This study explores the causes of business failures especially manufacturing firms in Ikwerre Local Government Area (KELGA) of Nigeria. The study samples were drawn from five (5) randomly selected manufacturing firms such as Rizonpalm Limited, Unizon Limited, Johnson Nigeria Limited, Chinda Limited, and Chizi Limited. Data were collected through the use of questionnaire and personal interviews of the sample elements of the population. The hypotheses were tested using both the Chi-square (X) and test of proportion (Z-test) statistical tools. The findings of the research showed that the business failures are caused by the negative internal and external environmental factors namely: pressure from competitors or new entrants, poor improvement in modern technology and poor sales, the outbreak of pest and farm diseases, government policy and etc. The study recommends that there must be application of strategies in order to ensure that manufacturing firms with poor performances can have suggestions for achieving business survival, increase in profit and greater market share.

In our turbulent world, there is nothing more permanent than change. Organizations face the continuous prospect of change as they fight to stay afloat and compete in an increasingly competitive and globalized economy. The question is, how do organizations manage this change? This article provides a brief overview of the history of change theory, followed by a discussion on differing change agent strategies and techniques to managing change and stability in organizations, including an introduction into the emergence of role of the change agent, a discussion of the implications for agents of change or stability, and a discussion of the need for anticipating how people will be affected by change. Finally, I provide some specific tools for change agents, and discuss how to be an effective change agent in organizations.

The aim of this paper is to review the principle of the leaky bucket in global and international partnerships.

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between distinctive capabilities, innovativeness, strategy types and the export performance of SMEs in the Malaysian manufacturing sectors. The conceptual framework is developed based on the distinctive capabilities, innovativeness, strategy types and the export performance. This study is based on a sample survey consisting of 121 SMEs in the manufacturing sector. Using structured questionnaires, the data were collected by mail as well as interviews with owner-managers of the SMEs. The finding indicates that there is no significant relationship between distinctive capabilities, innovativeness and the strategy types on the export performance of SMEs.

Psychological research demonstrates that overconfident behavior is inclined to emerge when people encounter uncertain situations. It is presumed that some investors practice overconfident behavior in the capital market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the overconfident investors in predicting the value of the securities when they receive no market information, good news, and bad news. In this quasi experimental research, the participants were grouped into two categories based on the level of their overconfidence, namely the less and the more informed investors. The result shows that the less informed investors tend to overestimate the values of the securities that produce higher prediction errors than do those more informed investors in all experimental markets except that in the presence of good news. The phenomena reflect that the less informed investors practice self deceptive behavior.