Development, Growth and Finance of Organizations from an Eastern European Context

The analysis of the form in which a business is founded is highly important for the economic development of a country and the regulation of the administrative sector can improve economic performances. This paper is intended to address the study of the manner in which the social and economic development indicators affect the number of procedures and time required to start a business and also the financial aspect that characterizes this entrepreneurial activity. In order to carry out this analysis, we have constructed a sample, which includes 125 countries pertaining to all continents for which we have recorded, besides the three variables, the values for the social and economic development indicators. We have completed our analysis through the graphical representations of the variables that define the administrative framework as a function of the social progress index, respectively, GDP/capita. Consequently, after constructing these graphs and computing the correlation coefficient, we have discovered reverse connections between all combinations of the variables that are subject to our study. The results obtained have implications in the development of the business sector and aid the legal mechanisms to implement regulations and norms aimed to facilitate the access of future entrepreneurs to the business environment.

For many years, excessive bureaucracy and widespread corruption have been the major scourges of the public administration system. The reform in public administration created the need to rethink the entire public administration system, the services provided to citizens and the manner in which citizens are approached and dealt with. The major challenge lies not only in providing citizens with full access to various public services (waste management, street lighting, public security, education, health care, culture, etc.) but mostly in building a lasting relationship based on mutual trust and sympathy along with a reconsideration of the way in which the citizen is perceived by the civil servants. At the beginning of the new millennium, civil servants are expected to be kind and helpful to citizens, eager to help them solve their problems quickly and effectively.

Due to the European integration and to the need to make the entire decisional process more transparent at local and central levels, several aspects are becoming imperative in what concerns the public administration bodies, such as the necessity to make a good impression on citizens, to raise their interest, to grow awareness, to develop a mutually advantageous relationship and practically to gain people’s trust. Developing a positive image is all the more important as, regularly, by voting, people can sanction the behaviour of the public administration representatives. This is why, by facilitating the free and unimpeded access of citizens to various public services and by supporting them any time they need it, the public administrators lay the foundations for a long-term relationship with the former.

Aware of all problems and difficulties faced by public administrations in Romania, the authors of the present research attempt to identify the major aspects that public authorities and institutions must take into account when drawing up their general strategy for approaching the citizens. Based on the empirical research conducted in various types of localities in Transylvania, the authors pinpoint a number of pressing problems of the system and attempt to come up with workable solutions. The research actually bears great scientific relevance, demonstrated mostly by the scarcity of similar studies in this field, as well as managerial and practical relevance useful to decision makers within local public administrations in rethinking the entire public system and mostly in building a lasting relationship with the citizens.

It is often suggested that the typical governance structures of family businesses provide them with a long-term horizon of strategic decision-making and a certain kind of stability. However, in case of business successions, family businesses are confronted with a new situation that challenges the former balance and marks a transition to a new one. It is hard to prepare for such situations, so in case of such transitions, the number of alternatives to find a new “balance” is rather restricted.

We posit that in times of business successions within family firms, the entrepreneurial orientation suffers a temporary wear-out of entrepreneurial orientation and action. Whereas the predecessors prepare to leave the company (or have already done so), a successor is, at least in most cases, not yet in sight. Against this background, the phenomenon of entrepreneurial myopia occurs, i.e., a limited entrepreneurial orientation and action. There may be different reasons for this problem. This paper addresses entrepreneurial myopia in terms of lacking real options. Real option thinking implies preparing the firm for an uncertain and complex future by proactively developing useful strategic alternatives that may be applied whatever may happen. The paper claims that business successions in family businesses are typical instances where alternatives are lacking or small in number so that decision-making leads to unfavorable results. We apply strategic option thinking to illuminate this problem and to find out ways to cope with it.

(Why) Does entrepreneurial myopia – i.e., a limited entrepreneurial orientation and action materialized in a reduced and non-entrepreneurial set of options – occur in family business succession? (If so) What kind of myopia can be observed, what are the reasons for a rather small set of options in business successions, and what are the potential solutions to overcome this condition?

In order to develop an answer to these research questions, this paper uses a transdisciplinary framework of analysis to explore the potential of strategic real option theory to enhance and improve the business succession situation. The unit of analysis is the organizational level.

The Romanian private medical system has had a significant increase during the last 10 years, and in this context, consumers have more treatment options, a fact which in turn generated a fierce competition in this sector. In this context, private medical companies are increasingly preoccupied with gaining as many patients as possible in order to increase their profits.

It is well known that having loyal clients is much less expensive than acquiring new clients, and, therefore, the medical care providers are trying to build customers’ loyalty.

This paper will identify and define the concept of “the client-patient” and map out some differences and similarities between the customer of the medical care services and the classical customer of different services, in order to highlight the characteristics of the client and patient.

