You are cordially invited to the lecture organized by Department of Management (DM), Faculty of Business and Management (FBM). Details of the lecture are as follows:

Topic: Managing to Adapt: Structured Management Practices and Firm Resilience

Guest: Dr. Wei LI, Research Assistant Professor, University of Macao

Date: November 20th, 2024 (Wednesday)

Time: 2:00-3:00pm

Venue: T1-302-R1

Language: English

Abstract

Why do some firms adapt and even thrive when major unexpected shocks occur? We hypothesise that structured management practices are a General Purpose Technology that helps firms adapt to unforeseen shocks. Using a novel, custom-designed survey, we find that firms with more structured management practices were more resilient to unexpected shocks, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, adopting homeworking and online sales practices more fully and seeing a smaller fall in their turnover. Linking at the firm level to a high-frequency business survey, we show that firms with highly structured management practices undertook more product, process and logistics innovation to facilitate this change, switched to homeworking more quickly and adopted hybrid working more completely in the long run. To test this hypothesis further, we look at firms affected by trade disruptions and find that firms with structured management practices were also more likely to experience positive outcomes following trade disruptions. We conclude that management is a General Purpose Technology that improves responses to many types of shocks.

About the Speaker

Dr. Wei LI is a Research Assistant Professor from the Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macao. She received her PhD from Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her PhD dissertation studies Competition in the Retail Market of Consumer-Packaged Goods, in which advanced quantitative methods are employed to study competition using large supermarket datasets. After her PhD, she first worked at a marketing consultancy company in London, doing quantitative forecasting, and later as a teaching fellow and postdoc researcher at the University of Nottingham. At the time, she collaborated with the Office for National Statistics (ONS)  to study firm management practices and their resilience to shocks. Her expertise lies in using quantitative methods (panel data model, lasso, elastic net, random forest, text mining, etc.) to study market responses.

Please scan the QR code in the poster for registration. Thank you for your attention and we look forward to seeing you at the lecture.