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.

Managing Technology

A significant organizational challenge confronting managers today is the set of issues involving the management of technology. Technology is the mechanical and intellectual processes the organization uses to transform inputs (raw materials, parts, cash, facilities, people) into products or services. Managing technology is essentially a reactive process. Whenever a supplier came up with a new piece of equipment to replace an old one, the organization buys it and trains its workers in how to use it.

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.

Compliance and Integrity

In the earliest stages, organizational ethics centered on the narrow perspective of ethics—the notion of compliance. Are we following the laws? Are we at risk from litigation? If so, how do we minimize that risk?

Ethics programs matured and ethics officers, most of whom are selected from the managerial ranks with little, if any, special preparation, developed increased sophistication regarding the challenges facing their organizations. Both the ethics officers and their organizations began to embrace personal and corporate values in decision making (value-based decision making) as the logical expansion of the definition of what it means to be ethical. What has emerged is what many ethics officers today characterize as the “best practices” model of the ethics office and of a values-based corporation.

But change continues. What is emerging today is a more holistic definition of what it means to be a “good” corporation. This new, global view will again help to reshape the responsibilities and focus of the ethics officer.

The shift to a global perspective means another broadening of the definition of ethics. “Global Integrity” is the latest descriptor, and it embraces both compliance and ethics. It also adds concern for rule of law, human rights, good governance, labor/child labor concerns, anti-corruption/anti-bribery, concern for the environment, safety, social responsibility, good corporate citizenship, and respect for the whole diverse array of local cultures to the definition. This increases the organization’s obligation to reach beyond traditional company boundaries to consider how decisions would affect the surrounding community. One consequence of this new global definition of the organizational ethics is increased scrutiny by stakeholders, especially advocacy groups and the media.

Corporate ethics officers, especially those in multinational corporations and/or corporations with global suppliers/markets, are being challenged with fundamental questions in this expanded integrity area. Perhaps the most common, and most challenging, is how the corporation will balance the desire for global standards (consistency) against the need for local application of standards.

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.

Incremental Change Analysis

Most business focuses on the current situation, with changes defined on an iterative, cumulative basis. In this context, issues represent problems or opportunities for change from the current situation. The gaps represent ways that a company may achieve or enhance a competitive edge.

The most common way to define issues is to assess the changes that are expected t occur. These are derived from either internal or external changes, intended by management or occurring as a result of uncontrolled forces (as in workforce changes). Issues are identified in the way that people normally think—incrementally from the present toward future.

In this process, managers identify and evaluate human resource issues by sorting through available strategic planning, competitive, and environmental information for evidence of changes having human resource implications and then define human resource issues that may be addressed. Such analysis may examine employee productivity issues, service quality, staffing surpluses or shortfalls, succession needs, skill requirements, utilization, costs, turnover/retention patterns, or employee attitudes.

Managers also obtain and consider perspectives of relevant constituents, such as other managers and employees, vendors, suppliers, and customers. Companies solicit inputs from managers at various levels through their participation in the planning process or through interviews, focus groups, or surveys with key managers. Many companies survey employees, either specifically for planning inputs or more broadly as an assessment of organizational climate and human resource practices. Companies may involve employees through interviews or focus groups to help define issues and alternative strategies. Some also interview or survey customers, contractors, and other business partners regarding human resource issues to be addressed.

Environmental scanning is used to identify prospective human resource issues deriving from changing external conditions. Scanning the many changes occurring in social, political, legislative, demographic, economic, technological and other areas yields a wide array of issues that may be considered.

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.

Toyota’s Supply Chain

The first-tier firms play a key role in Toyota’s Supply Chain. There are six areas in which these firms act  as the pivotal part of the system.

1. Quality Buffer
2. Gaining
3. System Developer
4. Purchaser
5. Designer
6. Problem Solvers

Within the Toyota supplier network there is only a small reliance on the micro firms. However, the key to Toyota’s success cannot lie within such very small firms at the 3^rd and 4^th tiers as they are only responsible for 3 percent of the value=adding processes, although due to their high productivity  this yields a 10 percent total productivity advantage  to the total Toyota supplier network.

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.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers

Increasing prices and reducing the quality of products sold are potential means through which suppliers can exert power over firms competing within an industry. If a firm is unable to recover cost increases through its pricing structure, its profitability is reduced by its suppliers’ actions. A supplier group is powerful when:

• It is dominated by a few large companies and is more concentrated than the industry to which it sells;
• Satisfactory substitute products are not available to industry firms;
• Industry firms are not a significant customer for the supplier group;
• Suppliers’ goods are critical to buyers’ marketplace success;
• The effectiveness of suppliers’ products has created high switching costs for industry firms, and
• Suppliers are a credible threat to integrate forward into the buyers’ industry. Credibility is enhanced when suppliers have substantial resources and provide the industry’s firms with a highly differentiated product.

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.

Competitive Intelligence

Developing useful plans offer requires knowing as much as possible about what competitors are doing or are planning to do. Competitive intelligence is a systematic way to obtain  and analyze public information about competitors. Although this sounds a lot like legalized spying, it’s become much more popular over the past few years.

There are a variety of techniques to find out what competitors are doing. They include keeping track of competitors by having specialists visit their facilities, and hiring their workers and questioning their suppliers and 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.

Economic Truths

Although there are few truisms that apply universally in the business world, there are four related economic truths that are valid in every business situation:

1. Over the long term, it is absolutely essential to be a lower cost supplier or profit margins will erode.
2. To stay competitive, inflation-adjusted costs of  producing and supplying any product or service must continuously trend downward.
3. The true cost and profit picture for each discrete product/market segment is often obscured by traditional accounting practice.
4. Real business winners concentrate as much or more on cash flow and balance sheet strength as they do on reported profits.

These points have always been valid, but they are far more serious today because there is much less margin for error in our more turbulent environment.

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.

Managing for Customer Satisfaction

If you are working in a business that is focused and dedicated to customer satisfaction you cannot manage it in the same way as an ordinary or traditional business – it just doesn’t work. Organizations have found this to their cost. Implementing policies without changing the organization first is self-defeating. The organization will defeat change as soundly as day follows night. However, if you change the organization and the way people are managed and led and you have developed the policies, ideas, procedures, standards and systems will evolve rapidly and effectively.

The first major change has to be  the ritual burning and demolition of the standard organization chart. Customers, suppliers and employees cannot be forced to work through traditional top down hierarchical management systems. Not only does it give people the wrong feeling, it actually just doesn’t work. It’s not that it ever worked particularly well anyway, it was just the thing that everyone used when they put together a large organization.

Today’s manager has to be much more of a communicator than a dictator. They also have to be much more of a facilitator than a policy determinator. People’s aspirations have changed, just as the customers have. They need to be treated in a way that encourages them, empowers them and enthuses them to deliver the best for their 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.