respect of existing markets. Strategic management, in contrast, is concerned with the future success of the business and may entail major changes in the benefits to be offered customers, in organizational capacity, and in competitive posture. The application of strategic management to small firms can be seen as posing particular challenges. This can be inferred from, for example, the organizational studies of Mintzberg (1979) who has argued that the typical owner-managers of small businesses, especially entrepreneurial ones, manage in quite a different way from the methods indicated by the strategic planning literature. Such businesses are governed, it is said, using more personal and arbitrary forms of control. However useful these arguments have been to the progress of understanding small businesses in the past, the time is fast approaching (and perhaps has arrived already) when this kind of argument is becoming fruitless and sterile. In this article it is assumed we now need to understand whether and how managers in small businesses have taken up the language and practice of planning and strategic analysis, and we need to understand with what results these have been taken up. At the heart of the article is the analysis of the results of a survey of owner-managers and other managers. The article is concluded with a look at the implications of the findings.

Successional Issues within Asian Family Firms Learning from the Kenyan Experience

This article explores succession within Asian family firms by considering whether experiences of succession are influenced by ethnicity. To understand these factors and develop strategies to assist succession this article explores experiences of Kenyan Asian family businesses. While British Asian firms are facing succession for the first time, a large proportion of the Kenyan Asian business community has already experienced first generation succession and the survivors are now preparing for round two. By drawing on the experiences of the Kenyan cases this article argues the findings may be applied to their British counterparts. The key findings from this article identify mothers of the heirs as crucial buffers between the generations. Previous experiences of succession have caused devastating splits both for the business and the family resulting in considerable motivation to invest resources into long-term planning as illustrated by the unexpected emphasis on separation of ownership and management. Finally, while ethnicity is argued to have a significant impact on succession, the situation is compounded by vast attitudinal differences between the generations, potentially leading to a time bomb within family firms.

Gender, age and the MBA: An analysis of extrinsic and intrinsic career benefits

Against the background of an earlier study, this article presents the findings of a Canadian-based survey of career benefits from the MBA. Results indicate first that gender and age interact to influence perceptions of career outcomes and second that both men and women gain intrinsic benefits from the MBA. However, intrinsic benefits vary by gender: Men in the study were more likely to gain confidence from having a fuller skill set, whereas women were more likely to gain confidence from feelings of self-worth. In addition, men emphasized how they had learned to give up control, whereas women argued that they had gained a voice in the organization. The role of the MBA in career self-management and in the acquisition of key skills is examined, as well as the implications for the design of programs in meeting the varied needs of men and women in different age groups.

Career progress and career barriers: women MBA graduates in Canada and the UK

This article explores the career progress of female MBA graduates in Canada and the UK and the nature of career barriers experienced in each context. Results suggest that while Canadian women have similar career profiles to men, women in the UK lag behind their male counterparts after graduation from the course. At the same time, UK women encounter more intractable career barriers in the form of negative attitudes and prejudice. A model of the “MBA effect” is proposed in terms of how the qualification may impact on career barriers. This incorporates three different types of barriers which are seen to operate at the individual level (person centred barriers) and at the intermediate/organizational level (organizational culture and attitudes, corporate practices) as well as, at the macro level, the impact of legislative frameworks. Results from the UK and Canadian surveys are discussed in relation to this model and in the context of feminist theory and women in management literature.

Managing for growth: decision making, planning, and making changes

The competencies that need to be developed and deployed in coping with accelerating changes in the business environment have been the subject of much work dating back at least to the 1960s. Two broad themes are discernible in this work. On the one hand there are those who argue that the speed of change is so fast that organisations and managers who can respond almost instinctively and improvise responses quickly will do well. On the other, there are those who argue that more formalised systems of strategic development and control are needed to give organisations a competitive advantage. The results from an empirical study of some 267 organisations are used to shed some light on this debate. The evidence supports the idea that a growing organisation is associated with the existence of internal strategic systems that support the firm’s growth ambitions, allowing it to make not only “good” business decisions and to monitor how well the organisations is doing against its strategy, but to do so speedily.

Workforce training:: are small firms different

The British CBI introduced national educational and training targets in 1991. Small firms might be regarded as unlikely to respond to them because of, for example, lack of time, cost constraints and fears of other firms poaching their employees. Is this true? Surveys of South London employers in November 1992 and February 1993, which were carried out for South London Training and Enterprise Council (SOLOTEC), provide some interesting insights on the relative standards of training in small businesses. Reports findings which show that size does matter and goes on to argue that there could be a different set of training dynamics in many small firms. Poses a culture of rational and incremental change in training activity in large firms against a more visionary approach in small firms to explain some curious evidence on the uptake of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs).

What do UK small and medium sized enterprises think about employing graduates

Purpose – The UK government is committed to increasing the proportion of young people entering higher education. This means that graduates will make up a greater proportion of the labour market. To some extent, this applies to all businesses, but will particularly affect small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), that have traditionally employed a lower proportion of graduates. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to help universities understand better what they could do to both prepare their graduates for jobs in small firms and to help them communicate better with small firms.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical findings are based on a telephone questionnaire survey of SMEs (n=396), drawn from a range of sectors.Findings – The findings indicate that, dependent on: the size of the firm, the proportion of graduates currently employed, the sector that the firm is in, its location and the role played in the organisation by the respondent, the firms attitude towards employing graduates can be ex...

Developing emerging social enterprise through capacity building

Purpose – To study the applicability of capacity building as a technique for developing social enterprises.Design/methodology/approach – Two emerging social enterprises, developed within the WestFocus Partnership, a consortium of seven higher education institutions, were studied in a series of capacity building sessions conducted by Brunel University Business School, UK. Reports the gathering of data for the project using participant observation, questionnaire surveys and focus groups, together with a series of capacity building sessions delivered by specialists, addressing the areas of leadership and human resources, marketing, environmental scanning, stakeholder analysis and business strategy where Session 1 addressed “Management and leadership styles”, Session 2 addressed “Strategic marketing and environmental analysis”, and Session 3 addressed “Strategy (in the widest sense)”.Findings – The results indicated that, although capacity building could not resolve a perceived conflict between social ends an...

The significance of seniority for women managers’ interpretations of organizational restructuring

This paper examines the impact of restructuring within the transport and logistics sector on women managers working at senior and less senior (middle/junior management) levels of the organization. The majority of women experienced increased performance pressures and heavier workloads as well as an increase in working hours. At the same time, there were pressures to work at home (i.e. weekends and evenings) and reduced opportunities to work from home (i.e. during normal office hours). Management level emerged as an important factor in how these changes were interpreted. Senior managers perceived more positive outcomes in terms of increased motivation and loyalty. Despite a longer working week, they were less likely to report low morale as an outcome from long hours. In fact, irrespective of management level, women working shorter hours were more likely to report low morale as an outcome. Results are discussed in relation to literature on restructuring and careers, in terms of perceptual framing and in relation to different levels of investment in the organization.