Dr. Fathi El-Nadi Articles

Smart Planning For Performance Managment - Click To Read Article
If you have just designed a new performance management process for your organization or if you've made changes to an existing process, you will need to hold information sessions with all staff about the new system before implementing it. This will increase employee buy-in into the process and avoid resentment and confusion.

Why Change Is So Hard - Click To Read Article
A single human brain is estimated to have the switching capacity of the entire U.S. telephone network.It can hold up to 100 trillion bits of information, dwarfing the capacity of any computer ever developed yet. But the brain can act as a prison unless we learn how to control it. The brain can, and often does, lick us into automatic perceptions and behaviors that are inaccurate, ineffective, or downright destructive. How the human brain works is worth noting if we want to change.

What Leaders Forget to Do - Click To Read Article
When people become a boss for the first time, they usually screw it up badly. Too often people think being the boss means "doing what I used to do except, except on a larger scale, and now I've got people I can order around."

Using Technology To Strengthening Team Ties - Click To Read Article
When team members are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, even the simplest of leadership tasks requires careful thinking, as Malhotra, Majchrzak and Rosen discovered through their research. The authors followed a virtual team at Boeing-Rocketdyne through its entire life cycle, and then did a large-scale follow-up study in which they attended meetings of 55 successful virtual teams in 33 different companies and interviewed team leaders. Finally, they boiled down their observations and conclusions into six clusters of recommendations, which are briefly summarized here.

Understanding Customer Relations Management (2) - Click To Read Article
Not long ago, companies with efficient facilities and greater resources were able to satisfy customer needs with standardized products, reaping advantages through productivity gains and lower costs. Mass marketing and mass production were successful as long as customers were satisfied with standardized products. As more firms entered the market, mass marketing techniques, where the goal was to sell what manufacturing produced, started to lose effectiveness. Target marketing, or segmentation, shifted a company's focus to adjusting products and marketing efforts to fit customer requirements. Changing customer needs and preferences require firms to define smaller and smaller segments.

Training as a Cultural Experience - Click To Read Article
Participating in training and development programs either as a trainee in the early stages of my business and academic life, or as an instructor when I became more mature and qualified enough to instruct, provided me with an excellent exposure to different cultures. I found out that even when a workshop or a training program had a preset agenda and topics, once the trainees start to interact, the program turns into a very rich cultural and learning experience that ingratiates those of the participants who attended with a spirit to discover new terrains of knowledge.

Understanding Customer Relations Management - Click To Read Article
CRM initiatives have resulted in increased competitiveness for many companies as witnessed by higher revenues and lower operational costs. Managing customer relationships effectively and efficiently boosts customer satisfaction and retention rates (Reichheld, 1996a, b; Jackson, 1994; Levine, 1993). CRM applications help organizations assess customer loyalty and profitability on measures such as repeat purchases, dollars spent, and longevity. CRM applications help answer questions such as “What products or services are important to our customers? How should we communicate with our customers? What are my customer's favorite colors or what is my customer's size?” In particular, customers benefit from the belief that they are saving time and money as well as receiving better information and special treatment (Kassanoff, 2000).

Tips On How To Deal With Stress - Click To Read Article
We have all encountered different types of frustrating situations: a boss who stifles our creativity or who gives us work to do and never thinks to ask us about it;a colleague who has absolutely no interest in details and who consequently puts an entire project at risk; an employee whose rigid approach to doing things by the book is actually harming relationships with our clients.

Tracking The Value Of Diversity Programs: Organizational Perspectives - Click To Read Article
The shortage of documented financial or performance results for diversity programs makes it difficult to determine what works and what doesn’t. Are there any models for companies to follow? "Not yet, says Guillermo Hysaw, vice president of diversity for Toyota Motor Sales, USA. Hysaw, who is managing his company’s newly announced 10-year, $7.8 billion diversity initiative, freely admits that he’s not sure whom to benchmark against. "Nobody is doing an outstanding job in diversity," he says. Here’s a brief look at how five companies--all among the largest and most successful in their industries--structure and evaluate their diversity programs.

