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The Economist - related
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Spinning Gold from Straw: Low-Cost Employee Retention and Motivation Tools in a Changing Economy Employee retention and motivation why should employers care? A storm is brewing. National productivity was up 3.9% in the second quarter and 1.9% in the third quarter of 2004. At the same time, the unemployment rate was up 5.5% in October 2004. ??Productivity is up, but fewer people are doing more,?? said Jennifer Loftus, SPHR, CCP, CBP, GRP, and National Director of HR consulting firm, Astron Solutions. ??In addition, the number of 25-34 year old workers will decline by 2.7 million by 2008, resulting in a predicted shortage of 10 million workers within the next ten years.?? Look Out The Window Quick, look out the window. It?s raining. No, the sun?s out. No, it?s cloudy. Wait a second, it is changing again, but I can?t tell what it is going to do. Innovation Management Innovation is different and distinct from creativity in that it is idea selection, development and commercialisation as opposed to creativity, which is problem identification and idea generation. The core issue with innovation management is, therefore, how to select those ideas that are most likely to succeed? Merger and Acquisition Valuation Practice Outline This outline describes the M&A package that our law firm or management consulting firm would normally prepare when retained to find targeted acquisitions for a client. The outline follows the six main stages of an acquisition: financial analysis, valuation, purchase price negotiation, deal structuring, financing, and closing. The analysis explains whether the target company gaining, holding, or losing financial ground; its market value; how much the buyer should pay; and what the purchase will ultimately cost. So, You Want to be in Management? Five Essential Factors that Will Determine Your Chances What senior executives are most concerned with: ?Retention of valued employees ?Turnover ?Ethical behavior ?Customer service and satisfaction ?Global competition ?and more What You Must Definitely Know About Multi Level Marketing The Network Marketing is currently a subject of much debate due to some unscrupulous companies exploiting the lack of awareness of Networking Marketing or MLM as it is commonly called. WFDSA has put out detailed guidelines for the network marketing companies on ethical conduct of business Critical Success Factors - Next (Note, although this article was written in early 2002, it is totally relevant. Right now.) The Arrow-Debreu Contingent Claims Model of Investment The Nobel-prizing winning paradigm of Arrow and Debreu, the so-called contingent claims model of speculation, contains a flaw identified by Nagatani (1975). This flaw relates to uncertainty of traders about what price will prevail in a given state of the world. Prices are normally endogenous to a market and determined by supply and demand. Unless prices are defined exogenously in the state of the world, traders in these models will speculate on what they believe others think the prevailing prices will be. First (1984) Derivation of a Fully Rational Speculative Bubble This article describes the first derivation of a fully rational speculative bubble (in 1984) in the economics literature. The model employs a Bayesian Nash Equilibrium in a game of incomplete information. Informed traders play opposite uninformed traders, each taking the other's strategy as given. The informed group, having incurred the cost of acquiring private information, moves first. The informed group may try to fool the uninformed into believing that asset returns are better than they actually are. Sometimes the deception succeeds. A bubble results, and after the crash is over and the dust has cleared, the informed group turns out to have gained at the expense of the uninformed. Sometimes the deception fails, and the informed traders wind up losing more money than if they had followed a conventional, fundamental-based investment strategy. Creativity and Innovation Management ? Money Doesn't Do It Though material reward is a significant motivating factor, it is not the whole story. |
