Products at the End of the Life Cycle

September 9, 2011 1 Comment

The company can sell its product in a different environment. The new market can be domestic or international depending of the product specifications and the new market demand. Products in the end of their life cycle can be a burden on the company because the margin between manufacturing the product and its selling price is declining (Jevons et al., 2007). Low-tech cell phones are good example for market relocation. The low-tech phones may be at the end of their life cycle in the developed countries but there is a good demand for such phones in the developing countries because of their relatively low price. The cell phone users in the developing countries need simple to use phone to communicate in the remote areas and other high-tech functions are neither important or available in the remote areas.

References:
Jevons, C., Ewing, M., & Khalil, E. (2007). Managing brand demise. Journal of General Management, 32(4), 73-81.

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Is Balanced Scorecard easy to do?

August 21, 2011 1 Comment

Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a management tool to measure the organizational implementation of the vision and strategy against the business and operating Key Performance Indicators (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). BSC transform the strategy into tangible and intangible performance measures that make the strategy a dynamic process (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). BSC is an innovative method to dissect and direct the strategy into four principles. The principles or categories that each strategy should have are finance, external relations, internal business process, and learning and growth. The vision and strategy can be mapped through the BSC information to give clear representation of the strategy to the stakeholders and shareholders.

Some organizations thing that BSC is a complete waste of resources and takes time to set up the required measures (Linna & Seal, 2009). The measures maybe be outdated and need change within few months. Success in the internal processes or human resources is sometimes not rewarded (Linna & Seal, 2009); however, the rewards are usually linked to the financial measures only. BSC may be a good performance dashboard if the tangible measures are updated frequently, however BSC will not be dynamic enough when most of the measures are intangible and cannot be update frequently.

References:

Carpenter, M. A., & Sanders, W. G. (2009). Strategic management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Linna, Y., & Seal, W. (2009). The balanced scorecard. Financial Management (14719185), 27-28.

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Competitive Advantage

August 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

Market imperfections can be in the form of monopoly, externalities or public goods but sometimes defined as anything that interferes with trade (DeGennaro, 2005). The organizational competitive advantage can be achieved by adapting to the external trends and events and adapt to the changes in capabilities and resources. The organizations can make the competitive advantages by formulating and implementing strategies that help adapting and taking advantage of these changes (Ogrean, Herciu, & Belascu, 2009). Organizations can definitely take advantage of the market monopoly and keep up its position until another competitor force its market penetration. Externalities can be used as a competitive advantage when the organization anticipates and plan for the positive externalities. Over fishing in a place would increase the demand when the fish supplied to the market is less than the demand. The organizations can take care of this externality by anticipating the decrease in the supply and importing enough supply of fish for the consumer in the local market.

Rolls-Royce found out that its automobile business was not competitive and its jet engine market was booming. Rolls-Royce sold its automobile business and concentrated on leasing jet engines to the airline companies (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). The leasing strategy made Rolls-Royce take larger share of the jet engine business (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009). Xerox had good innovations coming from its research center in Palo Alto, which could have been good competitive advantages. Innovations like personal computers, bit-mapped, desktop, icons, and the use of mouse and menus (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009; Rothkopf, 2000). Xerox did not use these competitive innovations and lost a good chance to be a leader in these markets (Carpenter & Sanders, 2009; Rothkopf, 2000).

References:

Carpenter, M. A., & Sanders, W. G. (2009). Strategic management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

DeGennaro, R. (2005). Market Imperfections. Journal of Financial Transformation, 14(2005), 107-117.

Ogrean, C., Herciu, M., & Belascu, L. (2009). Searching for sustainable competitive advantage– From tangibles to intangibles. Journal of US-China Public Administration, 6(4), 1-9.

Rothkopf, M. H. (2000). Under the Mike-R-Scope: What happened at Xerox PARC? Interfaces, 30(6), 91-94.

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كيفة وضع الاهداف الشخصية والمهنية

August 6, 2011 Leave a Comment

I would like to apologize to the blog visitors and readers for presenting this post (video) in Arabic language. Many visitors and friends asked me to blog in Arabic and this is my first start in the blog.

Part 1

Part 2

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Technical Position Training

July 21, 2011 Leave a Comment

Technical employees need intensive technical training but also need managerial and leadership training to advance in their jobs. Some organizations start the administrative and managerial training too late which make the technical employees struggle in approving and implementing their ideas.