Understanding Boss Psychology - Click To Read Article
Each one of us has one important person who can help him achieve greater job satisfaction and career success - his boss. This may be a somewhat radical way of looking at business strategy, but it is perfectly true that serving your boss well and intelligently is the most productive way to serve your best self interests.

TQM Implementation Process - Click To Read Article
While Total Quality Management has proven to be an effective process for improving organizational functioning, its value can only be assured through a comprehensive and well­thought­out implementation process. We will try here to outline key aspects of implementation of large­scale organizational change which may enable a practitioner to more thoughtfully and successfully implement TQM.

The Six Pillars of Market Leaders - Click To Read Article
A lot has been said on the characteristics of effective organizations; organizations that have a strong presence, and their impact can be felt in the markets and communities they operate in; organizations that utilize all their current and potential resources to achieve their strategic goals.

The Value Of Knowledge To The Organization - Click To Read Article
Since knowledge is an intangible asset, it is difficult to assign a value to it. Its amorphous nature exacerbates this difficulty. Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, has acknowledged the dilemma: "If HP know what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable." Intellectual capital is collective knowledge, but who collects it and who disseminates it? Successful and competitive organizations are rich in knowledge, but whose knowledge is it and and who assigns value to it? Values assigned to knowledge may differ. For example, knowledge May have one value for the organization, another for shareholders, yet another for current and potential partners, and still one more for individuals within the organization.

The Value Of Knowledge Workers - Click To Read Article
Generation X has joined the workforce of the new economy. Unlike the baby boomers who preceded them, generation Xers cannot and do not seek like-long learning. The seek employability over employment: they value career self-reliance (Elsdon and Iyer, 1999). They have joined a workforce dominated by 77 million baby boomers, many of whom, because of poor financial planning or personal satisfaction derived from work, do not willingly make room for Xers on corporate hierarchical ladder (Laabs, 1996).

Theories on NLP - Click To Read Article
Bandler's First Institute of Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ and Design Human Engineering™ has this to say about NLP: "Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ (NLP™) is defined as the study of the structure of subjective experience and what can be calculated from that and is predicated upon the belief that all behavior has structure....Neuro-Linguistic Programming™ was specifically created in order to allow us to do magic by creating new ways of understanding how verbal and non-verbal communication affect the human brain. As such it presents us all with the opportunity to not only communicate better with others, but also learn how to gain more control over what we considered to be automatic functions of our own neurology."

The Tough Pressure of Asking For A Raise in Recessions - Click To Read Article
HR is the prime area where employers usuually turn to to cut cost in recessions.Consequently, high performers may be demotivated and some may consider quitting if they get better offers with more competitive compensation. Here are some tips if you decide to go for requesting a due raise:

The Price of Being a Manager - Click To Read Article
Paying the price of being a manager could be the new challenging winning game of managers in today’s business world. The winning managers are those who are under the spell of the ‘change syndrome’, constantly being aware of the continuous market changes and all the other external environment aspects and the challenges they pose to the organization’s strategies. They are always one step ahead, not waiting for things to happen and then react, but drawing appropriate plans based on their educated forecast of their markets.

The ROI of Managing Diversity - Click To Read Article
To address diversity issues, consider these questions: what policies, practices, and ways of thinking and within our organizational culture have differential impact on different groups? What organizational changes should be made to meet the needs of a diverse workforce as well as to maximize the potential of all workers, so that San Francisco can be well positioned for the demands of the 21st century?

The Non-Price of Quality - Click To Read Article
In his book quality is free, Philip B. Crosby tried to emphasize that adopting quality education systems (QES) is a tremendous cost saving if we compare the price of quality (POQ) with the big saving organizations can have by doing things right the first time. It seems that some organizations took the book title literally and therefore wanted to cash in on the benefits of quality without investing first.

