Conor O'Kane

Strategic reorientation and business turnaround: the case of global legacy airlines

Purpose – This paper aims to illustrate how legacy airlines can reorientate to achieve sharp recoveries in performance following prolonged periods of stagnation, decline and eroding competitiveness.Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a qualitative analysis of five longitudinal case studies of legacy airlines that embarked on strategic change between 1997 and 2006. Data collection spanned ten years and included archival data, public documents, news clippings, accounts in specialist books and internal company documentation.Findings – The paper identifies two distinct approaches for reorientation in the legacy airline industry. Companies that have fallen behind and are in risk of failure focus on regaining customer trust and loyalty, and restructuring route networks, business processes and costs in an “improvement and innovation” reorienting approach. Underperforming airlines, for whom growth has declined in traditional markets and who note that opportunities exist elsewhere, focus on product and s...

Technology transfer offices as a nexus within the triple helix: the progression of the university's role

The prospect of increased revenue and spillovers has influenced the mission of the university to reflect an increasingly commercial orientation. This paper focuses on university commercialisation in three countries (Ireland, New Zealand and the USA), through 58 semi-structured interviews with technology transfer officers and a quantitative assessment of university patenting trajectories. Using interviews with technology transfer office executives and university patent applications as proxies for commercial orientation, the study uncovers explanations to the heterogeneous commercial orientation apparent in all three regions. Findings indicate that path dependency; university leadership; technology transfer office scale and connectivity are critical determinants of commercial orientation. The paper concludes by surmising how path dependency might strongly dictate the other determinants and outlines some implications for literature and policy development.

Leadership Changes and Approaches During Company Turnaround

This study examines the effect of leadership changes on (1) the initiation of organizational turnarounds, (2) turnaround performance, and (3) the leadership approaches adopted. Set in an Irish context, we use four in-depth case studies purposefully selected at different stages of the turnaround process. In our findings we describe under what circumstances chief executive officer (CEO) changes are likely; the importance of humility, trust, and integrity to turnaround leadership; and why certain companies might purposefully delay the implementation of CEO changes. In addition, we found that newly appointed outsider CEOs and insider leaders who are not replaced are differentiated in the manner by which they manage expectations and implement retrenchment-oriented moves at the outset of the turnaround process.

Resource synergies for on-farm water management: a study of New Zealand agribusinesses

ABSTRACT What are the key resources that farmers use to improve the impact of their operations on water resources? In what combinations are these resources applied to farms? This research adopted the natural resource-based view to interview nationally awarded New Zealand livestock farmers, and observe the operations on their farms, with the aim of finding out which key resources they use to achieve their sustainable water management objectives. While the extant literature suggests that human resources are key, our findings reveal that the farmers in this study do not apply human resources in isolation: they operationalise these resources in combination with other resources. Financial and intellectual resources seem to enhance the effectiveness of on-farm human and physical resources. We infer that the best description of these resource interactions is as a ‘synergy’ of resources, rather than simply a ‘combination’ or ‘bundle’. This is because the combined effect of these synergies on the farmers’ understanding and development of natural resource management capabilities (specifically, networking, consensus building and technology capabilities) appears to be greater than if applied on their own or in smaller combinations.