Technical Position Training Model

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Prepaid SIM card

April 30, 2011 2 Comments

What is the best use of the extra credit in the prepaid SIM card. You may answer by “Using it” but please think again. Many of us can’t stop using their mobile phones even during their vacations. I was using my original SIM card during my international travel but I learned (the hard way) that roaming services are very expensive once I mad it back home and got the first phone bill. I bought a cheap mobile phone and used it as a secondary mobile phone with a prepaid SIM card from the country I am traveling to. My international roaming service costs came down drastically, so I found myself calling home more often because of the low cost of the international calls when using the prepaid SIM cards. The only problem with such plan is the remaining credit on the SIM card during the last day of your travel. I noticed many people use up their credit by calling their friends and relative or somebody they just want to wast time with. They do these annoying calls in the airport boarding gates or on the airplane just before taking off. You will be tired and look for peace but people around you keep on telling their life stories over the phone to somebody in another time zone. The women next to me in the plane is giving a detailed report to her friend back home just to use up the prepaid credit. I know now what she did during her vacation to the last detail. And almost half of the airplane overheard her annoying conversation. When she hang up the mobile phone she asked her daughter if her phone also have unused credit?

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What Is Right For The Business?

February 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

Many employees work very hard to perform their  daily tasks, but they make mistakes and got blamed for it. The first reaction from their superiors is to look for the obvious mistakes and shortfalls in following the plans, procedure or regulations. Catching the obvious mistake is easy but will only solve the problem momentarily. Eliminating the cause of the problem is very difficult. Sometimes, the organization needs to change the procedures, review their assumptions or even ask themselves if they need the workers to perform that task at all. The following discussion and examples will show how mistakes and errors can take place and how we can we eliminate these mistakes immediately and permanently. Long term solutions needs time, effort and big budget, but eliminating a reoccurring problem will worth the cost, effort and time spent. Read More …

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Survey or Questionnaire?

January 23, 2011 3 Comments

Birthday cake
Image by Sami Malallah via Flickr

I was asked by one of the blog readers about the difference between surveys and questionnaire. We can easily get confused because they are doing almost the same thing. Surveys are more popular because most of the researchers use them to collect information from large population. But surveys need statistical calculations to analyse and interpret. Surveys are mostly used for quantitative researches. The surveys are usual printed on few pages and distributed in classrooms, shopping centers or social gatherings. Recently, most of the surveys are conducted online thought free survey services like Zoomerang or SurveyMonky who can collect and analyse the data for competitive prices.  Questionnaires are used for qualitative researches and usually conducted in a face-to-face setting.

Survey is a set of questions prepared with answers to choose from. For example the question can be “what is your favorite sweet after a good meal?” the answer can be: 1) cheese cake 2) chocolate cake 3) fruit salad 4) fresh apple. The survey participant will choose one answer. Questionnaires are set of questions to ask open-ended questions to get the participants perception or experience on the studied subject. Question can be “What do you like to eat after you main meal when you dine in a restaurant?”

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Communication Channels

January 21, 2011 3 Comments

Organizations have different communications channels to send strategies, objectives, instructions, and feedbacks to its employees. The same channels are available for upward communications like problems, results, suggestions, questions and workers’ needs (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2008). Different communications channels are needed for different communications richness. Communication richness materialize in the content of the communication. General information like the morning weather condition can have different richness. A note with the expected morning temperatures wind speed has low message richness. But detailed hourly weather report updated on your computer screen is considered a rich report. Some organizations find written memo as the main communication method. Face-to-face communications is the considered the second best communications channel because of the advancement in the video and audio communication through the Internet. Face-to-face communications is two-way communications channel which is preferred for its richness but not desired because of it’s relatively slowness to reach most workers in the organization.value face-to-face communication is rich but slow when compared with e-mails and electronic bulletins (Schermerhorn et al., 2008). So the choice of communication channel depends on the desired richness and speed of distribution to have the desired effectiveness and efficiency. Effective communications is achieved when the intended meaning of the message equal the perceived meaning. The efficient communications is reached when the intended meaning reaches the intended receivers at the lowest cost by using the available resources (Schermerhorn et al., 2008). A good example of and efficient way of communicating an effective message is by connecting a live weather report on the company’s intranet portal. The workers will read the report when they need a weather update from the computer screed on in the convince of their offices.

References:

Schermerhorn, J. R., Hunt, J. G., & Osborn, R. N. (2008). Organizational Behavior (10 ed.). NY: John Wiley & Sons.

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2010 in review

January 2, 2011 1 Comment

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Sami MalallahThe average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 132 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 144 posts. There were 179 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 376mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was November 17th with 135 views. The most popular post that day was Relationship Marketing – Coca-Cola in India.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, mail.yahoo.com, malallah.org, mail.live.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for problem statement, Acer SWOT analysis, whistle blowing, daily routine, and supply chain.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Relationship Marketing – Coca-Cola in India March 2010
2 comments

2

Acer SWOT Analysis June 2010
7 comments

3

Leadership Styles January 2010

4

Quantitative or Qualitative January 2010
5 comments

5

Research Overview February 2010
3 comments

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