...Learning Team Reflection: Week 2 March 4, 2015 Jean Goodman Learning Team Reflection: Week 2 Arthur Anderson was a leading accounting firm in 2002 and the organization was destroyed that same year A number of mistakes were made by Arthur Andersen leading to the failure of the organization; these were portrayed in the case, “A Sad Tale: The Demise of Arthur Anderson”. Arthur Anderson became commonly known for the motto “Think Straight and Talk Straight” (Parrino, Kidwell, & Bates, 2012). This motto served as an ethical guideline for the organization. Mistakes Made within the Organization Arthur Andersen quickly fell victim to accounting scandals within the accounting practice. The first mistake made within the organization was due to financial conflicts between the auditing department and the consulting department. Some of the consulting clients were also auditing clients and when the consulting departments profits exceeded the auditing departments profits, this created a conflict of interest. Maintaining the separation between these departments and the funds would have alleviated this issue. Another mistake made by the organization was the unethical act of forcing auditors to sell consulting contracts to their clients. This led to the largest mistake of reporting false information; the SEC charged Arthur Andersen with obstruction of justice, as the organization was found guilty of falsifying documents relating to Enron’s financial records. Actions to Prevent...
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...Week 4 Learning Team Reflection Discuss the Week Four objectives. Your discussion should include the topics you feel comfortable with, any topics you struggled with, and how the weekly topics relate to application in your field. Write a 350- to 700-word summary of the team’s discussion. 4.1 Analyze the influence of company structure on behavior. We have now found out from Robbins and Judge (2011) that company structures determine the manner in which job jobs are officially split up, arranged, and managed and that administrators must discuss about 6 essential factors while developing the structure of the company they work with. These 6 factors are: work expertise, series of command, departmentalization, and centralization, duration of control, formalization, and decentralization. Additionally, we understand that there are 3 common company designs, for example: the easy structure, the bureaucracy, and the matrix structure. I found out that there are companies where folks are happier and more effective once the jobs are standardized and when the ambiguity is decreased. There are other companies in which following official methods and plans result in a higher satisfaction on behalf of the worker. It means that company structures impact employees’ actions. According to Robbins and Judge (2011), facts and research show that work expertise results in higher worker efficiency; the disadvantage is that it leads to decreased job pleasure. Various...
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...Learning Team Reflection -Week 4 Our learning group has been overall successful in conducting productive meetings and completing tasks in a timely manner and at the desired quality level. However, there are aspects that can be improved in order to make meetings run more smoothly. The success can be attributed to several factors. One of the most important factors leading to successful meetings is setting clear goals and an agenda before the actual meeting. Being that all group members have demanding jobs and families to attend to, we have been able to avoid wasting time meeting for things that can be done via email or over the group discussion forum. Instead, we have identified the tasks that require of all the team members’ presence and set up face-to-face meetings to discuss only those things. Moreover, the group has created an atmosphere of trust in which all members feel comfortable expressing their ideas freely. Group discussion, active listening and constructive criticism are encouraged. Finally, we have been able to compromise and make group decisions that leave everyone satisfied. The learning group could improve success in conducting meetings and performing group tasks/projects by focusing on staying on topic. Instead of socializing during the meeting, team members could be rewarded with socialization time once the team goals have been met. At the same time, team members could contribute to time management by adequately preparing and gathering all...
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...Learning Team Reflection Alfred Clark, Jeremy Freeman, and Jonathan G. Hartsgrove Law/531 December 11, 2011 Kevin Spiering Learning Team Reflection In today’s society, we use laws and regulations to protect the rights of the people. As stated on the NOLO law website, “in a serious dispute with someone, you may consider filing a lawsuit to get it resolved. But that's a big step, and before you take it you'll need to know whether your case is worth suing over, how and where you would file the paperwork and what is involved in pursuing a case (2011)”. It is during this time of agitation that the benefits provided by counsel could help a victim to decide whether to take a settlement offer or purse litigation. Settlement Offers are usually settled prior to court in a form of Alternative Dispute Resolution. This is due to the fact that “the use of the court system to resolve business and other disputes can take years and cost thousands, or even millions, of dollars in legal fees and expenses (Cheeseman, 2010. pp.43)”. A lawyer can help to determine if an offer of settlement is fair by comparing it to other similar cases and help the client to decide if litigation would result in a larger settlement based on the legal issues of the case. Several studies have looked at the effect of lawyers on the ADR process. The studies have found that the lawyer does affect the outcome, but to varying degrees. According to Sternlight (2010. pp.391), the studies have generally suggested...
