Connecting the classroom to the "real world"
Economist
Kaizen
3 years ago
The Economist explores “kaizen” or “continuous improvement” in this excerpt from their “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus.” Once the hot new concept, kaizen has suffered lately (as have many one-time buzzworthy programs/concepts) in the face of the global economic decline. Still there are good points to continuously improving and/or striving to do so and it will likely always have a place in management jargon/plans.
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13480663
Zero-base Budgeting
3 years ago
We get into budgets and budgeting in Ch 6 in a few weeks, but here is an something I came across now that presents an interesting budgeting concept called zero-base budgeting.
http://www.economist.com/node/13005039
Peter Pyhrr, a manager at Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, developed the idea of zero-base budgeting. Each year he prepared his budgets as if last year’s figures had not existed. Every assumption had to be rethought from scratch and then justified. It was not acceptable to use last year’s expenditure as a benchmark for this year’s budgeted costs, and then only to have to justify the increase in that expenditure. In effect, zero-base budgeting treats all claims on financial resources as if they were entirely new claims for entirely new projects.
