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This article provides an interview with Marcus Buckingham.

An interview with Marcus Buckingham, looking at his work for The Gallup Organization and also his views about management and leadership development.

Marcus Buckingham answers questions about managers, leaders and the recent CIPD conference.

Provides an insightful interview with Marcus Buckingham.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as vital for economies to grow and survive in an increasingly competitive world. Studying the critical success factors of entrepreneurial activity is and will continue to be a primary scholarly interest. Factors that have been identified in current times as critical to the success of entrepreneurs can even be seen in the actions of an entrepreneur in nineteenth‐century America. This paper seeks to use historical evidence about the career of Henry B. Plant to illustrate the application of those key factors and to expand knowledge of customer networks in entrepreneurial success.

The recent Kauffman study of successful entrepreneurs identifies 12 characteristics that are associated with their success. Clustered into three groupings in descending order of importance they are: work experience and previous success, management team, and luck; professional and personal networks, university education, and availability of venture capital funding; geographic location, advice from investors, alumni networks, and state and/or regional assistance. Consequently, this article examines the career of Henry B. Plant to provide additional historical evidence for the Kauffman study's classification of critical characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. Moreover, it illustrates the value of strong ties in a customers network as a valued resource for entrepreneurs.

Henry B. Plant was an entrepreneurial pioneer and a visionary leader. Singlehandedly, he made Tampa, Florida by building the railroad to it. His strategy of opening up the state with an integrated rail and ship system necessitated thinking through the interconnections of different modes of transportation, tying together schedules, and making it possible to move people and goods from New York to Havana. By examining Henry B. Plant examples of how he used key success factors, similar to those in Kauffman's study, to create and develop his entrepreneurial efforts can be found. Moreover, his ability to create strong ties with his customer network created a valuable and unique resource in his entrepreneurial success.

While many studies of entrepreneurs focus on the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, an example from the nineteenth century remains of value in understanding the key drivers of entrepreneurial success. This is particularly true for Plant who showed that by carefully creating and maintaining strong ties with a customer network he could provide his enterprise with a valuable and unique resource that was a major contributor to his success as an entrepreneur.

This chapter examines the marketplace context for media innovations. This includes factors that have been well researched and about which much is known, for example, pricing and early adopters, as well as marketplace elements and patterns that are not so thoroughly understood but are nonetheless very important in understanding the process of adoption, for example, the role of serendipity. It reviews patterns of adoption that were prevalent in the twentienth century but which have changed in the twenty-first century, for example, how word of mouth has been transformed by social media. Declines and failures as well as successes along with the international scope of media innovations, including in developing countries, are accessed.

The advantages and disadvantages of large and small companies creating media innovations are reviewed as are the respective roles of content creation and distribution. The concluding discussion section describes the contexts for media innovations today, including concerns about their privacy, use of media in public places, filters for new media innovations to identify likely successes, and the importance of teams in developing media innovations.

This study aims to investigate whether “small- and medium-sized enterprises” (SMEs) benefit from their external accountants’ business advice through enhanced firm performance. Most SMEs draw on external support, and their main advisors are external accountants (Bennett and Robson, 1999). The resource-based view of the firm suggests that firms will seek external support if they perceive a gap in their internal resources.

Data were collected from a questionnaire mailed to a random sample of Australian SMEs, defined as businesses having between 5 and 200 full-time employees.

An analysis of 380 survey respondents confirms a positive relationship between the voluntary purchase of business advice and SME performance, and that SME performance is further enhanced when business advice is purchased jointly with auditing. These relationships apply to the small (5-49 employees) but not to the medium-sized (50-200 employees) businesses. Findings are consistent with smaller firms having narrower resource bases and thus a greater need to source business advice.

The accounting profession has long encouraged a broadening of its service base, and evidence that small businesses perceive a performance benefit from their accountants’ business advice provides support for the profession’s strategy.

This research extends the empirical literature investigating the link between the business advice of an external accountant and SME performance. It explains small firms’ demand for business advice by extending the application of the resource-based view of the firm and provides new evidence consistent with “knowledge spillover” from auditing to business advice in the small firm environment.

THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE of the British Library was set up in June 1971 following the acceptance in April 1970 by the government of the recommendations of the Dainton Report on the national libraries and the consequent White Paper (Cmnd 4572) in January 1971. The committee is to plan the organisation of the library and develop and co‐ordinate its policy, and is clearly of the greatest importance, not only to the national libraries but to all libraries through the bibliographic and research services the British Library will undertake. What do we know of the work of this committee, which has now been in existence for a year?

Notes that for whatever market – educational or general – low price paperback classic series have continued to expand rapidly and in the UK the market is dominated by Penguin and the Oxford University Press. States that the classic anthology remains one of the most influential forms of publishing poetry and that Oxford has been dominant in issuing throughout the twentieth century a series of magisterial anthologies which have gone a long way to establishing the canon of English poetry. Concludes that neither student nor general reader has ever been so well provided with such a wide range of truly classic literature at moderate prices from a range of publishers.