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Today’s business environment requires leaders to be able to react quickly to the changes that are constantly emerging. Agile techniques help leaders face such challenges and engage the organization in an environment where it can respond flexibly to emerging changes (Fincke et al. 2020; Hitka et al., 2018). Agile people leadership is based on motivating team members while allowing them to communicate with each other and set goals, with each of them involved in decisionmaking and capable of self-management (Salajová, 2020). In the past, people leadership has mainly focused on the individual and his or her relationship with subordinates or successors. The field of leadership has primarily focused on the behavior, thinking, and actions of the leader in a team or organization (Blštáková et al., 2020; Jankelová et al., 2021; Salajová 2020). This paradigm has dominated the field of organizational behavior for decades.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused turbulence that significantly shocks supply chain management. Regardless of the industry, we have seen the supply chain disruption due to factories shutdown, social distancing, restrictions in transportation, raw materials shipping, and border closure (Sarkis, 2020; van Hoek, 2020). Consequently, a research trend emerged to improve supply chain sustainability, resilience, and performance (e.g., Ivanov & Das, 2020; Shen & Sun, 2021), which raised the importance of close communication and collaboration among supply chain partners. For example, manufacturing firms can improve supply chain learning through supplier development activities and customer knowledge absorption (Huo et al., 2020). Supplier development refers to upstream supply chain coordination, which is the effort of focal firms to improve suppliers’ performance and capabilities to ensure long- and short-term supply needs (Krause et al., 2007).

Tourism is responsible for the movement of people worldwide, and the tourism industry has an enormous contribution to the global economy (Toral-Granda et al., 2017). According to World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, 2019), the tourism industry contributed 10.4% of the world’s service sector’s GDP and generated 319 million jobs, or 10% of total employment, in 2018. However, tourism is also one of the largest environmental resource consumers, accounting for nearly 5% of global CO2 emissions (UNTWO, 2017). Furthermore, environmentally friendly activities such as responsible tourism, sustainable tourism, and ecotourism improve local people’s quality of life and minimize environmental problems (Caruana et al., 2014). Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize environmentally friendly tourism activities.

Generational differences in various workrelated characteristics such as work values, motivational drivers, preferences and workplace expectations have become a widely discussed research and intervention topic in recent years (Lyons & Kuron, 2014; Campbell et al., 2015; Sobrino-De Toro et al., 2019). The growing interest reflects the impact of the demographic, economic and technological shifts in society on the world of work and on how organisations maintain a multigenerational workforce (Lub et al., 2016). In recent years, research has primarily focused on the members of three generations (Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y) to explore the features that differentiate these generations from each other in terms of workplace values, expectations, attitudes and organisational outcomes (Moore et al., 2015). At present, the next generation of employees – Generation Z – is about to enter the labour market, which will present challenges and opportunities for both researchers and companies (Knapp et al., 2017; Rodriguez et al., 2019).

One of the thematic objectives of the European Union cohesion policy for 2014–2020 is to improve access to information and communication technologies and increase usability thereof, including the applications for the digitization of government. The digitization of all government areas has been among the European Union’s priorities since 2014. The objective is to create a fully operational unified EU digital market. The European Commission has adopted the EU eGovernment Action Plan for 2016–2020. The aim of this action plan is the modernization of public administration, establishment of a unified digital market and increased involvement of citizens and businesses for the purposes of providing high quality services. The EU eGovernment Action Plan defines specific measures for the acceleration of implementation of the existing legislation and the transition to online public services.

