Use of social networks for financial and performance reporting Research Paper

Use of social networks for financial and performance reporting - Research Paper Example This research analyses how the financial reporting and organizations performance have improved for the past few years because of increased use of social networking. Inescapabilty and popularity of the social network has largely created awareness and improved the relationship between the business and the stakeholders by introducing a new way in which financial information is disseminated and eventually consumed. Companies primarily use the social media to report their performances so that the information can reach larger audience who may be interested. Information that was previously released in news releases, conference calls and presentations are revealed through twitter because of its ability to swiftly and efficiently receive and share information from a trusted source. There are live tweets of companies’ earning call enabling shareholders who are physically absent during call to receive live information. According to Scott (2013), â€Å"Of Facebook’s nearly one billion strong users, approximately 200 million are mobile only.† On the other hand, YouTube, and Flickr may be utilized in providing videos regarding earning calls, do presentations thus engaging investors with the business financial reports as well as sharing information such as crucial business transactions that include merger and acquisition. It is worth noting that the social network has the ability to reach even remote communities thus enabling the company to operate in distant and remote places while raising awareness about them. There are many reasons justifying the use of social media in financial reporting and performance. Social media’s ability to reach a huge audience makes it the best communication channels for businesses compared to the conventional methods that are inaccessible to some people. According to Scott (2013), â€Å"Statistical research has revealed that more than 95 per cent of  Facebook users log into their account every day. The same number

Hamilton’s Economic Vision Essay Example for Free

Hamilton’s Economic Vision Essay Alexander Hamilton was a staunch Federalist who believed in maintaining power within the national government that is led by men of wealth, intelligence and talent and who are driven towards commercial development. His original proposal for the new constitution was very conservative but he had to accept a compromise if the Constitution was to be approved. Hence, the new government was launched with George Washington elected as President. Hamilton himself was appointed Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton envisioned a country of great strength and he believed that growth can only be achieved through domestic manufacturing and overseas trade. He aimed to emulate the stability and governing style of England. He looked admiringly upon competitive and ambitious self-starters who focused on financial successes and encouraged close association with them. Hamilton was determined to move the new government into the direction which he deemed was right and proper. He had a nation to build. Working his way towards such a goal, Hamilton submitted reports to Congress for their endorsement into law. His first was a â€Å"Report on the Public Credit† which came in two phases. The first phase included his recommendations for the funding of the remaining Revolutionary War debt and the federal assumption of debt. He hoped that these actions would â€Å"stabilize the government finances, establish its credit, build confidence in the new nation at home and tie business and commercial interests firmly to the new constitution. † Essentially, funding would allow the government creditors to exchange their much depreciated securities at face value for new, interest-bearing government bonds while the remaining state war debts would be assumed by the federal government. The South argued against the funding mainly because they would not get much benefit from it while arguments against the federal assumption of the remaining debts run came mainly from the States who had almost completely paid off all their debts. Other critics were able to see through Hamilton’s ploy anticipating that the central government merely plans to develop close with the wealth creditors/individuals as the central government will now be the one who will control who gets to be paid and when. Moreover, the central government would now have a justifiable reason to impose taxes. With a side deal of moving the government seat from New York to Philadelphia, Hamilton got his endorsement. The second phase involved the creation of a national bank that is able to handle the â€Å"government’s financial affairs and pooling private investment capital for economic development. † Opposition again came from the South who prefers to promote agrarian development as it sees lesser benefit for them and more for the northern merchants. It was nonetheless endorsed and signed into law by Washington upon the urging of Hamilton. His second on â€Å"Report on Public Credit† proposed the imposition of a series of excise taxes including one on the manufacture of distilled liquor. The Whiskey Tax as it was coined, set the precedent for the government to use its taxing authority to increase federal revenue. Hamilton believed that â€Å"the power to tax and spend was the power to govern. † It became law in March 1791. Finally, in his â€Å"Report on Manufacturers†, Hamilton called for tariffs on imported European goods. This would make the goods produced by American industries more competitive in terms of price. The resulting revenue will â€Å"encourage the expansion of commercial agriculture and a network of federally-sponsored internal improvements† which would â€Å"stimulate commerce and bind the nation more tightly together. † However, since this might reduce overseas trade, Congress did not endorse this. Work Cited Creating a Nation. Name of Book. XXX ed. Year Published.