One of the most important steps in the process of obtaining the loyalty of clients is the efforts of the company to accurately know its clients, more specifically their needs, wants, and expectations.

Since the consumer of medical services has different specifics compared to the ones of the classical consumer, therefore, the methods of turning the consumer of medical services into a loyal one are different as well. For this reason, in the last part of this communication, I have briefly looked into some features and expectations of the consumer of medical services, which in the end will lead to its loyalization.

Working as a Project Office Manager in a company active in business-to-business IT Professional Services (PS), I’m directly interested in the importance of measuring and analyzing Customer Satisfaction for the success of our business. Our company has set the Customer Satisfaction as a major objective for each professional employee (with different levels of importance). For example, the middle management has only two objectives: Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance (profitability and revenue).

Why is Customer Satisfaction an objective of such importance? It is obvious that in PS activities, the cost of attracting new customers is greater than the cost of retaining them. The marketing literature and much empirical research showed a strong correlation between Customer Satisfaction and loyalty to the company, leading to a lower turnover of the company’s present customers.

In this context, it is important to assess if these two objectives (Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance) are compatible – is it possible to have satisfied customers and also make good profit? It might seem as an irrelevant question, but in fact it has great importance – for example, if the market main characteristic is to be price sensitive, then competing on price and operational excellence should be the main focus – while Customer Satisfaction becomes secondary. How are we actually standing in the IT Professional Services industry?

Our company is running Customer Satisfaction surveys four times per year (every quarter). The surveys are designed in such a way as to give us feedback in three directions:

Our company is also running Employee Satisfaction surveys two times per year by getting feedback from each team member working for a specific customer and a specific project – this makes it easy to relate Employee Satisfaction with the project’s performance.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the correlation between the three types of ratings received from customers and also to find out if there are correlations between Customer Satisfaction ratings and the Financial Performance of those projects. We would also like to find if Employee Satisfaction is related somehow to Customer Satisfaction and the Financial Performance of projects.

In the end, this research wants to prove that the two main objectives (Customer Satisfaction and Financial Performance) are compatible (or even sustaining each other) and that Employee Satisfaction is an important factor influencing both of them. These expected findings are supported by previous research and results published in the literature, but the current research is done in an IT Professional Services company (a case study) that might reveal industry-specific aspects worth considering.

For this research, I have collected all the data regarding Customer Satisfaction measurements in 2014 together with the employees’ feedback and the financial results of each project of our company.

The article under discussion analyzes the state of development of the world economy from a transdisciplinary point of view. The scientific problem to be solved in this article consists of presenting what types of world economic phases took place in comparison with the economic periods and cycles presented by other authors or scientific works as well as what is the difference between world economic phase, economic phase transition, and economic circle or period. But the major scientific result of the article is to define and argue the new phase transition of the world economy and the next economic phase that starts in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This work is a transdisciplinary and synergetic approach where scientific concepts such as thermodynamic efficiency, order parameter, attractors, collaborative commons, open society, sustainable development, etc. will be applied. The practical meaning of the paper consists of a deeper understanding of the world economic trends, the future social and economic organization, and to what extent capitalism is going to lead the world society to another economic realm or even another economic structure and organization.

Economical endeavors have become complex and hardly predictable processes, making them difficult and overwhelming for companies that fail in being creative and innovative. Managers, in their permanent quest for accommodating the fast-paced changing business needs, are stretching the limits of creativity toward three sought-after borders: “What?,” “How?,” and “What for?” (to create).

The coordinates of the managerial creativity phenomenon spring out of the alternation of the so-called exact activities with those that can be named creative activities. This endless alternation is a consequence of the fact that managerial creativity itself is a continuous investigation state that might become a fundamental attribute of management.

Concrete economical environment elements, along with organizational factors and abstract elements of managers’ own thinking, have critical influences on the creative capacity of managers, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. This makes the attempt of transforming the managerial creativity into an iterative and perfectly explainable process even a harder task for the interested managers and researchers.

The main objective of this paper is to reveal interesting insights on managerial creativity, which could help managers by giving them a plus in efficiency in valuing their held management knowledge with an input of speculative thinking.

Entrepreneurial behavior enabling the long-term successful survival on the market depends on each entrepreneur’s ability to foresee the circumstances of their enterprise and correctly make the needed decisions. Experience shows that this view into the near or remote entrepreneurial future is not the favorite of many entrepreneurs. So they fail in the start-up phase of their enterprise, or even later, by making wrong decisions or not foreseeing their circumstances. This fact generates such questions as what skills must entrepreneurs have to be able to anticipate their entrepreneurial future and its targets and where this ability for foresight comes from in humans. This question is nearly unexplored. So this short paper is a first step toward showing how other sciences (neurobiology, psychology) can lead to the skills that entrepreneurs should have to be able to run their enterprises in the present as well as in the future. This paper gives only a short view into the process of creating a model for a foresight-able entrepreneur, falsifiable in practice in the sense of critical rationalism. Thus, this paper is only a very first step toward learning more about foresight-oriented entrepreneurs.

