e-Nagar

Friends, I am doing my Behavior in Organizations project in Conflict resolution and for that I would be requiring your inputs. So please spare a couple of minutes to fill in this survey

This survey measures one’s conflict resolution techniques on 10 dimensions:
1. View of the conflict
2. Atmosphere
3. Clarification of perception
4. Needs
5. Power
6. Future
7. Options
8. Doable
9. Mutual Benefit agreement
10. Extra considerations

Thank you for taking your time to fill in this survey for me.

Over the past 2 months, all I have learned is that
1. Economies of scale: The bigger you get the cheaper it is to manufacture, you can get better price from your supplier, your distribution and advertizement costs (per unit output) will go down.
2. Innovation: Bigger firms can afford to spend larger amounts in R&D, patents, market research etc. which gives them an edge over smaller firms.
3. Professional management. In Larger firms have more competent mangers, who are there by virtue of their abilities and not their pedigree. Hence they are more rational and better.
4. Large firms can diversify their risks. Hence they have a higher probability of surviving a recession.
5. Their brands and products are well recognized and its hard for a small firm to match their marketing skills.
6. Greater pricing power, ability to modify the policies.
7. They usually have multiple functional strengths and core competency. (smaller firms have 1 core competency and idea)
8.

If all this are true, then why is that larger firms have not driven out all the smaller firms out of business? What decides that a particular firm has the required critical mass to gallop in the future as a force to be reckoned with, or its too small and would perish the corporate wars.

BTW: does anybody knows how to upload pdf online. Online file sharing tools force you to download (and takes too much time)

Here is one of the various class activity that we did in our class. in just 2 minutes, this activity will tell you how you both perform as a team.
Sit with your partner and have one pen and a sheet of paper in front of you.
Then both of you hold the pen TOGETHER, and try to draw a picture.. Maybe a picture of a house with hills, roads, stream etc.
The important point is that both the partners need to hold the pen together throughout the exercise and both of them cannot talk to each other, or communicate with facial communications.

Its looks simple, but the beauty is that in just 2 minutes you will realize who is dominating whom, who wants to draw and who is just there holding the the pen. Are the people drawing by taking turns or fighting. How the other partner reacts when you modify the object/part of the drawing which the other person was making.
Just try it, you will be amazed by the results.

Today I realized the true difference between data and information….
we took a 1GB worth of data files (just reports and texts, no pictures or multimedia) and then over the next 5 hours 4 of us crunched those numbers into a text report of 200KB and then after an hour later crunched that report One Single Word: Buy/Sell.

Karthi recently forwarded me this newslink

and here I was a fool trying to mask my real feeling for 4 straight years. BTW I realized today that Profs don’t appreciate swearing in the class.

Post copied from a textbook in management accouning (Damodaran)

The most troubling thing about earnings reports is that we are often blindsided not by the items that get reported (such as extraordinary charges) but by the items that are hidden in other categories. We would suggest the following checklist that should be reviewed about any earnings report to gauge the possibility of such shocks.

· Is earnings growth outstripping revenue growth by a large magnitude year after year?
This may well be a sign of increased efficiency, but when the differences are large and continue year after year, you should wonder about the source of these efficiencies.

· Do one-time or non-operating charges to earnings occur frequently? The charge itself might be categorized differently each year – an inventory charge one year, a restructuring charge the next and so on. While this may be just bad luck, it may also reflect a conscious effort by a company to move regular operating expenses into these non-operating items.

· Do any of the operating expenses, as a percent of revenues, swing wildly from year to year? This may suggest that the expense item (say SG&A) includes non-operating expenses that should really be stripped out and reported separately.

· Does the company manage to beat analyst estimates quarter after quarter by a cent or two? Not every company is a Microsoft. Companies that beat estimates year after year are involved in earnings management and are moving earnings across time periods. As growth levels off, this practice can catch up with them.

· Does a substantial proportion of the revenues come from subsidiaries or related holdings? While the sales may be legitimate, the prices set may allow the firm to move earnings from unit to the other and give a misleading view of true earnings at the firm.

· Are accounting rules for valuing inventory or depreciation changed frequently?

· Are acquisitions followed by miraculous increases in earnings? An acquisition strategy is difficult to make successful in the long term. A firm that claims instant success from such as strategy requires scrutiny.

· Is working capital ballooning out as revenues and earning surge? This can sometimes let us pinpoint those firms that generate revenues by lending to their own customers. None of these factors, by themselves, suggest that we lower earnings for these firms but combinations of the factors can be viewed as a warning signal that the earnings statement needs to be held up to higher scrutiny.