Euthanasia Is Not A Standard Form Of Care - 2076 Words

Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia are terms used to define the method in which a close relative and/or doctor of an ill or disabled individual, participates in an activity which directly or indirectly leads to the death of said individual (Garg, Chanana, Rai, Gargi, 2010). Due to the humanistic desire to end the individuals suffering and pain, the behavior is supported by the relative(s) and healthcare (Garg, Chanana, Rai, Gargi, 2010). Since euthanasia is not a standard form of care, the attitudes and practices of the matter vary. Amongst the different opinions of the method comes the separation of states. Throughout the United States, only four states have legalized physician-assisted suicide: Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Montana†¦show more content†¦Euthanasia by action/active euthanasia is defined as â€Å"intentionally causing a person’s death by performing an action such as by giving lethal injection.† And the last one, euthanasia by omission/passive eut hanasia, is not providing essential and conventional care deliberately and letting nature take its course. e.g. â€Å"not delivering cardio pulmonary resuscitation and allowing a person whose heart has stopped, to die.† (Garg, Chanana, Rai, Gargi, 2010). Starting with Pennsylvania, there is a consensus to why euthanasia should remain illegal in the state. Keep in mind, states are free to ban physician assisted suicide since there is no constitutional right protecting it. The topic is as controversial and sensitive as the abortion debate. Adversaries such as Pennsylvania argue that a medical professional’s job description does not entail ending a patient’s life and that it breaches a doctor’s oath as healers (FindLaw, 2014). Currently in Pennsylvania, anyone who intentionally aids or solicits another to commit suicide in Pennsylvania may be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor (one to two years in prison) and a $5,000 fine (FindLaw, 2014). This may include procuring the necessary supplies or confirming the plan through email or other communications, but without actually going through with the plan and attempting the suicide. If the person s actions actually cause a

Religion Is A Social Institution Essay - 1378 Words

Religion is a social institution dedicated to establishing a shared sense of identity, encouraging social integration, and offering believers a sense of meaning and purpose. Even though the participation of religious practices varies from place to place, it still continues to be a major force in the world and in individual lives. Each religion has unique content to it. Usually that includes a supernatural realm, such as heaven, but that does not necessarily mean it is outside our world. There are two ways to describe religion. First, sacred encompasses elements beyond everyday life that inspire respect, awe, and even fear. People interact with the sacred realm through practices such as praying or sacrifice. These practices help people accept what they cannot understand. The sacred realm exists in contrast to the profane, which includes the ordinary and commonplace. Different religions define their understanding of sacred and profane in different ways. A functionalist perspective focu ses less on what religion is and more on what religion does, with a particular importance and how it contributes to social order. Religion does not need to have gods or goddess, or an afterlife, because almost any social practice that strongly unites people and has a strong following, such as being a sports fan can have the same function as a religion. Emile Durkheim defined this functionalist approach with three focuses. First, it is important to have a unified system of beliefs. EachShow MoreRelatedReligion As A Social Institution1689 Words   |  7 PagesTo most people religion offers salvation, enlightenment, and an afterlife. In chapter twelve of the book, Miller defines Religion as a social institution consisting of the beliefs and practices associated with supernatural beings, powers, and forces. Miller also talked about how the root of all human religion is animism. Animism refers to the belief in spiritual beings such as angels, gods, and spirits. For example, the pre-Isl amic religion believed in animism that physical entities such as animalsRead MorePanopticisim and the Social Institution of Religion: Personal Opinion950 Words   |  4 PagesReligion can be described as a social institution built up around the idea of a supernatural being or beings, and the relation of human beings to them. In addition, religion provides individuals a belief to which they understand their existence as well network of emotional support during times of distress. Moreover, religious institutions provide individuals a proper perspective of life and establish values. Religion involves three major aspects: A conception of the nature and character of divinityRead MoreSocial Class Impact On Class And Social Institutions Of Family, Education And Religion957 Words   |  4 Pagesinteraction between social class and social institutions of family, education and religion. I assignment consisted of six questions, how social class impacts family, how family impacts social class ; how social class impacts education, how education impacts social