Family Businesses: Growth Stages and Challenges Faced

Family business can be describe when business own by one or more families members directly or indirectly and have significant ownership and commitment toward the business well being. Family business can be consist of numerous combination of family members such as husband and wife, parents and child, extended family and also multiple generations such as grandfather, father and son. These family members also play roles as stakeholder, board members, working partners, adviser and employees for the company. Generally there are three different stages of family business had gone through in order for the business to growth from inception to maturity. Different skills are required in each stage and family issues might happen when the business moving from one stage to another stage. The first stage is called as start up stage where the business is still new and varies from 1st to 5th year after the company started to venture Continue reading

Role and Importance of Insurance

Insurance has become an integral aspect in everyone’s life today. It is a written contract of insurance that offers protection against future loss. The life insurance generally helps to insure the life of people. A definite compensation is provided by the insurer to the insured person. The non-life insurance provides financial support to people or companies and helps them to overcome the losses. The basic human trait is to be averse to the idea of taking risks. There is always an urge to minimize the risks and provide protection against possible failure. The risk includes fire, the perils of sea, death, accidents and burglary. Any risk may be insured against at a premium commensurate with the risk involved. Thus collective bearing of risk is insurance that provides reasonable degree of security and assurance that insured will be protected in the event of a calamity or failure of any sort. The Continue reading

Guerrilla Marketing – A Case of Non-Traditional Marketing

When some starry-eyed startup or a small company takes on the big budget corporate in the marketing domain with an underground marketing campaign that costs nothing but causes shock-waves for months, its called guerrilla marketing.  Guerrilla marketing is a different kind of marketing which does not involve big budget but it is about out of the box thinking; it is about using anything around to market a product, an idea or a social message virtually anything under the sun.  It believes in entertaining and engaging the target customer. It does not involve preaching or educating but it is about exciting the viewer to find out a secret or solve a puzzle. Guerrilla campaigns purely depend on creativity, intensive word of mouth campaigns and its oddness like using unconventional locations. Some guerrilla campaigns are so brilliant that it has made bystanders feel lucky to be there to witness them. AMA defines Continue reading

Theory of Absolute Advantage and Comparative Advantage

Theory of Absolute Advantage   If one region can produce a commodity with less expense than another, and they exchange, then both should benefit. In a nutshell, this is the law of comparative advantage. It is used as the justification for WTO trade regulations. Some land grows corn better than other land. This economical insight into farming in early 18th Century was the cornerstone of the law of absolute advantage. Some farmland will yield more corn per acre than another, therefore the good land confers an absolute advantage over other regions. The conclusion drawn from this argument is that the farmer of the poor land should change products that it can produce to its absolute advantage, such as grazing sheep. The law of absolute advantage is based on the assumption that competition is the best paradigm within which to build an economy, it assumes that competition will improve production. The Continue reading

Futures Contract

Future contracts allow the price risk to be separated from the reliability risk by removing the former from the set of factors giving rise to opportunism. The governance structure supplied by the exchange authority effectively eliminates reliability risk from future trading. The seller of futures contracts incurs a liability not to the buyer, but to the clearing house, and likewise the buyer acquires an asset from the clearing house. The clearing house in effect guarantees all transactions. In addition, the exchange rules, especially regarding its members’ contract, severely limit their ability to behave opportunistically. Organized exchanges greatly reduce default and reliability risk from future contracts. This is achieved by transferring transactions over price risks from a personal to an impersonal market through standard form futures contracts traded in self-regulated market price. Future contracts are standard form contracts with only one negotiable term: price. The standardization of future contracts has significant Continue reading

Stimulating Forces for Organizational Change

What makes an organization to think about change? There are a number  of specific, even obvious factors which will necessitate movement from the  status quo. The most obvious of these relate to changes in the external  environment which trigger reaction. An example of this in the last couple of  years is the move by car manufacturers and petroleum organizations towards the  provision of more environmentally friendly forms of ‘produce’. However, to  attribute change entirely to the environment would be a denial of extreme  magnitude. This would imply that organizations were merely ‘bobbing about’ on  a turbulent sea of change, unable to influence or exercise direction. The changes  within an organization take place in response both to business and economic  events and to processes of management perception, choice and action. Managers in this sense see events taking place that, to them, signal the  need for organizational change. They also perceive the Continue reading