An improved environmental pathway model for assessing high-level waste repository risks.

An environmental pathway model useful for assessing the postclosure radiological risks from high-level waste repositories has been developed. The model describes more fully than its predecessors the long-term build-up of radionuclides in the biosphere and is consequently better suited to the analysis of the prolonged radionuclide releases potentially associated with geologic waste repositories. The effect of incorporating the additional features is to alter, in some cases substantially, the predicted population risks associated with a given long-term release of particular radionuclides. The model has been used to evaluate certain assumptions underlying the environmental standard for high-level waste repositories recently issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Interpretive management: what general managers can learn from design.

The past two decades have seen a dramatic acceleration in the pace of marketplace change. Companies have abandoned the old hierarchical model, with its clean functional divisions and clear lines of authority, and adopted flatter, less bureaucratic structures. But if most organizations have begun to adapt to the uncertainty of rapid change, most managers have not. They remain locked into the mechanical mind-set of the industrial age--that is, they assume that any management challenge can be translated into a clearly defined problem for which an optimal solution can be found. That approach works in stable markets and even in markets that change in predictable ways. Today's markets, however, are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they're trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can't even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. The challenges facing the general manager in these circumstances, the authors argue, resemble those typically confronted by design managers. In the unpredictable world of research and design, neither the flow of the development process nor its end point can be defined at the outset. Rather than the traditional analytical approach to management, the design world requires an interpretive one. And that approach is equally well suited to rapidly changing, unpredictable markets. The authors describe how companies such as Levi Strauss & Company and Chiron Corporation have stayed at the top of their industries by adopting just such an interpretive approach to management.