The Knowledge Workers Concept - Click To Read Article
Knowledge, as a corporate asset, is the focus of much discussion. What constitutes knowledge and where does it reside? By some estimations, knowledge is a personal possession, something an individual has as a result of education and/or experience; by other estimations, it is a "consensually supported result of information processing and thus part of organizational memory, a publicly documented body of knowledge (Nevis et al., 1995). However, most would agree that, in a corporate sense, knowledge is the productive application of information(Bendaly, 1996).

The Good Old Days of Quality Products - Click To Read Article
Are we living in a world of deteriorating quality? Or are we have to believe the quality gurus forecast that only organizations that are quality driven will remain in the market with their head above the water? Is it true that the good old days where customers were treated with reverence and respect are gone? Are customers becoming more and more the weaker party in selling transactions? What makes producers and their salespeople believe that they are doing their consumers a favor by making available the goods and services they need? Why welcoming smiles nowadays are replaced by tension between salespeople and customers?

Stress Causes and Impact - Click To Read Article
Stress is a fact of life. It goes with us to the office, follows us home, waits with us in traffic jams. A visit to the dentist, an upcoming exam, a boss's bad day, an approaching deadline, or company for dinner are all part of what we call stressful.

Successful Sales - Click To Read Article
Being fascinated by success stories, I cherished a classical book that was reprinted recently. It is an autobiography by Frank Bettger who was one of the highest paid salesmen in the U.S. the book is titled: How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling.

Stress and Peter Principle - Click To Read Article
In its simplest form, the Peter Principle is based on the observation that "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

Solving Priority Problems of Work Teams - Click To Read Article
Business is avidly embracing all kinds of teams as the fading century relaxes its grip on its ideals of scientific management and rugged individualism. But business teams, however robust they appear are still delicate organisms, at risk of succumbing to any number of internal and external threats. And sometimes, just when a team-or a plant full of teams-seems strongest, unanticipated problems can arise that range from time stealing and energy sapping to life threatening.

Six Sigma: A Case study in Motorola - Click To Read Article
For Motorola, the originator of Six Sigma, the answer to the question "Why Six Sigma?" was simple: survival. Motorola came to Six Sigma because it was being consistently beaten in the competitive marketplace by foreign firms that were able to produce higher quality products at a lower cost.

Secrets of Successful Sales - Click To Read Article
Being fascinated by success stories, I cherished a classical book that was reprinted recently. It is an autobiography by Frank Bettger who was one of the highest paid salesmen in the U.S. the book is titled: How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling.

Sam Walton: A Charismatic Leader - Click To Read Article
Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has been quoted as having said it takes just seven days for new employees to start treating customers the way they are treated at work. All the customer service skills and training in the world can be undone in only one week if an employee is treated poorly by his or her co-workers or boss.

Reviewing The Perfomance Management Effectiveness - Click To Read Article
How can we make sure that the performance management process we have designed has yielded the outcomes that we planned? Obviously, we cannot sit back and relax assuming it had before we check some parameters and standards.

Resource Dependence Theory In Management - Click To Read Article
In the early 1970s researchers began to question whether managers were able to accurately perceive the threats and opportunities actually present in the external environment. Scholars soon began to search for a more objective method of operationalizing the environmental uncertainty construct. Attempting to solve this dilemma, researchers in the 1970s began to explore resource dependency as a more objective measure of the uncertainty that organizations faced when dealing with their environment.

People Concern Developing a HR Competitive Advantage - Click To Read Article
Do we really walk the talk when we constantly emphasize the importance of human resources quality to the enhancement of organizational performance and the development of a competitive advantage based on People concern?

Overcoming Your Boardroom Presentation Fears - Click To Read Article
I have gone through a good number of Boardroom presentation with all the funny and awkward incidents that characterise this kind of presentations. I is a stress situation that requires preparation and wit. Here are some tips that may help.

