10 Steps to Successful Crisis Management

A crisis is an abnormal situation, or even perception, which is beyond the scope of everyday business and which threatens the operation, safety and reputation of an organisation.  Crises do not discriminate based on a company’s size or notoriety, and they can hit when a company least expects them. They come in many forms — strikes, layoffs, product recalls or allegations of misconduct, but while some of these may seem small, every crisis has the potential to damage the reputation of a company. Regardless of the severity of the situation, crises pose a serious threat to companies — not only to their reputation but their fiscal health as well. When Odwalla’s apple juice was thought to be the cause of an outbreak of E. coli bacteria, the company lost a third of its market value. The same allegation against Jack in the Box restaurant in 1993 caused the hamburger chain’s Continue reading

Organizational Innovation – Definition, Characteristics and Types

Organizational Innovation is a process of receiving and using new ideas to satisfy the stakeholders of an organization. It is the conversion of new knowledge into new products and services. Organizational  Innovation is about creating value and increasing efficiency, and therefore growing business. It is a spark that keeps organizations and people moving ever onward and upward. “Without innovation, new products, new services, and new ways of doing business would never emerge, and most organizations would be forever stuck doing the same old things the same old way. “Innovation here is defined broadly, to include both improvements in technology and better methods  or ways of doing things. It can be manifested in product changes, process changes, new approaches  to marketing, new forms of distribution, and new conceptions of scope.” (Porter, 1990, p. 45) The term organizational innovations covers a wide spectrum of innovations; for example, it can  mean innovations in Continue reading

Shareholder Wealth Maximization Vs. Stakeholder Interest

Until now, the discussion between shareholder value perspective and stakeholder perspective has still been argued critically. Some people think that stakeholder interest should be superior over shareholder wealth maximization, but others argue that shareholder wealth maximization should be the prime concern. However, it is obvious to realize that shareholder wealth maximization is the objective of a firm and shareholder wealth maximization should be superior over stakeholder interest in the concern of the both shareholder interest and stakeholder interest. Firstly, it is necessary to understand some definitions of shareholder, stakeholder and the theory of shareholder and theory of stakeholder. Why there has been many debates between two theories ? Shareholder is an individual or corporation owning stock in a public or private company. Shareholder decides the membership of the board of directors by making a vote. Maximizing shareholder wealth means maximizing the flow of dividends to shareholders through time – there Continue reading

The Concept of Co-Sourcing

New methods of outsourcing are today redefining the way of working. Co-sourcing  is a situation of partial  outsourcing, in which a business function or process is performed by both internal staff and by an external party or external resources, such as consultants or outsourcing vendors, with specialized knowledge of the business function.  Compared to full outsourcing, for the traditional owner of the processes, co-sourcing has advantages of staying in control, a non-transactional partnership and the ability to grow the own knowledge level of the co-sourced process. One such way is co-sourcing which is an investment relationship marked by shared objectives, shared risks and shared rewards between two companies, one of which is a service provider. Specifically, the service provider would have to help restructure the company and be willing to make new investments, while driving out costs from the co-sourcing company’s existing ways working. Although it may seem similar to Continue reading

What is Customer Analytics?

Data in any form is considered as the new gold in the 21st century.  Organizations that primarily focus on data-driven approaches have the potential to be ahead of their respective game. One of the important and core objectives of any company would be to maintain a solid and strong relationship with its customers, understanding them and providing them what they want. Customer Analytics is this field of analytics, where one dives deep into the consumer data and brings about useful insights on their clients. Customer Analytics finds its utmost use in the marketing as well sales departments where the customer data is the key to understand the customer behavior for them chart their marketing as well advertising strategy. Customer Analytics supports business decision-making through targeting specific groups based on income groups, age groups, and customer segmentation as understanding customer groups would help the businesses to create more strong strategies for Continue reading

DSMC/ATI Organizational Performance Improvement Model

Out of the organizational performance improvement planning process come specific performance improvement interventions, tactics and techniques. Note that these interventions happen at five checkpoints. Upstream systems, inputs, process, outputs and downstream systems. Quality management efforts must be defined relative to these five checkpoints. In effect, transformation and continuous improvement efforts are commitments to a practice of managing all five-quality checkpoints. The management team then develops, through the performance improvement planning process, a balanced attack to improve total system performance, not just system sub-components. After interventions are made to the system, measure, assess and analyze organizational performance at the five checkpoints to determine whether the expected impact actually occurred. Based on these data, make an evaluation relative to the business strategy, the environment (both internal and external), the vision, the plan and the improvement actions themselves. Note that the process of evaluation is separate from the process of measurement. In addition, Continue reading