Change and Gain

The best schedule for your business is likely to be very different from your current schedule. Innovative schedules that require major changes are the most likely to give the biggest benefits. On the other hand, the closer the new schedule is to the current schedule, the easier it is for workers to accept. Implementing a current modified schedule is easier but has a limited impact. In some companies even a relatively simple change—new shift start times, changing the direction of rotation, or a new vacation selection method—can create considerable controversy while not solving fundamental scheduling problems. Changing schedules is an emotional event for your employees, so you might as well tackle all of your scheduling problems at the same time.

Ask whether you want to make a small change or a big change. As a rule of thumb, aim for the greatest change possible, because you are not going to get all the way there anyway. Most organizations have a built-in inertia that limits change. On a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the current schedule and 100 being the perfect schedule, aim for 100, with the hope that your business will fall within the 80 to 90 range.

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.

Efficiency versus Competition

Is big business efficiency more important than preventing competition? Many big companies claim that their large size makes possible many operating economies.  Today’s complex technology, far-flung markets, complicated financial systems, and transnational competition make bigness essential for survival and efficient operation. Placing restrictions on today’s corporate growth just to preserve a competitive ideal formed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to make little economic sense. On the other hand, others point out that competition stands at the heart of private enterprise ideology and that small businesses, consumers, and workers should be protected against big business expansion even though it may mean a loss of efficiency.

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.

Person Marketing

Person marketing is a category of nontraditional marketing that refers to efforts designed to cultivate the attention, interest, and preferences of a target market towards a celebrity or authority figure. Celebrities can be real people, functional characters, or widely recognized authority figures.

Campaigns for political candidates and the marketing of celebrities are examples of person marketing. In political marketing, candidates target two markets. They attempt to gain the recognition and preference of voters and the financial support of donors.

The big winners among celebrity endorsers are professional sportspeople. The fans are eager to participate in an illusion—those landlocked pillars of their community pretending they are finally going to cash in their chips and set sail for uncharted waters.

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.

Pressure Groups

Big businesses, big labor, and big government are giants on the economic scene. As a pressure group or interest group, each tries to achieve its own objectives. And of course the major objective of a business is to earn profits. Some are more successful than others. To become and stay successful, big businesses employ full time representatives to fight for and protect their interests with government and consumers alike.

Labor is big too. The pressuring power of unions  is evidenced by such accomplishments as minimum wage laws and 40-hour work weeks. Big government now employs large share of all workers in its agencies, departments, and programs. Pressure from government is felt through such actions as taxes, environmental protection laws, and anti-trust legislation.

There is a wide variety of other types of pressure groups such as the media, professional organizations, neighborhood organizations, and dissident stockholder groups. Large and small pressure groups work vigorously to influence business, labor, and government in directions favorable to their own interests.

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.

Sales Secrets

• You have to be honest;
• When making a proposal to somebody, put yourself in the shoes of that person;
• You’ve got to know your business. Constantly increase your knowledge;
• You must work. If you have all the knowledge in the world and are the most honest person, if you’re going to stay home, can you make any business?
• Never, ever get discouraged and disappointed. No matter what business you’re in will have ups and down. Don’t think this is the end of the world.

As Fortune magazine puts it, “Of all the big time insurance salesman, Mehdi Fakharzadeh must surely qualify as the most improbable. For although he has lived half his life in the US, he continues to struggle with English language. Yet Mehdi has achieved fantastic success—because of his honesty and his extraordinary instinct for serving clients personally.

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 Cards

Business cards can be plain and straightforward for big company executives. The executive’s name, company name, address, and phone number are enough. Perhaps a title is also necessary. But for a smart practitioner of individual enterprise, that business card ought to contain a lot more information.

A business card can double as a brochure, a circular, a walletized advertisement. The cost to produce such a card is not much more than one pays for a standard card. But the need is different. Lacking a large stockpile of hard currency, the small businessperson must make use of all the advertising media available. A business card can be more than a mere listing of one’s name, address, and phone number, it can be an advertising medium.

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.

Vision and Profit Potential

Profit is your reward for serving others. In business, profit is what you earn from offering good products and services at a price. In non-business, profit may be number of people you help to learn and live better. Profit to a charity may be the number of people helped; and to trade association, profit may be its service to members. Always, profit represents the good you do.

Regardless of your vision/dream, you want to harvest the maximum profit because profit is the way results are measured.

Potential counts big. Each person has several talents. A key to the good life is selecting and developing one’s best talent. A path to a sad life is doing something we know is wrong. As you select a vision—a dream—ask, “How much satisfaction will implementation of your dream give others?”