class; how social class impacts religion, and how religion impacts social class. All of the above mentioned questions are interlinked, which means that it effects and determines the other questions answer. Family, education and religion plays a bigRead MoreImpact Of Social Institutions On Caribbean Culture1223 Words   |  5 PagesSocietal Institutions On Caribbean Culture and Society Objectives †¢ Gain a thorough understanding of the different social institutions: family, education, political systems †¢ Understand the main ideas of the Marxist and Functionalist perspectives †¢ Understand the Marxist and perspective on social institutions Functionalist Social Institutions †¢ Social Institutions are a fundamental part of the operations of society. They are the major organising framework in social life. Social institutions haveRead MoreSociological Perspectives Of Structural Functionalism1490 Words   |  6 Pagespaper –religion (as a primarily social rather than theological or psychological phenomenon) and the effects on societies. In looking at how religion functions in social structures, social systems, and small group interpersonal interactions sociologists could formulate a better understanding of religion s role in society and the human experience. The sociologist looks at the individual agency, and how that connects to a specific societal location or setting. Specifically, in the case of religion a sociologistRead MoreAbraham Lincoln And The Civil War944 Words   |  4 PagesSlavery† through the religious languages (Magagna). It is religious politics that Lincoln showed and succeeded during the Civil War. Rooted in the individual faith in Evangelical Protestantism, Lincoln emphasized religious morality and changed it into social responsibility by using biblical terms. People responded to Lincoln’s language, and people brought their faith to bear on political action, participating in the Civil War (Magagna). In this way, anti-slavery issue became religious politics. LikewiseRead MoreFamily and Religion : Influence on People Essay1602 Words   |  7 PagesFamily and Religion: Influence on People If you asked people to describe their families, some would describe single-household families, some would describe stepfamilies, some would describe gay or lesbian or adoptive families and many would describe divorced families. The word family has become a diverse institution it is very difficult to give it a meaning. In a wide sense especially in the biological sciences the term family refers to a group of individual beings linked by blood relations,Read MoreMarriage, Family, And Religion1687 Words   |  7 Pages Marriage, Family, and Religion Omar De La Garza Texas AM International University Abstract The institutions of marriage and family are fundamental concepts to the functioning of our present day society. In this paper, marriage and family and their changes over time will be discussed. Topics such as religion, which plays an important role is the development and changes of ideas regarding these two topics will be approached as well as the social changes due to tradition and theRead MoreThe Plight Of Modernity And The Social Conditions Associated With Modern Forms Of Capitalism1421 Words   |  6 Pagesmodernity and the social conditions associated with modern forms of capitalism are issues of deep interest in the works of Marx and Weber. For these theorists, religious institutions serve important roles in understandings of how societal changes emerge. However, their understandings of how religion relates to social change are vastly different. This is the result of fundamentally different assumptions underlying their particular theories. Within Marx’ understanding of religion, ideologies of religiousRead Moresociology in religion1257 Words   |  6 PagesPutnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon Schuster, 2010. Print, pp 1-246 In a renowned examination to approach religion as a sociological study, respected scholars Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell trek through the social history of our nation over the past few decades and the affects that have consequently—or thankfully—been left on religious institutions. While the authors explore detailed cultural developments, America’s

Themes †of Mice and Men Free Essays

Of Mice and Men, a novella written by John Steinbeck, is a tragedy incorporating a hero with a tragic flaw, a climax, and a tragic resolution. The title of the novella, â€Å"Of Mice and Men†, is the first clue to Steinbeck’s specific cultural issues. The title is a line taken from a poem called, â€Å"To a Mouse†, by Robert Burns. We will write a custom essay sample on Themes – of Mice and Men or any similar topic only for you Order Now This poem talks about man’s enslavement to forces of both elemental and human nature which cannot be controlled, destroying hopes and dreams. This stems into the theme of the loss of the American Dream. Along with alienation, the American Dream is a major theme explored throughout the course of the novel. Of Mice and Men is a story about the nature of human dreams and aspirations and the forces that work against them. Humans give meaning to their lives by creating dreams. George and Lennie’s dream — to own a little farm of their own — is so central to Of Mice and Men that it appears in some form in five of the six chapters. The