Profile Dr. Jonathan Calof Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Profile Dr. Jonathan Calof - Research Paper Example Awards also came to him from educational organizations like Academy of Business Administration, the International Council for Small Business - South Africa, the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada, and the Academy of International Business. The international journals like Competitive Intelligence Review, Business Quarterly, International Journal of Small Business Management, and International Business Review also contain informative articles and eye openers contributed by him. His case on the Sterling Marking products has become a key collection of Ivey School of Business and was a part of the 10 most marketed cases. This is also a selection amongst the best articles collected by Business Quarterly. He has been heard over the radio in different interviews (Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, n.d.). Dr. Jonathan Calof passed his graduation level from University of Western Ontario, Ivey School of Business and Carleton University. He is a part of the editorial t eam of many publications and an editor of Executive Magazine. In general he is a productive author and has over 100 publications in his name.

There are questions and i need to answer .I will write it in Essay

There are questions and i need to answer .I will write it in assignment criteria - Essay Example Employees, like the employers, want to feel being part of the organization and the products produced. However, in many organizations, employees are isolated and only reduced to production machines, with no attachment to what they do. This leads to low employee morale and other major challenges in the working environment. According to several theories of motivations, such as the drive theory, employees need to be motivated. When this term is used, many employees tend to think that high salaries are the only means of motivating the employees. While this act may produce positive results, this will however, work in the short term. Other main areas that need to be addressed include creating an effective and convenient environment in which the employees can work. This is especially through ensuring safety of the employees. Constant communication between employees and employers is also vital. It enables the two addresses the current challenges affecting employees, and the company early befo re it can become a challenge. Operations management becomes imperative when dealing with some of these issues. It is the process through which the management seeks to increase quality, reduce the cost of operation, and use as minimal resources as possible. Employers are focusing on increasing productivity, while at the same time ensuring that all the factors are considered. In terms of performance, the employees focus on speed, flexibility, dependability, cost, and quality. These five performance objectives of operations management are imperative in ensuring that the company becomes more productive. Customers focus on efficiency and quality. The speed at which the company supplies foods and services to the customers is vital. The kind of technology that is employed in any given company also becomes imperative. It must be flexible and dependable. This means it must be ready to accommodate the changes and new demands in the market. However, reducing the cost of operation is one of the major issues that the operations management seeks to solve. As the cost of operations reduces, so do the profits increase. For this reason, the operations managers may decide to employ strategies such as outsourcing. It is the process through which employers seek higher employees who can provide quality services but at a low cost. This is mostly done through acquiring employees from abroad. This has assisted many companies to solve the problem of increased cost of operation. Other areas of focus include the means of transportation used to deliver goods and services to the employees. The means but is both cost effective and efficient. Goods must reach their intended destination within the intended time. It is upon the operations manager to organize, control, and coordinate all the operations within the organization. This is vital if the company is to realize its goals and objectives. However, it will be difficult to achieve some of this goals, speed, and quality of goods unless the right technology is employed. Integration of information technology is important. Apart from increasing productivity, it also leads to high quality work at a minimum time. Challenge facing our manufacturing company This manufacturing company has become ineffective due to the problems of high employee turnover and general reduction in productivity. As a result, the profits of the company have decreased, with the increased cost of operation. With this problem likely to escalate, there is need to address it objectively.

Strategic Management of Human Resources Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5250 words

Strategic Management of Human Resources - Essay Example 1. The strengths based approach encourages people "to focus on aspects of work organization that lead to success rather than trying to correct failures" (case study). In this sense its approach to managing workforce is different from the SHRM approach. The SHRM approach focuses on types of people and skills needed, while the strengths based approach applies a wider perspective. It draws not on skills or things that people are good at, but on strengths which are defined as "pre -existing capacities for a particular way of behaving, thinking or feeling that is authentic and energising to the user and enables optimal functioning, development and performance". 2. SHRM is concerned with the contributions human resource strategies make to organizational effectiveness, and the ways in which these contributions are achieved (see Boxall & Purcell, 2000 and Delery & Shaw, 2001). The strengths based approach interpreted with regard to the SHRM model, is also a human resource strategy to increase organizational effectiveness. ... In this sense the strengths based approach can be seen as HPHRS since the focus is not on achieving a set organizational goal or being concerned with work systems or context, the idea is to change the organizational culture so that overall business performance improves (case study). However achievement of certain goals may still be targeted as seen in the case study where the board is allotted projects according to their strengths. As working on these projects is more energizing for the people since they are better matched to the types of tasks, better organization performance can be hoped for. It is about "focusing on aspects of work that lead to success". 3. The strengths based approach fits with what the SHRM scholars have suggested, for example, they suggest that certain employee behaviors and certain human resource strategies produce certain employee behaviors, and that the task of the human resource strategist is to uncover and test these linkages (Cappelli & Singh, 1992; Schuler & Jackson, 1987). Strengths based approach, does not identify behaviour but is a human resource strategy that matches strengths of people to certain tasks. Thus the SHRM strategist is needed to make these links between people and roles based on strengths assessment in a strengths based organization. 4. Interpretation of the strengths based approach according to the 5 Ps model of SHRM (Schuler & Jackson, 1987) is given below: 1. Philosophy- How the organization values and treats its employees. Essentially the culture of the organization. In the case study, BAE values its leadership team despite their apparent inability to solve certain tricky projects. Instead of classifying them as lacking in certain way, the organization shows respect for its people and changes

