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The objective of the paper is to analyse the economic justification of introducing deregulation to Israel's regulated electricity market and infer whether such a policy change makes sense for the country.

The paper employs an analytical model of electricity market equilibrium under regulation and deregulation. It considers two technologies – coal‐fired generators and combined cycle gas turbines, and two time‐of‐day prices – peak and off‐peak. It analyzes pricing, revenues, profits and consumer surplus both for the regulated industry and the deregulated industry where firms compete, during the peak and off‐peak periods, according to the Cournot conjecture. The model is then applied to the Israeli case.

The analysis shows that a workably competitive electricity market with financially viable firms does not improve net benefits to Israeli society. A deregulated market is likely to yield smaller net benefits than a regulated market, and certainly a smaller consumer surplus. This happens since efficiency improvements in generation costs under deregulation will not be sufficient to compensate for the reduction in consumer surplus due to higher electricity prices under deregulation.

The simplifications used in the analytical model for ease of analysis and presentation could have influenced some results.

The findings of the paper would have significant relevance for electricity sector deregulation in Israel and other regions that currently have a regulated electricity sector (e.g. Hong Kong, Africa, and many parts of North America).

The value of the paper lies in its ability to demonstrate the inherent weaknesses of the deregulation policy through an analytical model.

The goal of this study is to examine the effect that nine managerial skills of the firm's top management team (TMT) (persuasiveness, administrative ability, fluency in speaking, knowledge about group tasks, diplomacy and tact, social skills, creativity, conceptual skills, and cleverness) have on the performance of industrial firms (a weighted average of seven performance measures).

Data were collected from chief executive officers of 93 industrial enterprises in Israel through structured questionnaires and complementary in‐depth investigation. Both multivariate (robust canonical analysis and hierarchical regressions) and in‐depth analyses were used to analyze the study's results.

The results show that managerial skills possessed by the TMT strongly affect firm performance, their impact apparently being greater than that of variables representing industry sectors, firm size and age, and perceived environmental uncertainty. In particular, skills that are required to manage people (human resources skills) are found to be more important to firm performance than intellectual abilities.

The study emphasizes the importance of complementary managerial skills as an indicator of quality TMT. The TMT's ability to make good decisions and lead the organization to meet external and internal constituents is a very complex task.

The study contributes to the literature by first, providing support to the importance of managerial skills for firm performance; second, suggesting a new avenue to incorporate the resource based view into the field of strategic leadership in general and managerial skills in particular; and finally, indicating the importance of simultaneously testing the effect of a set of predictors (managerial skills) on a set of performance measures.

Few scholars have been cited as frequently as Pinto, Slevin, and Prescott for their contributions to project success and related critical success factors (CSF) in the 1980s. Studies since then built on their articles to broaden and refine our understanding of the topic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons for the impact of these seminal contributions and how the topic of project success continues to evolve.

The paper analyses the popularity of Pinto and his colleagues' contributions to project success and reviews the development of this field of research since then.

Project success remains a vibrant school of thought as do the earlier definitions, measurement scales and dimensions, and assessment techniques that Pinto and his colleagues developed. The authors view success more broadly and think of it strategically because they consider longer‐term business objectives. Some research is now based on managerial or organizational theories and reflects the multi‐dimensional and networked nature of project success.

Practically, the classic contributions in project success continue to be valid. The authors see diversity in how success is defined and measured. The CSFs vary by project types, life cycle phases, industries, nationalities, individuals, and organizations.

The paper relates earlier understandings of project success to subsequent research in the field and underscores the significant findings by Pinto, Slevin, and Prescott.