telling of the story, which George has done so often, becomes a ritual between the two men: George provides the narrative, and Lennie, who has difficulty remembering even simple instructions, finishes George’s sentences. To George, this dream of having their own place means independence, security, being their own boss, and, most importantly, being â€Å"somebody. † To Lennie, the dream is like the soft animals he pets: It means security, the responsibility of tending to the rabbits, and a sanctuary where he won’t have to be afraid. This theme not only applies to George and Lennie, but also to Candy and Crooks. To Candy, who sees the farm as a place where he can assert a responsibility he didn’t take when he let Carlson kill his dog, it offers security for old age and a home where he will fit in. For Crooks, the little farm will be a place where he can have self-respect, acceptance, and security. Having and sharing the dream, however, are not enough to bring it to life. Each man must make a sacrifice or battle some other force that seeks to steal the dream away. Some of these obstacles are external – the threat from Curley’s wife, Curley’s violence, and the societal prejudices that plague each man; others are internal – Lennie’s strength and his need to touch soft things. For George, the greatest threat to the dream is Lennie himself; ironically, it is Lennie who also makes the dream worthwhile. In addition to dreams, humans crave contact with others to give life meaning. Alienation is present throughout this novel. On the most obvious level, we see this isolation when the ranch hands go into town on Saturday night to ease their loneliness with alcohol and women. Similarly, Lennie goes into Crook’s room to find someone with whom to talk, and later Curley’s wife comes for the same reason. Crooks says, â€Å"A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. † Even Slim mentions, â€Å"I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean. † George’s taking care of Lennie and the dream of the farm are attempts to break the pattern of loneliness that is part of the human condition. Similarly, Lennie’s desire to pet soft things comes from his need to feel safe and secure, to touch something that gives him that feeling of not being alone in the world. For Lennie, the dream of the farm parallels that security. George and Lennie, however, similarly to the American Dream, are not the only characters who struggle against loneliness. Although present in all the characters to some degree, the theme of loneliness is most notably present in Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. They all fight against their isolation in whatever way they can. Until its death, Candy’s dog stopped Candy from being alone in the world. After its death, Candy struggles against loneliness by sharing in George and Lennie’s dream. Curley’s wife is also lonely; she is the only female on the ranch, and her husband has forbidden anyone to talk with her. She combats her loneliness by flirting with the people on the ranch. Crooks is isolated because of his skin colour. As the only black man on the ranch, he is not allowed into the bunkhouse with the others, and he does not associate with them. Of Mice and Men is a novella that tries to explain what it means to be human. Man is a very small part of a very large universe; in the greater scheme of things, individuals come and go and leave very little, lasting marks. Yet deep inside all people is a longing for a place in nature — the desire for the land, roots, and a place to call â€Å"home. † Steinbeck explores the themes of the America Dream and alienation to portray the uncertainty of success. How to cite Themes – of Mice and Men, Essay examples

Information System Management Amazon

Questions: 1.Give a Brief Introduction of the Business. 2.What is the Innovative Business Model using IT? 3.What are Innovative Business Processes using IT? 4.What are the Innovative Products or Services offered using IT? 5.What are the Innovative Business Values? 6. What are the Revenue Streams or Revenue Model? 7.What Technologies are most Important for this Model (RFID, ROBOTICS, 3D Printing. Or all). 8.Evolution: How this model has been Emerged? 9.Leadership: Background of the people behind it.10.Who are the Stakeholders? 11.How do they do Competitive Advantage? Answers: 1.Introduction on Amazon Business The report depicts the importance of implementing Information Technology in Amazon.com. The organization was founded by Jeff Bezos in the year of 1995. Initially, Amazon created a virtual platform for the book lovers and used to serve books. Amazon.com serves their services to the consumers, sellers, buyers and enterprises all over the world (Amazon 2015). The company has recently built a mobile application for the consumers, which could be accessed by the consumers regardless of their location and time. The price range and delivery time for the products are comparatively less than other online stores. Thus, most of the consumers prefer to use this online store to get their desired products. The integrated Information System used by Amazon.com includes supply chain management and customer relationship management to the customers. Due to innovative business strategy, Amazon.com has become one of the most successful online business organizations. The Electronic commerce business model used by Amaazon.com is found to be very much beneficial from the business perspectives. As, the number of consumers for the organization is growing rapidly thus, they need to add certain business and information strategy to satisfy the consumers (Varia and Mathew 2014). They provide their comments and responses only for the branded products served by Amazon.com. From the current annual report of Amazon.com it has been found that, though certain consequences are associated to the system but still the revenue structure is higher than other online service providers. Moreover, in order to grab competitive advantages from marketplace the organization uses different innovative business strategies and integrated Information System. 