Traditional Control Systems

Traditional Control Systems are based on setting standards and then monitoring performance. These systems include three categories of controls: diagnostic controls, boundary systems and interactive controls.

• Diagnostic Control Systems (such as budgets) allow managers to determine whether important targets have been met and if necessary, to figure out why they haven’t been.
• Boundary Control Systems are policies that identify the boundaries within which employees are to operate. Ethical rule against accepting gifts from suppliers are an example.
• Integrative Control Systems involve controlling employees interactively, by questioning them face to face.

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.

Soft Customer Standards

Not all customer priorities can be counted, timed, or observed through audits. As Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.” Understanding and knowing the customer is not a customer priority that a standard that counts, times, or observes employees can adequately capture. In contrast to hard measures, soft measures are those that must be documented using perceptual measures. We call the second category of customer-defined standards soft standards and measures because they are opinion-based measures that cannot be observed and must be collected by talking to customers, employees, or others. Soft standards provide direction, guidance, and feedback to employees in ways to achieve customer satisfaction and can be quantified by measuring customer perceptions and beliefs. These are especially important for person-to-person interactions such as the selling process and the delivery process for professional services.

Product-line Costs

Costs in the managed category can be changed up or down by management decisions. As a general rule, they are far more variable than they should be as a business expands and more fixed than they should be during periods of contraction.

 Once there is agreement on these cost categories and definitions, the next step is getting help from the accounting department to determine how the costs incurred in each of these categories should be divided and assigned to specific product businesses. This is always easier said than done. Many accountants are reluctant to divide fixed costs into the categories or to shared costs to specific product areas. Because it is impossible to do this with the precision accounting professionals normally use to develop traditional financial statements, there is a natural aversion to shifting numbers in an imprecise manner. However, there is simply no way to develop net profit statements for each product-line business, or to see clearly how costs behave with volume changes unless the total lump of fixed costs is split into the “bedrock,” semi-fixed, and step categories and assigned to these business units. And  net profit picture for a product/market business can’t be developed unless shared costs, often representing a large percentage of total operating costs and often the root cost disadvantage problems, are broken down and assigned to various business units.

 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.

Non-traditional Marketing

As marketing was turned to a generic activity, its application broadened far beyond its traditional boundaries. Broader appeals focus on causes, events, individuals, organizations and places is in the not-for-profit sector. In other instances, they encompass diverse groups of profit-seeking individuals, activities, and organizations. There are five major categories of non-traditional marketing: person marketing, place marketing, cause marketing, event marketing, and organization marketing.

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.

Kinds of Advertising

Different kinds of advertising are used by various organizations to reach different market targets. Some major categories include:

• Retail Advertising: advertising to consumers by various retail stores such as supermarkets and shoe stores.
• Trade Advertising: advertising to wholesalers and retailers by manufacturers to encourage them to carry their products.
• Industrial Advertising: advertising from manufacturers to other manufacturers. A firm selling motors to automobile companies would use industrial advertising.
• Institutional Advertising: advertising designed to create an attractive image for an organization rather than for a product.
• Product Advertising: advertising for a good or service to create interest among consumer, commercial, and industrial buyers.
• Advocacy Advertising: advertising that supports a particular view of an issue
• Comparison Advertising: advertising that compares competitive products.

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.

Pro Forma Income Statement

Because marketing managers are accountable for the profit impact of their actions, they must translate their strategies and tactics into pro forma, or projected, income statements. A pro forma income statement displays projected revenues, budgeted expenses, and estimated net profit for an organization, product, or service during a specific planning period, usually a year. Pro forma income statements include a sales forecast and a listing of variable and fixed costs that can be programmed or committed.

Pro forma income statements can be prepared in different ways and reflect varying levels of specificity. They have a typical layout consisting of six major categories or line items:

1. Sales—forecasted unit volume times unit selling price
2. Cost of goods sold—costs incurred in buying or producing products and services. Generally speaking, these costs are constant per unit within certain volume ranges and vary with total unit volume.
3. Gross margin (sometimes called gross profit)—represents the remainder after cost of goods sold has been subtracted from sales.
4. Marketing expenses—generally programmed expenses budgeted to produce sales. Advertising expenses are typically fixed. Sales expenses can be fixed, such as a salesperson’s salary, or variable, such as sales commissions. Freight or delivery expenses are typically constant per unit and vary with total unit volume.
5. General and administrative expenses—generally, committed fixed costs for the planning period, which cannot be avoided if the organization is to operate. These costs are frequently called overhead.
6. Net income before (income) taxes (often called net profit before taxes—the remainder after all costs have been subtracted from sales.

A pro forma income statement reflects a marketing manager’s expectations (sales) given criterion inputs (costs). This means that a manager must think specifically about customer response to strategies and tactics and focus attention on the organization’s financial objectives of profitability and growth when preparing a pro forma income statement.

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.

Techno-stress and Well-being of People

The technological revolution has redistributed levels of stress in the workplace. Many jobs that formerely involved high stress levels, such as burning the midnight oil to do year-end inventory checks, can now be done in minutes, with less stress, thanks to  computers. Jobs that were formerly considered to have little stress, such as routine typing, now involve much more stress because of computers.

Computerized clerical workers suffer higher levels of stress related complaints than any other occupational group, including air traffic controllers. Worker’s compensation claims for computer-related stress form the fastest growing category of illness in the workplace. The human cost of the poorly planned march towards technological utopia has been significant, and can affect any part of the body.

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 Goals

Business goals or objectives convert the organization’s mission into tangible actions and results that are to be achieved, often within a specific time frame. Goals or objectives divide into three major categories: production, financial, and marketing. Production goals or objectives apply to the use of manufacturing and service capacity and to product and service quality. Financial goals or objectives focus on return on investment, return on sales, profit, cash flow, and shareholder wealth. Marketing goals or objectives emphasize marketing share, marketing productivity, sales volume, profit, customer satisfaction, and customer value creation. When production, financial, and marketing goals or objectives are combined, they represent a  composite picture of organizational purpose within a specific time frame, accordingly, they must complement one another.

Goal and objective setting should be problem-centered and future-oriented. Because goals or objectives represent statements of what the organizations wishes to achieve in a specific time frame, they implicitly rise from an understanding of the current situation. Therefore, managers need an appraisal of operations or a situation analysis to determine reasons for the gap between what was or is expected and what has happened or will happen. If performance has met expectations, the question arises as to future directions. If performance has not met expectations, managers must diagnose the reasons for this difference and enact a remedial program.

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.