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...Learning Team Reflection In a business, government or private organization, an employee must be efficient and effective in order to accomplish the company goals and expectations. All companies that per sues high standards, the employees must be efficient and effective by control measures. The types of control measures used to see how efficient and effective an employee is by observation, performance appraisal and reports. There a lot of ways to measure an employee’s performance in a call center: responsibility on the job, capabilities and abilities, and communication skills. A responsible employee must be on time at work, have discipline towards co-workers and, customers and be respectful. The capability is measured by observation and the ability of an employee’s potentials. The characteristic an employee must have to perform well at work is by responding with quantitative and qualitative reports and actions. Another skill of an employee must be communication skills. The employee must be task orientated in order to be able to help promote the company’s goal assuring the growth of the company. The sensation the employee transmits to the customer is the key to measure the efficient and effectiveness of the business. By transmitting a good sensation to the customer, this will give his the relief that his call will be taking care of in satisfactory or higher level. There are many tools to measure a call center in order to evaluate it. “As a tool for monitoring and measuring...
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...Learning Team Reflection Issue The issue in this case is whether Mutual Pharmaceuticals should refrain from making the generic equivalent of Clinirol which is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug sulindac or change the label on the drug to “contain a more explicit toxic epidermal necrolysis”, warning which was recommended by the FDA. Although the New Hampshire had a design-defect clause which forces progressive duties on manufacturers the federal law states that the drug company cannot modify the label or composition of the drug that a generic version of another drug. Since both of these laws contradict each other Mutual was left with only one option to discontinue the production of said product. Rule The FDA requires that all drugs be manufactured approved by the FDA before it engages in interstate commerce. When a new brand name is created that drug must be submitted as a New Drug Application (NDA). The NDA compiles all materials and must be submitted to the FDA with a full report. This can be an expensive and lengthy process, so then congress created an easier path for generic drugs to be issued to the public. In 1984 the Hatch-Waxman Act was created which allots for generic drugs to be approved for use without so many provisions. The drug is a mirror image of the name brand drug. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mutual Pharmaceutical reversing Bartlett’s initial argument of failure-to-warn and design-defect claims. The courts denied her failure-to-warn claim...
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...Finagle Bagel is a family owned business, founded by two former corporate workers. Headquartered in Boston, its operations cover the food industry. Doing something on their own and experience entrepreneurship was the main motivation behind the first investment in this company, back in 1998. They started without knowing for sure if they are going to be successful or not. Investments always carry a risk. This is the first lesson we could learn from their story. Sometimes you just have to be willing to risk your money, without making a sure bet. From their experience, Finagle Bagel founders are making a statement about the global perspective for return on investment. Revenue does not equal investment budget. If we sell a product, we must consider reinvesting a part of the income, not a part of the revenue. Investment opportunities can sometimes be covered with debt. Choosing venture capitals is also an option. For the Finagle Bagel owners, venture capitals were excluded because they did not want to work or involve other partners in the ownership. They exchanged the comfort of not sharing shares with the risk of having a debt at a bank. Paying back the debt was projected from the future positive cash flow results. When going for a loan, an entrepreneur should calculate if the investment can be covered from his own money or not. Bank interest rates may vary, but some opportunities cannot be missed in a growing business. , Even a recession...
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...Learning Team Weekly Reflection week 2 HRM/531 Human Capital Management April 1, 2013 Learning Team Weekly Reflection The key to a successful correlation regarding an organization's hiring process and maintaining workplace motivation is a creating a job analysis and providing a job description for each position. This process enables an organization to identify clearly the job requirements and explain its task. A job analysis and description provide expectations of employee performance. They also keep employees in line with the business strategy while increasing workplace motivation. Team D will explain how a job analysis is used to create a job description and explain the functions of a job description. Job Analysis A job analysis is an important tool used within an organization. It is the process used by human resource managers to collect important information about what a job entails. The information assist managers identify the qualifications of individuals for the position. The data collected includes the specific job task, the skills necessary for performance, what responsibilities go along with the position, the type of work environment, and the outcome of the job. Once the job analysis process is completed, the information collected is analyzed to assemble a job description. Job Description According to “Jobs Online" (2009), “a job description typically consists of six major components: 1) essential job functions, 2) knowledge...