What Is The Mckinseys 7s Model Commerce Essay

What Is The Mckinseys 7s Model Commerce Essay The McKinseys 7S Model was created by the consulting company McKinsey and Company in the early 1980s and subsequently has become the de facto standard used by practitioners and academics alike in analysing the performance of an organization. (Pascale Athos, 1981; Peters Waterman, 1982). There are seven variables in the model which include structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff and shared values. All beginning with s, justifying why it was termed as the 7S model. This treatise evaluates each of the seven components of the model and the links between them with respect to the Big I of Enterprise Integration using a case study approach. The model is as shown in figure 1 above, showing the interdependency of the variables. This is illustrated by the model also being termed as the Managerial Molecule. It was found that several organisations using the model pay more attention to those variables they consider changeable (e.g. structure, strategy and systems) rather than the other variables (e.g. skills, style, staff and shared values) considered to be soft variables. For long-term benefit, they feel that the variables should be changed to become more congruent as a system. Description of 7 Ss Strategy: Strategy is the plan of action an organisation prepares in response to, or anticipation of, changes in its external environment. Strategy is thought-out, well-structured and often practically rehearsed and is differentiated from tactics or operational actions. It sought to answer three questions; where the organisation is at this moment in time, where the organisation wants to be in a particular length of time and how to get there( ). Thus, strategy is designed to transform the firm from the present position to the new position described by objectives, subject to constraints of the capabilities or the potential (Ansoff, 1965). Structure: Business needs to be organised in a specific form of shape that is generally referred to as organisational structure. Organisations are structured in a variety of ways, dependent on their objectives and culture. The structure of the company often dictates the way it operates and performs (Waterman et al., 1980). Traditionally, the businesses have been structured in a hierarchical way with several divisions and departments, each responsible for a specific task such as human resources management, production or marketing. Many layers of management controlled the operations, with each answerable to the upper layer of management. Although this is still the most widely used organisational structure, the recent trend is increasingly towards a flat structure where the work is done in teams of specialists rather than fixed departments. The idea is to make the organisation more flexible and devolve the power by empowering the employees and eliminate the middle management layers (Boy le, 2007). Systems: This refers to some systems or internal processes to support and implement the strategy and run day-to-day affairs. Different systems exist in companies for procurement, recruitment, promotion and so on. The traditional approach is bureaucratic which are intended to achieve maximum effectiveness but however creating bottle neck. The emerging trends in organisations are to simplify and modernize organizational processes by innovation and use of new technology to quicken decision-making process, especially those involving customers with the intention to make the processes that involve customers more user friendly(Lynch, 2005). Style/Culture: refers to distinct culture and management style in organizations. It generally includes the dominant values, beliefs and norms which develop over time and become relatively peculiar to the organisation. It consists of the way companys top management interact the employees. Traditional approach has been largely military style of management and culture where strict adherence to top-down management, concentrating power at the centre, thereby creating bottlenecks which invariably leads to time wastage and ineffienciecy. Recent efforts have sought to change culture to a more open, innovative and friendly environment with fewer hierarchies and smaller chain of command. Culture remains an important consideration in the implementation of any strategy in the organisation (Martins and Terblanche, 2003). Staff: Organisations are made up of humans and its the people who make the real difference to the success of the organisation in the increasingly knowledge-based society (). The importance of human resources has thus got the central position in the strategy of the organisation, away from the traditional model of capital and land. In order to ensure quality staff, organisations put considerable efforts into hiring the best staff, providing them with rigorous training and mentoring support, and pushing their staff to limits in achieving professional excellence, and this forms the basis of these organisations strategy and competitive advantage over their competitors (). It is also important for the organisation to instil confidence among the employees about their future in the organisation and future career growth as an incentive for hard work (Purcell and Boxal, 2003). Shared Values/Superordinate Goals: All members of the organisation share some common fundamental ideas or guiding concepts around which the business is built. This may be to make money or to achieve excellence in a particular field. These values and common goals keep the employees working towards a common destination as a coherent team and are important to keep the team spirit alive. The organisations with weak values and common goals often find their employees following their own personal goals that may be different or even in conflict with those of the organisation or their fellow colleagues (Martins and Terblanche, 2003). CASE STUDY Rescuing Troubled Software Projects by Team Transformation: A Case Study with an ERP Project, Kim Man Lui and Keith C. C. Chan Strategy. This companys direction and scope over the long term is to be market-leading international beverage brand. This is one of the main motivations necessitating SAP R/3, an ERP system to replace the existing IBM A/S400 owing to growing competitions. Structure. The hierarchical team structure is adopted though a change in the composition and communication flow was effected to ensure success of project team. Functional areas of expertise was key to inclusion in the project team. Systems. In the case study, Accelerated SAP (ASAP) was adopted to implement the new ERP system. ASAP is comprised of five phases. The phases are project preparation, Business blueprint, realization, final preparation and Go Live and support. Skills. There are some issues in the staffing and learning process of the staff in the company. There are some weakness in the staffing and there is no clear cut way of training and assessing the competence of an individual staff in the project team. There is lack of adequate knowledge in the staff included for implementation of the project. The two programmers in the project team are not well experienced in ASAP. Shared values. The core value and belief of this organization is to become the leading international beverage brand. This is the motivation behind the approaches and efforts of all staff involved with the project. Staff. Staffing and training has not been properly developed. Obviously, inclusion of inexperienced programmers is a pointer to the shortcoming. This would definitely impact the success of the enterprise integration project. Style. There is a sign of leadership maturity in the company. The company was rescued majorly because there was a transformation of the team. In spite of the fact that there were a number of issues as mentioned above, the approach adopted to rescue the team was to transforming the project team.

