Exploring Why People Love Their Jobs: A Multi-Industry Case Study

Unfortunately, many businesses discuss that rather than valuing people as their most important asset, firms are focusing their efforts on downsizing, outsourcing and taking other actions in order to reduce their labor costs.  Instead, developing employee loyalty through inspiring leadership, knockout facilities, and a sense of purpose, management strategically leverages the three most popular traits that employees love about their companies.  By questioning HR representatives, managers, and fellow co-workers, the authors were able to determine our own version of the most common traits that employees develop loyalty at Mellon Financial Corporation, the Abreon Group, and the Pine-Richland School District.  A number of interesting trends from surveying both administrator and employees of these three diverse settings in Pittsburgh, PA were found.  Toxic worry was minimized and loyalty maximized when employees are encouraged to professionally and personally enjoy the people they work with, since this is extremely important to tactical on-time issues with minimum conflict.    &nbsp

Measuring The Theoretical Paradigm Shift From Marketing Mix To Relational Marketing

Much has been written in the recent marketing literature on the perceived importance of moving from a transaction basis to a long-term relationship basis in terms of personal selling.  Since the traditional marketing mix paradigm has dominated marketing philosophy for so long, many perceive there is a marketing shift, especially in service marketing, to the relational marketing paradigm.  A sales force from five industries, representing primarily service industries (n=142), were tested on a number of statistical techniques including correlations, stepwise regression, and n-way ANOVA, and yielded no significant trend to support the theoretical paradigm shift

Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Analyzing A Start-Up

Successful entrepreneurial companies are those that realize the benefit technology can provide before the competition does.  Additionally, there are intangible benefits for companies that utilize technology before their competitors.  While the competition is attempting to catch up, companies can build off of their current technology and continue to out-distance themselves from the competition.  Although there are many positive and negative forces associated with entrepreneurial start-ups today, there exists a multitude of opportunities for entrepreneurialism to grow.  A start-up company’s staff located in Pittsburgh was interviewed for their insights and several strategies were examined in this paper

Regulating Advertisements: The Case of Smoking Cessation Products

In this paper we investigate how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of pharmaceutical products in affected by regulations of the Food and Drug Administration and by market conditions. We focus on a relatively under-studied segment of the pharmaceutical market -- the market for smoking cessation products. Because of their proven effectiveness, these products could be the key to meeting public health goals to reduce smoking. However, in many ways, smoking cessation products have been more heavily regulated than cigarettes. Our empirical analysis uses data on advertising expenditures and data from an archive of print advertisements. The archive includes all smoking cessation product advertisements that appeared in over 13,000 issues of 28 magazines between January 1985 and May 2002. Our study period begins shortly atfer the first nicotine replacement product was introduced, and covers the evolution of the market as new products are introduced while some of the older products move from prescription to over-the-counter (OTC) status. OTC status eases the disclosure requirements imposed on advertisements of prescription pharmaceuticals, substantially reducing the costs of a print advertisement. Our results suggest that OTC status is associated with an increase in advertising expenditures and the number and pages of magazine advertisements. A current proposal to reduce disclosure requirements on all DTC advertisements of prescription drugs could have similar effects. Our results also suggest that advertising increase with the introduction of new products and with market competition.

Strategically Comparing Selected Major College Basketball Powerhouses Through The Resource Based View Of The Firm

The key to sustaining a competitive advantage through effective management is working with people.  Especially dealing with sport management and marketing, concepts such as organizational culture and reputation are identifying strategic assets that are intangible resources.  These concepts form the basis on the strategic theory behind the Resource-based View (RBV) of the firm.  Strategic assets are intangible since they are inherently hard to duplicate, since duplication requires the inputs of how an object reacts with all the senses.  Intangible assets are, by their very nature, ‘unknowable’ in the purest sense and, thus, difficult to duplicate.  In addition, intangible assets are rare in that the variations that will be found within will be profound from owner to owner.  The organizational cultures and reputations of the Duke University and the University of Cincinnati were compared, since they have petitions for national level basketball, but radically different organizational cultures.  What constitutes organizational culture in one organization will have differences not present in another’s culture, thus allowing for some teams to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage

Exploring Agency Theory Implications With Franchising

The franchiser-franchisee relationship (FFR) can be examined from two theoretical perspectives, Agency Theory and Exchange Theory.  Strategic management of demands that the leadership makes decisions on what the company should do and what the company should not do.  This type of decision-making is called making trade-offs and has much to do with Agency Theory’s applications to FFR.  One reason that operational effectiveness is the preferred way is that it has inherently little risks during the short term.  Managers would be willing to make decisions if the risks were not so high on the long term.  From the Agency Theory viewpoint, dual distribution can be analyzed in a cost versus cost trade-off schema.  The approach argues that both franchising and company ownership have costs associated with them.  Dual distribution is considered an internal solution to the cost tradeoff.  Some of the costs in question are inefficiency of client risk sharing, franchisees that are free riding and the legal costs of terminating a franchise.  Under dual distribution the mix of company ownership and franchising minimizes the sum of these total costs.  When looking at market demand and the impact strategic decisions may influence it several factors come into play, including point of sale service.  The components include the impact of outlet level services provided to the consumer enhancing value via the shopping experience, the franchiser’s level of effort to streamline the supply chain to all retail outlets, which enhances the image and reputation of the brand with the customer.  Aspects of Agency Theory can be extended to include credible communication of franchise brand equity.&nbsp

The statistics of critical points of Gaussian fields on large-dimensional spaces

We calculate the average number of critical points of a Gaussian field on a high-dimensional space as a function of their energy and their index. Our results give a complete picture of the organization of critical points and are of relevance to glassy and disordered systems, and to landscape scenarios coming from the anthropic approach to string theory.Comment: 5 page