Creative Approaches to Problem Solving, Methods and Framework

Creativity is sub-set of intelligence, meaning a group of basic relational process. Creativity is fueled by the process of conscious or unconscious insight. It is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts. A model of creative process is shown in figure:

Creative Process

1. Idea Germination: This stage is seeding process. It is not like planting seed as a former does to grow, but more like the natural seeding that occurs when pollinated flower seeds, scattered by the wind, find fertile ground to take root. Exactly how an idea is germinated is a mystery; it is not something that can be examined under microscope.
2. Preparation:  Once a seed of curiosity has taken form as a focused idea, creative people embark on a conscious search for answers. If there is a problem they are trying to solve, then they are began an intellectual journey, seeking information about the problem.
3. Incubation: The idea once seeded and given substances through preparation, is rut on a back burner; the subconscious mind is allowed time to assimilate information.
4. Illumination: In this stage the idea surfaces as realistic creation. Illumination may be triggered by an opportune incident.
5. Verification: An idea once illuminated in the mind of an individual still has little meaning until verified as realistic and useful. Verification is the development stage of refining knowledge into application.

Creative Problem Solving:

It is a mental process of creating a solution to a problem. In this solution is independently created rather than learn ideas. It usually involves team approach because people within work place are empowered to participate in the change process and looking for creative solution. It is finding innovation approaches for finding solution. Creative problem solving always involves creativity, however creativity does not involve creative problem solving, especially in field such as music, poetry and art.

Creativity is often linked with problem-solving. Problems come in all shapes and sizes including crossword puzzles, scientific paradoxes, industrial relations conflicts, ethical issues, difficult managerial decisions and global questions. Problems are what people have when they want something and don’t know how to get it.

A) Creative Problem Solving Framework:

There are many creative problems solving model used in today, but they all follow two basic principles:

1. Define the problem, and then solve it.
2. Diverge, and then converge, at each step.

B) Creative Problem Solving Methods:

We can solve any problem by different way. There are some methods which help to solve the problem in creative way. These solving techniques are mentioned below-

1. Brainstorming:  It is a group creativity technique design to generate a large no. of ideas. For the solution of a problem. This method was popularised by Alex Faickney Osborn in a book Applied Imagination. The groups are organised by sitting together and stimulate greater creativity by exchange of mutual experience and participating in discussions. There are some rules for it-

• No criticism is allowed.
• Free willingness is allowed.
• Combination & improvements are sought from the method.
• Quantity of member is desirable.

The main advantages of this technique are broader participation, enthusiasm, deferred judgement, greater task orientation, team work and stimulated thinking. This technique is very effective when problem is comparatively specific and can be simply defined.

This process is very time consuming and requires an experienced and sensitive facilitator.

2. Heuristic: It involves experience based technique for problem solving, learning and discovering. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer or optimal solution. It may be argued that the most fundamental heuristic is “trial and error”.

The advantage of heuristic evaluation is that it is cheap, intuitive, it hardly requires any planning, and it can be hardly used early in the design process. The disadvantage is that there is a focus on problems rather than solutions.

3. Synectics:  Term Synectics is taken from greek word which means “bringing for together” or “bringing difficult things into unified combination”. Creativity involves the co-ordination of things in new structure, every creative thought or action draws on synectic thinking. Synectic thinking is process of discovering the links that seemingly disconnected. 

Synectics encourage the ability to live with complexity and apparent contradiction. It stimulates creating thinking. It mobilize both side of brain, the right brain and the left brain.

4. Value Analysis: Value is personal perspective of a person’s willingness to pay for the performance delivered by a product, process or project.

Good value is achieved when the required performance can be accurately defined and delivered at the lowest life cycle cost.

                           Value (P) = Desired Performance/Overall costs (C)

Value can be increased by the either improving the performance or reducing the cost. Value of a function can be increased by four methods:

• Decrease the cost while ensuring the same level of information.
• Enhance the performance at same cost.
• Decrease the cost and increase the performance.
• Increase both cost and performance ensuring that performance increases more than the increment in the cost.

