Shopping for Credit

Just as you shop around for the best deal when you are buying goods and services, you should shop around for the best buy in credit terms. Look for the lowest interest rates but keep in mind that you may be required to pay for other services too, such as life insurance to cover the amount you are borrowing. The cost of these services and other conditions of the lending agreement will vary from lender to lender.

 Sometimes the cost of borrowing may not be the most important consideration. For example, even though the interest you pay on credit card or department store charge accounts is high, you may actually be able to save in the long run if you sell them  to buy things you need but don’t have the cash for, while they are on the sale.

 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

Retail Trends & Strategies

• Better market positioning: This involves more careful identification of market segments and providing service superior to that of competition.
• Market intensification: This involves clustering more stores in the same metropolitan area and contiguous markets.
• Secondary markets: Expansion will be increasingly focused on secondary markets  of under 100,000 population because there may be less competition from larger retailers, and costs, such as wages, may be lower.
• Differences in store size: Retailers will have a more flexible portfolio of different sized stores depending on the size of the community and existing retail competition. More use of second-hand space will occur because this can result in savings of 30 percent or more in rent.
• Productivity increases: The application of central checkout, self-selection, and low gross margins to areas of trade where these techniques have not been used before will occur. Look now at toy supermarkets, home-decorating centers, and self-service shoe stores.
• Fewer product options: Product lines will increasingly be consolidated, and new product development will be cut back.
• Service growth: Services retailing will continue to grow as a percentage of total retail sales. Services already represent about 50 percent of the gross national product.
• More mergers: Increasingly, smaller and weaker firms will be absorbed as more retail outlets struggle to survive.

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.

Marketing Eras

• Production Era:  Prior to 1925, most firms operating in highly developed economies focused narrowly on production. Manufacturers stressed production of quality products and then looked for people to purchase them.  The production era did not reach its peak until the early part of 20^th century.
• Sales Era: Manufacturers began to increase their emphasis on effective sales forces to find customers for their output. Firms attempted to match their output to the potential number of customers who would want it. Companies with a sales orientation assume that customers will resist purchasing products and services not deemed essential and that the task of personal selling and advertising is to convince them to buy. Although marketing departments began to emerge from shadows of production, finance, and engineering during the sales era, marketing dominated sales and other areas. Selling is thus a component of marketing.
• Marketing: Personal incomes and consumer demand for products and services dropped rapidly thrusting marketing into a more important role. Organizational survival dictated that managers pay close attention to the markets for their goods and services. The trend ended with the outbreak of World War 11, when rationing and shortages of consumer goods became commonplace. The war years created only a pause in an emerging trend in business: a shift in the focus from products and sales to satisfying customer needs.
• Relationship: It emerged during the 90s. Organizations carried the marketing era’s customer orientation one step further by focusing on establishing and maintaining relationships. This effort represented a major shift from the traditional concept of marketing as a simple exchange between buyer and seller. Relationship marketing by contrast, involves long-term, value-added relationships developed over time, strategic alliances and partnerships retailers play major roles in relationship 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.

Child Laborer

Do you see the Child Laborer

Employed in his master’s shop?

He works all day and night

He never has time to stop.

Do you see the Child Laborer

Making carpets for the rich?

Another part of his life

Is lost with every stick.

Do you see the Child Laborer

With papers in the street?

In the dust and traffic

Always on his feet.

I see the Child Laborers

And they look at me, everyone

And their eyes are asking

“Where has our childhood gone?”

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.

Writing Tips

• When writing consider the recipients. What do they know already? What can you tell them?
• Outline your memos and letters before beginning to write.
• When writing reports, summarize key points or conclusions on the first page and document them with more information on subsequent pages.
• Write like you speak to make your writing as readable as possible.
• Learn the writing style of your organization and follow it. Don’t use flowery language (many adjectives and verbs) when inappropriate.
• Have your secretary or assistant edit and proofread your correspondence for sentence structure and grammatical errors.
• Keep dictionary thesaurus on hand to check spelling and word usage.
• Use variety of sentence structures—simple, complex, and compound—to add interest to your writing.
• When writing for a non-ethical audience, have a non-technical person identify jargon. Then either eliminate it or include a glossary defining the terms.
• Use charts and tables wherever possible to present numerical information.
• Use “action verbs” to add punch to your message.
• Eliminate weak words like “very,” “interesting,” “often,” and other bland adjectives or adverbs.
• Keep paragraphs short. Make sure the content of a paragraph revolves around only one thought—the topic sentence.
• If you do a large amount of routine correspondence, standardize it as much as possible.
• If procrastination is a problem, start writing a rough draft early so you have time to reverse it at least once.
• When allocating blocks of time for writing, set aside periods of one to one-and-a-half hours, rather than trying to do it in segments of 5 to 15 minutes.
• Develop a flash card system to work in your own common misspellings.
• Dictate correspondence, memos, and so forth, to save time.
• Seek immediate and specific feedback on reports you write.
• Take a second or third look at your memos before sending them.
• Use a grammar checking software program on your computer to identify errors you frequently make, and use that feedback to focus your efforts to improve your writing.

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.

Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior is the study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself. Although we can focus on any one of these three areas, we must remember that all three are ultimately relevant to a comprehensive understanding of organizational behavior. We can study individual behavior without explicitly considering the organization. But because the organization influences and is influenced by the individual, we cannot fully understand the individual’s behavior without learning something about the organization. Similarly, we can study organizations without focusing specifically on the people within them. But again, we are looking at only a portion of the puzzle. Eventually we must consider the other pieces, as well as the whole.

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.

Writing a Marketing Plan

• Use a direct, professional writing style. Use appropriate business and marketing terms without jargon. Present and future tenses with active voice are generally better than past tense and passive voice.
• Be positive and specific. At the same time, avoid superlatives (such as terrific, wonderful). Specifics are better than glittering generalities. Use numbers for impact, justifying computations and projections with facts or reasonable quantitative assumptions where possible.
• Use bullet points for succinctness and emphasis. As with the list you are reading, bullets enable key points to be highlighted effectively and with great efficiency.
• Use “A level” (the first level) and “B level” (the second level headings under major section headings to help readers make easy transitions from one topic to another. This also forces the writer to organize the plan more carefully. Use these headings liberally, at least once every 200 to 300 words.
• Use visuals where appropriate. Illustrations, graphs, and charts enable large amounts of information to be presented succinctly.
• Shoot for a plan 15 to 35 pages in length, not including financial projections and appendices. An uncomplicated small business may require only 15 pages, while a new business startup may require more than 35 pages.
• Use care in layout, design, and presentation. Laser or ink-jet printers give a more professional look than  do dot matrix printers or typewriters. A bound report with a cover and clear title page adds professionalism.

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.