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Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services. Major, overall activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations of processes. A great deal of focus is on efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Therefore, operations management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes. Ultimately, the nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of the products or services in the organization, for example, on retail, manufacturing or wholesale.

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The job of coordinating and controlling the activities required to make a product typically involving effective control and scheduling costs, performance, quality, and waste requirements. Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifestyle.  Similarly, product lifecycle management integrates people, data, processes and business systems. It provides product information for companies and their extended supply chain enterprise.

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A management control system is a system which gathers and uses information to evaluate the performance of different organizational resources like human, physical, financial and also the organization as a whole in light of the organizational strategies pursued.

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Management Control - organization, levels, system, examples, manager, definition, type, hierarchy, business

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Encyclopedia of Business, 2nd ed. Management Control: Log-Mar

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Operations control has authority over normal business operations at the operational level, as opposed to the strategic or tactical levels. Operational control includes control over how normal business processes are executed, but does not include control over the strategic business targets or high-level business priorities.

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Strategic Management :: Operating Control

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Strategic Management :: Operating Control

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The best managers understand the need for building alliances and communicating throughout all levels of the organization. Effective communications skills are a must for breaking down barriers, which promotes the collaborative atmosphere that an organization needs to thrive. A typical employee's engagement and interest in work varies from day to day. Astute managers accept this reality but can tailor their own communication style to motivate an employee to achieve the desired result.

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I provide pragmatic advice and services to entrepreneurs and startups. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Every business professional and entrepreneur believes they are good communicators, but how do they know? It's really the perception of the recipients that counts, and poor communicators are almost always poor listeners, so they don't hear the shortcomings. Warren Buffet once told a class of business students that better communication could boost their value by fifty percent.

That's certainly worth going after, so it is time for all to take a hard look in the mirror, recognize the need to improve, and make the commitment to change. But looking in the mirror doesn't help unless you know what to look for. I see real help a new book, " What MORE Can I Say," by Dianna Booher, one of the most recognized business communication gurus, which clearly calls out the parameters of effective business communication.

In that context, she offers a nine-point checklist for success in the art of communication and persuasion that I believe every professional should use in their own self-evaluation. I'll paraphrase a few of her insights here to get you started:

1. Generate trust rather than distrust. Effective communication requires trust in you, your message and your delivery. We tend to trust people that we think are like us, or we have social proof that others trust, or we feel reciprocal trust from the sender. People who are optimistic, confident, and demonstrate competence generate trust. Are you one of these?

2. Be collaborative rather than present a monologue. Collaborating for influence has become a fundamental leadership skill. Be known for the questions you ask - not the answers you give. Statements imply that you intend to control the interaction, whereas questions imply that other input has value to arriving at a mutually beneficial decision.

3. Aim to simplify rather than inject complexity. Simplicity leads to focus, which produces clarity of purpose. People distrust what they don't understand, what they perceive as doublespeak, or things made unnecessarily complex. Influencing people to change their mind or actions requires building an intuitive simple path to your answer.

4. Deliver with tact and avoid insensitivity. Some word choices turn people off because they are tasteless, tactless, or pompous. Phrase your communication to avoid biases that might create negative reactions. Consider using other authority figures or quotes to deliver a more persuasive message while eliminating any sensitive implications.

5. Position future potential instead of achievements alone. The allure of potential is normally greater than today's actual achievements. This is especially true for career advancement, motivation, and the power of systems. For customers and clients, let them have it both ways. Consider what you can package as your own untapped potential.

6. Consider the listener perspective rather than the presenter. Listeners tend to average all the pieces of information they hear and walk away with a single impression. More is not always better, so reduce the length of presentations and speeches. Perceptions are more important than reality. Avoid the over-helpfulness syndrome.

7. Tend toward specifics rather than generalizations. Many executive speeches miss the mark because they aim for the general constituency and hit no one. People need to know how a message relates to them personally, not just what has to be done and why. Your challenge is to make the future seem attainable and applicable to each listener.

8. Capitalize on emotions as well as logic. Emotion often overrides logic, but logic rarely overrides emotion. For many listeners, a logical explanation merely justifies and supports an emotional decision that has already been made. Recognize and calm first any emotional reactions of fear. Engage multiple senses to reach a listener's emotion.

9. Lead with empathy before your own perspective. Empathy starts with active listening to what's being said and what's not being said. Listen for the gaps and distortion between perception and reality, and then focus on closing these gaps before any persuasion to your own perspective is attempted. Let others help you listen, and tune your response.