5. Innovation: It can be defined as to create something new based on knowledge that has been attained. Innovation plays an important role virtually in every aspect of life. Though it is usually connected to business, technology, or engineering and can even be useful on a personal level.

According to Stephen P. Robbins,” Innovation is a new idea applied to initiating or improving a product, process or services”.

Innovation is not something that has to be unique to society as a whole. It could be unique to someone on a personal level.

Relationship between factors in the Improved Standing of Entrepreneurial Process

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Impact of Corporate Governance in Modern Workplace

Corporate Governance refers to the way a corporation or organization is governed. It is the technique by which companies are directed and managed. It is actually conducted by the board of Directors and the concerned committees for the company’s stakeholder’s benefit.

It is all about balancing individual and societal goals, as well as, economic and social goal. Corporate Governance is the interaction between various participants (shareholders, board of directors, and company’s management) in shaping corporation’s performance and the way it is proceeding towards. The relationship between the owners and the managers in an organization must be healthy and there should be no conflict between the two.

Corporate Governance deals with to take effective strategic decisions. It gives ultimate authority and complete responsibility to the Board of Directors. In today’s market- oriented economy, the need for corporate governance arises. We are actually needed to Corporate Governance to be effective in all era of corporate world.

Constituents of Corporate Governance: 

The three key constituents of corporate governance are as follows-

1. Board of Directors: The crucial role in any system of corporate governance is performed by the Board of Directors. It stewards the company, make the strategic aim and financial goals also took of their implementation. They make always transparency among all stakeholders regarding all type of reports, information’s and authorities. 
2. Shareholders:  The shareholders role in corporate governance is to appoint the directors and the auditors to hold the board accountable for the proper governance of the company.
3. Management: The responsibility of the management is to undertake the management of the company in terms of the direction provided by the board.

Mechanisms and Controls of Corporate Governance:

The purpose of corporate Governance mechanism and controls to reduce the inefficiencies. We can classify the monitoring system into internal and external monitoring system. As the name indicates both handle their activities according to it for organization. Internal corporate governance control deals with all the activities performed with in organization related to management, investors and also for policies implementation while external corporate governance control deals with all external affairs like media, competitions and merger/takeovers etc.

Corporate Governance models around the world:

There are many different models of corporate governance around the world. Different countries follow different corporate model for their organizations. Some models as The Anglo-American models deals with the interest of shareholders the another model is the coordinated or multistake holder model associated with Japan and continental Europe which emphasizes over the interests of workers, managers, suppliers, customers, and the community.

Here are some corporate governance model country wise-

1. Continental Europe: Some continental European countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, require a two-tiered Board of Directors as a means of improving corporate governance.  In the two-tiered board, the Executive Board, made up of company executives, generally runs day-to-day operations. 
2. India: India's SEBI Committee on Corporate Governance defines corporate governance as the "acceptance by management of the inalienable rights of shareholders as the true owners of the corporation and of their own role as trustees on behalf of the shareholders.
3. United States and United Kingdom: The so-called "Anglo-American model" of corporate governance emphasizes the interests of shareholders. It relies on a single-tiered Board of Directors that is normally dominated by non-executive directors elected by shareholders. Because of this, it is also known as "the unitary system”.

In the United States, corporations are directly governed by state laws, while the exchange (offering and trading) of securities in corporations (including shares) is governed by federal legislation.

Benefits of Good Corporate Governance to a corporation:

Good corporate governance also ensures better management structures and systems. There are various benefits of good corporate governance which improve company’s growth value and share value.

Thus we can see that how important is corporate Governance for running any business organization. It controls and maintains transparency over every constituent of corporate Governance.

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Personal Selling – Steps, Theories and Difference between Advertisement

In today’s competitive market salesperson’s role is not just to sell the product. In present globalized world products are changing very rapidly. It all depends over customer taste. So identify the customer tastes is typical job for sales department.