The paper notices troublesome aspects of compiling industry statistics for the purpose of inter-enterprise comparison in corporate financial analysis. Whilst making a caveat that this issue is unbeknownst to practitioners and underrated by theorists, the goal of the paper is two-fold. For one thing, the paper demonstrates that financial ratios are inclined to frequency distributions characteristic of power-law (fat) tails and their typical shape precludes a simple treatment. For the other, the paper explores different approaches to compiling industry statistics by considering trimming and winsorizing cleansing protocols, and by confronting trimmed, winsorized as well as quantile measures of central tendency. The issues are empirically illustrated on data for a great number of Slovak construction enterprises for two years, 2009 and 2018. The empirical distribution of eight financial ratios is studied for troublesome features such as asymmetry and power-law (fat) tails that hamper usefulness of traditional descriptive measures of location without considering different possibilities of handling atypical values (such as infinite and outlying values). The confrontation of diverse approaches suggests a plausible route to compiling industry statistics that consists in reporting a 25% trimmed mean alongside 25% and 75% quantiles, all applied to trimmed data (i.e. data after discarding infinite values). The paper also highlights the sorely unnoticed fact that the key ratio of financial analysis, return on equity, may easily attain non-sense values and these should be removed prior to compiling financial analysis; otherwise, industry statistics is biased upward regardless of what measure of central tendency is made use of.

Relationships in the supply chain have been a longstanding theme of research (e.g. Ailawadi et al., 2010; Corsten & Kumar, 2005; Vlachos et al., 2008). Manufacturer-retailer relationships have changed in recent decades due to the growing power of retailers (Amato & Amato, 2009) reinforced by concentration processes in retailing (Burt & Sparks, 2003), the emergence of mega-retailers and their internationalization, and the rise of the Internet. The shift in bargaining power toward retailers is manifested by the growing market shares of private brands (Chimhundu, 2011). On the heels of these trends, changes have come in business models of both retailers and producers (e.g. Ritala et al., 2014; Witek-Hajduk, 2017). The role of retailers has evolved “from mere service providers to market makers” (Hamilton & Petrovic, 2011). The growing power of retailers has prompted many manufacturers of consumer goods to establish their own or controlled retail channels and/or to produce goods under retailers’ private labels often competing with their own brands. Consequently, various forms of cooperation and competition have developed giving rise to the phenomenon of coopetition (Kim et al., 2013).

Globalization increases the complexity of supply chain and companies are faced with competitive pressure and environmental uncertainties as well as increasing customer demand (Thomas & Esper, 2010). To satisfy the fluctuating customer demand and to make various players in a supply chain align with customer requirement, collaboration between the players based on the timely communication is required. Moreover, sharing important information such as customer demand and on-hand inventory level with other players is required to coordinate the players’ activities. With respect to the inventory management, various collaborative policies such as QR (Quick Response), ECR (Efficient Customer Response), VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) and CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) have been developed so as to overcome the limitation of standalone inventory management policies. These collaborative inventory management policies are based on the sharing of customer demand information between players in the supply chain.

Mechanical engineering belongs to the key industries in Slovakia. In terms of achieved sales and the rate of employment, it ranks among the largest manufacturing industries. The industry currently employs 12 per cent of the population and accounts for up to 42 per cent of total output of the Slovak Republic. Many of the enterprises operating in this industry are small or mediumsized. This industry apparently plays an essential role in the global economy, it is a source of entrepreneurship, innovations and new jobs. These are some of the reasons for which SMEs´ profitability and ways of its improvement should draw particular attention. It is therefore obvious that the issues of the financial analysis in SMEs are receiving constant attention. Since SMEs are the backbone of the Slovak economy and mechanical engineering is one of its key industries, our intention in this article is to focus attention on profitability and factors influencing it in SMEs active in the mechanical engineering industry.

The world’s population continues to increase rapidly, and, within the next 30 years, more than half of all people will choose to live in large urban centers (Faria et al., 2018). This has led to a number of problems, such as congested people and transportation traffic and increased pollution that produces climate change. The concept of “smart” cities has emerged as a way to deal with these issues, in which these cities are defined as an ecosystem that seeks to improve citizens’ quality of life through a combination of technology, sustainability, and physical infrastructures (Estrada et al., 2018). Smart cities have to use new technologies ranging from the Internet of Things (IoT), which facilitates connections between everything, to home automation (i.e., the ease with which citizens can manage daily routines through their homes).