Sports and war metaphors abound in business today. For example, one management book, Thunder in the Sky, by Thomas Cleary, opens with a Chinese saying that translates: “The marketplace is a battlefield. The Asian people view success in the business world as tantamount to victory in battle.”...

Recently I completed a review of the empirical research on scientific journals (Armstrong 1982). This review provided evidence for an “author’s formula,” a set of rules that authors can use to increase the likelihood and speed of acceptance of their manuscripts. Authors should: (1) not...

In “natural learning” the learner takes responsibility for learning. This responsibility applies to setting objectives, selecting active learning tasks, obtaining feedback, and making applications. Self- oriented skill training (SOS) provides a highly structured procedure to help the learner...

Anterasian et al. (1996) present a one-sided argument that the use of market share as an objective is detrimental. Because two-sided arguments are persuasive for intelligent audiences, one might wonder why they chose a one-sided approach. Having spent the past decade working on this topic, I...

A literature review suggested that behavioral changes occur more rapidly when the learner assumed responsibility. Natural learning, an approach to help learners assume responsibility, was compared with the traditional strategy in seven field experiments. It produced more than twice as many...

A quantitative critique of 28 studies concludes that formal planning is valuable for firms. The results were particularly favorable for manufacturing firms: nine studies found formal planning to be associated with better performance and none found detrimental performance.

Graffiti is regarded by many as a blight on our cities because it contributes to visual pollution. City governments spend vast sums in an effort to clean the ubiquitous graffiti from urban walls. I suggest that the “cleansing strategy” is an expensive, ineffective way of dealing with the...

Replication is rare in marketing. Of 1,120 papers sampled from three major marketing journals, none were replications. Only 1.8% of the papers were extensions, and they consumed 1.1% of the journal space. On average, these extensions appeared seven years after the original study. The publication...

When we first began publication of the Journal of Forecasting, we reviewed policies that were used by other journals and also examined the research on scientific publishing. Our findings were translated into a referee's rating form that was published in the journal [Armstrong (1982a)]. These...

Recent research shows that journal reviewing practices are neither objective nor fair. I propose a procedure to increase the likelihood of publishing important papers. This will be tested by Interfaces for a year.