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...Learning Team Weekly Reflection Eric Gibbs, Maximino Valdez, Aisha Savage, John Palmer Law/421 Monday, February 03, 2014 Terry Coniglio Learning Team Weekly Reflection Black’s Law Dictionary defines a copyright as “the right of literary property as recognized and sanctioned by positive law.” Melvin (2011). The development of the web and other internet technologies will continue to increase the number of copyright issues. The copyright act was developed in 1976 and it grants exclusive rights to the holder that protects their original work Melvin (2011). With these rights, the holder has exclusive rights and they are: reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, display, audio, and transmission. There are three theories to copyright infringement and they are: direct infringement, indirect infringement, and vicarious infringement. Direct infringement occurs when the copyright owner can prove legal ownership of the work in question and that the infringer copied the work without permission Melvin (2011). According to Melvin (2011) indirect infringement involves three parties, the copyright owner, the direct infringer, and the facilitator of the infringement. It states that the indirect infringement is the one that holds the facilitator liable for damages, so before pursuing the theory indirect infringement the copyright owner must identify the direct infringer. Vicarious infringement, is similar to the indirect infringement theory in that they both involve...
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...Learning Team Weekly Reflection Jennifer Naccarato, Nancy Perez, Anthony Aguirre, Edward Felix MGT/498 May 5, 2015 Dr. Tim Fish Learning Team Weekly Reflection The team discussed the topics covered in the reading material and concluded that it is difficult to forecast and foresee what is significant enough to understand what is applicable information to work with for the success of each of the companies. Seeing as we have each worked in an individual department within the organization, we are unable to predict and foresee when we are not aware of necessary information to understand what direction to go in. We are expecting to learn how to think outside the box and have the capacity to see the big picture. The team knows how strategic management could be advantageous to an organization, and how ethics should be a part of that too. We have seen in our companies on various occasions where people have committed wrong actions and how it could hurt the organization. Those actions can slowly or swiftly take over and destroy an organization. Such unethical behaviors can disrupt the goals of the company to perform efficiently and effectively. After finishing the homework and reading the objectives, the team was comfortable discussing both internal and external environmental scans and how it is not the same as a SWOT analysis. Environmental scanning is composed of observation, reviewing, and finally circulating the data assembled from internal and external environments based...
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...Learning Team Reflection Marlon Bailey, Timothy Granger, Nadia Martinez, and Sherie Ralston MGT 598 August 3, 2015 Dr. James Bottorff Learning Team Reflection During Week, Three Learning Team B will discuss this week’s objectives with our team. This paper will explain the topics we feel comfortable with, any topics the team members struggles with, and how the weekly topics relate to application in each of our fields. Steeple The topic Sherie struggled with was Steeple. “To take a closer look at the business system and ‘bigger picture' factors in which the business operates; it is useful to use a technique like the STEEPLE analysis. STEEPLE, like SWOT, is an acronym. It stands for ‘social (demographic), technological, economic, environmental (natural), political, legal and ethical’ factors” (Wickham & Wickham, 2008, p. 129). Sherie was unaware of how effective these tools are to help organizations monitor changes that take place in the environment of the organization. She learned that these tools played a significant role for any organization regardless of their products, services, and their industry. Balanced Scorecard After reading the paper by Kaplan and Norton, Timothy discovered through other readings that they are somewhat the basis for using the balanced scorecard system. Although at first it seemed a little foreign to him, he discovered that most companies only take the tangible items that are backed with a financial gain to assess the corporation's...
