Category: Leadership

The saving of New Orleans: Demolition, preservation, reincarnation?

Part One: While it seems inevitable that one day thousands of former New Orleans residents will return home, it’s equally likely that the city will not so much be rebuilt as reincarnated — and that the effort will prove successful only with radically new approaches to land use and a strict adherence to high standards of planning and accountability. Even with new and improved levee systems, pumping facilities and flood-control strategies, experts say it may be time to abandon the lowest-lying areas. In the first of a two-part discussion of whether and how to begin rebuilding the city, experts from the ASU community and the W. P. Carey School of Business weigh in with their opinions.

CEOs with COOs: Two heads are not necessarily better than one

Depending on the size of the corporation, the diversity of its products and the background of the CEO, a COO as second-in-command can be a help or a hindrance, according to a new study by professors from the W.P. Carey School of Business and Pennsylvania State University. The study, CEOs Who Have COOs: Contingency Analysis of an Unexplored Structural Form, reported that in many instances, "CEOs who have COOs deliver lower organizational performance than those who do not." The study probes this phenomenon and offers several possible explanations.

Iridium’s house of cards: An analysis

An outgrowth of Motorola in the late 1980s, Iridium was set up to be the world’s first global wireless phone company. With 19 organizational partners spread across 160 countries, dozens of novel technological inventions, and over $5 billion in investment, expectations were high when Iridium was launched amid great acclaim. Less than a year later the company filed for Chapter 11. A W.P. Carey School of Business professor and his teammates have made a study of Iridium’s collapse, focusing on its stages of decline and especially the transitions between those stages.