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1.
Introduction
Running a business successfully requires overcoming the many challenges posed by the business environment. These challenges historically have been affecting companies in many ways (Abidi and Joshi, 2015), but today the impact of these challenges together with their speed, frequency and intensity are ascending in nature (Johansen and Euchner, 2013; Bolboli and Reiche, 2013).
These collective challenges, with their dynamic nature and frequent changes, are usually represented by the "VUCA" acronym, which was first used by the "US Army War College" in 1998 (Whiteman, 1998, p. 15; Manwani, 2013), where "VUCA" represents business environment "Volatility," "Uncertainty," "Complexity" and "Ambiguity."
When the business environment was relatively stable, excellence via the traditional quality tools and techniques was enough to succeed. However today, the winning criteria is not just product or service quality, but now includes its delivery in a fast and responsive manner (Horney et al. , 2010). This has created a need to re-examine the business excellence concept that emerged from within a stable business environment so as to understand how the increased dynamics of "VUCA" affects this knowledge area.
The body of literature in the business excellence area is very rich with different frameworks and models. To research "Business Excellence" under high "VUCA" conditions, the two terms were combined in six library database searches, but this resulted in only two English language documents namely, Suciu and Petrescu-Prahova (2011) and Murthy and Murthy (2014). However, neither paper illustrated how companies can achieve world-class performance when the business environment is no longer stable. This lack of guidance leads to the creation of "BEVUCA" term (Business Excellence in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment) as a starting point for a structured management solution.
2.Research methods
The originality of the business concept represented by BEVUCA precluded empirical research, so a library-based research that utilizes a systematic literature review process was conducted. This type of review process requires the researcher to follow a rigorous structure in searching, screening and synthesizing the previous primary researches (Cook et al. , 1997; Gough et al. , 2012, p. 1), accordingly, this research utilized the steps that were developed by Tranfield et al. (2003) as illustrated below.
First, the key research terms were identified; followed by determining all the combinations...