2.Innovative Business Model Using IT Used by Amazon.com The Chief Executive officer of Amazon.com stated that the concept of Business model innovation is referred to as a new emerging technology nowadays and it is the core or base for the entrepreneurial startup. In order to speed up the delivery of products and services, RFID tagging technology has been introduced by Amazon (Girotra and Netessine 2013). With the help of this technology the products tracking and monitoring has become more efficient. The existing software and robotics based infrastructure of Amazon is merged up with RFID and thus the delivery has become faster than others. It helps the organization to gain competitive advantage from the marketplace. Recently Amazon has received a high quality deal of attention to plan for the unnamed aerial vehicles widely known as drone to deliver products rather services to the consumers regardless of their location. It also improved its automated warehouse with addition to a virtual work zone for the robot and workers at the same time. In order to resolve the existing business inefficiency, Amazon implemented a centrally controlled system that will provide a routing instruction to the business organization. The instruction will be provided to the robots those are outfitted with the RFID tags. The technology will help to boost up the productivity of private and public automated warehouse of Amazon. The Amazon Web Service (AWS) provides a wide range of accessibility, data storage, backup resilience and disaster recovery to the organization. The evolutionary business model of Amazon.com shows that from 1995 to 2010 the business model is continuously changing by the developers. The inventory changes according to changing year are as follows: Year Inventory changes 1995 An online book retailing portal 1999 An auction and zshops 2000 Marketplace 2001 Partnership and logistic as well 2002 e-commerce platform 2007 E books The business model canvas of Amazon.com is build up of 9 building blocks such as consumer segmentation, revenue stream, cost structure, different key resources, consumer relationship management, key partnership, channels, key activities and value positioning (Madduri et al. 2014). All the components of the business model are interrelated to each other and none of the component could be executed singly. The service oriented architecture of Amazon.com is distributive by nature and the decentralized service platform makes it more robust and scalable. Figure 1: Business Model Canvas of Amazon.com (Source: Girotra and Netessine 2013, pp- 540) 3.Innovative Business Processes Using IT used by Amazon.com With the help of new cloud service currently Amazon is serving a automated business process. In order to provide large scale management services and transaction throughput Amazon.com is adapting significant Business Process Management (BPM). With the help of Simple Work Flow (SWF) service launched by Amazon Web Service (AWS) the customers of Amazon.com are capable to access both the cloud based and on premises business applications (Kalin 2013). The technology driven components of the business process help the service providers to make effective control and co ordination with the implementation steps including tracking and monitoring. In order to create image processing, video encoding, infrastructure provisioning the business process of Amazon is using the Simple Web Flow (SWF). Different work flow of the business model plays different organizational tasks in a co-ordinate manner. The architecture of the business process includes the workers and the deciders as well. All the tasks o f SWF are executed with the help of the workers and the deciders. Different programming languages could be used for writing the workers and deciders with the help of the SWF by using the API web services (Slagel et al. 2015). The program could be executed in cloud, on premises or in both platforms. Before adapting the SWF an enterprise could also test its efficiency. Though, the business process of Amazon is not available all over the world but still they are trying to serve the requirement of the consumers. 