Overview of Fraud – The Fraud Triangle Fraud has become an important topic in today’s business environment, especially in the light of scandals such as Enron (Read: Enron Accounting Scandal) and WorldCom (Read: WorldCom Accounting Scandal). While many think of top corporate executives committing fraudulent acts, especially those considering financial reporting, it is important to note that lower level employees also add to the risk of fraud within a company. The fraud triangle shows the three main elements necessary in order to create fraud: pressure, rationalization, and opportunity. Financial pressure is often the first reason someone within a corporation would want to commit fraud. This could take the form of a lower level employee who finds himself in a difficult personal situation and believes that he would only benefit from stealing from the company. Alternatively, an employee may commit fraud because they believe that the company or their job could Continue reading
Modern Business Concepts
Blue Ocean Strategy – Summary and Examples
Strategy involves standing out from the competition and making choices that give the company a unique and valuable position by offering distinctive products and services. Competitive advantage and profitability can be achieved simultaneously by approaches that create consistent internal synergies and combine a company’s operational activities efficiently. Strategies are formed at various levels of the organization. However, a typical organizational structure incorporates strategies at 3 specific levels: corporate, business and functional. Corporate strategy defines a company’s holistic growth and management direction pertaining to its various businesses, products and services. Business strategies, on the other hand, are established at the divisional levels and typically focus on enhancing the strategic business unit’s competitive position in its industry. Functional strategies aim to maximize resource productivity and are typically set by functional departments within each SBU to improve competencies and performance. The profitability of a company depends on three primary factors which include the Continue reading
Business Continuity Management (BCM) According to ISO 22301
Doing business is a great thing if everything runs perfectly. As we all know there is no such thing as a perfect way of doing anything. This is true in the business arena. Things are going to happen which is not in the best interest of the day to day operation of any business. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fire, and volcanoes can happen at any given time. Your business could be a victim of a serious data breach. All of the previously mentioned scenarios can seriously affect how business is run. To counteract those on foreseen events every company should have a continuity disaster recovery plan. Planning for the worst case and how the company is going to limit their downtime. The ultimate goal of the disaster recovery plan is to limit every potential risk and get the organization running as close to normal in the shortest Continue reading
How to Manage Innovation?
When we think about innovation one question arises in the mind: Does the innovation come naturally? Or it may be taught. The answer is that everyone can be creative and innovative the only requirement is to encourage the innovation among people. Innovation is real work and it can & should be managed like any other corporate function but that does not mean it is the same as other business activities. Indeed, innovation is the work of knowing rather than doing. Buzz today is to encourage and manage innovation through innovation management. One strategy to build up an innovative organization is getting people to accept that the way they work just might not be the best. The most important thing is to help people broaden their perspective. Innovation is like a sky with horizons defined. These horizons can only be broaden through innovation. There is no agreed definition of Innovation Management. Continue reading
Open Innovation – A New Innovation Paradigm
An innovation is a product or service with a bundle of features that is new in the market, or that is commercialized in some new way that opens up new uses and consumer groups for it. Innovation is invention implemented and taken to market. Invention however is the creation of something that was previously unknown. In summary, INNOVATION= INVENTION+COMMERCIALIZATION. Today companies who, want to deliver consistent organic growth to their shareholders, customers, and their employees can do that only through innovation. Concept of Open Innovation According to American organizational theorist Henry Chesbrough, Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. Open innovation assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology. As mentioned Continue reading
Changing Face of Outsourcing Industry in India
Starting in the mid 1980’s, the ways of doing business changed forever. The business world was for the first time introduced to the concept of ‘outsourcing’ whatever it thought was not core to profit making. Slowly, through the subsequent decades, we have learnt how to make a sharp demarcation between what makes profits for the business and what is simply undifferentiated cost. As time passed, most businesses came to understand that non-core activities i.e. those things that were not important to the money making machinery in a business could be given to someone else to do. It was a smart thing to do. One could get more time and investment to spend on ‘profit centers’ rather than diluting efforts with the time and management effort needed to manage ‘cost centers’. Moreover, simultaneously moving work to the low cost production locations helped to cut down costs further. This phenomenon gave us Continue reading