Do mass firings improve or hurt performance?

The American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO are up in arms over the firing yesterday of all the teachers and administrators at Central Falls High School in Central Falls, Rhode Island – 93 in all.  The high school had consistently been ranked in the bottom 5% of all schools in Rhode Island, only 7% of the school’s 11^th grade students were proficient in math, and less than half the schools seniors graduate.

The Department of Education is cracking down on poor performing schools throughout the country and giving states four options:

1. School closure.
2. Takeover by a charter school or school management organization.
3. Follow a “transformation model” and lengthen the school day and make other changes.
4. “Turnaround” which requires firing the teaching staff and rehiring no more than 50% of those teachers the following year.

The teachers and the teachers’ union wouldn’t support option three unless they received pay increases which led the school board to decide on option 4.

Many people think this is a horrible way to improve students’ academic performance and are shocked at the school board’s decision.  But what if this was a business or a retail store?  Would everyone feel the same way? Read the rest of this entry »

Are powerful people more likely to cheat?

Are people with questionable morals just naturally drawn to positions of power and authority, or does the power that goes with the position change people for the worse?

Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois and Tilburg University in the Netherlands developed a series of experiments to answer this question.  Groups of student volunteers were asked to recall and write about times in their lives when they were in a position of high and low power, and the process of mentally reliving these events would “prime” the volunteers for the study.  Half the group would be in a mindset of high power and the other in one of low power, and each group was then given one of two tasks to perform.

Half of each group was sent to a private room, given a pair of ten-sided dice, and told to report to a lab assistant the number from 0-100 they rolled (the first dice rolled was the tens digit and the second was the ones digit).  The lab assistant would then give the subject a corresponding number of lottery tickets for a drawing to be held after the study was completed, so the higher the number they rolled the more tickets they would receive.  There was no one to witness the rolls of the dice and the participants were on the honor system to report the number to the lab assistant.

The results: Read the rest of this entry »

Run your personal finances like a corporation

Wouldn’t it be nice if your life and personal finances were run as orderly and efficiently as a major corporation?  Follow these 5 steps and you’ll be well on your way to running your personal finances as smoothly as a well-oiled corporate machine.

1. Get approval for major purchases.

Even if you have a corporate card with no credit limit you’re eventually going to have to answer to the bean counters.  Adopt this attitude toward your personal credit card and ask your significant other to review your purchases and do the same for him or her.  No significant other?  Draft a close friend or family member to audit your credit card statement and in turn offer to do the same for them.  This way your purchases will be as transparent as any corporate financial report and you’ll probably be a lot less likely to make impulse buys.

2. Make decisions by committee.

Proverbs 15:22 says “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”  Take this to heart the next time you have a major decision to make, whether it’s for a major purchase, an investment, refinancing, credit card offer, etc.  Read the rest of this entry »

"He's dead, Jim"

Anyone who’s familiar with the original Star Trek series knows the term “red shirt”.  These are the hapless crew members whose sole purpose in the plot is so Dr. McCoy can say “He’s dead, Jim.”

They’re routinely zapped, vaporized, stabbed, blown up, and dispatched in a variety of ways by alien life forms.  They gave their lives so drama could be added to dangerous situations without harm having to come to one of the main characters the plot revolved around.

It makes you wish you could be a fly on the wall so you could eavesdrop before they beamed down – I’m sure their conversations went something like “Hey, did you hear Johnson is going to be part of the away team beaming down to the new plant with the Captain, Spock, and Dr. McCoy?” “No, that’s too bad.  Dibs on his bunk!” Read the rest of this entry »

How do you deal with a blowhard?

I was scanning through Aesop’s Fables for Children looking for stories I could tell my kids and rediscovered how the  “children’s” fables were just as appropriate for grown ups.

Aesop’s fables are credited to a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC, although its questionable Aesop ever existed and the stories may actually be far older.  Most of the characters are animals with human-like behavior and each short story has a moral.

Three of the stories in particular reminded me of difficult people I’ve had to deal with in the past, who I’ll affectionately refer to from hereon as the Blowhard, the Guy Who Never Gives an Inch, and the Jerk with the Hot Temper.

The Blowhard

The Blowhard is the North Wind in the fable The North Wind and the Sun, which gives an example of two different approaches to solving a problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Learn how to define your marketing mix

In part 4 we talked about how you develop your marketing strategy by creating objectives and setting goals based on the results of your SWOT analysis.  All that’s left now is to develop programs for implementing your new marketing goals, the controls you’ll put in place to ensure your programs are effective, and profit and loss (P&L) statements.

The first step to implementing your marketing program is to decide on a budget.  Companies typically set their marketing budget as a percentage of their sales goal, and allocate more money to marketing if they’re seeking more market share.  The budget is then split between the different parts of your marketing mix, product, price, place, and promotion (the four P’s). Read the rest of this entry »

Set clear objectives and goals

After you’ve completed the SWOT analysis we discussed in Part 3 you should have identified market opportunities you’re ready to go after.  You should develop financial objectives based on those opportunities which will then be converted to marketing objectives.

An objective is simply something that you set out to achieve, and goals are the things that help you meet your objectives.  Objectives are broad and general, and goals are the steps you need to take to meet your objectives.  Goals need to be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time based.  One of your objectives may be to increase your rate of return on investment (ROI) by 10% this year, which could be done by increasing profits, reducing the amount of invested capital, and/or reducing expenses.

Each one of these ways to meet your objective could be turned into a goal, as long as they meet the SMART criteria.   If the ROI of 10% equated to $100,000, and you wanted 25% of that goal to be met through reducing expenses, you could set a goal of reducing expenses by $25,000 this year or roughly by $2,000 each month.  Read the rest of this entry »

It's not easy being green

I had the misfortune of hearing the end of the EPA’s administrator Lisa Jackson’s speech to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on Public Radio International the other morning.  When I heard her say “we are seeking” for the fourth time she had me seeking another radio station.

It’s rubbing salt in a festering wound to hear bad news poorly delivered, and the bad news the EPA had was that they would begin tracking major producers of green house gases the same way they track major polluters.  The EPA now considers greenhouse gases a danger to public health which makes them subject to federal regulations under the Clean Air Act.

As a result the EPA can begin to impose fines on more than 13,600 coal-burning power stations, crude oil refineries, metal smelters, and many other industrial facilities.  The EPA’s goal is to not just let companies purchase carbon credits and upgrade their plant equipment on their own schedule but to force them to use the “best available technology” when applying for permits for any new construction or modifications that would affect greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest of this entry »

I said "SWOT"

In the previous two articles we talked about identifying your target market and business competition, planning product distribution, and pricing strategies.  The most important thing to take away from both of these articles is the importance of gathering data about your target market, customers, and sales.  You don’t have to be a statistician or marketing analyst to do this, just track your sales and get to know your customers.

The next step for your marketing plan is to do a SWOT analysis, an overall look at your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  Identifying strengths and weaknesses requires you to look within your company, and opportunities and threats can be found outside your company.   Read the rest of this entry »

Name your price

In my last post on how to develop your own marketing plan we talked about how to size up the market you’re trying to break into and how to write an executive summary.  The next step is probably the most important part: how are you going to make money?  You could have the most brilliantly executed marketing strategy in the history of marketing strategies but if you didn’t price your products or services correctly it won’t matter.  The first step is to determine your pricing objective – are you setting your prices for maximum current profit, maximum market share, maximum market skimming, product-quality leadership, or just for survival.   Read the rest of this entry »