Case Study on Entrepreneurship: Larry Page

Business Analysis

The Boundaryless Career: Modern Contemperory Perspective on Career

Human Resource Management

Concepts of Throughput Accounting and Theory of Constraints

Financial Management

Kaizen – Understanding the Japanese Business Philosophy of Continuous Improvement

Operations Management

Role of Leaders in Shaping Organizational Culture

Management Principles

Case Study: Cisco Systems Inc.’s ERP Implementation

Introduction Cisco Systems, Inc. is a big player in the Internet technologies field, manufacturing their primary product – the router. Two Stanford computer scientists founded the company in 1984, unbelievably by 1997, Cisco became a fortune 500 company and in the following year Cisco’s market capitalization was over $100 billion dollars.  With the gigantic growth experienced Cisco needed to look into their future regarding their existing Enterprise Resource Planning package. Unreliability and common outages brought into question the validity of trying to enlarge the current system to meet the Cisco’s constantly growing needs. The current system was a UNIX-based software package that supported financial, manufacturing, and order-entry systems.  An upgrade was made available to Cisco, but would be a fix that offered more reliability and redundancy without maintainability or room for growth.  The management structure in 1993 provided that each functional business unit make its own decisions regarding the future of their IT Continue reading

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New Trade Theory of International Trade

New Trade Theory  of International Trade  takes a different approach from the Ricardian and the Heckscher-Ohlin models on why countries engage in international trade. Both Ricardo and Heckscher assumed constant returns to scale where to them if all factors of production are doubled then output will also double. But a firm or industry may have increasing returns to scale or economies of scale in way that when all factors of production are doubled, output more than doubles which will necessitate a bigger market and thus forcing firms to engage in international trade where there is a larger market. The New Trade Theorist noted that the bigger the size of a firm or industry the more the efficiency of its operations in that the the cost per unit of output falls as a firm or industry increases output. The increase in output must however be met with an increase in the Continue reading

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Perspectives on Industrial Relations

Industrial relations is a set of phenomena operating both within and outside the workplace, concerned with determining and regulating the employment relationship. Scholars have described three major theoretical perspectives or frameworks, that contrast in their understanding and analysis of workplace relations. The three important perspectives on industrial relations are generally known as Unitarism, Pluralism and Marxism. Each offers a particular perception of workplace relations and will therefore interpret such events as workplace conflict, the role of unions and job regulation differently. The three major perspectives on Industrial Relations are; 1. Unitary Perspective In unitarism, the organization is perceived as an integrated and harmonious system, viewed as one happy family. A core assumption of unitary approach is that management and staff, and all members of the organization share the same objectives, interests and purposes; thus working together, hand-in-hand, towards the shared mutual goals. Furthermore, unitarism has a paternalistic approach where it Continue reading

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Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) and Human Resource Management (HRM)

Today’s economy is experiencing its ups and downs very quickly: rising competitiveness and fast changing technologies create pressure to the companies that want to stay at the top of their markets. This is not going to slow down, so the need for tools of success is arising. At the same time we are moving away from the belief that “entrepreneurs are born, not made”. That is why the wanting, believing, hoping, planning must be followed by doing. As already Confucius said: “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps”. It is time for action and one form of it that suits different businesses nowadays is — Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE). Corporate entrepreneurship is the process whereby an individual or group of individuals, in association with an existing organization, create a new organization or instigate renewal or innovation within that organization. There Continue reading

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Case Study of Motorola: Brand Revitalization Through Design

When Motorola released its earnings report for the second quarter ending June 2005, analyst and competitors alike were stumped. The company posted revenues of $8.83 billion up from $7.4 billion a year ago and earnings of $993 million against a $203 million loss a year ago. Selling 34 million handsets, the cell phone unit accounted for 55% of the quarterly revenue and $ 498 million in operating earnings. Motorola’s market share increased to 18.1%, a gain of 3.3%, establishing itself firmly as the second largest manufacturer behind Nokia (33% market share). This was an impressive turnaround for a company that had seen market share decline from a high of 51% during 1996 to a low of 13% in 2004 pushing it behind the market leader Nokia and the South Korean rival Samsung. A key contributor to Motorola’s turnaround was the RAZR V3 (Razr), the thinnest phone ever developed. This ultra-slim Continue reading

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Knowledge Management Systems: Conditions for Success

Certain factors or concerns also need to be considered in order to make this firm’s investment in Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) worthwhile. There is need for a major transformation in organisational culture to create desire to share, (give and receive). When there is organisational culture barrier, people tend to hoard their knowledge. One of the reasons why employees don’t share knowledge is the belief that knowledge is power and that hoarding it guarantees job security. Employees also tend to believe that there is no credit for knowledge sharing or won’t be able to own it anymore if they share. There might also not be time for knowledge sharing or afraid of making mistakes or being reprimanded. Some employees also do not know how to share knowledge or do not realize that their knowledge is valuable to the organisation. In order to solve these problems, employees need to be educated on Continue reading

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