Organizational Success Hallmarks - Click To Read Article
Companies that wish to compete successfully in a turbulent business environment characterized by global competition, exploding information technology, fast-paced change, and new employer-employee relationships will inevitably be forced to make significant adjustments in the way they operate.

Motivation: The Art & Science of Recharging Human Batteries - Click To Read Article
Behavioral scientists and psychologists, such as Taylor, Maslow, Herzberg, McGregor, Skinner, Blake and Mouton, and Argyris, were concerned with human models and the most effective ways to motivate people. They all tried to discover what motivates people and how can organizations tap their resources to enhance their performance through highly motivated teams. If the ultimate organizational goal is higher productivity, superior quality, customer satisfaction and happiness, and increased net profit they have to invest in their people’s welfare and being.

Old New Ways to Motivate Employees - Click To Read Article
Over the last quarter century, I have studied and taught the theories on motivation of Taylor, Maslow, Herzberg, McGregor, Argyris, and McLland. Although each of those management and behavioral scientists has tackled the topic from a different point of view, defending his opinion with both theoretical research, observation, I find Herzberg’s theory the most practical and easy to implement in the workplace. Naturally, the work of all those scientists complements the whole approach to the very important topic of motivation, but herzberg’s points more clearly at the satisfiers and dissatisfiers in the workplace. His focus on the job content as a lasting motivator qualifies for more analysis and serious consideration.

Origins of NLP - Click To Read Article
Back in the 70's NLP started as a meta-model, or a model for making and changing other models. The NLP meta-model focuses on verbal models, and how language both shapes and reflects human thought. The two explained their meta model in The Structure of Magic. They first used the meta-model to find how highly successful therapists like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir managed to help so many people. They wanted to know: What language and behavioral patterns did these therapists have? In Erickson's case, how did he consistently produce deep hypnotic trances? What happened in the client's mind as they changed?

Organizational Readiness To Performance Management - Click To Read Article
Organizational Readiness to performance management is crucial in ensuring an efficient and effective evaluation of the individual, departmental, and organizational performance. Therefore, it is important that, before you develop a performance management process, other human resources management practices should be in place to support the process .

New Trends In HR Development - Click To Read Article
Big organizations that are keen to sustain their growth rate and secure bigger market shares, are nowadays facing serious problems in developing their people at the same rate they grow. managers became so involved in strategic planning, Production, marketing, and sales activities to the extent they do not find time to coach their teams.

Organizational Illusions - Click To Read Article
Truth-a proper and clear understanding of reality-is the key to success in organizations, teams,relationships, and careers. In fact, the departure point for all achievement is a relentless commitment to truth-truth about who we are, where we're headed, where the market is going, what our customers want, what our core competencies are (and whether anyone cares), what our core limitations are (and whether anyone can help us), and what our employees are thinking.

Organizational Environmental Uncertainties - Click To Read Article
From the genesis of management studies it has been recognized that organizations do not operate in a vacuum. In the seminal work, The Functions of the Executive, Chester Barnard (1938) theorized that an organization’s survival was dependent on its ability to sustain a balance with its external environment by readjusting its internal processes to match the various elements in the environment (Barnard, 1938, p. 6). In recognition of Barnard’s observation that firms must maintain equilibrium in an ever-changing environment, a considerable body of literature has developed that is devoted to conceptualizing and comprehending the external environment and its role in management theory.

New Training Trends to beat Terrorism - Click To Read Article
In the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nicholas Santangelo of the Fire Department of New York spent days and nights searching for bodies at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center. Sleep was an afterthought for Santangelo and his fellow New York City firefighters as they tirelessly combed through the rubble of the Twin Towers 24 hours a day.

Measuring the Quality of Your Hires - Click To Read Article
Most employment managers measure success in the wrong way. Looking at the cost of a hire, the number or even the speed of the hire is at best misleading and at worst an inaccurate measure of hiring success. The primary (or perhaps sole) measure of hiring success should be the quality/performance of the hire.