The paper proposes a retrospective analysis of merger and acquisition activity carried out during the fifth wave of transactions, a wave that remained deeply entrenched in the history of corporate takeovers. To provide a clear picture of the topic treated, the author analyzed comparatively the merger and acquisition activity undertaken during the fifth wave in the USA and the EU. The research conducted in this paper is based on a systematic, logical, and comparative analysis of scientific literature and statistical data regarding the fifth wave of mergers and acquisitions. The author used as a research method the qualitative approach in order to analyze the factors generating and the particularities of the fifth merger and acquisition wave. This was actually the first wave that was truly international; it reflected the evolution of the economic globalization process and had particular importance in the analysis of the development of the merger and acquisition activity globally. The author found that during the 1990s, Europe achieved a number of transactions comparable to those achieved in the USA and that the share of international operations in the total mergers and acquisitions recorded in the USA or the European Union increased. Also, cross-border merger and acquisition activity gained new values, and the European Union has strengthened its position on the international market of corporate takeovers. The European Union has become a serious competitor, the role of the EU companies being very important both from the perspective of the purchasers and of the sellers. However, the large volume of mergers and acquisitions is noted in the USA, a country that basically sets the tone in terms of adopting this strategy of company growth and development.

Long before Gardner proposed his model of multiple intelligences, an important question has been constantly fueled by both management theorists and practitioners: “Is the quality of the decision making process linked with the genetic heritage that managers have in terms of intellectual potential?”

Each person and (by default) each manager is thought to be born with an almost unchangeable intellectual potential, which can impact the manner in which they execute a specific managerial task. While examining whether a managerial decision was cleverly or foolishly reached, or otherwise the decision was handled intelligently or ineptly, we can find distinctive connotations of the multiple intelligences model, which may feed the assumption that there are certain criteria for a behavior to be considered a managerial intelligence.

The main objective of the paper is to reveal a part of the interesting conclusions that were brought to light by a daring research initiative of a Romanian psychometric technologies inventor (Dumitru Grigore), in the field of multiple intelligences.

The paper starts from debating on the limitations of Gardner’s model of multiple intelligences and continues with exploring the main principles of analysis that were used for identifying the fractal intelligences and then the managerial fractal intelligences. The discussion leads to a set of well-articulated assumptions, reinforced by concrete results of a research conducted on a sample of over 4500 subjects, tested with the help of modern psychometric technologies, which are based on the EDA concept (electrodermal activity).

The authors’ approach can represent a fresh perspective on the multiple intelligences theory, which might be of interest to students, researchers, managers, or psychologists.

This paper aims to estimate the size of the Romanian shadow economy (SE) by applying a structural equation approach using quarterly data for the period 2000–2013. In order to do that, the shadow economy is modelled like a latent variable using a special case of the structural equation models – the MIMIC model. The empirical results pointed out the best model as a MIMIC 4-1-2 model with four causal variables (unemployment rate, self-employment, government employment and 12-month real interest rate) and two indicators (index of real GDP and currency ratio M1/M2).

The shadow economy measured as percentage of official GDP records the value of 40.27% in the first quarter of 2000 and follows a descendent trend reaching the value of 27% in the third quarter of 2008. The size of the shadow economy begins to slowly increase, reaching the value of 32.8% of official GDP in the third quarter of 2010. For the last years, the size of the unreported economy oscillates around the value of 28–29% of official GDP.

Universities remain major contributors to regional knowledge-based economies since they undertake relevant research in areas defined by smart specialization strategies, and they also have the capacity to improve the human capital through education and training. During the period 2007–2013, Romanian universities attracted significant funding under European Social Fund (ESF) to support human resource development projects as part of the sectoral and regional development strategies that were influenced by the absorption capacity of ESF. This paper is based on the assumptions that (a) the absorption rate measures the extent to which an organization is able to fully spend EU funds in an effective and efficient way and (b) the “demand side” absorption capacity is largely dependent on the administrative capacity, namely, the ability of applicants and project beneficiaries to prepare and implement good eligible projects and to properly manage the projects in order to reduce the incidence of irregularities. The research aims to analyze the administrative capacity of selected Romanian universities, as eligible project beneficiaries, to attract and make effective use of ESF funding during the 2007–2013 period and to identify transformations that motivate university management; we will also make recommendations for universities to further build their capacity in the 2014–2020 programming period.