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Are your products alive, dead or in between?
Effective product life cycle management can enhance product sales and keep a business profitable for a long time. Marketers should recognize at which stage of its life cycle their product is in and adopt their marketing strategies accordingly. Thus, a new product will need constant promotion to create market awareness while a product in the growth stage will need strategies to maintain market interest. Mature products may require innovative packaging and pricing or the creation of new markets...
Continuous improvement - managing the risk successfully.
A company's ability to continuously improve depends on a corporate culture that fosters creativity and action. This entails management's ability to balance risks and innovation, adopt a system of accountability and communicate expectations and goals to employees. It also involves cooperation between departments wherein selected managers and employees perform tasks which are assigned to them and are essential for the completion of a project.
Federally backed business improvement loans worth a look.
The federal government's business improvement loans program provides an alternative financing scheme for cash-strapped companies planning to expand or upgrade their operations. The loan covers up to 90% of an asset while interest rates will depend on the charter bank. Loans are also 90% government guaranteed while the bank assumes the remaining 10%. The loan program is feasible to law and other professional practices which plan to establish their headquarters in smaller communities where real...
Lighten Up: Survival Skills for People Under Pressure.
Looking beyond hiring traditions.
Managers can avoid employee problems if they hire the right persons at the onset. They can do this by participating in the selection process, assessing applicants' technical and social skills and conducting interviews designed to reflect applicants' work attitudes. Employee recruitment also entails prioritization of required skills and a little instinct. This will ensure greater productivity and reduce wasted time and effort in motivating ineffective people.
Multicultural Management: New Skills for Global Success.
Pen-based computing: the new wave of computing.
Pen-based computing provides a new alternative for inputting data into computers. Its advantages include its time-saving properties, its flexibility and compatibility with different software programs and its being user-friendly. It facilitates information retrieval since data can be placed directly into a client's personal computer file. Industry observers foresee that the pen-based computing technology will soon become an important tool in office operations.
Recruiting for potential should be based on work complexity.
The Career Path Appreciation provides a method for predicting an employees' potential to handle responsibilities. It is based on Dr. Elliott Jacques' concept of individual growth curve capability to tackle work challenges. It involves a good knowledge of the link between an organization and its work complexities and an accurate evaluation of the complexities of a job opening. This will provide the basis for assessing an applicant's actual and potential capabilities.
Team goals: aligning groups and management.
The alignment of management and team goals is critical to the success of creative approaches to business problems. It enables a company to develop a corporate culture that promotes innovation and continuous improvement and allows management to maximize employee capabilities through motivation and empowerment. The Strategic Innovation Management Assessment Profile provides a framework for both management and work teams to link their objectives to meet corporate challenges.
Performance measurements which focus on processes rather than solely on financial aspects can provide an effective strategy to control business operations. This enables companies to achieve their goals by concentrating on relevant processes which will ensure success and improve performance. It also provides a means for management to communicate its goals to all organizational levels and encourage employee support for the comapany's objectives.