Monitoring The Performance Management Process - Click To Read Article
For a performance management process to be effective, progress must be continuously monitored. Monitoring means developing a system that enables the organization to follow up on the progress of its projects and how its employees are behaving on the doing their jobs. A good monitoring system should be driven by the following directions:

Managing corporate Change Resistance - Click To Read Article
In 1492 when Columbus set out across the Atlantic Ocean and landed in a new world, his voyage changed the perspective and literally broadened the horizon of mankind. Almost overnight, trade routes had to be redrawn, power began shifting from the Mediterranean to the countries on the Atlantic seaboard closest to the Americas, and great riches began flowing onto the continent from places with unusual sounding names that nobody had ever heard of them before Columbus.

Managing Employees Performance - Click To Read Article
Measuring employee performance has come a long way from the annual performance appraisal to an on-going performance management process. In the past, managers and employees met once a year for the annual performance appraisal (review) to look back at the work done during the previous year and to evaluate what was accomplished. Human resources managers, managers/ supervisors and employees have come to realize that only looking back does little to improve performance. In recent years, there has been a shift away from performance appraisals to a more comprehensive approach called performance management.

Managing Diversity: A Bliss or a Curse - Click To Read Article
Workforce diversity is a reality at San Francisco. We already reflect the national demographic trends predicted for the year 2000 by the Hudson Institute in its 1987 report, Workforce 2000. Accommodation issues for our diverse workforce, such as childcare, elder care, flexible work arrangements, disability accommodation, and literacy are being addressed in the workplace.

Managing A 'People' Company: Beyond A Workplace of Robots - Click To Read Article
At good workplaces, it's common to hear employees talk about working in "a people-oriented company," or to hear them say, "They treat you like a human being around here." Or, "You feel like you can be yourself." Employees of good workplaces assume that it's a normal part of their working environment to feel like a human being.

Managing Transitional Change - Click To Read Article
Beckhard and Pritchard (1992) have outlined the basic steps in managing a transition to a new system such as TQM: identifying tasks to be done, creating necessary management structures, developing strategies for building commitment, designing mechanisms to communicate the change, and assigning resources.

Managing Organizational Stars - Click To Read Article
What contributes to an individual's ability to remain a star? To what extent does past star performance predicate future star performance? And to what extent does a key organizational factor—colleague quality—help or hinder the ability to sustain star performance? The performance of stars is an important career matter for individuals as well as for managers who want to inspire, nurture, and recruit stars.

Leadership Power and Change - Click To Read Article
Many of the corporate values statements that are supposed to guide large-scale change efforts appear to have been developed without acknowledging the realities of power. The fact is that some individuals are intensely driven by motives such as power and individual achievement, seemingly to the exclusion of almost anything else.

Learning From Experience: Opportunities & Constraints - Click To Read Article
Having spent more than 40 in executive positions and then as a management consultant, side by side with my academic career, my belief that experience is the best teacher was always confirmed and was never been shaken.

Learning Organizations is Action Oriented - Click To Read Article
Execute. Implement. Stop talking and do something. Actions speak louder than words. If you have a learning organization, it needs to be a doing organization too. No matter how you put it, the evidence is rolling in: The distinction between so called “old economy” and “new economy” companies are overblown. Regardless of industry, knowing what to do isn’t enough. Those companies and business units that dominate their competitors win by turning knowledge into action.

Lean Operations Systems - Click To Read Article
Thanks to the pioneering success of Toyota, the concept of a "lean" operating system has been implemented in countless manufacturing companies and even adapted for industries as diverse as insurance and healthcare.

Knowledge And The Intellectural Capital Of The Organization - Click To Read Article
In the new economy of the millennium, knowledge has emerged as an asset to be valued, developed and managed. The quest for knowledge is not new: in the fourth century BC, Aristotle noted "All men by nature desire knowledge." Now, 25 centuries later, knowledge drives the global economy. No longer is knowledge considered only an individual's personal wisdom; knowledge is a component of the intellectual capital of organizations (Stewart 1997).