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...Reflections Week Four Learning Team E Andrew Appleton, Samuel Bowers, Martha Martin Jennifer Payton RES/351 November 4, 2013 Joshua West Reflections Week Four Learning Team E The objectives for week four reflections are: Differentiate between qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Explain commonly used qualitative research designs and quantitative research designs. Select the appropriate type of research design in a given business situation. Team member Mandy discussed that qualitative research is a systematic subjective approach used to describe life experiences and give them meaning. This includes focus groups, in-depth interviews, and reviews of documents for types of themes. This most commonly used in Health Care. Quantitative research is a formal, objective, systematic process for obtaining the precise measurement of something. This includes surveys, structural interviews and observation, reviews of records or documents for numeric information. This is commonly used in Education research. If a clothing company sells blue jeans and they want to measure the impact of the company by changing the product from blue jeans to black jeans, this would be a causal research design. Further discussion within the subject by team member Joann consisted of the importance to understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods of research. In qualitative method of research is designed to know more about the subject’s feelings. This would be a...
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...Learning Team Reflection: Chase Strategy OPS/571 June 24, 2013 Chase strategy is when production meets the demand and capacity from one period to the next. This strategy is mostly used when demand is unpredictable and there is no inventory. Many cases when using this strategy result in a hire turnover rate when it comes to employment which can lead to insecure and unhappy employees. Problems with labor unions may arise as well. Other results of this strategy include increased inventory costs and erratic use of factories and equipment. This allows factories to have a large amount of flexibility. A major advantage of the strategy is that inventory is allowed at its lowest level which can provide a savings to some companies. The just-in concept firms utilize the chase strategy to aggregate planning. There are many companies that prefer to use a combination of the level and chase strategy. The combination enables optimization of goals and lower costs more so than independently. Companies and businesses within the service industry that use this strategy are demand matching which means that the workforce must match the demand. Another example of an industry that uses the chase strategy is the auto industry. Companies like Ford, GM, and Hyundai have automobiles that depreciate quickly and the cost of warehousing, insurance, and taxes are high. Automobiles cannot be stockpiled for too long so therefore, only so many are made based on demand of the consumer. Another example...
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...Economics/561 June 21, 2011 Learning Team Reflection: Week Four Team A group discussion for week 4 focus on the first topic of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is the basic measure of an economy economic performance. This is the market value of the total quantity of final goods and services produced over the specified time period. The GDP is actually measured quarterly, but the number is then multiplied by four, so that the amount is in annual terms (Mankiw, 2010). In order for our team to understand this measure, we all agreed that it is necessary to first understand the concept of a final product. The GDP does not measure the market value of everything that is produced, because this would entail double counting. Each final product includes intermediate goods whose value is included in the value of the final product. Take, for example, a simple loaf of bread: the loaf is made from flour (and other ingredients), the flour is made from (say) wheat, and the wheat is grown from seeds. The value of the bread (the final product) includes the value of the flour, which includes the value of the wheat, which includes the value of the seeds. The GDP includes the market value of the bread — it does not then add the value of the flour, the value of the wheat and the value of the seeds. The value of a final product is also the value of the incomes of everyone involved in the production of both the final product and the intermediate goods that went into its production (Mankiw...
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...Week 4 Learning Team Reflection Faruque Ahamed, Siead Hasan, Ralph Kitson, and Sangeeta Walia-Chopra FIN/571 February 10, 2014 Beatrice Jones In Groton, Connecticut stands one of the largest industrial drug complexes on earth. The structure is 2.8 million square feet and it rests on a place of land that is approximately 160 acres of land. The site was designed to offer the best to drug researchers including flexible office space with mobile accommodations. Such a space offers 250,000 square feet of dedicated facilities that are designed to maximize drug research for profit (Pfizer, 2014). The building even saves money by being self-sustaining with electric car charging stations, micro-turbines and photo-voltaic cells. Research at the Groton facility is devoted to comparative medicine, drug safety, clinical trials, pharmaceuticals, medicinal chemistry, pharmacokinetics and medical dynamics. This entire profile is committedto a company that is unafraid to spend money to make billions in profits. Pfizer is the largest research based drug company in the world with 65 billion dollars in revenue (Pfizer, 2014). Pfizer invests heavily in developing their unique signature pharmaceutical products. For Pfizer a successful drug product has four phases. Phase one is approximately 100 million dollars of investment. Testing is done in labs for several years, from there it is then tested on a small sample population of healthy humans to determine its viability. If successful...
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