Gangster Life Portrayed in the Movie, Scarface :: Movie Film Essays

Gangster Life Portrayed in the Movie, Scarface As an exile from Communist Cuba, †¦.Montana†¦wha you say? You say wrong Scarface? Maybe I say you wrong, man. Maybe I say you in wrong place at wrong time chico. Maybe I no even speak to you, maybe I let someone else talk. I got someone you should meet. Say hello to my lil’ frie†¦. I’m sorry, let me start over. There is a thin line that exists between the depiction of a villain and a gangster that Hollywood has mastered walking on. While villains and gangsters may do many of the same things in movies, like stealing and killing, they each do them for different reasons. Villains enjoy crime because that is what gets them off; some may feel they are doing society a favor, like Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and others are more simply portrayed as naturally evil or mentally ill. But Gangsters are doing what they do for something American society can relate to—to make a living and, ultimately, get to the top. This â€Å"business† aspect of organized crime is what the movie industry has latched on to in the Gangster genre. In Scarface, Tony Camonte is in the business of selling beer to the town watering holes. Of course, he doesn’t so much sell the beer as force it on the bar owners at jacked up prices. And just like any other business, there is competition for dominance in the market. And for this dominance, or rather monopoly, ringleaders do not think twice about taking their competition out – not by buying them out or forcing them into bankruptcy, but by sending a squad out to murder them. Like most things captured on film for the purpose of being marketed, the richness of gangster life, with sex, money, and power in surplus, is glorified, and thus embraced by the audience. And as a rule, if something works Hollywood repeats it, ala a genre. What Scarface and Little Caesar did was ultimately create a genre assigning powerful qualities to criminals. Such sensationalism started with the newspapers who maybe added a little more color here and there to sell a few more copies, which is portrayed in Scarface’s two newspaper office scenes. Leo Braudy denounces genres as offending â€Å"our most common definition of artistic excellence† by simply following a predetermined equation of repetition of character and plot. However, Thomas Schatz argues that many variations of plot can exist within the â€Å"arena† that the rules of the genre provide. Gangster Life Portrayed in the Movie, Scarface :: Movie Film Essays Gangster Life Portrayed in the Movie, Scarface As an exile from Communist Cuba, †¦.Montana†¦wha you say? You say wrong Scarface? Maybe I say you wrong, man. Maybe I say you in wrong place at wrong time chico. Maybe I no even speak to you, maybe I let someone else talk. I got someone you should meet. Say hello to my lil’ frie†¦. I’m sorry, let me start over. There is a thin line that exists between the depiction of a villain and a gangster that Hollywood has mastered walking on. While villains and gangsters may do many of the same things in movies, like stealing and killing, they each do them for different reasons. Villains enjoy crime because that is what gets them off; some may feel they are doing society a favor, like Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and others are more simply portrayed as naturally evil or mentally ill. But Gangsters are doing what they do for something American society can relate to—to make a living and, ultimately, get to the top. This â€Å"business† aspect of organized crime is what the movie industry has latched on to in the Gangster genre. In Scarface, Tony Camonte is in the business of selling beer to the town watering holes. Of course, he doesn’t so much sell the beer as force it on the bar owners at jacked up prices. And just like any other business, there is competition for dominance in the market. And for this dominance, or rather monopoly, ringleaders do not think twice about taking their competition out – not by buying them out or forcing them into bankruptcy, but by sending a squad out to murder them. Like most things captured on film for the purpose of being marketed, the richness of gangster life, with sex, money, and power in surplus, is glorified, and thus embraced by the audience. And as a rule, if something works Hollywood repeats it, ala a genre. What Scarface and Little Caesar did was ultimately create a genre assigning powerful qualities to criminals. Such sensationalism started with the newspapers who maybe added a little more color here and there to sell a few more copies, which is portrayed in Scarface’s two newspaper office scenes. Leo Braudy denounces genres as offending â€Å"our most common definition of artistic excellence† by simply following a predetermined equation of repetition of character and plot. However, Thomas Schatz argues that many variations of plot can exist within the â€Å"arena† that the rules of the genre provide.

