Going to the Movies

October 2, 2010 2 Comments

Listen to this postI do not spend much time enjoying the entertainment most of the people do, or at least not the same way they did. I listen to music from my PC or iPad while I working or studying and using the Internet. I usually listen to Smooth Jazz music on one of the Internet radio channels. I do not watch TV! In a full week I would spend about one hour watching TV only because it was switched on one by somebody else. For example the TV is now switch on one of those 24 hours cartoon channels and I am now typing this post thinking that I am spending quality time with the kids! I entertain myself by spending time chatting with my wife or drinking tea with my mother. I do that almost everyday. I do not go out to coffee shops, restaurants, theaters or other public functions, but I enjoy going to the movies. Every weekend, and sometime weekdays, I would dress up and take my wife to the movies. I like sci-fi, adventure, and drama. I only chose movies which are ranked 6.5/10 or above. I usually buy nachos with cheese and jalapeño. Every time I eat the jalapeño I wake up the next day with a troubled stomach, but again, I would have the same Nachos and jalapeño next time I go to a movie. I consider the weekly movie as major entertainment that break my busy weakly routines. I wonder what other busy people do to entertain themselves?

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Giving Feedback: Positive or Negative

September 28, 2010 4 Comments

Listen to this postGiving feedback or confronting employees is one of the most difficult social task we face in our lives. Giving positive feedback is sometimes called motivation or encouragement, and many of us are sometimes doing it wrongly by generalizing the feedback by saying “you have done a good job”. A good feedback should be specific like saying “Your report has listed the major critical points that we did not notice before, thank you for reporting them to us.” We do similar or even worse mistakes when we give negative feedbacks. Sometimes our negative feedback has more destructive effect than the constructive change we hoped for. Reading the following pages will help you understand the types of feedbacks you may use at work or at home. Some valuable examples are given at the end for your reference.

Giving feedback or confronting employees is one of the most difficult social task we face in our lives.Giving positive feedback is sometimes called motivation or encouragement, and many of us are sometimes doing it wrongly by generalizing the feed back by saying “you have done a good job”. Agood feedback should be specific like saying “Your report has listed the major critical points that we did not notice before, thank you for reporting them to us.”We do similar or even worse mistakes when we give negative feedbacks. Sometimes our negative feedback has more destructive effect than the constructive change we hoped for. Reading the following pages will help you understand the types of feedbacks you may use at work or at home. Some valuable examples are given at the end for your reference. Read more …

Click here to download the full material as PDF file.

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Explicit or Implicit Knowledge

September 27, 2010 2 Comments

Listen to this postDyer and Hatch (2004) stated that knowledge is two types, explicit and implicit. The explicit knowledge can be recorded and shared easily without losing its value during the transfer (Dyer & Hatch, 2004). An example of the explicit knowledge would be the market’s facts and figures that make most of the general information shared by any trade. The implicit knowledge is the pragmatic and complex knowledge that results from experience or experimental learning (Dyer & Hatch, 2004). Implicit knowledge is the hidden and most people do not know that they have it in them. An example of the implicit knowledge would be the required know-how to change and organization culture. The culture change would be done mostly by unfelt skills and knowledge. Implicit knowledge is difficult to imitate and considered as a competitive advantage for the organization over its rivals. Implicit knowledge is thought to be the base for innovative products and processes. One of Dells implicit knowledge examples is the technology that mixes mass customization; just-in-time and customer focus in one strategy and executes it flawlessly (Magretta, 1998).

References:

Dyer, J., & Hatch, N. (2004). Using supplier networks to learn faster. MIT Sloan Management Review, 45(3), 57-63.

Magretta, J. (1998). The power of virtual integration: An interview with dell computer’s Michael Dell. Harvard Business Review, 76(2), 72-84.

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Wasta

September 21, 2010 8 Comments

Listen to this postWasta is a small city in south Dakota with a population of 75 people. But “Wasta” is whom you know in Kuwait or how strong is your social network. The equivalent of wasta in English would be “Cronyism”. In Cuba it is known to be “Sociolismo” but in Russia it is called “Blat” and in China called “Guanxi” and finally in Germany has a longer word that I can not even pronounce “Vetternwirtschaft”.  So what is “Wasta”? Wasta is your social network and how you can maximize the use of your relationships. Wast is calling somebody you know to do you a favor that you have to repay back sooner or later. It is a way to overcome bureaucracy and unnecessary delays in the routine work. But like everything useful in life, you can misuse wasta to get what you are not entitled for. You have to “Pull some strings” sometimes to get what you deserve, but some people pull “stronger” strings to get what you deserve before you. Some of my friends says that they use wasta just to make sure that they are getting what they should get. But the question is: how did they know that whatever they got by wasta was meant for them?

