Bureaucratic Management Approach

The roadblock stems from management’s reluctance to push profit and decision-making responsibility on with too many management levels and high-paid support people. The real contributions of most corporate, sector or group level marketing, advertising, manufacturing, planning or R&D activities cannot be to line management responsibilities and too costly to justify their existence. We have not been able to find proven profit contributions that offset the costs involved.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Rational Management

Rational management means making full use of the thinking ability of the people in an organization. It is a continuing process. Use of the ideas and their benefits will eventually fade out if they are not continually used and reinforced.

Rational management aims at major change and therefore demands major commitment. But this system cannot be introduced by half-heartedly sprinkling a few ideas and suggestions among a random mix of the organization’s people in the hope that something good will happen. We must identify the significant people within the organization, for they should be the first to learn and use the new ideas. We must identify their subordinates and the people who provide them with information. We must identify those who will implement the conclusions that come out of the use of the ideas. In short, it is imperative to pinpoint all the people within an organization who make things happen. The objective is to move the organization closer to it full potential. This can be done only by introducing teamwork based on the continuing conscious use of common approaches expressed in a simple, common language and directed toward resolution of an organization’s important concerns.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Concepts of Organizational Behavior

The concepts of primary interest to organizational behavior can be grouped into five basic categories: 1) individual processes; 2) interpersonal processes; 3) methods for enhancing individual and interpersonal processes; 4) organizational processes and characteristics; and 5) approaches to integrating individuals, groups, and organizations.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Personal Selling: Two Approaches

Personal Selling: Two Approaches

Many American companies do not put nearly enough effort into direct, personal communication. Japanese success in displacing the US as Saudi Arabia’s leading supplier is instructive. Japanese exporters and small teams to meet with Saudi importers: Japanese exporters; they go to Saudi workshops, travel to secondary towns, and meet with sub-agents. The Americans, on the other hand, invite all their Saudi agents together for a luncheon, do not have private meetings, do not get their hands dirty, and never travel to secondary towns—they tend to stick to the three market centers. Saudis complain that US effort is misdirected: American personnel devote infinitesimal detail to making advance arrangements for visiting executives, going so far as to specify rooms overlooking a certain view from the hotel.

Japanese firms supplement their direct, personal efforts with heavy local advertising. They use gifts generously in product introductions, and warrantees on Japanese consumer electronics range up to three years. To carry out this business, Japanese trading companies have large staffs of professional international marketers who have been cultivated since graduation from a Japanese international trading university, schooled in English and Arabic, and rotated worldwide as international trading specialists.

Compared to most other cultures, particularly non-Western. Americans are extraordinarily preoccupied with the tangible aspects of a product. They round up all their sales agents and give a product presentation instead of putting their energies into the more important component of international marketing—people. In American and only a few other countries it is normal to do business from a distance, between strangers, by mail or telephone.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Consumer Sovereignty

Mainstream economics uses some simple starting points; it believes that they are the best possible. First is that agents have more wants than they can attain, so that they feel scarcity; in fact, for practical purposes, wants are assumed to be endless. Second, third and fourth are that agents are self-interested, rational, and the best judges of their own well-being. These four assumptions are indeed usually good starting points, rather than starting by assuming that agents are completely fulfilled, altruistic, irrational, and not well-placed to evaluate their own situation. They are not equally good as finishing points. Sometimes good arguments exist for not accepting them.

An assumption that agents are the best judges of their own well being is less questionable for businesspeople and corporations, given the resources they have for analysis. Debate focuses more on consumers. The phrase consumer sovereignty is sometimes read descriptively, to mean that consumers are sovereign, in that procedures are induced via profit-seeking and competition  to provide what consumers want. Sometimes it is read normatively, to mean that consumers should be sovereign, their wishes should prevail concerning what is good for them. The normative claim can rest on three different bases: that consumers do make good choices; that the alternative stance is worse – to use someone else’s judgments and estimates of what is good for a person and how good it is; or quite differently, that people have the right to make their own choices and mistakes.

Consumers will not make good choices automatically and unconditionally. Our wants are not simple; for example, some are wants to not to have other wants (such as the desire to smoke or a compulsion to gamble). Establishing a mature balance between wants involves skills. Choice is also unlikely to bring satisfaction if taken on the basis of weak information. Markets often do not provide consumers with full and reliable information, for it is hard to exclude people from information and therefore to ensure payment for it, so its market supply is weakened. Instead, in a commerce-dominated society, one of the main types of information that adults get will be images that say the good life is obtained through high consumption of commodities; there is too little counteracting public information.