As the economy continues to improve, and the competition gets tougher, you need every ounce of communication skill you can muster to land the career and business opportunities that will be coming your way. Standing still means falling behind. Are you listening and changing at the right pace to get your fifty percent advantage?

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How Effective Is Your Business Communication Skill?

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Every business professional and entrepreneur believes they are good communicators, but how do they know? It's really the perception of the recipients that counts, and poor communicators are almost always poor listeners, so they don't hear the shortcomings. Warren Buffet once told a class of business students that better communication [...]

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Effective business leadership is critical for meeting employee, customer and business needs. Leadership skills are skills that can, fortunately, be learned. It is not true that leaders are born, not made. Business leadership skills generally center on the ability to communicate effectively, the ability to focus on the big picture, and the ability to gather and analyze information. Some examples are lack of communication, effective business strategies, and knowing how to gather and analyze data.

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Lynda Silsbee, CPT, SPHR

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Founder and President at Alliance for Leadership Acceleration

Being a leader can be tough, it can also be really rewarding. In 12+ years of coaching leaders through challenges so they can have a rewarding leadership experience and inspire their employees, we've identified what we would say are the top 7 challenges we see again and again:

# 1: Isolation. Being a leader can be really lonely. You need to be the boss and sometimes you can't really talk through issues you're having with your employees, team, or management team. For example, you have an employee that reacts in a very emotional way every time you give them feedback-who do you talk to about this? You can't talk to other employees. You don't necessarily want to expose the behavior to upper management and tarnish the perception of this employee. You don't want to take it home. It's sensitive and you want to respect the privacy of the employee, honor their trust, and help them overcome their challenges. But how? This isolation can lead to loneliness, conflict avoidance or problems like the example, and it can also lead to a lot of second guessing resulting in delayed decision making and wishy-washy back and forth directives.

# 2: Lack of honest feedback. It's not that people are dishonest, they just often times aren't asked to provide feedback, or they hold back when they do.

# 3: Lack of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is so important. To have emotional intelligence is to be self-aware, be able to self-regulate, to have social awareness and social regulation. It's all about knowing your strengths and challenges and how you contribute to the outcomes of different situations.

You may be seeing a connection among all of these challenges: if you are isolated, it's hard to get honest feedback. If you can't get honest feedback, it's difficult to obtain emotional intelligence. You can see how leadership can be really tough! But, back to the list...

# 4: The fourth biggest challenge facing a leader would be that they lack the skills to lead from a place of influence rather than authority. When you only use your authority-your position as boss, or VP, or director--those around you will often only do what they are required to do-they are compliant; managers often end up micro-managing task lists with employees making sure the minimum gets done-not an efficient use of time. However, when you lead from a position of influence, using your relationships and knowledge, people will do their tasks to the best of their ability.

# 5: Leading and managing change effectively. This is a fairly global challenge-up to 70% of all change efforts fail! But it doesn't have to be this way. Particularly mid-level managers can have a big influence on whether change is implemented effectively. This is why developing leadership skills and confidence within the mid-level management at organizations is so critical.

# 6: Communicating and operating across teams and across the organization. This is the difference between operating in a silo-manager and their team members, and working across the organization, breaking silos down in order to work as a larger team and network to really utilize the resources of the organization.

# 7: Thinking big picture and systematically. Along with working in silos-it's difficult for many leaders to pull themselves out of the day to day and see the big picture. But it's critical for decision making and for breaking down those silos and starting to work across the organization to harness the power contained in the resources of the entire organization.

Stay tuned for our series of posts about overcoming these challenges.

If you or someone you know is looking to make the LEAP to leadership, our LEAP Leadership Acceleration Program has new cohorts starting soon. Find out more about LEAP.

If you are a top quality coach looking to add a proven leadership development program to your service offerings, join the Alliance for Leadership Acceleration and become a LEAP Certified Coach.

Founder and President at Alliance for Leadership Acceleration

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THE TOP 7 CHALLENGES FACING LEADERS TODAY

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Being a leader can be tough, it can also be really rewarding. In 12+ years of coaching leaders through challenges so they can have a rewarding

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Extrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is driven by external rewards such as money, fame, grades, and praise. This type of motivation arises from outside the individual, as opposed to intrinsic motivation, which originates inside of the individual.

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Intrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is driven by internal rewards. In other words, the motivation to engage in a behavior arises from within the individual because it is naturally satisfying to you. This contracts with extrinsic motivation, which involves engaging in a behavior in order to earn external rewards or avoid punishment.

