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This chapter provides an overview of the key management conclusions that can be derived from this book. It presents the key directions which will be pursued further regarding management practices and strategies to measure and manage IO to improve business performance in the future.

This chapter empirically shows the existence of IO as a new comprehensive measure of effective information use. It then establishes a direct causal link between higher IO and higher business performance. It notes that the integrated IO perspective demonstrates how senior managers perceive the three information capabilities contribute to a comprehensive measure of effective information use in their companies. It frames this discussion as an answer to an ongoing controversy over the IT productivity paradox, and the elusive connection between IT investments and practices and improvements in business performance.

This chapter examines the use of IO as a new metric to measure effective information use across companies and industries, and within the business units of global companies. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the three schools of management thinking and practice related to business performance metrics. It notes that none of the schools has provided an integrated theory and empirical validation of a metric directly linking information use in companies to business performance. It presents the Information Orientation Dashboard as a new diagnostic tool for evaluating IO inside and across companies over time. It adds that there is an initial assessment of the types of management strategies, and actions that can be used to improve the behaviours and capabilities associated with the three information capabilities of IO within companies.

This chapter focuses on how well senior managers perceive their company in managing information to improve business performance. It discusses the underlying information practices associated with the five phases of the ‘information cycle’ — sensing, collecting organising, processing, and maintaining information to enhance its use for decision making in a company.

This chapter offers a limited critique and a forward-looking research agenda for studies of the institutional development of business schools. Three important research themes are identified and justified. These are: international comparative studies to map the degree of convergence and divergence in business schools throughout the world; studies which explore and explain performance differences between business schools; and micro studies of the processes, practices, identity and performance of business school faculties in their changing institutional and environmental contexts. In each case, the three research themes are located in pre-existing literature in the social sciences, in organization and management theory, and in studies of higher education and the universities.

The purpose of the balanced scorecard is to provide a holistic perspective to setting firm goals and monitoring performance. The balanced scorecard provides a financial, marketing, operations, and human resources perspective of a firm’s performance. When used to implement strategy, the balanced scorecard approach prompts managers to think about what needs to happen in different elements of the business for the strategy to take hold. It encourages managers to think about how the strategy will impact the customer, operational, and people processes to ultimately affect financial results. This chapter discusses the underlying theory, core idea, depiction, process, insight or value created, and risks and limitations of the balanced scorecard. The chapter also continues the illustration of the Chocolate Moose and applies the steps of the balanced scorecard to this case.

This final chapter pulls together the main themes of the book. It is organized under four main themes: (1) What are the crucial elements of the JLP model, how is leadership exercised and how, within such a model, are managers held to account? (2) What are the implications of the model for business performance? (3) How do managers view the nature and importance of partner engagement and democracy? (4) What are the lessons to be drawn from this case example of a stakeholder-oriented organization for policy makers and practitioners and can the positive attributes of the model be replicated elsewhere?

This part of the book provides a short summary on the analysis in the chapters that have dealt with the third theme in this book: balancing and trade-offs. A traditional view on the logic of markets states that any reconciliation of business performance with societal progress necessitates trade-offs between competing objectives. The theme of this section of the book has been devoted to assessing the precise form of these trade-offs, the manner in which they might occur, and whether they are in fact required at all.

Chapter Three provides an overview of contemporary writing about work in the pluralist frame of reference. The chapter defines pluralism, describes its research programme and how pluralist scholars have tended to conceive of worker subjectivity. Explanatory theories favoured by pluralists are discussed and the chapter reviews the main prescriptions for good industrial relations that are proposed by pluralists. The chapter ends by considering the engagement roles of pluralist researchers, arguing that these embrace the activities of arbitrator, policy evaluator, and Fabian reformer. The main thesis of the chapter is that pluralism has changed over time and has become a more radical body of thought. This is so because the neo-liberal framework for much public policy is not favourable to pluralist thinking, thereby pushing pluralist researchers to adopt a more critical ‘outsider’ perspective on public policy.