4.Innovative Products or Services Offered by Amazon.com Amazon prime is referred to as membership programs that provides consumer access to the streaming video, music, e-books and free shipping also. This is a paid service that serves different sort of advantages to the consumers in terms of trial version. In order to get distinct advantages a user should subscribe to Amazon Prime. Amazon prime gives different deal and discounts to the users. Amazon Web Service (AWS) serves a large set of global could based products including computer, storage area, memory, data storage, analytics, networking, developing tools, management tools and internet of things also in terms of security and organizational application (Bernstein 2014). Another important service of Amazon is Amazon Go it is a new kind of store that has no associated checkout system. Amazon serves one of the most advanced shipping technologies and the free checkout shopping experience helps to get competitive advantages. Currently Amazon Go is open to the employees in the Beta programs but will be soon open for public also. Amazon has a cashier free self checkout system that is designed with the help of Robotics. Other list of products and services served by the organization are as follows: Products Services Amazon Advertising and Amazon Alexa Connects the brand to the consumers and serves Voice control system. Amazon Dash, Amazon Drive It is a good ordering services and it also serves unlimited backup, disaster recovery and application resilience for photos, video, files sharing Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire OS Hand free speaker for voice controlling and Fire range of devices for the employees d consumers also. Amazon Tap Portable Bluetooth and wi fi services for the consumers and for the employees at the same time. Amazon workspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Serves a suite of cloud computing services for the consumers. It serves a secured desktop that run on the AWS. 5.Innovative Business Values The robotics of Amazon is continuously focusing on Reimagination aspects for faster migration and continuous development. A better picture imagined by Amazon has developed an effective connection which is capable to drive a complex issue to a simple one (Irani 2015). The simplicity of the solutions helps to drive the business faster easier and consistence as well. It helps to mitigate the range of challenges by meeting the desired requirements of the consumers. Amazon store is using the RFID enabled tags abut they are not implementing it in their stores. The innovative business models used by Amazon B2B and B2C, provides value to its consumers. Mainly in order to meet the requirement of the consumers the business is focusing to become a consumer centric business model. As the number of distributors and manufacturers are entering to the B2B e-commerce business model, thus the business is becoming more capable to serve the desired strategies (Sultan 2013.). The innovative business strategies are found to be very much beneficial. The IT based model rather the integrated information system has efficiently built a supply chain management system and effective consumer relationship management system for achieving the desired business revenue model. 6.Different Revenue Streams or Revenue Model From the current scenario it has been found that Amazon.com is one of the greatest revenue generating online organization over the world. Due to the introduction of different innovative business models Amazon is making profit from the marketplace. Before implementation of this business process, the developer of the online organization has gone through a Regret Minimizing Framework. Amazon is capable to make a large set of money with the help of the additional business properties and E-commerce venture as well. Instead of short term impact Amazon is currently focusing on the long term business profit generating models (Zheng et al. 2014). The revenue stream of the business organization showed that they could easily beat their competitors. After adapting an automated system flow Amazon is efficiently grabbing a large number of consumers throughout the world regardless of their location. Not only is this but also the organization is investing a lot for building robots that will allow th e users to become more friendly. It is also able to automate the data warehouse process used by Amazon.com. In the initial phase the organization was not at all profitable from the business perspectives but after the implementation of Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the year of 2003, the business is exceeding the margin of the standard profit level. The revenue of AWS makes a 7% profit but the total revenue is all about 50% of the total revenue structure (Yadav 2013). Again the services and products served by Amazon.com are found to be the main reasons behind the success of the online organization. 7.Important Technologies in terms of RFID, ROBOTICS, 3D Printing Amazon.com is using B2B and B2C business model for their business development and different technologies such as ROBOTICS, RFID and 3D printing could be used for the business model. There technologies used by different business models have their own value and features. Each and every business features are effective and beneficial from the organizational perspectives. Microsoft has developed RFID as an alternative for 3D printing (DaSilva et al. 2013). In order to track a set of orders and for gathering information from different resources, for the manufacturer, barcodes and electronic chips these kind of applications are used by most of the online shopping supporting business organizations. The technology used for 3D printing is also known as additive manufacturing. Though, for most of the end products