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The ability to provide timely and well-reasoned feedback to employees is critical in the development of a quality workforce that supports the goals and mission of the University of Louisville. Supervisors have a unique opportunity to directly impact the work of the unit, the success of its employees, and ultimately, their own success. This is both a privilege and a responsibility. The Performance Management Program is comprised of several different components, including the performance evaluation. The performance evaluation cycle includes four components: establish, plan, monitor and evaluate.

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Training and developing is a function of human resource management concerned with organizational activity aimed at bettering the performance of individuals and groups in organizational settings. It has been known by several names, including "Human Resource Development", "Human Capital Development" and "Learning and Development".

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The human resources selection process is important because of the production and performance value companies get by making good hires and the high costs of replacing employees following bad hires. These considerations are especially heightened for small businesses.

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Why Is the Human Resource Selection Process Important?

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The human resources, or HR, selection process is important because of the production and performance value companies get by making good hires and the high costs of replacing employees following bad hires. These considerations are especially heightened for small businesses. HR has taken on a more strategic role in many ...

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Recruitment (hiring) is a core function of human resource management. Recruitment refers to the overall process of attracting, selecting and appointing suitab candidates for jobs (either permanent or temporary) within an organization.

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The purposes of employee rewards are:

Attracting, retaining and effectively rewarding qualified, talented and diligent employees.

Supporting exceptional performance and outstanding employee efforts.

Performance-related motivation of effective labor, self-education, and mutual coaching.

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An organizations culture is defined as the shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide the actions of its members.  It tends to be shaped by the founders' values, the industry and business environment, the national culture, and the senior leaders' vision and behavior. The work culture gives an identity to the organization. In other words, an organization is known by its culture. The organization culture brings all the employees on a common platform. The employees must be treated equally and no one should feel neglected or left out at the workplace. For example, I worked at Jeremiahs Italian Ice where the culture was laid back, "chill", and "cool". These words not only described our products ( Italian ice" but it also described how each employee should act.

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An informal organization is the interlocking social structure that governs how people work together in practice. It is the aggregate of norms, personal and professional connections through which work gets done and relationships are built among people who share a common organizational affiliation or cluster of affiliations. It consists of a dynamic set of personal relationships, social networks, communities of common interest, and emotional sources of motivation.

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The formal structure of a group or organization includes a fixed set of rules of procedures and structures usually set out in writing, with a language of rules that ostensibly leave little discretion for interpretation.

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What is Formal Organizational Structure

The formal organizational structure (also used the term organizational structure) is an officially codified hierarchical arrangement of relationships between different jobs within the organizational units and relationships between departments within the organization. It defines hierarchical relationships and assignes competencies (competences), mutual ties and liability.

The Formal organizational structure (also just organizational structure) is an officially codified hierarchical arrangement of relationships between different jobs within the organizational units and relationships between departments within the organization (shown in a Organigram). It includes hierarchical relationships and assigns competence, ties and responsibilities. A formal organizational structure is necessary for the management of a bigger number of people, because it unites different business activities, processes and people and formalizes their relationships to achieve the common objectives of the organization. There is no optimal organizational structure. There are only organizational structures that optimize the deployment of management and staff to achieve the organization's goals.

The formal organizational structure of an organization is a type of a social network. Depending on the type and size, there are different typologies of formal organizational structures.

The formal organizational structure includes:

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The formal organizational structure (also used the term organizational structure) is an officially codified hierarchical arrangement of relationships between different jobs within the organizational units and relationships between departments within the organization. It defines hierarchical relationships and assignes competencies (competences), mutual ties and liability.

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In the SWOT analysis, threats are anything that could cause damage to your organization, venture, or product. This could include anything from other companies, to supply shortages. Threats are negative, and external. This mean that threats do not benefit your company, but there is nothing you can do to stop them from coming about.

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Another component to SWOT analysis is opportunity. A useful approach when looking at opportunities is to look at your strengths and ask yourself whether these open up any opportunities. Alternatively, look at your weaknesses and ask yourself whether you could open up opportunities by eliminating them.

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This is another component of SWOT analysis. Again, consider this from an internal and external perspective: Do other people seem to perceive weaknesses that you don't see? Are your competitors doing any better than you? It's best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

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Small businesses use SWOT analysis to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses, and to identify potential opportunities and threats. Uncovering these factors can help small business owners focus on growing their businesses and attracting customers. Weaknesses, as identified in SWOT analysis, focus on areas a business can improve upon so that it doesn't lose sales or ruin the company's reputation.