Personal Selling is a two way communication and oral presentation. It is flexible and extremely effective. As well as it is effective in other hand it is costly form of sales promotion. It promotes long term business relations through personal intimacy. Today, personal selling has become a challenging and rewarding profession.

In personal selling, a sales person has to deal with an individual client, take account of the personal style and attitude. If a sales person is meeting clients in a group, then it is important to distinguish the different individuals who made up the group. In the interaction, the salesman should adapt his style and behave appropriately to the different group members who are present.

In order to be successful, a salesperson must possess a set of personal, product related and functional qualities. Various analytical and administrative duties are important components of the job. Before approaching a prospect every salesperson is advised to do a bit of homework regarding the company’s name, size authority, concern and general requirements. The salesperson should introduce himself, his company the product under promotion, product presentation and overcome any customer objections.

STEPS IN PERSONAL SELLING

Successful personal selling calls for an integrated approached devised from the experience of the sales personnel. The approach are figured in following figure-

Presentation and Demonstration- In the very first stage of Personal selling, a salesperson represents himself on the behalf of his company and tells about his product and service for which he is available there and tries to attract his customer by telling features of his item during demonstration. This action initiates the curiosity to know more about the product in customer’s mind.

Holding Objectives- During this stage a sales person give his demo article to customer to use it. When customer holds it in his hand and use the features one by one of that product will be a good shine for salesperson to move on next step.

Closing- Now salesperson wants to know about the customer mind whether he is happy and interested to buy or not. If he need something else then the salesperson show the another one otherwise he will negotiate to buy that one and will close the deal.

Follow-up- This is the final and important step not for personal selling even for all products i.e. follow-up. We always try to get feedback from the user to improve our product or service quality and which is beneficial for both company growth and also for customer’s point of view.

THEORY OF PERSONAL SELLING

There are three main theories of personal selling, which are as follows-

1. AIDAS Theory

– The proponents of this theory believe that a salesperson should design his presentation in such a manner which takes care of all these stages of the process of selling.

Attention: The salesperson should attract the prospect to his presentation before he actually goes into the details of the same.

Interest: Once the salesperson has successfully gained the prospect’s attention, he/she should maintain interest of the prospect throughout the presentation.

Desire: The next step in the sales process, as per the AIDAS theory, is to create a strong desire in the prospect’s mind to purchase his product.

Action: Once the salesperson has been successful in taking his prospect through the three stages. It would be interesting for us to understand that even after going through three stages attention, interest and desire; the prospect may still have some doubt or some inertia which will stop him for taking the final decision of actually buying the product. Now it’s important task to salesperson to help his prospect in taking the final decision.

Satisfaction: Once the prospect has placed an order, the salesperson ensures that the prospects carry the impression of having the right decision. He should always thank the prospect and even go to the extent of saying “I appreciate your choice sir, you have taken an excellent decision”.

This is how AIDAS theory works to become a successful salesperson.

2. Right Set of Circumstances Theory –

If the salesperson is successful in securing the prospect’s attention, maintaining his interest and including his desire to buy the product, sales will result. Moreover, if the salesperson is highly skilled, he will control of the presentation, which would lead to sale.

3. Buying Formula Theory –

The buying formula theory is based on the analysis of the sequence of events that goes in the buyer’s mind during the sales presentation. The sequence of events in a prospect’s mind can be represented as-

Difference between Advertisement and Personal Selling

From a broad prospective, both personal selling as well as advertising are the means to communicate with the target customers for the product or service of an organisation. Both are the important components of marketing mix. There are some notable differences between these two means of communication.

While the personal selling effort is two way communication process, advertising is a one way communication.

In the personal selling situation salesperson that represents his organization, comes direct in contact with customers and in which customer can ask many number of questions. So as being representative it is his responsibility to satisfy his/her queries. In advertising, in the other hand, customer does not come in direct contact with any representative of the organization.

Advertising has a major role during the pre-purchase phase as the mass demands for the product has to be generated. Personal selling on the other hand has an important role to play in all the three phases (pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase). It plays an important role in purchase phase.

