Global Recession to Global Recovery : Enhancing Enterprise Competitiveness Through Human Capital and Operations Management

Global Recession to Global Recovery: It is well known fact that all good things, as also bad things, come to an end and business cycles pass through good and bad economic times. Economically 2010 was a year of transition from economic recession to recovery. Economies were improving in some countries and industries were showing signs of betterment but were still far away from a significant path of recovery and were contemplating to shift their strategies that could be more suitable in a changed scenario of transition. A transition period is unique because it represents a time of adjustment and uncertainty which has common forces of varying impact on individual enterprises, societies, geographies, and companies’ strategies. There are no clear or universal ‘must-dos’ in a period of transition; rather, there are times when leaders make the changes that are necessary to get ahead for sustainable growth of their business. The transition from recession to recovery presents unique opportunities and challenges to all organizations and once the recovery begins the answers are more complex. Executives face a decision of where to invest and trade to support recovering revenues rather than to continue cost cutting. Enhancing Enterprise Competitiveness through Human Capital and Operations Management: In this backdrop, this book contains 42 selected papers from over 200 papers presented at the 15thNirma International Conference on Management (NICOM 2012) organized during January 5-7, 2012, at the Institute of Management, Nirma University, on the theme of “Global Recession to Global Recovery: Opportunity, Challenges and Strategies for Sustainable Growth”. With the primary objective of developing collective strategies for sustainable growth and development from various opportunities to be traced during the transitional period of recession to recovery, the papers included in the book cover the areas of management education primarily dealing with issues of human resource management (HRM), organizational behavior (OB), operations management (OM), information technology (IT), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sector specific studies. Managing these issues in a transition period to achieve sustainable growth is a challenge for every enterprise. The various papers in this book, pertaining to these issues suggest strategies and prescribe policy implications during the transition period to achieve sustainable growth