Online Presence

Consumers are increasing use of the Internet to research companies, find their contact information and browse their inventories. Some traditional brick-and-mortar operations don't have an online presence, such as is found on websites or in social networking profiles, so it is hard for potential customers to find them. Small businesses might lose customers if their competitors are online.

Branding and Reputation

Small businesses have competition that may have better branding and better reputation than they have established. This type of weakness is prevalent when customers are already familiar with a specific store or brand, and then a small business creates or offers a competing product or service. Company's with better brand recognition, and established reputations, see a higher percentage of the market share, which is a potential weakness for a small operation.

Outdated Technology

Today's business world relies on technology for everything from inventory management to communicating with customers. When a business uses outdated technology it can slow down productivity and contribute to the business losing money. For example, if a graphic design company uses a desktop publishing program that most printers don't use anymore, it could limit the types of printers the company could work with and negatively impact how files are formatted and transferred.

Marketing Budget

Marketing is a key factor in promoting products and services to customers, whether through pay-per-click campaigns or by offering product samples to potential customers. If a business lacks the budget for marketing, this is a major weakness that can affect how much of the market share a business acquires, and how high its sales are from quarter to quarter.

Human Resources

Limited human resources is a weakness many small business owners discover they have when they do their SWOT analysis. Limited human resources can include having a small staff, which makes it difficult to tackle every item on the company's to-do list. On the other hand, a company with a full staff that lacks the skills and training necessary to perform tasks can be a hindrance to an organization. If a company wants to launch its social media presence, but none of the staff has experience in social media, it can be a major weakness for the company. Either they'll have to hire a consultant, or risk an unsuccessful social media launch.

About the Author

Miranda Brookins is a marketing professional who has over seven years of experience in copywriting, direct-response and Web marketing, publications management and business communications. She has a bachelor's degree in business and marketing from Towson University and is working on a master's degree in publications design at University of Baltimore.

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Small businesses use SWOT analysis to examine the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses, and to identify potential opportunities and threats. Uncovering these factors can help small business owners focus on growing their businesses and attracting customers. Weaknesses, as identified in SWOT analysis, focus on areas a business can improve upon so that it doesn't lose sales or ruin the company's reputation.

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This module was all about SWOT analysis. One of the components is strength. When looking at your strengths, think about them in relation to your competitors. For example, if all of your competitors provide high quality products, then a high quality production process is not a strength in your organization's market, it's a necessity.

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Whenever you do an internal analysis or SWOT analysis of a company, you first observe the strengths of the company. The reason for observing the strength in swot analysis of a company first is because that is what is giving you the competitive advantage. The stronger the company, the more difficult it will be to defeat it. Hence, the SWOT analysis starts with strengths, then progresses to weaknesses, opportunities and threats respectively.

There are two ways you can conduct a SWOT analysis. First, you can do your own SWOT analysis and therefore find out your own SWOT. Or you can also do the SWOT of your competitors, which after a detailed analysis, will reveal their strengths and weaknesses to you. It will also reveal the opportunities available to your competitors and the threats to them. All in all, you can get into your competitors psyche with a SWOT and the way ahead becomes clearer for you.

There are numerous variables which can act as strengths for the organization. A strength of the organization can also be looked as its competitive advantage. Because the firm is strong where its strengthening factors are concerned, it will be difficult to beat the firm where it is strong. Hence, firms generally carry out weaknesses secondary so that the parent company can actually cover their own weakness, or uncover the weaknesses of a competitor.

Here are some examples and variables of Strength in SWOT analysis.

1. Technological advantage

If you have a technological advantage over any other competitor then it is a great strength to you. The top few technology leaders of the century each have a technological advantage over the other. Where Microsoft has Windows, Apple has their own operating system which is different, but nonetheless a technological leader. Similarly, in Televisions and Smartphones, Samsung is known to be the technological leader.

2. Brand valuation / brand equity

Brand valuation, brand recall, brand equity as well as brand's image and reputation in the market play a major role in strengthening the core of the brand. A brand which has a high brand recall is more likely to have automated sales in the market then a brand with less brand recall. This is why, many small businesses when they start need investments, because they have to build their brand to start selling in this tough market.

3. Distribution network / Internal customers

If you ask me, the support of your internal customers is the best strength in the SWOT analysis of a company which a company can have. You cannot make a company a success by the brains of the top management only. You need ears on the ground. And for this, your internal customers play a crucial role. Your employees, your dealers and distributors are all your informers. They will inform you what the competitor is planning and might have their own ideas to defeat the competition. As a result, a company which has loyal and active internal customers will have a strong advantage over a competitor.

