Strategic resistance for sustaining enterprise relevance

Imperatives of Sustainable University Excellence: A Conceptual Framework

This study envisions the architecture of a modern era university with sustainable standards of excellence. Sustainable University Excellence is herein defined as the ability of a university to excel in the core areas of knowledge creation and dissemination via the mobilization of human, social, intellectual, and financial capital to serve on socioeconomic and environmental fronts ethically, efficiently, and effectively to secure a sustainable future. Seven core performance domains of a university are explored: Teaching quality, research culture, technological capability building, accessibility, community engagement, internationalization, and environment, which should be prioritize in order to continuously advance along a sustainable excellence continuum. This study provides a self-assessment methodology that universities can employ to compare their performance relative to the aforementioned domains, thus enabling the identification of performance gaps, the knowledge of which is crucial to the formulation of more targeted strategy. This approach allows decision makers to form a more coherent vision for sustainability within institutional and broader contexts. The approach proposed herein incorporates the three aspects of sustainability that form the so-called Triple Bottom Line (TBL).

Sustainable Enterprise Excellence: Attribute-Based Assessment Protocol

This paper is intended to design and provide a reliable and valid measurement instrument to aid organizations that wish to self-assess their performance and positioning relative to sustainable enterprise excellence. Recent research trends in performance excellence, quality management, and organizational sustainability have been directed towards integrated management systems (IMS). Sustainable Enterprise Excellence (SEE) is among these integrated management systems. SEE is undergoing ongoing development and its measurement scale is rudimentary, hence it lacks the more sophisticated sorts of measurement scales often used for organizational self-assessment purposes. A scientific approach is used herein to devise a more comprehensive SEE-oriented organizational assessment against six proposed performance results-oriented domains or constructs: governance and strategy, process implementation, sustainability performance, financial performance, innovation performance, and human capital performance. Each organizational performance construct is to be measured by ten attributes-based items. Maturity scale ratings that range from 0 to 10 reflect organizational performance relative to the associated item and the sum of item ratings across a construct reflects performance within the specific domain, the summation of the six construct scores then yields a measure of the overall organizational performance with respect to SEE. The assessment areas against which organization performance compares poorly suggest opportunities for improvement of associated business processes, the achievement of which will contribute to a sustainable future.