Flood is the most frequently occuring natural disaster worldwide, with Asia suffering the highest incidence. While humanitarian efforts and initiatives to alleviate suffering caused by floods are ongoing, we believe there is a new opportunity to coordinate "last mile" humanitarian efforts in the event of a flood, using micro-retailers. Micro-retailers are the 'last mile' nodes in traditional retail supply chains in many Asian countries, and we propose the use of social enterprise to buttress these supply chains for distribution of essential goods by coordinating with micro-retailers before and after floods. In support of this we also present a stylised model to quantify the benefits of our proposal.

Analysing 60 years worth of data, Amanda Goodall and Ganna Pogrebna discover that the most successful Formula One teams are those led by former competitive drivers. Teams led by managers who have less 'hands-on' experience within the sport tend to underperform in comparison. This research suggests why greater experience of driving makes for more successful team leaders, and what this can teach us about leadership in other industries.

Private equity firms are accused of increasing the short-term performance of buyouts by reducing investments in human capital. To explore this issue, this paper presents findings from the first representative pan-European survey of managers' perceptions of the impact of private equity on management practices in buyouts. Managers report that private equity investment results in an overall increase in high performance work practices (HPWPs), and the increase is greater where private equity firms anticipate a late exit. Anglo-American private equity buyouts are just as likely to introduce new HPWPs as non-Anglo-American private equity backed buyouts, and also extend financial incentives to cover a greater proportion of employees.

As policy makers seek to draw lessons from the growth of Chinese manufacturing, we need to better understand the evolving strategies adopted by Chinese manufacturers since the economic reforms of the 1980s. Focusing on the apparel and electronics sectors, we look at how Chinese manufacturers sought to move to higher value-adding parts of the supply chain in different ways during the period 2001-2011 and how their western OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) responded. As a first step towards understanding the co-evolving strategies and tactics of Chinese contract manufacturers and western OEMs, we use a simple game-theoretic framework of contract manufacturer and OEM strategies to look at the actual tactics many Chinese contract manufacturers adopted.