4. Customer loyalty and customer relationships

Just like internal customer relationship is important, external customers are even more important because they are the ones generating the revenue for you. There are multiple ways you can look at customers as the strength of your company. Telecom companies will look at their subscriber base and show them as stronger against competition. Social media companies will show the number of followers and users they have and therefore show their dominance over the competition.

A B2B company will show the number of Long term contracts it has with various businesses, which in turn shows how strong the B2B company actually is. There are multiple ways you can measure customer loyalty and their relationships with your company or with that of your competitors. This measure will give you an idea of how likely a customer is to favour a competitor over your own business or company.

5. Experience & Management

Experience matters a lot. This does not mean that the company has to be old. But if the company has some experienced player in its management panel, then definitely the competitors have to sit up and take notice. This is why when a company is valued, the angel investor specially considers the people who are going to form the management team of the business. This is because the experience of the management team and their ability to give results matters.

If i tell you to think of companies which always have high quality products, then some of the brands which come in mine are Siemens, Intel, Daikin or Dell. These are brands which have given good quality products year on year and decade on decade. As a result, you can blindly rely on these companies for the quality of their products. The better the quality of your products or your competitors, the more is the strength in SWOT analysis.

7. Geographical advantages

Firms which are geographically far apart are finding it easier to penetrate emerging and rural markets because of globalisation. However, even after this penetration, many of these firms realise that localisation is a challenge. Top marketing firms like McDonalds or Pizza hut have localised themselves as per the market they are catering to. This becomes their major geographical advantage. On the other hand, it is possible that some firms have various logistical and supply chain advantage over competitors due to their geographical location. Thus, location and geographical advantages have to be considered as a strength in SWOT analysis.

8. Resources of the firm

There are many resources a firm may have. Financial resources are critical to a firm and the more financial resources it has, the more success the firm can have. Limited financial power is crippling to a growing firm. Other resources include manpower, infrastructure, government support, internal customer support etc. The more resources a firm has, the more chances of the products being a success. Look at HUL. Because of the hge amount of resources available at its beck and call, each new product that it launches in the market, generally has the backing to make the product a success.

It has a set distribution network already prepared for its beck and call, it has a brand name which shines across markets, it has the manpower which can focus on this new product and it has the financial advantage to make this new product a success. In general, the more the resources of a firm, the more are the possibilities of the success of the firm.

9. Production capacity / Infrastructure

If you look at the cement industry, the leader of the market in each country is the company which can manufacture maximum Cement in a year. So for example, in India, Ultratech has the maximum production capacity in a year as a result of which it is leading the market easily. It is a need based sector where demand might be lesser then supply. Hence, a firm which has a high production capacity in a market where demand is more then supply will obviously have the upper hand and this forms a strength in SWOT analysis.

10. Economies of scale

Whichever part of the world you are, i am sure you have heard of Walmart which is the leading modern retail giant in the US and which spawned the whole modern retail industry. The same can be said for E-commerce players like Amazon and Ebay. These companies work on Economies of scale. The larger they are, the more competitive they become because they can then reach everywhere. These companies have lower fixed costs and higher variable costs due to which they can achieve economies of scale.

11. Organizational Culture

The culture in the organization plays a major role in employee attrition as a result of which, companies which pay attention to organizational culture, actually retain more employees and get more work done from them. Some companies which thrive due to an excellent organizational culture are Accenture, Google, Facebook, Adobe. As these companies have an excellent culture, they attract the best talents from within their industry.

12. Cost or differentiation advantage

There are two advantages as per michael porter which have to be considered as a strength in SWOT analysis of a firm. One of them is the Cost advantage, where the cost of the products of the firm is so low that the competitors cannot match the pricing of the firm. The other advantage is the differentiation advantage, where the company differentiates its products so well that consumers always prefer the companies products over competition.

13. Selling power

Some companies have a fantastic selling power and salesforce as compared to competitors. They are known for their aggressiveness and their sales skills. Once such company in India is Eureka Forbes, which is known initially for its vacumm cleaner and later on for its Water purifiers. Eureka forbes is known for its aggressive strategy wherein incentives play a major role in motivating the sales force. At the same time, the sales force has a tremendous target to achieve, which makes them aggressive and at the same time, more competent then competitors.

14. Low Overheads and debts

An example of a company which is excellent in terms of products and brands but is suffering due to high overheads and debts is Toshiba. Due to its nuclear power plant problems, Toshiba has huge debt. Thus, this is a major weakness for Toshiba. Consequentially, a company which is not much in debt and has low overheads is a company which is strong in its financial structure.