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Things to Know while Developing your Career in Retail

Retailing is evolving into a global, high-tech industry that plays a major role in the global economy. More than 60 percent of U.S. economic activity is affected by retailing and about one in five U.S. workers is employed by retailers. Although most people identify retailers as stores products seller, retailers are also involved with selling products over the internet through catalogs. Firms selling services to consumers, such as dry cleaning and automobile repairs, are also retailers.

Retailing is defined as a set of business activities that add value to the products and services sold to consumers for their personal or family use. These value-added activities include providing collection, breaking bulk, holding inventory and providing services.

For Example, most large retailers—such as Safeway, Wal-Mart, and Lowe’s – engage in both wholesaling and retailing activities. They buy directly from manufacturers, have merchandise shipped to their warehouses for storage, and then distribute the merchandise to their stores. Other Retailers such as The Gap and Victoria’s Secret are even more vertically integrated. They design the merchandise they sell and then contract with manufacturers to produce it exclusively for them.

Retailing offers exciting and challenging career opportunities. Retailing offers a variety of career paths, such as buying, store management, sales promotion and advertising, personnel, operations/distribution, loss prevention, and finance, in several different corporate forms such as department stores, specialty stores, food stores and discount stores. In addition retailing offers almost immediate accountability for talented people so they can reach key management position within a decade. Starting salaries are competitive, and the compensation of top management ranks among the highest in any industry.

Career Opportunities in Retail Industry

In retail firms career opportunities among the merchandising/buying, store management and corporate staff, function. Corporate positions are found in such area as accounting, finance, promotions and advertising, computer and distribution systems and human resource. The primary entry–level opportunities for a retailing career are in the areas of buying and store management. Buying positions are more number oriented, where as management positions are people oriented. Retailers typically want all of their employees to understand their customers and their merchandise. Therefore, most executives and corporate staff managers begin their careers in the store management or buying.

Store Management

All the discipline necessary to run a successful business: sales planning and goal setting, overall store image and merchandise presentation, budget and expense control, customer service and sales supervision, personnel administration and development and community relations. Store Managers directly work in the local markets, often at quite distance from the home office.

The typical entry-level for store management position is a department manager with responsibility for merchandise presentation, customer service and inventory control for an area of the store.

Merchandise Management

Merchandise management attracts people with strong analytical capabilities, an ability to predict what merchandise will appeal to their target markets, and a skill to negotiating with vendors as well as store management to get things done. Many retailers have divided the merchandising management into two different yet parallel career paths: buying and merchandising planning.

The typical entry-level position of college graduates interested in merchandise management is either assistant buyer or assistant planner in a merchandise category. In these positions you will do the sales analysis needed to support the decision eventually made by the planner or buyer for whom you work.

Corporate Staff

The corporate staff positions in retail firms involve activities and require knowledge, skills and abilities similar to comparable positions in non retail firms. Thus many mangers in these positions identify with their profession rather than Retail Industry.

Management Information System (MIS)

Employees in this area are involved with applications for capturing data and developing and maintaining inventory as well as the management of store system POS terminals and self check-out systems.

Operations/Distributions

Operations employees are responsible for operating and maintaining the store’s physical plant, providing various customer services, the receipt ticketing, warehousing and distribution of store’s inventory and buying and maintaining store supplies and operating equipment. Students in operations and MIS are typically major in Production, Operations or Computer Information System.

Promotions/Advertising

Promotion’s many aspects include public relations, advertising, visual merchandising and special events. This department attempts to build the retail firm’s brand image and encourages customers to visit the retailer’s store and or Website.

Loss Prevention

Loss prevention employees are responsible for protecting the retailer’s assets. They develop system and procedures to minimize employee theft and shoplifting.

Finance/Control

Many retailers are large business involved in complicated business structures. The finance/control division is responsible for the financial health of company. They prepare financial reports for all aspects of the business including long range forecasting and planning, economic trend analysis and budgeting, shortage control and internal audits, gross and net profit, accounts payable to vendors and accounts receivable from charge customers. In addition they manage the retailer’s relationship with the financial community

Real State

Employees in the real state division are responsible for the selecting locations for stores, negotiating leases and land purchases and managing the leasehold costs.

