Quality or Excellence?

The question is what is the organization trying to accomplish? Is it striving for quality, or excellence or both? Quality and excellence are two different terms. Quality is an absolute state—in the control of total quality management, quality is conformance to requirements, doing things according to standards. Excellence is a relative term, to put it simply, it is being better than others. It requires comparison. So it can be said that quality is built in, while excellence is designed. If the goal is quality, it means individuals will be assessed on whether they meet the established standards. It is assumed that they possess the minimum competencies. If the goal is to achieve excellence, individuals will be assessed on their competence levels based on a continuous evaluation scale. Hence when evaluating for excellence, it would be necessary to compare the relative competence between two employees in addition to measuring their competence against the standards scale.

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.

Organization Structure

Any group possessing common goals is an organization. But business organizations can be classified according to the nature of their internal authority relationships. Although there are five forms of organization structure, four forms are common: line, line and staff, committee, and matrix. The line structure is the oldest form and is frequently used today in smaller organizations. The functional form uses specialist managers entirely responsible for their own fields within the operation. The line and staff form uses specialists to assist line officers. This is commonly used in medium and large size firm. The fourth and fifth types, committees and the matrix organizations exist in many firms but only ready as the sole types. They are typically used as a sub-organizational form within a line and staff structure.

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.

Not-for-Profit Marketing

Non-for-Profit organizations encounter a special set of characteristics that influence their marketing activities. Like profit making firms, not-for-profit organizations may market tangible goods and/or intangible services. One important distinction exists between not-for-profit organizations and profit oriented companies. Profit-seeking businesses tend to focus their marketing on just one public—their customers. Not-for-profit organizations, however, must often market to multiple publics, which complicates decision-making regarding the correct markets to target. Many deal with at least two major publics—their clients and their sponsors—and often many other publics, as well. Political candidates, for example, target both voters and campaign contributors. A college targets prospective students as clients of its marketing program, but it also markets to current students, parents of students, alumni, faculty, staff, local businesses, and local government agencies.

A second distinguishing characteristic of not-for-profit marketing is that a customer or service user may wield less control over the organization’s destiny than would be true for customers of a profit-seeking firm. A government employee may be  far more concerned with the opinion of a member of the legislature’s appropriations committee than with that of a service user. Not-for-profit organizations also often possess some degree of monopoly power in a given geographic area.

Perhaps the most commonly noted feature of the non-profit-organization is its lack of a bottom line—business jargon referring to the overall profitability measure of performance. Profit-seeking firms measure profitability in terms of sales and revenues. While not-for-profit organizations may attempt to maximize their return from specific services, they usually substitute less exact goals, such as service-level standards, for overall evaluation criteria. As a result, it is often difficult to set marketing objectives that are aligned specifically with overall organizational goals.

A typical aspect of a non-for-profit organization is the lack of a clear organizational structure. Not-for-profit organizations often respond to constituencies that they serve, but these usually are less exact than, for example, the stockholders of a profit-oriented corporation. Not-for-profit organizations often have multiple organizational structures.

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.

Vicarious Learning

Vicarious learning, or modeling, is learning through the experiences of others. For example, a person can learn to do a new job by observing others or by watching videotapes. Several conditions must be met to produce various learning. First, the behavior being modeled must be relatively simple. Although we can learn by watching someone else how to push three or four buttons to set specifications on a machine, we probably cannot learn a complicated sequence of operations without also practicing the various steps ourselves. Second, the behavior being modeled usually must be concrete, not intellectual. We can learn by watching others how to respond to the different behaviors of a particular manager or how to assemble a few components into a final assembly. But we probably cannot learn through simple observation how to write a computer program or to conceptualize or think abstractly. Finally, to learn a job vicariously, we must possess the physical ability needed to do the job. Most of us can watch televised baseball games or tennis matches every weekend.

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.

Communications: Compliance

Compliance results through a power relationship between the participants in the communications process. That is, a receiver complies with persuasive efforts of the source because the source has the power, legitimate or otherwise, to administrator rewards or punishments.

Because the powerful source controls rewards and punishments, he or she can often induce compliance to his or her advocated position. However, compliance is relatively superficial in the sense that a compliant individual does what he or she is forced to do and does not necessarily adopt the complied-to position as a matter of personal desire or preference.

