Purpose -By making an analogy with the human body, the purpose of this paper is to underline the relations between a firm's failure causes and its current situation, in terms of the syndrome that can be identified at its level. Design/methodology/approach -For this reason, some elements taken from medicine, such as symptoms, causes and syndromes are presented and characterized from the point of view of the firm. Findings -It is shown that knowing the type of syndrome and the relation between it and the causes that determined its occurrence, a firm's situation can be improved and its life can be lengthened. The study was conducted on 19 firms and the results are conclusive. Practical implications -By knowing the main causes that determine a certain type of bankruptcy syndrome, the firm's management can properly intervene to establish a new order and a new equilibrium, which can "save" the firm from an imminent collapse, bringing it to a normality situation and even leading it, in future, to increased performance. Originality/value -The paper succeeds in shaping the relation between a firm's situation, its symptoms, the bankruptcy syndrome and the causes that led to a certain situation. Using one of the newest developed theories -the grey systems theory -and one of the newest concept used in firms' diagnosis -the bankruptcy syndrome -the paper extends the characteristics of this term and uses it in determining the causes that generate anomalies at firm level.

This paper attempts to put forward a hybrid model which combines the advantages offered by grey systems theory, fuzzy theory and genetic algorithm, and tries to identify the causes that are influencing financial failure of a company. For this purpose, a knowledge matrix will be computed. Further, this matrix can be composed with a one-dimensional symptoms matrix for a certain company and so the causes that generate the anomalies can be identified. Knowing the causes, and managing them properly, we can improve company's financial situation and also lengthened its life on the market.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a social network approach for identification of micro-organizational re-design interventions to make more efficient and fluid the knowledge flow in a rehabilitation multidisciplinary team. The structural information of different kinds of knowledge networks within a team is augmented with additional analyses aimed at collecting information about the ways through which participants use knowledge, the motivation behind knowledge exchange, and the non-human knowledge sources used by subjects to perform their work. This paperwork was supported by CNCSIS – UEFISCDI, project number PNII – IDEI 810/2008. Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose a definition of knowledge network including human and non-human knowledge source (documents and knowledge repositories) as it is more adequate for the analysis of knowledge flows in multidisciplary medical teams. The mapping and analysis of the network are carried out through: elicitation of knowledge flows between people within and outside the team through a structured questionnaire; mapping of the knowledge flows toward non-human knowledge sources; and identification of critical aspects and proposal of re-engineering interventions to make knowledge flow more efficient and effective. Findings: The analysis of the critical aspects emerged in the field study identifies a number of opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge sharing through the re-design of the team network. The re-design interventions concern three main features of knowledge network: “knowledge centralization,” “Over-reliance on External experts,” “Unshared knowledge tools and sources.” Originality/value: The originality of the work resides in applying social network analysis (SNA) for healthcare management settings, proving evidence and guidelines to show how healthcare organizations can benefit from the adoption of SNA-based approaches

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