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The Personnel Policy

September 18, 2010 2 Comments

Listen to this postMost of the medium and large organizations has a written personnel policy. The size and effectiveness of such policy depend on the organization size and culture. The bigger the organization the more detailed is its policy. The policy start small and simple but grow up and get more complicated with time. New procedures or rules are written frequently to cover the organizational needs. Expansions and new ventures require new rules and regulations; however, most of the new procedures are written to regulate or organize new situations that led to or going to lead to a problem. This fact explain why most of the personnel polices are complexed and confusing. The personnel policy was written in a reactive (or firefighting) mode. Some of the rules in policy are not applicable now or could cause more damage that it can regular and prevent. Some internet sites offer a ready-made “cookie cutter” policy that the starting companies can use with some customization. I doubt that a policy written for specific culture in a specific industry would be useful for anther culture and industry, but unfortunately, sometimes this happens! The best way to write a personnel policy is to have a specialist in Organizational Behavior to study the organizations culture and nature of work then write the full policy. The policy would be updated as needed but the specialist or consultant should be called whenever the organization anticipate change at work. The policy would need periodic revisions to rewrite or drop some of the old rules and regulations.

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My Wedding Ring

September 15, 2010 8 Comments

Listen to this postI got married ten years ago when I was 37 years old. Some of you would immediately ask why I was so late since the average age for marriage in Kuwait is 25. My answer would be in a future post. I am now happily married to a wonderful wife with three children. I have been through work stress, labor strikes, fire fighting, swim with sharks and raised children. Life is tough but with little patience all problems would pass way and will turn to be a distant memory. I like photograph and love to take pictures of roses and natural sites, but do not like to be photographed. I do not want to look at the pictures after 10-20 years and then say something like “Ooooh …I was so young” or “Looook how funny I was with that hair cut!”. I believe what had happened in the past should stay in the past, and we should live our lives they way we are now. It is like diving for many years then you find yourself in a place that you are happy with. The pictures form our live journey would not make much sense now. The picture on the right side shows my wedding ring which I always wear. I just took it off one day for cleaning and found the dents and beating it took through the years. The engraved artistic decoration had been wiped out through the years. The ring is a good indicator to what had happened in the past 10 years.

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I Love You Soooooo …!

September 1, 2010 9 Comments

Listen to this postI was working on the computer when my middle son came to me and asked my for a permission to sleep with me in our bed then when he is sleep I can carry him to his room. He is a hansom 7 years old boy that you find it very difficult to say no to. So we lay down in the bed and I hugged him and kissed then the following conversation took place:

Him: ” Dad I love you”

Me: ” I love you this much” showing a small gap between my fingers

Him: ” I love thiiiiissss much” he open his arms wide open.

Me: “I love you as big as the closet”

Him: ” I love you as big as the house”

Me: “I love you as big as the supermarket”

Him: ” I love you as big as the Earth”

Me: “OOOOOhh….I love you Soooooo….” then he stopped me by saying ” please be quite I am trying to sleep!”

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Preparing a Code of Ethics

August 21, 2010 3 Comments

Listen to this postTseng, Duan, Tung, and Kung (2010) analyzed 85,000 cited references of 3,059 articles from three business ethics related journals. The researchers found three concentration of interest in the cited references. The concentration was around the following:

  • Ethical and unethical decision-making
  • corporate governance and firm performance
  • Ethical principles and code of conduct

Comparable study was conducted by Forster, Loughran, and McDonald (2009) on a sample of firms listed on the Standard & Poor’s 500 showed similar sentences in their code of ethics. The repeated phrases are covering law obedience, acting with integrity, commitment to integrity,  commitments to treating others with fairness, exercising citizenship rights and remaining committed to the organization’s values. Messikomer and Cirka (2010) stated  honesty, respect, integrity, quality, neutrality and responsibility as the code of ethics principles for the organization (Messikomer & Cirka, 2010).

The list of important rules and principles above are a good guideline to write most of the organizational code of conduct. The process can start with identifying the organizational values and learn for the past experiences when the organizations had ethical problems or when employees violated the organizational values. The employees should be involved in writing the code of conduct, however representatives from each departments or sections would be enough when the organization has many employees that could not be assembled in one locations to discuss such intangible issue. The key stakeholders comments would be valuable for writing the code of ethics because the stakeholders are directly affected by the organizational ethics. The code of ethics history shows that the code writing was reactive to the international ethical violations (Messikomer & Cirka, 2010). Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 was set to control the supply side corruption by imposing anti-bribery provisions and accounting provision. The act had limited success in the anti-bribery practices according to Darrough (2010), but the ethical users relatively subsided after issuing the act (Messikomer & Cirka, 2010).