Muhammad The Revelation of the Qua'ran fuels early Islamic growth Essay

Muhammad The Revelation of the Qua'ran fuels early Islamic growth - Essay Example s at that time, the manner in which Quran played a pivotal role in fuelled the growth of Islam and will also shed light on the life of Muhammad, who is the spiritual leader of more than 1.8 billion Muslims all over the world. Muhammad was born in 570 A.D in the city of Mecca, located in the Arabian Peninsula. He belonged to the respected clan of the Quraysh, who were not only well-to-do merchants but also the keepers of the Holy Ka’abah. The Ka’abah is the oldest known structure and attracted pilgrims from the entire Peninsula. (Haykal, 1994) Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib was the custodian and after his demise, the responsibility was passed on to his uncle Abu Talib. Muhammad was orphaned at a very young and was raised by his grandfather and then his uncle; hence Muhammad had a very honorable lineage and upbringing as he had been under the tutelage of some of the most respected members of the society. (Haykal, 1994) Despite the countless vices that pervaded the Arabian society at that, Muhammad earned the love and respect of the people for his honesty and truthfulness. He never indulged in corrupt activity and when he was 25 years old, he was hired a widowed businesswoman Khadija. Despite the fact that Muhammad was younger than Khadija and had an age difference of 11 years, they were bound by matrimony and together had a fairly happy marriage that lasted for a quarter of a century until the death of Khadija. Polygamy was rampant at that time, but throughout his marriage to Khadija, Muhammad never took up a new wife and remained devoted to her completely. Muhammad had always rejected the religion of Arabia at that that was largely based on paganism and idol worship. Muhammad felt that the idols were not responsible for giving life or creating this world, and was highly perturbed by the lawlessness that permeated every aspect of the society. In order to get away from these lecherous affairs of the society, he found solace in meditation and

Mondrian's Mathematical principles art Speech or Presentation

Mondrian's Mathematical principles art - Speech or Presentation Example Mondrian employed the very simple geometrical shapes and primary colors for expressing reality, nature and logic. His perspective of viewing things was different. He considered that it is possible to construct any kind of shape as long as there is a basic geometric one. Same is the case with colors; any color can be made by a combination of two or more of the primary colors, red, blue and yellow. A very common element of Mondrian’s art is the Golden Rectangle. This comes under the basic shapes and it has been used repeatedly by Mondrian in his artwork. The following compositions were created using the primary colors and both contain several golden rectangles. The first one was painted in 1942 and the second, right one in 1926 (Mondrian 1937–42). Basically, through his work Mondrian wanted â€Å"to achieve harmony through the balance of the relationships between lines, colors and planes. But only in the clearest and strongest way† (Ruhrberg, et al. 2000,