Philosophy-Metaphysics Essay

â€Å"The PNC: A property cannot both belong and not belong to a subject at the same time and in the same respect. The PNC is the most certain principle, i. e. :1) It is not possible to be wrong about it. 2) If you know anything, you know it (all statements of knowledge imply it). †(Chance, 2005) The Principle of Non-Contradiction is both a law of thought and a law of being. Aristotle propagated this principle first. Since then, voluminous literature is written on this principle, many arguments have been put forth elaborating it. It is believed that this principle is the basis, foundation of all demonstrative sciences. Intuitive understanding is the gateway to knowing PNC. In character, it is un-hypothetical. Its indemonstrability needs to be understood in the proper perspective. The PNC protects the unity of the thought process. The content of one’s thought is its non-contradictory nature. That is to say, the content of one’s thought is the non-contradictory nature of being. To deny it is not to say reality itself is contradictory by nature. Here, the fact to be noted is that insufficient education and understanding on the part of the person who denies the principle. But there are many, who deny; foremost among them are para-logicians. Their mental block seems to be their problem, i. e. how we present what we present before them. How the reality is framed for tendering the version to them. The principle could be both true and false. As per Quantum Mechanics, when we can’t make out the proper option between the two, the principle needs to be deemed as meaningless and void. Many situations can be quoted in support of drawing such a conclusion. Aristotle has the answer for this sort of criticism. Those who deny the principle merely assume that they deny; the very denial contains in fact, their acceptance of the principle. Their question whether the PNC is true or false has the answer –they assume that it is either true or false. Ipso, facto, they speak in is affirmation. But there are instances where the PNC contradicts physics. Relativism as a theory must be false, if the PNC is true. If A believes that the sun is shining, and B believes that the sun is not shining, one of them obviously must be false. Every argument has a counter argument; every example can be challenged by yet another contradictory-example. The attitude of most of the people is, ‘Whatever I say is correct. None is willing to accept that ‘whatever correct is there in the world, belongs to me. ’ It is the acknowledged principle with the rationalists and scientists that nothing could be accepted as true without evidence. But then there is an authentic counter-question for this as well. How one can know that the method employed for knowing or accepting the evidence is true? This is an important observation, which is difficult to refute. The truth of the PNC can be soundly argued on the basis of what Aristotle has propounded about it. But this is true of mind-level issues and examples. If one of the ‘arguing’ individuals has transcended the mind-barrier, his uttering will be on the basis of his realization, and that can never be explained through words, sentences and explanations. Such ‘issues’ form part of the experience-domain of an individual. Even Aristotle has to stop here, with his files related to PNC. To take something for granted as truth, the essential tools one uses are, Reason and Logic. These tools will break and are powerless at the end of the mind barrier. They will never be able to break the barrier.

Five stages of dying Essays

Five stages of dying Essays Five stages of dying Paper Five stages of dying Paper Essay Topic: As I Lay Dying Thanatology, or the study of death and dying, has gone through significant growth since the 1950s, when Herman Feifels â€Å"Meanings of Death† was introduced to the behavioral science field. Before then, dying and death were mainly the concerns of poets and mystics. Death was considered a word to be avoided as much as possible by physicians, and as a topic of restriction even by psychologists. Since that time the research and writings of Robert Fulton, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, among others, have helped to make thanatology a serious area of scientific research and discussion. Even though all dying people do not show a terminal drop in their abilities and actions, many of them do realize when they are about to die (Kalish Reynolds, 1981). This epiphany affects different people in different ways. People who no longer want to live may give up without putting on a fight and die fairly quickly. When they lose their will to survive, they embrace death as the ultimate solution to all their problems. Another group of severely ill people are those those who find themselves unable to cope with the pain and frustration of long term illness but are also afraid of death itself, continually battling between a desire to live and a wish to die. This constant conflict between dying and living is worsened when the person has one or more dependents but is afraid of becoming a burden on them. : Even when they are not told directly by a family member, a friend, a doctor or a nurse, a large majority of terminally ill patients realize that they are going to die in the very near future. They sense it in the changes in their bodies and the attitudes of other people. Consequently, an honest report on the part of others frequently comes as no surprise but simply confirms what the patient suspected all along (Kubler-Ross, 1969). Whether they desire to die sooner or later, it is generally acknowledged that people can, through their own attitudes and behavior, either hasten or delay their own death. Having accepted the fact that death is imminent, they may even decide on a particular time for it to occur. Stages in Dying The stage theory of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, as well as of many other researchers, is related to the time, dimension of the dying process. Kubler-Rosss (1969) stage theory was formulated from an analysis of her interviews with over 200 dying patients. She argued that it is important for health workers and families of dying patients to be observant and aware of these progressive stages.