Job 'Misfits' and Their Damaging Impact - Click To Read Article
Is it true that no one would hire any job candidate whom he/she feels would be a potential threat to him? And if this is true, how can organizations revitalize, rejuvenate, and enhance its HR capital? Is 'You're over-qualified for the job' tag truthful, or is it a devious technique to fend-off qualified job seekers from getting the jobs they knew they could do? What can organizations do to guarantee that only best candidates will be hired? What kind of authority should be given to HR Department to challenge biased selections of personnel? What role organizational politics play in recruiting and selection decisions?

Kyaizen An Old New Quality Concept - Click To Read Article
The Japanese word 'Kaizen' means gradual, unending improvement; doing little things better; setting - and achieving - ever-higher standards. Masaaki Imai, the author of a book with the same title in the late eighties, says that it is Kaizen that is the simple truth behind Japan's economic miracle and the real reason the Japanese have become the masters of "flexible manufacturing" technology - the ability to adapt manufacturing processes to changing customer and market requirements, and do it fast.

Influence of EI on Job Function - Click To Read Article
The Technical Manual for the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal™ reveals interesting findings from a study of more than 13,000 individuals worldwide. Employees from various job functions, in different organizations and countries, were asked to evaluate their emotional intelligence by answering 28 questions. Job functions included sales, marketing, finance, operations, customer service, human resources, information technology (IT), engineering, business development, manufacturing, and R&D.

Imposed Stress at the Workplace - Click To Read Article
In order to understand how to deal with stress, we need to know how it works as well as how we physically respond to stress. Obviously it is equally important that body and mind respond to stress as a unit. Our mental response, specifically our cognitive perceptions, must work with our body when stress comes.

Improving the Performance Gap of New Employees - Click To Read Article
The news is full of stories about talent management, the importance of getting and keeping the “right” employees, and the impending lack of employees as the workforce changes. With these dire warnings come many ways to select and retain employees.

HRM and the Quality of Work-life - Click To Read Article
Coercion in the workplace can certainly get things done. It can even yield more productivity in some cases. This type of ‘direct action management’, i.e. ‘kicking’ people to do what is required of them. Such an approach to motivation would be like kicking a dog each time you want it to move. Likewise, you can charge an individual’s battery, and keep on charging and recharging it to get things done, but it is only when that individual has his own generator that we can talk about ‘self-motivation’, the internal generator that automatically recharges employees batteries.

Ideas On Global Learning - Click To Read Article
Sun Microsystems Inc., a leading provider of hardware, software and services for network computing solutions, has also developed a worldwide corporate learning system. In July 2000, Sun began the implementation of Sun Sigma, the company's adaptation of a worldwide business phenomenon called Six Sigma—a comprehensive program for building and sustaining business performance, success and leadership. The company used the Sun Enterprise Learning Platform to manage the training of 39,000 globally dispersed employees on Sun Sigma concepts.

How to Overcome Serious Regrets - Click To Read Article
There is no such thing as a life without any regrets. However, regrets can become either burdens that interfere with your present happiness and restrict your future, or motivation to move forward. If you find yourself overcome by regrets, here are some steps that should help you let them go.

How Developing Countries Survive Intellectual Drain Competition - Click To Read Article
Global companies based in the developing world look much like their developed-world counterparts. They manage their employees with similar policies and pay practices. In this world of sameness, differentiating the employment brand requires a new focus on career development.

Happiness Starts At The Workplace - Click To Read Article
Is there a way we can convince ourselves that we are happy? How about the pressures of personal, family, and work pressures? Which of these contribute the biggest pressures on us? The problem here seems to be that the time we spend at work is in average twice the time we spend with our families and friends, and that the pressures we suffer from in the workplace continues to take hold of us even after we leave the workplace. Thus, our personal life is both affected and controlled by our work life.

