Freeloader

Management skills in a critical world

This new job turned out to be an exciting opportunity to expand my knowledge by operating a business. This business apparently has some issues that require critical thinking skills to help resolve. We will identify and work to solve the problems through the use of the tools and techniques of decision-making. Once complete, we will have a clear picture of the problem, the associated risks and expected outcome that will hopefully lead to a successful achievement of our goal.

There were several problems that were identified. One dealt with the opening of a new store down the street which can threaten the business. Another dealt with low morale in the office from what appeared to be a pay scale problem. Our final problem was concerning product surplus and how this could affect the profit margains. There were some others identified, but we chose to attempt to address these as a first effort.

When we think of a competitor setting up shop next us, the thought can provoke unsettling thoughts. We chose to use cause and effect as a technique to begin looking at this scenario. Thoughout this process, we determined the fact that we did not specialize on specific branded products, rather a more broad selction for customers to chose from, we should be able to handle the onset of the new store. We might lose business from the specific products, but we would balance from the variety.

The rumor was that the sales were quickly on the rise and were said to be twice of ours. Being a new store, the competitor had to spend money to not only lure our employees away, but also advertise to create interest in the new location. We chose to use structured internal surveys with the employees to help identify where their thoughts were with regard to both the current operations within our walls and also the potential for uncertainty with the new competitor location.

With these results, we are hoping to use the brainstorming technique to collectively come up with a strategy to help maintain a strong presence and continue to offer an attractive incentive to work here. This data will help identify the gaps in our current business processes. The objective is to solidify the concept of the employees being the most important to help drive every other initiative. Without happy and productive people, the rest doesn't really matter.

We really feel that we have discovered that the employee problem is more of a symptom of of problem which we will try to turn