Discounted Cash Flow

It is a useful conception from Discounted Cash Flows that they are future cash flows expressed in terms of their present value. The discounted cash flow technique employs this reasoning by evaluating the present value of a business’s net cash flow (cash inflows minus cash outflows). A simplified view of cash flow is “cash flow from operations,” which is net income plus depreciation charges, because depreciation is a non-cash charge against sales to determine net income. The present value of a stream cash flows is obtained by selecting an interest or discount rate at which these flows are to be valued, or discounted, and the timing of each. The interest or discount rate is often defined by the opportunity cost of capital—the cost of earning opportunities forgone by investing in a business with its attendant risk as opposed to investing in risk free securities

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.

Two-way HR Planning Process

Like other business strategies, human resource strategies are shaped through both top-down and bottom-up processes in an organization. A top-down processes provides the strategic context necessary for team and unit planning.

Through a focused company environmental assessment, it provides information on possible future trends and issues affecting  the business and influencing the shaping of plans and objectives. People close to the operating business may not readily take such a broad future view. It requires looking outside the company to external competitive practices, economic and social trends, and possible future conditions that may some day have an impact on the business.

A plan is strategic in character if it is focused on important issues raised in an environmental assessment. In today’s competitive organization, it is important that employees at all levels be attuned to external  forces and changes and to the strategic direction being taken to address them.

In a bottom-up approach, planning of human resource actions is a cumulative process. Instead of broad strategies being broken down into progressively greater detail, detailed strategies are aggregated and synthesized into  meaningful umbrella strategies. Each business unit or department is asked to identify the human resource issues of concern, taking into consideration the guidance of the long-term planning inputs. They are also asked to specific analyses, forecasts, and assessments regarding these issues. Specific action plans are selected and adopted. Both human resource staff and managers should participate in this effort.

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.

Imperfect Organizational Decision-making

Decision-making must be made in all organizations and actions must be taken. It is up to the appropriate people in the organization to select the actions, determine how to carry them out, and take responsibility for their successful implementation. But there is often confusion over decisions. People find it hard to think together about the choices they must make. They don’t agree on where to start or how to proceed. As a result they may overlook important information, fail to consult the proper people, and make mistakes. Organizational decision-making is often not as good as it should be.

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.

Meanings of Meaning

Meanings are internal responses people hold for external stimuli. Many times people have different meanings for the same words. Good communicators are people who select verbal and nonverbal signs that they feel will elicit the intending meaning. Marketing communicators must be especially careful to use signs that will evoke the intended meaning in prospective buyers. All too often companies communicate their product offerings in terms familiar to themselves but not in terms familiar to their potential customers.

Meaning can be thought of as the set of internal responses and resulting predispositions evoked within a person when presented with a sign or stimulus object. Meaning is internal rather than external, to an individual. Meaning is psychological in that it represents a person’s subjective perception and effective reaction to stimuli.

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.

Planting Ideas

Think of a carefully selected extra-special tomato seed. Potentially, that little seed can grow 25 pounds of wonderful fruit. One seed will easily produce one million times its weight in good food. But the seed with all its promise won’t grow any tomatoes unless it is planted.

So it is with great dreams. The best ideas in the world for making money, building a business, solving a social problem, or making an improvement in life are useless until they are planted in a well-prepared mind, tremendous results happen. Every great enterprise was once simply an idea that was planted

A fortune is an idea acted upon. All around us are people who have the disease of dreaming. This ailment takes on many forms, but it as common as the cold. As you grow your ideas, surround yourself with people who are positive. Positive people want you to win, achieve, enjoy life, find satisfaction, and contribute to others. Negative people want you to accept life as  it is, content with boredom and mediocrity, satisfied with a small income, and miss out rewards that come from helping others.

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.

Compliance and Integrity

In the earliest stages, organizational ethics centered on the narrow perspective of ethics—the notion of compliance. Are we following the laws? Are we at risk from litigation? If so, how do we minimize that risk?

Ethics programs matured and ethics officers, most of whom are selected from the managerial ranks with little, if any, special preparation, developed increased sophistication regarding the challenges facing their organizations. Both the ethics officers and their organizations began to embrace personal and corporate values in decision making (value-based decision making) as the logical expansion of the definition of what it means to be ethical. What has emerged is what many ethics officers today characterize as the “best practices” model of the ethics office and of a values-based corporation.