Store Design

Employees working in this area are responsible for the designing the store and presenting merchandise and fixtures in stores.

Human Resource Management

Human resource management is responsible for the effective selection, training, placement, advancements and welfare of employees.

Myths about Retail Sector

There are so many myths about retail jobs. Some are as Following:

1) Sales Clerk Is the Entry Level Job in Retailing

Most students and their parents think that people working in retailing have jobs as sales clerks and cashiers. They hold this view because, as customers in retail stores, they typically only interact with sales associates not their managers. Entry-level positions for college and university graduates are typically management trainees in the buying or store organization not sales associates.

2) College and University Degree Not Needed To Succeed In Retailing

While some employees are promoted on the basis of their retail experience, a college degree is needed for most retail management positions ranging from store managers to CEO. Over 150 colleges and Universities offer programs of study and degrees or major in retailing.

3) Retail Jobs Are Low Paying

Starting salaries for management trainees with a college degree range from $25,000 to $45,000 annually and compensation for top management ranks with the highest in Industry. Compensations vary according to the amount of responsibility. Specialty store managers are generally paid less than department store managers because their annual sales volume is lower.

4) Working in Retailing Requires Long Hours and Frequent Relocation

Retailing has an often exaggerated reputation of demanding long and unusual hours. Superficially this reputation is true. Store managers do work some evenings and weekends. Most professional careers requires more than 40 hours per week for the person to succeed.

5) Retailing Doesn't Provide Opportunities for Women and Minorities

Many people consider retailing to be among the most race and gender blind industry since most purchase are made by women and because minorities are becoming an increasingly important factor in the market.

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Domestic Entrepreneurship Effect on Indian Economy

What is Entrepreneurship?

The word entrepreneur is derived from the French word entreprende, which means to ‘undertake’. The Webster Dictionary explains that the term entrepreneur is applicable to one who organizes, manages and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

Entrepreneurship is a person oriented task where the entrepreneur creates a small world of his own and becomes the master of own and his business. Entrepreneurship is creating a business enterprise and managing it.

John Galbraith, a noted economist, who had also served as the ambassador of the US to India, observed that there are many aspects of life in India that can be rather daunting for the uninitiated. 

Entrepreneurship has to be ready to deal with uncertainty; but, in India entrepreneurs are likely to be faced with a greater degree of uncertainty than in the developed world. On the other hand entrepreneurs in India currently have a very progressive regulatory framework and have access to many exciting market opportunities.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report in 2007 observed very high incidence of entrepreneurship throughout the world, particularly in Asia, with Thailand and India leading the way.

Through this article we will identify and discuss the many benefits afforded to Indian economy through entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and the disadvantages of the same and draw conclusions on the overall impact of the entrepreneurs.

Positive Impacts of Entrepreneurs

1) Innovation

Individuals often resort to entrepreneurship for one of the following reasons:

• They find a market niche and have the solution to profit from such niche
• They have been unable to find suitable employment or a suitable means of income and therefore have resorted to using their creativity to generate an income for themselves
• They have the technological know-how and the financial resources (or able to source all of the above) necessary to generate income by satisfying a need in the marketplace. 

Irrespective of which of the above led an individual to become an entrepreneur, it is clear that innovation and creativity is the driving factor and therefore it can be stated that the biggest impact of entrepreneurs to an economy is the innovative contribution that they make.

2) Job Creation

As stated in the previous section one of the main reasons that individuals tend to become entrepreneurs is because they are unable to find suitable jobs. As a result, by being enterprising, creative and finding a market niche, not only are they able to generate an income for themselves but also to employ other individuals in their business operations. Therefore one of the most positive impacts that entrepreneurs make on an economy is job creation and the reduction of unemployment levels within that economy. In developed countries, we see that almost 40 – 50% of the workforces are employed in small and medium scale business enterprises that were started up by very enterprising individuals. Likewise in countries like India we see that millions of women have been able to pull their families out of poverty through self employment and entrepreneurship that has been made possible by different Non Governmental Organisations and due to the availability of such resources through micro finance etc. Africa is another good example of small scale entrepreneurs helping to reduce poverty and help many avoid destitution. Therefore based on everything that has been stated above it is apparent that entrepreneurs can cause a great degree of impact on an economy through job creation and income generation.