There is nothing right or wrong with money. Money is simply (a) a tool you use to energize and direct human activity, and (b) a device for keeping score. On one hand, money builds and operates schools and hospitals and runs our government. On the other hand, money finances crime, bribe those in trusted positions, and corrupts some people in government, in education and others areas of human endeavor.

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.

 

Group Decision-Making

The person leading the discussion can have a big effect on whether the group’s decision is useful. If a chairperson monopolizes and continually shoots down others’ ideas while pushing his or her own, it’s likely that other points of view will go unexpressed.

An effective discussion leader has responsibility to do the following:

1. See that all group members participate. As discussion leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that all group members participate and have an opportunity to express their opinions. Doing so can help ensure that different points of view emerge and that everyone takes ownership of the final decision.
2. Distinguish between idea getting and idea evaluation. Evaluating and criticizing proposed solutions and ideas actually inhibit the process of getting  or generating new ideas. Yet in most group discussions, one person presents an alternative, and others begin immediately discussing its pros and cons. As a result, group members quickly become apprehensive about suggesting new ideas. Distinguishing between the idea getting and idea evaluation stages—in particular, forbidding criticism of an idea until all ideas have been presented—can be useful here.
3. Not respond to each participant or dominate the discussion. Remember that the discussion leader’s main responsibility is to elicit ideas from the group, not to supply them. As a discussion leader, you should therefore work hard to facilitate free expression of ideas and avoid dominating the discussion.
4. See that the effort is directed toward overcoming surmountable obstacles. In other words, focus on solving the problem rather than on discussing historical events that cannot be changed. Some groups make the mistake of becoming embroiled in discussion about who is to blame for the problem or what should have been done to avoid the problem. Such discussions can’t lead to solutions because the past can’t be changed. As a discussion leader, your job is to ensure that the group focuses on obstacles that can be overcome and solutions that can be implemented.

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.

Cardinal versus Ordinal

What do we mean when we say that a variable is “quantitatively measurable”?We do not necessarily mean that there is only a single way of measuring or scaling it. Temperature is certainly quantitatively measurable, but there are alternative ways of doing so. For example, 32⁰ Fahrenheit is 0⁰ Celsius, and each degree up or down of Celsius corresponds to 1.8 degrees up or down of Fahrenheit. The two scales differ, but only in zero point and unit interval. Similarly, altitude could be measured from sea level or from the center of the earth (shift of zero point) and in feet or meters (shift of unit interval). Both temperature and altitude are more technically called cardinal magnitudes, variables which have the following property: that, regardless of shift of zero-point and unit interval, the relative magnitudes of differences remain the same. In case of altitude, for example, there’s a bigger difference between the heights of the base and crest of Mount Everest than between the ground floor and roof of even the tallest building. This remains true whether we scale altitude in feet or meters or whether we measure it from sea level or from the center of the earth. If people can state that they prefer two million to one million—but not by how much—their utility is said to be an “ordinal” magnitude. Put another way, if Total Utility is an ordinal magnitude we cannot say anything about the  size of Marginal Utility but we can still say whether Marginal Utility is positive or negative.

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.

 

21st Century Corporate Strategy

Business, government and society are independent and their relationship is complex in every nation. General systems theory tells us that all organisms or systems are affected by their host environments; thus, an organization must be appropriately responsive to changes and conditions in its environment to survive and succeed.

The web of interactions between business, government, and society creates a system of stakeholders—groups affected by and influential in corporate decisions and actions. The analysis of these stakeholders—who they are, what power they hold, and the ways in which they interact with one another—helps managers understand the nature of their concerns and needs and how these relationships are changing. If the creation of stakeholder networks is a natural process for organizations, managers must learn how to understand and utilize these relationships. The business of the 21^st century must have managers who understand the importance of creating business strategies that include these considerations.

The relationship between business and society is also continuously changing. People, organizations, and social change; inevitably, new issues will arise and challenge managers to develop new solutions. To be effective, corporate strategy must respond to the biggest and most central questions in the public’s mind. People expect businesses to be competitive, to be profitable, and to act responsibly by meeting the reasonable expectations of stakeholders. The corporation of the 21^st century is certain to be affected by global economic and political trends, powerful new technologies, and a global population of stakeholders who will expect their interests to be integrated into the thinking of the companies from which they buy goods and services, to which they contribute labor and ideas, and to which they extend the hospitality and support of their communities.

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.