Great Places To Work For - Click To Read Article
If we ask a random sample of employees in any organization what causes them to like to stay with their the organization, we will get tens of different reasons that are all valid, but vary to reflect the personal views of the respondents. While some employees will focus on tangible explicit motivators, others will focus more on intangible implicit ones. That's, too, is natural as people's motives are driven by their different needs which again vary from one person to the other.

Fundamentals of NLP - Click To Read Article
NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a name that encompasses the three most influential components involved in producing human experience: neurology, language and programming. The neurological system regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we interface and communicate with other people and our programming determines the kinds of models of the world we create. Neuro-Linguistic Programming describes the fundamental dynamics between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how their interplay effects our body and behavior (programming).

Full Time Home Based Jobs - Click To Read Article
How would you like to work from home? No hustling out the door 10 minutes late, no fighting your road rage or battling for the last seat on train, no fast food lunch and no noisy co-workers. Sounds like heaven doesn't it?

Examples Of Strong Corporate Cultures - Click To Read Article
Corporate culture has become increasingly important to firms in the past 20 years. Despite its intangible nature, its role is meaningful, affecting employees and organizational operations. And while culture is not the only factor guaranteeing success, positive cultures offer significant competitive advantages over rivals.

Entrepreneurial Thinking - Click To Read Article
Entrepreneurs have always been described as risk takers who start their own small projects. In that sense, anyone can be an entrepreneur. Without finetuning that definition, the door is left wide open for adventurers to try their luck starting high risk projects without really spending too much time on the study of their feasibility.

Environmental Dimensions In Measuring Uncertainties - Click To Read Article
Integrating the work of previous authors, Dess and Beard (1984) employed three environmental dimensions in their measure of uncertainty. These three dimensions, which were very similar to those developed earlier by Child, were “dynamism,” “complexity,” and “munificence.” The first dimension, “dynamism,” referred to the “rate of change and innovation in an industry as well as the uncertainty or predictability of the actions of competitors and customers” (Miller and Friesen, 1983, p. 222). Dynamism in Dess and Beard’s measure was similar to the stability/dynamism dimension of Thompson’s measure, the static-dynamic element of Duncan’s, and the variability component of Child’s.

Even the US is Losing it Intellectual Capital - Click To Read Article
The land to which people immigrated for its educational and employment opportunities is losing an increasing number of potential citizens. In 1991, 1.82 million people immigrated to the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 849,807. Although it was back up some to 1.06 million in 2002, it had dropped again to 705,827 by the end of the 2003 fiscal year.

Designing A Performance Management System - Click To Read Article
The design of a performance management system requires you to think about the features that would make performance management effective in your workplace. The goal is to design a performance management process that provides an accurate picture of each employee's accomplishments.

Demotivating Employees - Click To Read Article
It is a very disheartening experience to listen to a demotivated employee complaining how his/her boss's management style is having a negative frustrating impact on his performance. my job as a consultant and university teaching staff has given me an opportunity to experience some of my clients and/or students organizational woos.

Creating a Better Place to Work - Click To Read Article
In our evolving global economy, we tend to look to capital and technology for competitive advantage. Effective organizations are also critical to global success. The realization has led us to various approaches for redesigning our operations. However, in the processes of "restructuring" and "downsizing" - tactics that provide our companies with leaner structures and flatterer hierarchies - we often tend to overlook the fact that our people are the most important source of competitive advantage.

Culture and Institutional Reform - Click To Read Article
Culture is often described as "the way we do things around here." In fact it is more complex. It is also feelings, underlying beliefs, values, history, and assumptions about an organization. Those are rooted in experiences, stories, and behaviour patterns sometimes decades or centuries old. The culture tells people what is and is not okay. Culture is enduring, difficult to develop or reshape.Despite that, fundamental culture change is necessary for the reforms envisaged in Results for Canadians.

Concerns on Quality Impelementation - Click To Read Article
Are we living in a world of deteriorating quality? Or do we have to believe the quality gurus forecast that only organizations that are quality driven will remain in the market with their head above the water? Is it true that the good old days where customers were treated with reverence and respect are gone? Are customers becoming more and more the weaker party in selling transactions? What makes producers and their salespeople believe that they are doing their consumers a favor by making available the goods and services they need? Why welcoming smiles nowadays are replaced by tension between salespeople and customers?

