Modern Management Practices

Innovation Culture in Organizations

Growth creates a need for structure and discipline, organization changes which can strain the culture of creativity that is so vital to future success. To sustain competitive advantage, companies need to institutionalize the innovation process; they need to create an internal environment where creative thinking is central to their values, assumptions and actions.

Innovation is the engine of growth. It is also a mindset – meaning it is influenced by beliefs, values, and behavior. Company culture therefore has a huge influence on innovation, being able to either facilitate it or restrain it. Realizing this, many companies have attempted to put systems and processes into place that encourage an innovation culture.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Green and Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Environmental changes across the world have generated a movement to identify the causes of global warming and develop solutions to end it before it is too late. In an effort to achive this, many countries are creating laws and regulations with the specific aim to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gas effect.

The truth is that environmental change is upon us. Not only do we have climate problems but we are also dealing with a resource depletion issue. With economies like India and China growing at near double digit rates, the population of the world continues to grow creating shortages of many resources that we use to take for granted.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Introduction of Market-Based Management

Market-Based Management is found on the principles that cause societies to become wealthy instead of mired in poverty. It sees the business as a small society with exceptional features requiring variation of the education drawn from society at large. Through this variation an organisation could build MBM structure and ever-evolving mental models.

Market-Based Management is a holistic approach to organization that incorporates theory and practice and organizes businesses to deal effectively with the challenges of change and growth. It also draws on the training learned from the failures and successes of individuals to attain prosperity, peace and organisational progress. Thus, it involves the study of the history of economies, politics, societies, cultures, governments, businesses, conflicts, science, non-profits and technology.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Adoption of Blue Ocean Strategies in Business

Strategy involves standing out from the competition and making choices that give the company a unique and valuable position by offering distinctive products and services. Competitive advantage and profitability can be achieved simultaneously by approaches that create consistent internal synergies and combine a company’s operational activities efficiently. Strategies are formed at various levels of the organization. However, a typical organizational structure incorporates strategies at 3 specific levels: corporate, business and functional.  Corporate strategy defines a company’s holistic growth and management direction pertaining to its various businesses, products and services. Business strategies, on the other hand, are established at the divisional levels and typically focus on enhancing the strategic business unit’s competitive position in its industry.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

The Concept of Hybrid Managers

A hybrid manager can defined as a person who possesses strong technical skills and adequate business knowledge or vice versa. He should have the required skills needed in the technical as well as the management aspect. Along with that, he should also possess the management competences like communication skills, negotiation skills and also he should be able to motivate others working under him. A Hybrid manager should be able to reduce the gap between the business and technical aspects of the organization and build it with his expertise. Any organisation which has business and technical department working in tandom with each other has an advantage over other organisations whose technical and business department is not integrated.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Discontinuous Improvement – Abernathy and Utterback Model

The common innovation process happens in a set frame, following certain rules and ways of thinking. This ‘game played’ by competitors is to innovate by doing what has been done before like product or process innovations or even position and paradigm innovations, but doing it better. In this competition of ‘playing the same game’ some firms manage to do better than others and can gain a competitive advantage through these innovations, but the ‘set of the game’ is accepted and do not change.

Very rare something happens that breaks up this framework and changes how the game is played. This will not happen every day but when this arises the rules and boundaries of a market change rapidly.… Read the rest

Abey Francis