15. Marketing and communications

Finally, the company's marketing and communications exercises can lend the company a great competitive advantage over all others. Coca cola is a company known for its brand equity and for its mass following across the world. Although it has an arch rival in Pepsi, Coca cola still manages to win over hearts and sell more products by the day due to its continous marketing and communication efforts. Vodafone Zoozoos, Adidas, Harley Davidson bikes and many other such campaigns are proofs that great companies generally come out with great marketing campaigns. It can also be considered vice versa, that great marketing campaigns actually make great companies.

The above are the various ways that you can analyse the strengths of an organization or they are examples of strengths in SWOT analysis of an organization.

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Strength in SWOT analysis - Examples of strengths for SWOT analysis

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The reason for observing the strength in swot analysis of a company first is because that is what is giving you the competitive advantage. The stronger the company, the more difficult it will be to defeat it.

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Transnational organizations are organizations competing on an international basis face choices in terms of resource allocation, the balance of authority between the central office and business units, and the degree to which products and services are customized in order to accommodate tastes and preferences of local markets. When employing a transnational strategy, the goal is to combine elements of global and multi domestic strategies.

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by ·

Transnational Organizations was a term we used extensively in the 90's to put forth a different version of what it meant to "go global" or "become international." As a practitioner and a junior consultant, traveling the world to implement change management projects for large corporations (usually called Business Process Re-Engineering or Enterprise Resource Planning or Global Shared Services...), it was fascinating to see the different forms companies could take.

Projects were very large and global, and there was a lot of cost reduction and productive improvements to be had. These projects were designed centrally and rolled-out regionally, and the business case was so obvious that consultants did not have to work too hard to prove ROI. A $10M project for a large petroleum or pharmaceutical or automotive company would yield $50-100M in tangible benefits, tracked on unsophisticated spreadsheets. What made these large corporations unique and what made them similar?

We developed terms and used organizational characteristics to determine the way companies go-to-market internationally. For example, one can observe the asset configuration, corporate capabilities, the role of international operations, the interfaces between headquarters (home country) and the branch offices abroad to determine if the company is in fact more of a:

For alliance professionals, this is not merely semantics. Large and small companies alike have different ambitions and organizational frameworks to manage their international business. A quick overview might look like this:

Assets and Capabilities

Decentralized

Centralized

Mixed

Virtual

Role of Offices outside HQ

Local initiatives / bottom up

Execution of top down strategies

Adaptive and local changes within limits

Differentiated and specific to each market

Knowledge Sharing

Locally retained knowledge

Centrally retained knowledge

Centrally driven with local input

Joint development and diffusion

There are several schools of thought concerning the advantages and disadvantages of the centralized - decentralized approach to global corporate development. The excellent book "Managing Across Borders" (Bartlett and Ghoshal), first written in 1998, is subtitled "The Transnational Solution". It offers an compelling case for Transnational Organizations as the preferred model of the 21st century.

Here is a summary of the characteristics of Transnational Organizations as per the authors:

Competitiveness

Dispersed and independent

Acknowledging and encouraging differences

Flexibility

Differentiated and specialized

Key competencies are coordinating synergies

Learning

Joint development and knowledge sharing

Shared core vision with individual contributions

Alliance consultants and global managers need to clarify better the type of organizational model a company has, not just on paper but in its daily business practices, in order to match better intended joint activities across partnerships and channels.

Transnational Organizations are one way of labeling and articulating the global-local model. The impact of technology and creative collaborative solutions continue to push the international organizational design concepts into additional complexity and new exciting models. These new ways of working are still in infancy but already we can begin to see their impact on the workforce and organizations.

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Transnational Organizations was a term we used extensively in the 90's to put forth a different version of what it meant to "go global" or "become international." As a practitioner and a junior consultant, traveling the world to implement change management projects for large corporations (usually called Business Process Re-Engineering or Enterprise Resource Planning or Global Shared Services...), it was fascinating to see the different forms companies could take.

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A multinational organization is usually a large corporation incorporated in one country which produces or sells goods or services in various countries. The two main characteristics are their large size and the fact that their worldwide activities are centrally controlled by the parent companies. Below is a picture of different examples of multinational organizations.

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A global organization is a international alliance involving many different countries. Below is a link to many different global organizations that are determined to change our world.

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Learn more about major world organizations that focus on global challenges such as poverty and famine, war and oppression, disease, environmental pollution, and animal extinction. Many programs partner with smaller non-governmental organizations that need support from people like you. Check them out and consider studying them further and becoming involved in the issues they represent.