But change continues. What is emerging today is a more holistic definition of what it means to be a “good” corporation. This new, global view will again help to reshape the responsibilities and focus of the ethics officer.

The shift to a global perspective means another broadening of the definition of ethics. “Global Integrity” is the latest descriptor, and it embraces both compliance and ethics. It also adds concern for rule of law, human rights, good governance, labor/child labor concerns, anti-corruption/anti-bribery, concern for the environment, safety, social responsibility, good corporate citizenship, and respect for the whole diverse array of local cultures to the definition. This increases the organization’s obligation to reach beyond traditional company boundaries to consider how decisions would affect the surrounding community. One consequence of this new global definition of the organizational ethics is increased scrutiny by stakeholders, especially advocacy groups and the media.

Corporate ethics officers, especially those in multinational corporations and/or corporations with global suppliers/markets, are being challenged with fundamental questions in this expanded integrity area. Perhaps the most common, and most challenging, is how the corporation will balance the desire for global standards (consistency) against the need for local application of standards.

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.

Futures Analysis

Futures analysis allows companies to project future conditions and set future objectives to be achieved. It represents a leap to the future rather than step-by-step progression from  today’s situation forward to the future. It allows managers to assess the future relevance of issues that appear important today and thereby identify important human resource issues.

Futures analysis is an inherent requirements for strategic thinking. It requires defining the forces shaping the future, evaluating alternative future states, setting objectives, and selecting courses of action that will yield needed changes in direction for the enterprise. While incremental change analysis looks at continuities, futures analysis looks at discontinuities.

Futures analysis provides at least a conceptual vision of the future that can help identify and define organizational or competitive requirements. In its simplest forms, futures analysis involves open thinking about future issues and options. Companies use brainstorming, visioning, or modified Delphi analysis (iterative survey of experts) to help define the future human resource issues that need to be addressed. It is an exercise that may involve many participants within the company as well as outside consultants or others.

Futurists, functioning on company planning staffs and as independent consultants, have helped assess the prospective futures in which companies would operate. Their value added appears to lie in their work on demographic technological and environmental futures. In other areas, such as, socio-political changes worldwide, energy availability, economic conditions, or legislation.

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.

Ethical Decision-making

1. Define the problem carefully and be certain that all the pertinent information has been gathered. Too often we act without taking time to obtain the necessary information;
2. List all the parties that you believe may be affected by the decisions (the stakeholders). A decision that does not take into account the way in which  it will affect others is not an ethical one regardless of its actual consequences;
3. List all the relevant core values that you believe are involved in the decision that you had previously developed;
4. List all the possible alternatives of what you can or cannot do.
5. Choose and prioritize:

• Of all parties you have listed above, select the one that you believe is the most important for purpose of making this decision;
• Of all the core values you listed above, select the one that  you believe is the most important for purposes of making this decision;
• Of all the options you listed above, select the one that you believe will cause the greatest good or least harm

6. Make decision based on the above priorities;

7. Devise a strategy that will effectively implement your decision.

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.

Women at Workplace

Traditionally, stress-related health problems have been considered a masculine phenomenon. Heart attacks, stomach ulcers, burnout, and strokes were all considered diseases of men in the workplace, and indeed are the reasons why elderly widows outnumber wid-owners by almost five to one. However, with the equal responsibilities women are taking at work now, they are also being exposed to at least equal amounts of stress. If anything, in fact, stress levels faced by career women can be considerably greater than those levels imposed on men.

While women are being given equal hiring opportunities and equal rates of promotion to the middle management levels, they seem to encounter a “glass ceiling” preventing their climb up the corporate ladder. In other words, they have been granted equal access, but not equal ascent. In fact, only 2% of top management in major corporations is female. This reflects a modest advance of women in selected fields such as financial services, telecommunications, retailing, advertising, public relations, and publishing.

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.

Business Process Reengineering: Things to Remember

• Do not undertake reengineering of all processes simultaneously. Select only those which meet the following criteria:

1. Processes that require immediate attention;
2. Processes that will have significant impact on customers;
3. Processes which are most amenable to redesign.

• Communicate intensely to persuade people to accept and not resist the proposed changes.
• CEO must be seen to commit, at the minimum, 50 percent of his time.
• Set aggressive reengineering performance targets; incremental improvement targets will not create either urgency or excitement.
• Monitor progress and initiate corrective action.

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.