Conceptualizations Of Organizational Environmental Uncertainty - Click To Read Article
In the management literature, the external environment can be broadly defined as “the totality of physical and social factors that are taken directly into consideration in the decision-making behavior of individuals in organizations” (Duncan, 1972, p. 314). Organizational researchers have long theorized that the overall environment consists primarily of several independent components (e.g. Duncan, 1972; Miles and Snow, 1978; Hambrick, 1982). Among the most significant elements that were theorized to exist in the external environment were customers, competitors, government regulations and labor unions. While the individual components that made up each researcher’s conception of the environment were not always the same, each conception agreed that the various environmental elements acted to create uncertainty for firms.

Boosting Teams Morale - Click To Read Article
Teams' energy wanes every now and then under the workload and the workplace internal and external environmental pressures. When this happens, the team-leader's top priority should be to boost the morale of the team before giving them any more work to do. The right amount of motivation needs to be injected in order to energize the team and bring the members to their original efficiency level again. If this is not done both productivity and quality are sure going to suffer.

Bridging the Generation Gap - Click To Read Article
Young people, we hear, want to play video games all day, while thinking they should be in charge the Monday after they start. They are disloyal and will leave the job at the drop of a hat. Young people need praise all the time, yet they are non-conforming and don’t understand the rules of workplace.

Assessing Training Effectiveness - Click To Read Article
There is no question about it. Training and development is gaining attention in Corporate America. The industry is growing and changing to achieve a variety of goals, from satisfying immediate employment skills shortages to meeting organizations' long-term strategic needs. According to a survey conducted by Chief Learning Officer magazine and Fairfield Research Inc., enterprise firms in the United States spend, on average, $3.7 million every year on learning and training. Total spending on corporate learning by enterprise companies is forecast to increase to $11.8 billion—a projected 4.3 percent increase in 2003.

An Integrated Training Assessment Program - Click To Read Article
An integrated assessment program also provides insight and development goals for the instructor and course design. Assessment is a diagnostic tool that ultimately helps the learners confirm what they have learned and helps the instructor plan for future learning or remediation. A well-built test is a quick and objective way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the delivery of the learning program.

Appealing As Part Of Performance Managment - Click To Read Article
Even with a well designed and implemented performance management process, there may be situations when an employee has a serious difference of opinion with the manager about his or her performance assessment.

A Marketing Approach To Assess Training - Click To Read Article
Imagine that you have been asked to implement a new enterprise-wide training program to ensure that each employee masters a new skill and can successfully demonstrate competency within a month. Maybe you have five employees, maybe you have 50,000, but the idea is that all employees have to master the skill. Would you ignore data that told you which employees knew the information already? What about data that told you how your employees learned most efficiently? How about data that told you what to change about your current learning programs to make them more effective? Of course you wouldn't, you would welcome this information with open arms. Without this information, your training program will never achieve its full value.

A Checklist For Performance Managment Planning - Click To Read Article
The planning phase of performance management is vital in setting the goals and direction of that critical process. It might help to develop a checklist of the things an appraisor would need to have in place before, during, and after the appraisal starts. The following checklist may be used as a guide:

A New Perspective Of Organizational Culture - Click To Read Article
One cannot help wondering sometimes whether major problems in organizations are due to lack of effective communication at all levels. These problems can range between bad morale, declining performance, non-compliance with safety regulations, or destructive conflicts. The root cause may be the same for all these complicated problems: miscommunication.

Adoption of TQM - Click To Read Article
The analysis of the force field involves looking at which driving forces may be strengthened and which restraining forces may be eliminated, mitigated, or counteracted. If it appears that, overall, driving forces are strong enough to move back restraining forces, adoption of TQM would be worth pursuing.


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