When to trust your gut

Many top executives say they routinely make big decisions without relying on any logical analysis. Instead, they call upon their "intuition," "gut instinct," "hunches," or "inner voice"--but they can't describe the process much more than that. What exactly is gut instinct? In this article, author Alden Hayashi interviews top executives from companies such as America Online and Johnson and Johnson to find out how they make decisions. Hayashi also presents the research of leading scientists who suggest that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential. Specifically, one theory contends that our emotions help us filter various options quickly, even if we're not consciously aware of the screening. Other research suggests that professional judgment can often be reduced to patterns and rules; indeed, truly inspired decisions seem to require an ability to see similar patterns across disparate fields. A CEO who possesses that ability can craft a perfect strategy by detecting patterns that others either overlook or mistake for random noise. But various traits of human nature can easily cloud our intuitive decision making. One potential pitfall is our tendency to see patterns where none exist. Thus, continual self-checking and feedback are crucial, and some organizations have made these processes part of their corporate culture.     

When your culture needs a makeover.

In 1994, the consumer products company Alberto-Culver North America faced flattened sales and the most difficult competitive environment of its history. President Carol Bernick knew that overcoming theses challenges would require a certain kind of corporate culture-but it wasn't the culture the company had. She changed that by focusing on four areas. First, Bernick made culture visible and elevated it to priority status, often by highlighting desired values and behaviors that already existed in pockets of the company. Her annual "state of the company" address stresses that people must be attuned to business realities and the drivers of success. Employees now develop statements of individual economic value describing their contributions to the company's profitability. The company's ten cultural imperatives are required knowledge for all. Second, Bernick and her executive team created the role of growth development leader (GDL). Each mentors about a dozen people. Her frequent meetings with GDLs make them effective agents of change upward and downward. The role is coveted because GDLs have real power to make change: every year they vote on the issues, large and small, that must be addressed by the business as a whole. Third, the company uses an employee survey to identify areas for improvement and to provide 360-degree feedback to GDLs and top management. And fourth, successes are celebrated constantly--through stock awards for the best GDLs, Business Builders Awards for great innovators, and many other, less formal means. Since 1994, the company has cut employee turnover in half, seen sales grow 83%, and watched pretax profits rise 336%--indicators of how cultural change is driving business results.     

议付单据被银行扣留之后

出口商H公司与土耳其进口商R公司签订出口合同,付款方式为即期信用证,并通过交通银行向信用证指定的美国美联银行有限公司上海分行议付。美联银行上海分行收到议付单据后,以检测到单据中包含受美国经济制裁国家信息为由扣留了信用证议付单据。随后,H公司向中国信保报损,并委托中国信保介入解决此问题     

EMBA:未来的竞争对手

在这个日新月异的竞争时代,几乎所有今天的权威都受到某种潜在的威胁,没有人敢宣称自己"高枕无忧"--纵使他的确满腹经纶.对于为公司服务的高级管理人员,也许情况更为严峻.     

自助设备厂商论剑2006金融展

白1987年2月第一台金融自助设备在国内开始使用至今，金融自助服务已经逐渐深入到人们的生活和工作中，并被国内各大金融机构作为业务延伸的有力工具。2006年9月17日，金融自助设备厂商又一次齐聚北京，各施手段，论剑2006金融展，都希望从中获得商机，分得头啖汤。德利多富、广电运通、联迪商用、迪堡、日立、怡化等一大批知名厂商，在金融展上占据了展馆的显著位置，展示全新ATM设备、银行系统解决方案、现代银行网点创新模式、中间件业务应用等，让观众目不暇接。下面就让我们一起来体验一下本届金融展中自助设备所带来的最新技术和先进服务理念。     

