What makes you or your company distinctive? What sets you apart from the competition? These are important questions for businesses and individuals alike, and we at the Graziadio Business Review hope that our new issue will give you some new knowledge to help you rise above the rest. Whether you do that legally, by securing a trademark, financially, by aligning your financial decisions with your strategy, or through your unique management style, the Spring issue has something for you. And be sure to subscribe to the GBR Blog, which will feature weekly podcast interviews with each of the authors on their research.
A Look Inside This Issue
Establishing your “distinctiveness” is a requisite if you want the legal protection of a trademark, but if your mark is not inherently distinctive, you may still have a case in secondary meaning. Authors David Scalise, JD, Alexa Koenig, JD, MBA and Brandon Carr clarify this seemingly muddy legal issue in “Secondary Meaning in Trademark and Trade Dress Law: What it Is and What You Need to Know.” This is the second in a series of three articles on trademark and trade dress law written by this cross-disciplinary team. Stay tuned for the final installment on “protecting descriptive brands” in the forthcoming Summer 2011 issue.
Business is often typified by greed, exploitation, and winning at any cost, but the school of “positive organizational scholarship” says that nice guys don’t always finish last. In his article, “Positive Organizational Scholarship and Practice: A Dynamic Duo,” Andre S. Avramchuk, PhD, draws from a decade of implementing large-scale change projects at Kaiser Permanente to bring the reader three tenets for fostering organizational positivity.
There is much written on resilience in business strategy, but how do financial decisions factor in? Stephen F. Austin State University’s Garland Simmons, PhD and Dillard Tinsley, PhD, offer a step-by-step approach to fortifying your fiscal fitness in “Financial Elements of Business Resilience: A Systematic Approach to Financial Staying Power.”
With the current debt crisis facing the United States and many European countries, we couldn’t think of a better time to engage Graziadio finance faculty on the future of the global currency system. This video panel, entitled “Currency Wars,” features finance experts Davide Accomazzo, Peggy Crawford, PhD, Edward Fredericks, and Clemens Kownatzki.
We also have faculty reviews of several of the latest business books. Check out what they had to say about Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order; Ignited: Managers! Light Up Your Company and Career for More Power, More Purpose and More Success; The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World; Ethics in Motion, and Workforce of One: Revolutionizing Talent Management Through Customization.
Finally, we at the Graziadio Business Review hope that the secondary meaning you get when you see our logo is one of relevance, intellectual stimulation, and dialogue. We encourage you to comment on articles, offer your own insights, and let us know how we can do it even better.
Distinctively yours,
Audra Quinn
Managing Editor, Graziadio Business Review