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International management is a form of management that you can get a degree in which is what the article below explains. There are many steps to becoming an international manager but in this module we learned the different tasks that one must do in order to become one.

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International Management Major (BBA) in New York | LUBIN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

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Policy based management is an administrative approach that is used to simplify the management of a given endeavor by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to occur.

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Policy-based management is an administrative approach that is used to simplify the management of a given endeavor by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to occur.

Policies are operating rules that can be referred to as a way to maintain order, security, consistency, or otherwise furth a goal or mission. For example, a town council might have a policy against hiring the relatives of council members for civic positions. Each time that situation arises, council members can refer to the policy, rather than having to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

In the computing world, policy-based management is used as an administrative tool throughout an enterprise or network, or on workstations that have multiple users. Policy-based management includes policy-based network management, the use of delineated policies to control access to and priorities for the use of resources. Policy-based management is often used in systems management.

Policy-based management of a multi-user workstation typically includes setting individual policies for such things as access to files or applications, various levels of access (such as "read-only" permission, or permission to update or delete files), the appearance and makeup of individual users' desktops and so on. There are a number of software packages available to automate some elements of policy-based management. In general, the way these work is as follows: business policies are input to the products, and the software communicates to network hardware how to support those policies.

See also: configuration management, network configuration managment, policy server

Continue reading about policy-based management:
Policy-Based Management is a policy based system for managing one or more instances of SQL Server.

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What is policy-based management? - Definition from WhatIs.com

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Policy-based management is an administrative approach that is used to simplify the management of a given endeavor by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to occur. Policies are operating rules that can be referred to as a way to maintain order, security, consistency, or otherwise furth a goal or mission.

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Organizational ethics are the policies, procedures and culture of doing the right things in the face of difficult and often controversial issues. Ethics topics that challenge organizations include but aren't limited to discrimination, social responsibility and fiduciary issues. Ethics issues and how any organization practices ethics are more important than ever because social media readily exposes issues that might have been swept aside in previous generations.

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Social responsibility is an ethical framework and suggests that an entity, be it an organization or individual, has an obligation to act for the benefit of society at large. Social responsibility is a duty every individual has to perform so as to maintain a balance between the economy and the ecosystems.

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Gender diversity in the workplace is the equal treatment and acceptance of both males and females in an organization. Diversity adds value to a company's bottom line due to the different viewpoints and backgrounds of diverse individuals.

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In 2017, India was ranked 125 of 159 countries in the Gender Inequality Index (GII), and recently it slipped 21 places on the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap index (2017) to 108. While less participation of women in the economy and low wages continue to be two of the major challenges, India is moving towards achieving the goal of gender equality and inclusion.

Large and small organizations across industries are working towards bridging the gender gap, and some of them have been successful as well. One such example is Dr Reddy's Laboratories, making constant efforts towards building gender diversity and inclusion. Let's take a look at how they overcame the challenge of gender inequality:

Strengthening gender diversity and inclusion: Dr Reddy's Laboratories

Two years back, while taking stock of diversity within the organization, the company realized that although they had a healthy overall representation of women, the number of women in sales and manufacturing were lesser. Given that over 60% of their workforce was in these functions, they realized the need to bring more gender parity in this space. That's when a decision to look at hiring more women into sales and manufacturing and encouraging them to occupy some unconventional roles was taken.

Here are few highlights of the two major challenges they identified and the steps taken towards overcoming them and achieving gender equality:

The SHE Story: Increasing Women in Sales
Challenge
Dr Reddy's Sales & Marketing Business in India was facing a conundrum. They wanted to expand their penetration to tap the potential of 300+ medical colleges in India. However, a regular Sales Representative whose target is to meet around 10-12 doctors in a day was not able to cover these medical colleges due to geographical and time constraints. These medical colleges demanded one dedicated salesperson per college. Moreover, at that time, the sales team was also looking at a gender diversity of 1.9% as compared to the organization's 9.6%.
Solution
SHE - Special Hospital Executives, an all-women sales force (Medical Representatives)

To increase the diversity in their field sales and to efficiently deepen the market reach, a team of women returning from career breaks was created. 50 SHE's were recruited as a pilot across tier 1&2 cities in two of the sales divisions. They were hired on Fixed Term Contract basis for the first year to study feasibility and success of the project. Medical institutes where SHEs would be deployed were identified, and performance evaluation parameters were created. The work design was also redesigned to make it compatible for "SHE". Here is a comparison between the work by a regular medical representative and SHE:
Impact
With SHE initiative, Dr Reddy's brand's visibility and recall in the market has grown. Additionally, this has helped them to generate a higher number of prescriptions in a potentially untapped market. Today, 50% of SHE employees from Wintura and Aqura SG are above 100% of their targets. Here are some of the key achievements that this initiative led to:

The formation of SHE field force led to an addition of 45 lakhs strips for the year.