人才战略变得越来越重要

国家间人才的流动正越来越成为公司重要的考虑因素,德勤合伙人Rob Hodkinson如是说为了能够在这个竞争日益激烈的世界上求得生存及成功,公司要有战略性,也要灵活,因为这个世界正受到成熟市场中的财富波动以及新兴市场中快速但不协调的发展的打击。人才争夺战仍旧是公司发展的一个关键障碍,公司需要为其顶尖人才制定发展规划,给他们提供相关的全球化经验,但同时,公司需要具备快速反应的能力,以便能够在机遇到来时在合适的地方赢得合适的人才。那些能够在全球化人才部署上采取战略性方法的公司更有可能利用好发展的机     

Manage your energy, not your time

As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work--their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings--the body, emotions, mind, and spirit--and in each, it can be systematically expanded and renewed. In this article, Schwartz, founder of the Energy Project, describes how to establish rituals that will build energy in the four key dimensions. For instance, harnessing the body's ultradian rhythms by taking intermittent breaks restores physical energy. Rejecting the role of a victim and instead viewing events through three hopeful lenses defuses energy-draining negative emotions. Avoiding the constant distractions that technology has introduced increases mental energy. And participating in activities that give you a sense of meaning and purpose boosts the energy of the spirit. The new workday rituals succeed only if leaders support their adoption, but when that happens, the results can be powerful. A group of Wachovia Bank employees who went through an energy management program outperformed a control group on important financial metrics like loans generated, and they reported substantially improved customer relationships, productivity, and personal satisfaction. These findings corroborated anecdotal evidence gathered about the effectiveness of this approach at other companies, including Ernst & Young, Sony, and Deutsche Bank. When organizations invest in all dimensions of their employees' lives, individuals respond by bringing all their energy wholeheartedly to work -and both companies and their people grow in value.     

See your brands through your customers' eyes.

Subaru markets an L.L. Bean Outback station wagon. Dell stamps Microsoft and Intel logos on its computers. Such inter-weaving of different companies' brands is now commonplace. But one of the central tools of brand management-portfolio mapping--has not kept pace with changes in the marketplace. Most conventional brand maps include only those brands owned by a company, arranged along organizational lines with little regard for how the brands influence customer perceptions. In this article, the authors present a new mapping tool--the brand portfolio molecule--that reveals the way brands appear to customers. The brand portfolio molecule includes all the brands that factor into a consumer's decision to buy, whether or not the company owns them. The first step in creating a brand portfolio molecule is to determine which brands should or should not be included. The second step is to classify each brand by asking five key questions: 1) How important is this brand to customers' purchase decisions about the brand you're mapping? 2) Is its influence positive or negative? 3) What market position does this brand occupy relative to the other brands in the portfolio? 4) How does this brand connect to the other brands in the portfolio? 5) How much control do you have over this brand? The last step is to map the molecule using a 3-D modeling program or by hand with pen and paper. Individual brands take the form of atoms, and they're clustered in ways that reflect how customers see them. The usefulness of the tool lies in its ability to show the many forces that influence a customer's buying decision--and to provide a powerful new way to think about brand strategy.     

试论合同关系中的诚信原则

文章探讨合同关系中的诚信原则问题。     

合同惹祸,问题出在哪儿？

如果贸易合同形式有欠缺,但出口企业已履行了主要合同义务,是否可以认定合同成立,并据此向买方主张违约责任？贸易合同书面形式的缺失会给出口企业实现自身权利带来哪些不利影响？请看中国信保专家分析在国际贸易实践中,为尽可能防范贸易纠纷的发生,贸易合同内容的严谨、详实是一项必要保证;     

航意险,又成焦点

有关航空保险的话题,从来没有像今年这样被人们热切地关注着. 痛苦中清醒 先是年初,著名经济学家茅于轼借新闻媒体,激烈抨击航空机场的"天价咖啡",引起社会各界的广泛共鸣.三月份,茅于轼乘势将矛头一转直指航意险(航空旅客人身意外伤害保险),称航意险存在可能高达300%的暴利,引起消费者对保险公司的口诛笔伐,也引起保险专家和茅老先生在新闻媒体论战.     

