Strategic planning and forecasting tend to use projections of past events to develop future plans. These approaches rely on historical data and assume a continuation of past business practices and environmental stability.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent, nonpartisan, quasi-judicial regulatory agency that is responsible for administering federal securities laws.
Sensitivity training is often offered by organizations and agencies as a way for members of a given community to learn how to better understand and appreciate the differences in other people. It asks training participants to put themselves into another person's place in hopes that they will be able to better relate to others who are different than they are.
The term service factory, coined by Richard B. Chase and Warren J.
The growth of the service industry in the past two decades has prompted a number of questions about this sector of the American economy and the reasons for this trend. Some questions about the growth of the service industry include: What is the service industry and what types of businesses operate in it?
Services lie at the hub of economic activity in the United States. Service jobs account for almost 80 percent of total U.S.
The Service Process Matrix is a classification matrix of service industry firms based on the characteristics of the individual firm's service processes. The matrix was derived by Roger Schmenner and first appeared in 1986.
Shareholders or stockholders own parts or shares of companies. In large corporations, shareholders are people and institutions that simply invest money for future dividends and for the potential increased value of their shares, whereas in small companies they may be the people who established the business or who have a more personal stake in it.
Simulation is used to model efficiently a wide variety of systems that are important to managers. A simulation is basically an imitation, a model that imitates a real-world process or system.
Span of control or span of management is a dimension of organizational design measured by the number of subordinates that report directly to a given manager. This concept affects organization design in a variety of ways, including speed of communication flow, employee motivation, reporting relationships, and administrative overhead.
Before a definition of spirituality in leadership can be provided, one must first examine the meaning of the two key aspects of the phrase: the "spirit" and the "leader." One dictionary definition of spirit is "that which is traditionally believed to be the vital principle or animating force within living beings." Thus, the spirit relates to the deeper sense, meaning, or significance of something. A dictionary definition of the leader is "one who shows the way by going in advance; one who causes others to follow some course of action or line of thought." Thus, the leader is one who influences followers to think or behave in some way.
A firm's stakeholders are the individuals, groups, or other organizations that are affected by and also affect the firm's decisions and actions. Depending on the specific firm, stakeholders may include governmental agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, social activist groups such as Greenpeace, self-regulatory organizations such as the National Association of Securities Dealers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, distributors, the media and even the community in which the firm is located among many others.
The term six sigma (6σ) originated as a performance measure or a measure of quality. Using six sigma, process goals are set in parts per million (PPM) in all areas of the production process.
Statistics is a field of knowledge that enables an investigator to derive and evaluate conclusions about a population from sample data. In other words, statistics allow us to make generalizations about a large group based on what we find in a smaller group.
Strategic management is the process of defining the purpose and pursuits of an organization and the methods for achieving them. Robert Grant emphasizes that competition provides the rationale for strategy because strategy is about winning.
Strategic planning may be characterized as a systematic effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what a business organization is, what it does, and why it does it. The objective of strategic planning is to develop a map by which to manage an organization's positioning.
Stated simply, strategy is a road map or guide by which an organization moves from a current state of affairs to a future desired state. It is not only a template by which daily decisions are made, but also a tool with which long-range future plans and courses of action are constructed.
A key role of a CEO's is to communicate a vision and to guide strategic planning. Those who have successfully implemented strategic plans have often reported that involving teams at all levels in strategic planning helps to build a shared vision, and increases each individual's motivation to see plans succeed.
Although alignment of strategic initiatives is a corporate-wide effort, considering strategy in terms of levels is a convenient way to distinguish among the various responsibilities involved in strategy formulation and implementation. A convenient way to classify levels of strategy is to view corporate-level strategy as responsible for market definition, business-level strategy as responsible for market navigation, and functional-level strategy as the foundation that supports both of these (see Table 1).