From Gate to Plate – Strategic Management Accounting for Agribusiness

Lisa Jack (Benchmaking in Food and Farming) is running a workshop at CIMA on 27th May 2011, based on her paper ‘From Gate to Plate’. The event explores how to link the twin disciplines of benchmarking and target cost management in agribusiness … a wonderful example of how to import management accounting practice, that has been proven in other industries, into farming and food production.

HR Management in Global Projects

Jean Binder, author of Global Project Management  (Awarded ‘best of the best’ Project Management Book by the Project Management Institute 2008), will participate in the Congres de Management de Projet in Switzerland,  and present the topic “Human Resource Management in Global Projects”. 

Jean Binder, PMP, has more than 20 years of experience working in project environments, most of them living abroad and communicating in multi-cultural and multi-language environments. He has particular experience of managing global projects, having implemented collaborative tools and techniques in a number of global organisations.  

The Presentation will be on Thursday 28th April 2011, 10:30 to 12:10 at The University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

 Find more information about the presentation and congress.

How Consumers’ Diverse Personal Values influence the Country-of-Origin effect

The country-of-origin effect, defined in various ways in the literature, refers in general to the influence of a product’s country of origin on people’s attitudes and behaviour towards the product (including agricultural and industrialized goods, as well as services). This effect may represent an intangible barrier to the product’s entry into new markets due to the consumers’ negative biases towards imported products.

In this chapter (from The New Cultures of Food) you will find out how to understand the country-of-origin effect; what personal values are and why they are important in defining people’s behaviour; and learn about the relationship between values and the country-of-origin effect on the basis of the results of empirical research.

Gower authors are Linked-in

The ‘Author Blogs’ tag on our blog page gives you a sense of what Gower authors are talking about. A number have established Linkedin Groups too, for example Andrew Fearne’s Value Chain Thinking Group and Jean Binder’s Global Project Management Group, this latter group has over 13,000 members.

In praise of good applied research!

I have a huge amount of time for good applied research. The best material coming out of universities and other research establishments is very relevant to business practitioners and deserves a wider audience than I suspect it gets. Our two series of books for the food and agribusiness industries (The Food and Agricultural Marketing Series, and Gower Sustainable Food Chains Series) are a case in point and there are also some wonderful case studies on the website of the Centre for Value Chain Research (headed up by the Series Editor of the latter series, Professor Andy Fearne).  If you are in the food or agribusiness industries, do have a look at this material and maybe you’ll start to share my admiration for our researchers.

Value Chain Thinking – author blog

The latest addition to our ‘author blogs tab’ (at the top) is by Professor Andrew Fearne (author of Regoverning Markets). In his entry on 4th January he discusses the  first of a series of short videos where he describes the key challenges facing businesses today and the core elements of effective value chain management. The videos can then be found in ‘Categories’. (The Centre for Value Chain Research provides a Shopper Insight and Business Improvement Service for UK Farmers and Small Food Producers).