Case Study of Toyota: Birth of Lexus

Toyota’s most popular car in North America is the inexpensive Camry, the car targeted at the lower end of the market. Based on informal information from sales records and competitor sales, Toyota executives, especially CEO Toyoda, perceived a need to move into the luxury car market. The people who for years bought Camrys were moving up in life and wanting more expensive cars, such as the BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, and Cadillac. To fully define the decision requirements, Toyota dispatched 20 designers to the United States to study what customers wanted. They visited dealers, buttonholed car buyers, and organized focus groups. They learned that the need was for a luxury car that would suit younger buyers who wanted to buy European cars but could not yet afford them. Because the United States was the major market, a small team stayed in California designing clay models. In the meantime, the U.S. subsidiary, Continue reading

Factors to Consider in a Cross-border Merger or Acquisition

Cross border mergers and acquisitions are playing an important role in the growth of international production. Not only they dominate FDI flows in developing countries, they have also begun to take hold as a mode of entry into developing countries and economies in transition. Although the basic merger or acquisition is the same worldwide, undertaking a cross-border transaction is more complex than those conducted ‘‘in market’’ because of the multiple sets of laws, customs, cultures, currencies, and other factors that impact the process. How should the Transaction be Financed? The financial structure of the transaction might be impacted by which country the target is in. For example, from a valuation perspective, ‘‘flowback’’ can have a negative impact on the acquirer’s stock price and cause regulatory problems (i.e. stock ‘‘flowing’’ back to the acquirer’s home jurisdiction). Other types of considerations include the change in the nature of the investments held by Continue reading

Case Study on Corporate Governance: Enron Scam

Enron is an energy-based company in Houston, Texas that deals with the energy trade on international and domestic based. Enron Corp. Is one of the world’s largest energy, commodities and Services Company was created out of merger of two major gas pipe line in 1985. Enron was created by merge between Houston Natural Gas and Internorth. Houston’s gas’s CEO Kenneth lay headed the merger of the two companies. After that Kenneth lay become the CEO of Enron. Earlier Enron was Enron was solely involved with the distribution and transmission of electricity and gas of United States. In merger, Enron incurred a large amount of debt, and which resulted deregulation, after this Enron was no longer had the rights of its pipelines. The company had to find a way to generate profits and cash flow. Kenneth lay hired Jeffrey Skilling to work for Enron as an accountant. Skilling suggested the practice Continue reading

The Five Phases of Ethical Hacking

It is debatable, if hacking can be ethical or not, the term “Hacking” over time has been associated with destructive activity. These are some of the terms used in the context of hacking which provides better clarity, Hacker is somebody who enjoys learning hacking for a defensive purpose; an ethical hacker is the security professional who exercises his skills for a defensive purpose. The term Cracker refers to a person who uses his hacking skills for destructive purpose. The ethical question here is in regard to the physical activity of hacking which is sometimes hard to differentiate from cracking. The main difference being, Ethical hacker just identifies vulnerabilities and does not exploit them unlike a cracker. Ethical hacking is the process adopted by ethical hackers to discover the vulnerabilities existing in information systems operating environments. With the growth of internet, computer security has become a major concern for business. Organizations Continue reading

Human Resource Cost Analysis

Human resource cost analysis is the study of behavior of cost in relation to one or more HR criteria. Controlling manpower costs has now become important for organizations, particularly when we are required to look within for cost savings to sustain organizational growth and profitability. To enforce control on HR costs, it is essential to develop a check-list at the outset. This requires grouping of activities under different cost heads and then Identifying the individual cost elements under each head. By developing an HR costs spreadsheet, we can understand the magnitude of HR costs in an organization. Element-wise cost trend over the years facilitates regular monitoring and operational control. At the macro-level, net value added per employee is an indicator of cost efficiency. Developing an HR Costs Checklist HR costs checklist varies from organization to organization due to obvious differences in their practices. Here we have mentioned about those cost Continue reading

Importance of Communication

Communication in its simplest sense involve two or more persons who come together to share, to dialogue and to commune, or just to be together for a festival or family gathering. Dreaming, talking with someone, arguing in a discussion, speaking in public, reading a newspaper, watching TV etc. are all different kinds of communication that we are engaged in every day. Communication is thus not so much an act or even a process but rather social and cultural ‘togetherness’. Communication can be with oneself, god, and nature and with the people in our environment. Interaction, interchange, transaction, dialogue, sharing, communion, and commonness are ideas that crop up in any attempt to define the term communication. Communication is important both for an individual and also for the society. A person’s need for communication is as strong and as basic as the need to eat, sleep, and love. Communication is the requirement Continue reading