3) Increased Competition

Another positive impact of entrepreneurship on an economy is the increasing level of competition in that economy as new entrepreneurs joins the fray in existing domestic markets. While one may venture to say that this will only lead to market saturation, the upside of such a phenomenon is that it causes all the players in the market to re-evaluate their operational capabilities, increase value addition, lower costs and become more efficient. Thus it can be stated that competition reduces likelihood of monopolies and oligopolies in the marketplace and is beneficial to the customer and the economy as a whole.

4) Increased Productivity

One of the advantages of increased competition in an economy is that individuals and firms continue to source methods that can better improve their operations; use resources more efficiently and most importantly reduce costs while adding value. All this often results in an increase in productivity in an economy and increase in the gross domestic product (GDP), which is indeed a benefit for the economy. 

5) New Markets

As stated in the previous section increased competition in the marketplace can cause saturation and as a result many entrepreneurs maybe driven to seek new markets for their products and services or adapt market penetration tactics. Either way such a phenomena of increased competition, which ultimately causes individuals to look for new markets can be considered as a positive impact on the economy and therefore entrepreneurs can be considered to play a very important role in the economy. As integration of economies continues due to globalization entrepreneurs often tend to look for markets that are outside of their domestic sphere thus generating foreign revenue and increasing the prosperity of the economy as a whole.

Negative Impacts of Entrepreneurs

The single largest negative impact of entrepreneurs on an economy is the plundering of resources, which can have a disastrous affect on the environment. While such negative impacts are mitigated to some extent in developed economies due to the enforcement of environmental protection standards and regulations, this is not the case in developing economies. Further entrepreneurship requires a certain degree of business knowledge and awareness, without which entrepreneurial ventures can often fail, which can also cause many financial hardship that in extreme cases can even lead to destitution.

Social Entrepreneurship

Today we see the realm of social entrepreneurship growing exponentially which is a very positive sign and has helped to draw millions out of poverty, decrease unemployment, decrease the number of people dependent on social welfare and all in all uplift the living standards and quality of life of millions. Further social entrepreneurship initiatives are also often seen as ‘green initiatives’ that take into consideration the impact on the natural environment and therefore strives to keep this at a minimum, thus increasing awareness about such issues, avoiding plundering of natural resources and conserving the environment wherever possible. Therefore it can be stated that the negative impacts of entrepreneurs on an economy can be mitigated to some extent through social entrepreneurship.

Women form one-third of early stage entrepreneurs in India

When it comes to entrepreneurship, Indian women are fast catching up with men as entrepreneurs, as a recent global survey pointed out that among all early-stage entrepreneurs, around one-third or 32% are women.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Survey 2013, touted as the largest annual study of entrepreneurial dynamics in the world, stated that most of the early stage entrepreneurs fall in the age group of 25-34 years.

Around 61% of people in India consider entrepreneurship as a good career choice, it said, adding that a large number of women are getting involved in starting and owning-managing new business in the country.

Final Thoughts

Based on everything that has been discussed above it is apparent that the positive impacts of entrepreneurs on an economy far outweigh the negative impacts. Job creation, reduction in unemployment levels, increased competition, opening new markets, increasing productivity, foreign income generation and poverty alleviation are some of the positive impacts that entrepreneurs have on national economy. However this is not to say that there are no negative impacts such as the wastage and plundering of resources, yet taken as a whole it is apparent that the entrepreneurs positively impact an economy.

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My First Post

Today I am very happy that I am going to publish my own blog.

It was in my knowledge since few months but I am not curious to write. But  today somehow I land on this page.

I will continue and keep writing.

Thank you. 

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