Sales representatives sometimes possesses a degree of power over buyers, especially in a seller’s market where demand exceeds supply and buyers are dependent on their vendors for supplies of raw materials, parts, or merchandise. Purchasing personnel may feel that if they do not comply with a sales representative’s requests, their orders may be delayed or cut off completely.

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.

Executive Recruitment

The value of understanding individual personality strengths and developmental areas through the assistance of personality assessment inventories has been especially important in choosing business leaders and senior executives. Executives search firms have long valued the importance of choosing not only the most intelligent candidate with a strategic business sense and proven experience, but one who also possessed the necessary personality traits and leadership competences to operate effectively within an organization’s culture. It was, and is, accepted knowledge that personality plays a critical role in the cultural fit of an incoming senior executive into a new organization. Consideration of personality traits takes on even greater importance when an executive is being chosen to change the direction or culture of the organization.

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.

Human Capital

The economic growth, employment levels and the availability of a skilled workforce are inter-related. Economic growth creates employment, but economic growth partly depends on skilled human resources – a country’s human capital. The concept encompasses investment in the skills of the labor force, including education and vocational training to develop specific skills.

Personal and national success are increasingly correlated with the possession of skills. Skilled individuals can command a premium salary in periods of high economic activity. Worldwide, unemployed levels remain high, while organizations have difficulty filling vacancies which require specific expertise. A shortage of skilled people can act as a limiting factor on individual organizations and on the economy as a whole. Small firms are also vulnerable because their owners do not possess basic marketing and finance skills. It is in the interest of any country to maximize its human resources by investing in the skills of its workforce, its human capital. Human capital is one component of a country’s overall competitiveness.

The most successful developing countries are investing heavily in the education and technical skills of their population. Skills requirement are particularly critical at the managerial level.

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.

 

Concentric Diversification

Grand strategies involving diversification represent distinctive departures from a firm’s existing base of operations, typically the acquisition or internal generation (spin-off) of a separate business with synergistic possibilities counter-balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the two businesses. Diversifications occasionally are undertaken as unrelated investments, because of their high potential and their otherwise minimal resource demands.

Concentric diversification involves the acquisition of businesses that are related to the acquiring firm in terms of technology, markets, or products. With this grand strategy, the selected new businesses possess a high degree of compatibility with the firm’s current businesses. The ideal concentric diversification occurs when the combined company profits increase the strengths and opportunities and decrease the weaknesses and exposure to risk. Thus, the acquiring firm searches for new businesses whose products, markets, distribution channels, technologies, and resource requirements are similar to but not identical with its own, whose acquisition results in synergies but not complete interdependence.

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.

 

Strategic Reasons for Outsourcing

1. Improve business focus: For many companies, the single most compelling reason for outsourcing is that several “how” issues are siphoning off huge amounts of management’s resources and attention.
2. Access to World Class capabilities: By the very nature of their specialization, outsourcing providers bring extensive worldwide, world-class resources to meeting the needs of their customers. Partnering with an organization with world class capabilities can offer access to new technology, tools, and techniques that the organization may not currently possess, better career opportunities for personnel who transition to the outsourcing provider; more structured methodologies, procedures, and documentation; and competitive advantage through expanded skills.
3. Accelerated Reengineering benefits: Outsourcing is often a byproduct of another powerful management tool—business process reengineering. It allows an organization to immediately realize the anticipated benefits of reengineering by having an outside organization—one that is already reengineered to world-class standards—take over the process.
4. Shared risks: When companies outsource they become more flexible, more dynamic, and better able to adapt to changing opportunities.
5. Free resources for other purposes: Outsourcing permits an organization to redirect its resources from noncore activities toward activities that have the greater return in serving the customers.

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.

 

Generic and Grand Strategies

Many businesses explicitly and all implicitly adopt one or more generic strategies characterizing their competitive orientation in the marketplace. Low cost, differentiation, or focus strategies define the three fundamental options. Enlightened managers seek to create ways their firm possesses both low cost and differentiation competitive advantages as part of their overall generic strategy. They usually combine these capabilities with a comprehensive, general plan of major actions through which their firm intends to achieve its long-term objectives in a dynamic environment. Called the grand strategy, this statement of means indicates how the objectives are to be achieved. Although every grand strategy is, in fact, a unique package of long-term strategies, some basic approaches can be identified: concentration, market development, product development, innovation, horizontal integration, vertical integration, joint venture, strategic alliances, consortia, concentric diversification, conglomerate diversification, turnaround, divesture, and liquidation.

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.