360-degree Feedback

The 360-degree Feedback Process is being increasingly used in organizations for development, appraisal and compensation purposes. It involves a collection of perceptions about an individual’s behavior and its impact on bosses, colleagues, subordinates as well as internal and external customers. Competency models help to ensure that such feedback relates specifically to the competencies crucial to individual or organizational success.

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.

Talking about Bookkeeping

Everyone knows intuitively, if not experientially, that good bookkeeping is good business. If you don’t keep track of your business’s money matters—what comes in and what goes out—you will be in the dark as to how well or poorly your business is doing, and hence how well or poorly you’re handling certain aspects of the business. After all numbers do not lie. If they indicate that all is well, you’ll be able to capitalize on your success by, if nothing else, continuing to do with confidence whatever you’re doing right. If the numbers reveal that all is not well, you will be able to take appropriate measures to solve problems which if left unchecked could land you in failure zone. Just as with certain physical diseases, early detection means early cure and increased chance of survival. Lastly, it goes without saying that slipshod recordkeeping can cost you time, anxiety and even money when tax time rolls around. In sum, while its understandable that people are inclined to avoid and neglect bookkeeping matters, its fundamentally inexcusable.

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.

HR Strategy

Human resource strategies define how a company will manage its people toward the achievement of business objectives—setting priorities for action. Like any strategy, a human resource strategy is a directional plan of action for managing change. It provides a business perspective of actions necessary to gain and sustain competitive advantage through the management of human resources—a focus on priorities in managing people in a changing environment.

Through human resource strategy, managers and human resource staff jointly define and resolve people-related business issues. The planning process adds value by helping managers identify the issues most critical to the organization’s competitiveness and ultimately to its success. It helps management set priorities and define a vision of how it intends to manage its people.

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.

Effective Segmentation

Segmentation does not promote marketing success in all cases. Effectiveness depends on the following basic requirements:

• The market segment must present measurable purchasing power and size.
• Marketers must find a way to effectively promote to and serve the market segment.
• Marketers must identify segments that are sufficiently large enough to give them good profit potential.
• The firm must target segments that match its marketing capabilities. Targeting a large number of niche markets can produce an expensive, complex and inefficient strategy.

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.

Productivity—the Japanese Way

Economists are forever telling us that we need to increase productivity in order to improve our standard of living. Productivity is one of those concepts that are so loaded with meaning and implications that is very difficult to define, much less explain. Not surprisingly then, improving “it” is one of the most difficult tasks facing business. More to the point, the time for improvement is quickly running out. Industrial performance is being outstripped at a frightening pace by the Japanese. In fact, it has reached the point where their productivity performance is so superior that they can literally pick any product and any market and quickly come to dominate it.

The idea that Japanese are uniquely gifted in only a few related areas has been debunked by their proven successes in industries as diverse as automobiles and semi-conductors. As well, the facile suggestion that the Japanese are somehow culturally inclined to be productive doesn’t wash. Japanese managers have taken over factories in Europe and the US and greatly improved productivity records. Productivity has also been high in their North American plants.

If corporate managers believe that their workers can be as competitive as anyone else in the world, and technically, there’s no valid reason why they can’t be, then they must find better ways to help their employees realize their potential. In that sense, study of Japanese methods is a jumping-off point that can lead to adaptations that will produce unique ways of improving productivity.

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.

Weapons for Success

One type of weapon is seldom enough to win a war. The same is true in our bodies. The successful conquest of the stresses we now face at work requires that we understand the strengths and limitations of each level of defense and use them in concert to encourage victory, prevent disaster, and cultivate excellence at work.

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 Lifecycle

The new products process essentially turns an opportunity (the real start) into a profit flow (the real finish). It begins with something that is not a product (the profit). The product comes from a situation and turns into an end.

What we have, then, is an evolving product, or better, an evolving concept that, at the end, may become a product. There are stages, like individual frames in a movie film:

• Opportunity concept-a company skill or resource, or customer problem.
• Idea concept-the first appearance of an idea.
• Stated concept-a home or technology, plus a clear statement of benefit.
• Tested concept-it has passed an end user concept test; need is confirmed.
• Full screened concept-it passes the test of fit with company situation.
• Protocol concepts-a statement (product definition) of the intended market user.
• Prototype concept-a tentative physical product or system procedure, including features and benefits.
• Batch concept-first full test of fit with manufacturing; it can be made. Specifications are written, exactly what the product is to be, including features, characteristics, and standards.
• Process concept-the full manufacturing process is complete.
• Pilot concept-a supply of the new product, produced in quantity from a pilot production line, enough for field testing with end users.
• Marketed concept-output of the scale-up process either for a market test or full scale launch.
• Successful concept (new product)-it meets the goals set for it at the start of the project.

Some firms have as many as three production models or prototypes. So, the idea that a new product suddenly “emerges” from R&D-like a chicken from an egg-is simply incorrect.

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.

Entrepreneur

Most businesses start as a dream in somebody’s mind. An entrepreneur is a person with an idea. He or she also is someone with the energy and drive to turn that idea into a business. An entrepreneur needs these characteristics because in a young firm he or she must often do everything at once—manufacture the product, sell it, find enough money to keep going, and manage few employees.

The entrepreneur must be willing to take great risks, too, for most new businesses fail within a year. The odds against success are stiff, partly because many business ideas simply are not very good. After all, whoever wanted to buy paper dresses or quadraphonic sound. Factors that create special risks for new businesses are those over which entrepreneurs have little control. Also, technology has become highly complex and many new products—a filter to remove the salt from sea water, for example, require many years and teams of scientists and engineers to develop. Then, too, a vast array of government regulations creates additional burdens of time, energy, and expenses for owners of new businesses.

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.