The issue of consumer sovereignty goes beyond whether choices are good for the chooser. Other people are affected. Some wants may thus be unacceptable, notably wants that bring harm to others, including even wants to harm others. Mainstream economists have unfortunately often taken a don’t-want-to-know approach to ethics in which they confuse acceptance of all wants with a value-neutral stance.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Characteristics of Quality Function Deployment

• Simply a technique that keeps the companies focused on what is important to the customer;
• A standardized approach to document and keep track of customer’s needs;
• A technique to help neutralize the voice of the executives;
• A process that force conversation about customers’ needs that typically would not happen later in the product development process;
• A systematic tool on technique that supports the old adage: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure;
• A planning methodology that organizes relevant information helps companies make better decisions;
• A technique that helps companies do the things they know they should be doing;
• A systematic process that helps ensure that the voice of the customer doesn’t get lost in the product development process;
• A formalized way to keep track of all of the customers’ needs and to make sure that the most important needs get special attention.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Product Development Strategy

A product development strategy dictates that the organization create new offerings for existing markets. The approach taken maybe to develop totally new offerings (product innovation) to enhance the value to customers of existing offerings (product augmentation) or to broaden the existing line of offerings by adding different sizes, forms, flavors,  and so forth (product line extension).

Companies successful at developing and commercializing new offerings lead their industries in sales growth and profitability. The likelihood of success is increased if  the development effort results in offerings that satisfy a clearly understood buyer need.

Important considerations in planning a product deployment strategy concern the market size and volume necessary for the effort to be profitable, the magnitude and timing of competitive response, the impact of the new product on existing offerings, and the capacity (in terms of human and financial investment and technology) of the organization to deliver the offerings to the market(s). more importantly, successful new offerings must have a significant point of difference reflected in superior product or service characteristics that deliver unique and wanted benefits to consumers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Needs of 21st Century Organization

No one in his right mind wants to go back to the days of hunting and gathering. But it would be tremendously valuable if we could recapture that ability to work together with even a fraction of that efficiency to deal better with modern problem situations. Now, through contrivance and planning, we can recapture that ability and channel it to meet the needs of 21^st century organization.

This is not to say that the organizational team will somehow represent a 21^st century hunting group around with ballpoint pens instead of bows and arrows. Hunters’ ways of thinking were totally aligned, and their lives were totally aligned. What is required today is not total teamwork in all aspects of life; rather, it is selective, functional teamwork that can be turned on when needed, limited to those activities where it will be most productive. What is required is teamwork that can be summoned to handle organizational problems yet leave team members free to act as individuals in all other respects.

An approach is needed that can be invoked and shared when we need answers to specific questions, regardless of content that applies orderliness to complexity and confusion.

This kinds of accurate communication and common understanding is needed that prevail in the hunting bands. These must be modernized, selectively adapted to current conditions, and directed towards the critical functions of organizational activity where teamwork is most essential. All of this can be done.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Value-based Pricing

• Choose four firms in a given market, locate and discuss their relative position.
• What is the real difference between competing on price and competing on value? Explain.
• Provide specific examples of companies adapting the following approaches in an attempt to change and improve their value pricing:

1. Selling “less for less” – no frills.
2. Selling “more for more.”
3. Selling “more for same.”
4. Selling “same for less.”
5. Selling “more for less.”

• How might introducing value pricing be different for services rather than goods?
• Where among the companies does the opportunity for a competitive advantage exist, and why?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Concept of Service

If we open a new business, the key issue is how long we are planning. If all we want to do is make a quick buck and move on, there is absolutely no point spending a single penny we don’t absolutely need to. But that is not the route to creating an amazingly successful organization.

The only approach for an organization to take if it wants to become amazingly successful is to become highly effective and highly focused. And that doesn’t pay dividends overnight.

But no single working culture is right for every situation. Why should anyone spend money to create a future that they do not expect to be part of?

Why invest in intangible assets that are hard to value on the balance sheet such as staff, improving team moral, developing customer focus and lifting competence levels, if you expect to be moving on soon?

A working culture centered around the concept of service generally and customer service specifically is the most likely to deliver long-term amazing success.

An organization that wants to adopt a service-based working culture must however be ready for the long haul. It must have both the patience and the resources to get through the early stages in a market where market dominance and being the largest are critical whatever the future price?

Some organizations are better off starting with one working culture and then migrating to another when scale and success allow or demand it.

Planning to evolve or change our working culture is fine as an idea when those in charge are sufficiently switched on to the challenges of changing an organization’s culture: to act at the appropriate time and effectively instigate a culture shift in line with new market conditions.

Let’s not forget that the larger an organization is, the more careful it must be in choosing its working culture in the first instance. Larger organizations are always going to be harder to change; they are clumsy and less fleet of foot than their smaller counterparts. Larger organizations must change their working culture less often and less dramatically, so must put more time and effort into avoiding problems in the first place.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.