Read also in this blog: Ethical Management and  Starting New Business Ethically

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References:

Darrough, M. (2010). The FCPA and the OECD convention: Some lessons from the U.S. experience. Journal of Business Ethics, 93(2), 255-276. doi: 10.1007/s10551-009-0219-5

Forster, M., Loughran, T., & McDonald, B. (2009). Commonality in codes of ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 90, 129-139. doi: 10.1007/s10551-010-0380-x

Messikomer, C., & Cirka, C. (2010). Constructing a code of ethics: An experiential case of a national professional organization. Journal of Business Ethics, 95(1), 55-71. doi: 10.1007/s10551-009-0347-y

Tseng, H.-C., Duan, C.-H., Tung, H.-L., & Kung, H.-J. (2010). Modern business ethics research: Concepts, theories, and relationships. Journal of Business Ethics, 91(4), 587-597. doi: 10.1007/s10551-009-0133-x

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The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

August 16, 2010 2 Comments

The foreign corrupt practices act (FCPA) is as an anti-bribery regulation. The act is prohibiting direct and indirect valuables (monetary or physical) offering to foreign officials to influence their decisions in favor of the giver. The act has consist of two parts to control the international corruption, the first would be an anti-bribery provision and the second is books and records internal controls that enforce a good accounting provisions (Darrough, 2010). International corruption prevention is difficult and a single act like FCPA would only result in limited success if not fully embraced by the international organizations and the countries these organizations work in. the bookkeeping, disclosure and maintenance of internal controls systems are effective measures to prevent unlawful acts by the multinational organizations according to Darrough (2010), but the so-called “facilitating payments” are allowed by the act and these payments can be considered as another form of bribery. U. S. Companies would be would be disadvantaged by this act if they chose to implement it without any deviations. Bribes and “facilitating payments” were common before the act and were practiced by the U. S. companies and other international companies. The U. S. Companies should act ethically (before acting legally) and withhold these payments, but foreign officials would most probably be influenced by the bribes they received from non U. S. companies (or U. S. companies that chose to pay facilitating payments).

Darrough, M. (2010). The FCPA and the OECD convention: Some lessons from the U.S. experience. [Article]. Journal of Business Ethics, 93(2), 255-276. doi: 10.1007/s10551-009-0219-5

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Starting New Business Ethically

August 12, 2010 4 Comments

Listen to this postSome of us would like to start a new business or expand their business to new geographical location. The new business owner would think of most of the business related issues but forget the soft and intangible issues like ethics and culture. Three thousand managers and employees were surveyed in the U. S., stated that ethics compliance did not change as expected after implementing ethics compliance programs (Gebler, 2006). Organizational culture had more influence on ethics programs success than any other factors (Gebler, 2006). Managers who aim for ethical culture change and target long-lasting Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are facing difficulty in showing the benefits of such programs to the shareholders (Grossman, 2005). The shareholders would like to see immediate results to prove the managers spending (Grossman, 2005).

The basic components for ethical decision-making are moral issues, recognition, making moral judgment and engaging in moral behavior (Ingram, Skinner, & Taylor, 2005). These components would help in setting up an ethical international operation that  account for cultural, religious, national, gender, and racial differences. We need to study the local culture and religion and how it will be affected by the new business. If the business is established in the international market then we need to assess the effect of the existing business form the environmental, religious  and cultural aspects and make sure their compliance to the findings. Deviating from the ethical standard would lead to social and economical conflict with the locals. The result would be assessed for risk before taking the action to avoid legal actions. Deviations are allowed when the deviations benefits can outweigh the losses from the ethical operation.


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References:

Gebler, D. (2006). Creating an ethical culture. Strategic Finance, 87(11), 28-34.

Grossman, H. A. (2005). Refining the role of the corporation: the impact of corporate social responsibility on shareholder primacy theory. [Article]. Deakin Law Review, 10(2), 572-596.

Ingram, R., Skinner, S., & Taylor, V. (2005). ‘Consumers’ evaluation of unethical marketing behaviors: The role of customer commitment’. [Article]. Journal of Business Ethics, 62(3), 237-252. doi: 10.1007/s10551-005-1899-0

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