Negotiating contract types and contract clauses in the German construction industry during the Third Reich

This article examines the determinants of contractual form and renegotiations in the German construction industry during the Third Reich. At the beginning of World War II, firms dealt with growing uncertainty by convincing procurement agencies either to use cost‐plus contracts or to include an additional risk premium in fixed‐price contracts. In the later years of the war, procurement agencies initiated renegotiations over contract clauses to reduce the extraordinary profits resulting from information rents and high‐risk premiums. This regulatory course undermined the credibility of the regulatory commitment, thereby weakening the incentives of the fixed‐price contracts still in use.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.     

Match your sales force structure to your business life cycle

Although companies devote considerable time and money to managing their sales forces, few focus much thought on how the structure of the sales force needs to change over the life cycle of a product or a business. However, the organization and goals of a sales operation have to evolve as businesses start up, grow, mature, and decline if a company wants to keep winning the race for customers. Specifically, firms must consider and alter four factors over time: the differing roles that internal salespeople and external selling partners should play, the size of the sales force, its degree of specialization, and how salespeople apportion their efforts among different customers, products, and activities. These variables are critical because they determine how quickly sales forces respond to market opportunities, they influence sales reps' performance, and they affect companies' revenues, costs, and profitability. In this article, the authors use timeseries data and cases to explain how, at each stage, firms can best tackle the relevant issues and get the most out of their sales forces. During start-up, smart companies focus on how big their sales staff should be and on whether they can depend upon selling partners. In the growth phase, they concentrate on getting the sales force's degree of specialization and size right. When businesses hit maturity, companies should better allocate existing resources and hire more general-purpose salespeople. Finally, as organizations go into decline, wise sales leaders reduce sales force size and use partners to keep the business afloat for as long as possible.     

了解你的客户

在澳大利亚,身份窃贼的数量正在以每月3倍的速度迅速增长,而每年身份窃贼所造成的损失更是高达10亿～50亿澳元,其中很大一部分损失都由银行承担。但     

Reinsurance contract design with adverse selection

ABSTRACT

In light of the richness of their structures in connection with practical implementation, we follow the seminal works in economics to use the principal–agent (multidimensional screening) models to study a monopolistic reinsurance market with adverse selection; instead of adopting the classical expected utility paradigm, the novelty of our present work is to model the risk assessment of each insurer (agent) by his value-at-risk at his own chosen risk tolerance level consistent with Solvency II. Under information asymmetry, the reinsurer (principal) aims to maximize his average profit by designing an optimal policy provision (menu) of ‘shirt-fit’ reinsurance contracts for every insurer from one of the two groups with hidden characteristics. Our results show that a quota-share component, on the top of simple stop-loss, is very crucial for mitigating asymmetric information from the insurers to the reinsurer.     

Welfare effects of insurance contract non-performance

Non-performance lies at the heart of much of the regulation that insurance companies face. Consumers’ concerns about non-performance of the insurance provider have also been cited as a possible explanation for low demand of microinsurance. We provide a behavioral evaluation of the welfare effects of non-performance risk. We test the hypothesis that the presence of non-performance risk negatively impacts not just take-up of insurance but more importantly the welfare of the insured. We also test if violations of the reduction of compound lotteries axiom could drive this decrease in take-up and welfare. The results show that the compound risk characteristic of non-performance risk does not significantly decrease the welfare of insurance choices made by individuals. This counter-intuitive result is sensitive to the structural modeling of risk preferences. If one assumes the reduction of compound lotteries axiom does characterize behavior towards risk, one finds evidence that non-performance risk reduces welfare for the insured. But if one correctly allows for violations in that axiom in the representation of risk preferences, which is appropriate if one is going to test for the effect of compound risk from non-performance, then the counter-intuitive result is obtained. Take-up is not a reliable proxy for welfare, and the behavioral drivers of take-up are again not the same drivers of welfare. These results provide structural behavioral insight to inform normative policy design with respect to insurance regulation.