The overall customer base expanded for pan India, from 1.10 lakhs customers to 1.17 lakhs.

A solid presence was established in over 25 untapped medical institutions -especially in colleges where only females are allowed. The initiative started with 50 SHE's in two divisions as a pilot, and currently, they are operating with 100 SHEs spanning pan India in three divisions. Now, they look forward to increasing the scope of this team further.

Increasing Women in Manufacturing
Challenge
Given that a significant number of Dr Reddy's workforce is in manufacturing, they identified a need to bring more gender parity in this space.

This was probably happening because generally, Managers avoid recruiting women in manufacturing as they believe that women would not opt for unconventional roles or take up the grueling shifts in production. Hence, there was a need for breaking this stereotype. And this could be done by making the workplace more conducive and by encouraging the women to challenge these conventions.
Solution
Dr Reddy's instead of approaching this issue from a numbers perspective adopted a pull-based approach. Openings were made for women in roles that were otherwise not available to them, such as process engineering, warehouse, R&D, etc. and the women themselves applied to these roles. This demonstrated that women were not only capable of taking these roles up but if given a choice, they would willingly take it up too.

Besides this, the senior leaders reached out to more women candidates, built more awareness about the kind of roles that were available through planned communication and continuously pushed themselves to explore all possible ways of introducing them into core areas of the plants.

Some of the key features of initiatives in the manufacturing segment were:

Women were hired at all levels- entry, mid & senior levels.

It became legally compliant to deploy women in API Production and also in night shifts in plants (select plants).

Garnered support of family members by organizing plant visits for them and dialed up their interactions with plant leaders. Such events helped bring confidence among family members that Dr. Reddy's offers a safe workplace for women to work in production.

Hired women who are on career breaks through a unique platform- "Career Comeback for women."

Shifts were redesigned to make it a five day work week in our Bio-similar plant. The 9.5 hrs (Fixed shift schedules) A and B now allow for two days weekly off and better predictability thereby encouraging women employees to opt for both the shifts. It also facilitated proper shift handover with the overlap.

Impact
The gender diversity has increased from 8.4 percent in FY15 to 13 percent as of today.

Here are few more highlights of the impact created by these initiatives in sales and manufacturing:

Diversity hiring increased

All the supportive policies and practices such as maternity counseling and buddy mothers caused maternity resignations to drop significantly

The number of resignations post maternity declined

Besides the initiatives discussed above various other efforts were done to promote inclusion. For instance, point-to-point cabs were introduced, and women drivers were trained to build safety. Further, to increase the visibility of women working in unconventional roles story inspired other women to take up these roles too.

Dr Reddy's with these initiatives in two major areas overcame the challenge of gender inequality and achieved the goal of empowering, engaging, developing and supporting women workforce. All these efforts helped them top the "Diversity in Corporate Asia" among 200 major companies in the report issued by Carnstone and also made them the only Indian company to be in the Bloomberg's Gender Equality Index 2018.

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Strengthening gender diversity and inclusion: Dr Reddy's story

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Dr Reddys Laboratories is working towards overcoming gender inequality through its various initiatives and has witnessed a growth in women headcount from 778 in FY 15 to 2 349 currently Read on to know about their journey of building gender diversity and inclusion

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Organization is another managerial function. Managers organize by bringing together physical, human and financial resources to achieve objectives. They identify activities to be accomplished, classify activities, assign activities to groups or individuals, create responsibility and delegate authority. They then coordinate the relationships of responsibility and authority. The photo below is the effect of an unorganized manager.

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Influencing is another one of the managerial functions. Influencing requires managers to motivate employees to achieve business objectives and goals. It requires the use of authority to achieve those ends as well as the ability to communicate effectively. Managers who are influential can influence their personnel to view situations from their perspectives.

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Controlling is one of the managerial functions. It is an important function because it helps to check the errors and to take the corrective action so that deviation from standards are minimized and stated goals of the organization are achieved in a desired manner. This meme is funny and is the opo

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In the first module we learn that planning is one of the managerial functions. It is essential to a managers job. Taking time to plan and doing it well reflects on how well the business does.