Outsourcing and Risks.Outsourced Software Products Essay

Outsourcing and Risks.Outsourced Software Products - Essay Example Companies generally opt for outsourcing to reduce production costs (i.e. outsource to a company that would develop the software in less cost), to access skilled labor force and knowledge expertise (i.e. when the in house employees do not have the essential domain knowledge and skills required for development and teaching costs would be too high and time consuming), to achieve on-time marketing (i.e. when the company cannot meet a deadline within the available time and resources) or to level workload (i.e. when the company cannot complete all tasks as per schedule). Although the service providing organizations offer outsourcing companies with opportunities towards stability, there are some basic challenges and risk involved in the various kinds of outsourcing means. When any of these services are taken from a company within the same geographical region, it refers to as domestic or onboard outsourcing; when acquired from neighbouring countries that are aware of the cultural status of o utsourcing company, it is called near-shore outsourcing and when the services are acquired from beyond national boundaries, it attributes to global or off-shore outsourcing. This document discusses a major common issue associated with these outsourcing means i.e. the maintenance of outsourced software. 2. Issues in Software Maintenance Software maintenance is usually the longest and most demanding phase in the software lifecycle model. New releases and upgrades make software outdated in no time. Therefore, software companies invest considerable resources in keeping the software in line with customers’ requirements even after the software is launched (Ahmed, 2006). For software maintenance, a company has two options; either to maintain it in-house which could induce a technical overhead or outsource the maintenance which imposes managerial overhead. Whether in-house or outsourced, when the various components of software are outsourced for development, the maintenance activitie s such as bug fixing, code maintenance, upgrades, hardware/software compatibility, testing, etc. becomes challenging. This is because the outsourced software could either be of fundamentally low quality or the associated documentation could be incomplete or poor. As a result of this, the contractor may have to invest extra budget in in-house maintenance of the developed product. For instance, a team would have to be arranged to reverse engineer the finished product and extract the missing details in the documentation or attain its better comprehension. In case of upgrades, its effects in the working of various components would have to be retested. Or the contractor could avoid the hassle and outsource the maintenance task by paying some extra. Both ways the objective of outsourcing which is to save cost is somewhat compromised in the maintenance (Earl, 1996). Secondly, if various components of the software are outsourced to different parties then in case any problem is found in the software product, none of the parties would take complete responsibility of the association of the problem to their developed component. And therefore, troubleshooting problems would get further complicated (Ahmed, 2006). Even besides testing, verifying and validating the software on test data, it could happen that the software shows different results when installed in the actual environment. In that case, the software maintenance crew (in-house or outsourced) would have to take over as the purchase would already have been made from the vendor. In case of poor documentation and low quality code, the maintenance team would be placed in a critical situation as the

Video games Essay Example for Free

Video games Essay Today, video games have become the most popular means of entertainment throughout our world. More than three-quarters of American youths have video-game consoles, and on a typical day at least 40 percent play a video game. Moreover, recently there has been a wide range of studies by professors throughout the world all focusing on the idea of whether or not video games are causing the youth to become a more illogical violent society in the future. Moreover, some people believe they are just a waste of precious time. However, they have been proven by many scholars that they are not only the best means of entertainment, but also one of the best sources of learning and improving brain performance and strategies, speed of alertness and decision making, and problem solving skills. Coming up with good strategies can be very handy for our lives whether it be in business, learning, teaching, etc. Nowadays video games have been proved to make people smarter towards creative strategy thinking. For example, it has been stated that â€Å"While there are many games that place a premium on strategy, most set an overall goal and give the gamer numerous ways in which he or she can achieve that goal. † Vila, Monica. 7 Reasons Why Your Son Should Play Video Games. http://www. babble. com/. N. p. , 04 Feb 2013. Web. 4 Nov. 2013. Video games teach kids to think objectively about both the games themselves and their own performance. In addition, players also get instant feedback on their decisions and quickly learn their own strengths and weaknesses through try and error since they get unlimited lives in a video game. Video games have a great effect on the youth regarding decision making. Some researchers compared action video-gamers and non-gamers with a series of simple decision-making experiments. Gamers devoted at least five hours weekly in the year before the experiment to playing action video games, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 2. They presented volunteers with arrays of dots, asked them to identify which way the dots were moving, and varied the number of dots moving in the same direction to make the task easier or harder. Video games get kids to think. There are dozens of video games that are specifically geared towards learning, but even the most basic shooter game teaches kids to think logically and quickly process large amounts of data. Rather than passively absorbing content from, say, a TV show, a video game requires the player’s constant input to tell the story. Moreover, well known sources such as the video games CQ research proved this characteristic about video gaming â€Å"Games stress taking your knowledge and applying it. That’s pretty crucial in the modern world,† says University of Wisconsin Professor of Reading James Gee. † Glazer, Sarah. Video Games. Congressional Quarterly, 2006. 939. Print. Indeed, the argument that video and computer games are superior to school in helping children learn as gaining currency in academic circles. Claimed benefits include improved problem-solving, mastery of scientific investigation and the ability to apply information learned to real-life situations. In conclusion, as you have seen, there is more than just killing and violence in video games. Our future children should be more exposed to video games not only for ways of entertainment, but also for the sake of improving their intelligence whether it be in creating new strategies, enhancing problem solving skills, or even allowing them to make better life decisions.