this technology is not fund to be cost efficient. The 3D printer provides a lower range of price point and high valued system features for the computing system. The high valued commerc ial expectation of Amazon services are running faster and the due to these innovation the shortcoming are mitigating at a rapid rate. Across the product spectrum, the speeds of the printers are increasing at a rapid rate. The concept of prototyping modeling has driven out the usage of the 3D printing. The RFID system works in two divided segments such as a tag or a label and a reader. The labels are associated to the transmitter and receiver to receive the radio frequency and transmit it to the desired location (McCreary and Kelly 2014). The Robotics of Amazon.com is looking for the continuous development and innovation In order to adapt large scale business growth, they are focusing on Reimagination. In order to turn complex business problems a simple solution, a better connection is required to be developed in terms of Reimagination. From the technological perspectives it has been found that 3D printing, robotics and RFID all of these are associated. 8.Evolution of the Business Model in Amazon The business models used by Amazon are B2B and B2C and about 800 pound of gorilla of the E-commerce has announced the launching story of the business models in the real world of application. After platform migration the developers realizes that implementation of B2B is a little harder than the others. The seller of amazon.com has offered their services in around 45 business specific categories (Klaus 2013). The category includes IT, tools and food at the same time. In addition to this, the features of the business model is consists of different business pricing, quality amount of discount, seller programs etc. Amazon performs an exceptional and efficient measure against the revenue per visitor that is referred to as one of the key measuring tool for the commercial website. In the initial day the organization used to serve only book for the book lovers butt gradually they implemented online website that was consists of several categories (Girotra and Netessine 2013). The major vision and the strategy of Amazon is to develop a consumer centric business model for the consumers. The Amazon online value positioning is communicative and it could communicate both online and offline. The online website is user friendly and through the online communicating platform the users and the service provider could interact with other efficiently. The consumers who want to access the official website of Amazon are required to register themselves with the website. Amazon has over 76 million of consumer accounts but only 1.3 million of sellers in the marketplace (Bergvall?Kreborn and Howcroft 2014). With the help of B2B business model the organization is capable to serve online secured payment service also. 9.Leadership Principle in Amazon While analyzing the leadership strategies for Amazon it has been found that the principles of leadership management are precisely used by the organization. The main leader behind the success of Amazon is Jeff Bezos. The leadership strategies helped the organization to operate efficiently (Varia and Mathew 2014). A list of leaders and executives are found while evaluating the success of the business organization. The founder of Amazon is the pioneer of e-commerce business strategies used in different business organization. The leaders motivate the employees to earn their trust and commitment at the same time. The leadership principles used in Amazon are as follows: Consumer obsession: The leaders of Amazon.com are strictly consumer focused and work at the backend of the business organization. In order to keep the trust of the consumers the organization is working vigorously (Madduri et al. 2014). They also keep their attention on the competitors to increase the growth revenue structure. Ownership: The business leaders are the owners and their active participation helps to increase the long terms values for the short term business results. The owner plays active roles behalf of other employees of the business organization. Invention and simplicity: The business leaders of Amazon are focused on innovation and invention from their project development team members (Kalin 2013). They are focused to new technologies development in order to simplify the work load and pressure. Hiring and developing the best: The leader of the HR department of Amazon, raise the bar of performance after each hiring approach. They look for exceptionally talented person who will be able to serve innovative ideas to others. 10.The List of Stakeholders of Amazon.Com Amazon is one of the most well-known online E-commerce organizations that is capable to satisfy their stakeholders throughout. It uses Carrolls model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to measure the satisfaction of its stakeholder and the required responsibilities that are needed to be served by Amazon (Mathew and Varia 2014). From global aspect it is found that, Amazon should respond to the requirement of the stakeholders by evolving comprehensive CSR business strategies. With changing time Amazons stakeholders interest also keeps on changing. For global reach the condition needs a broad range of scope in terms of business strategy, policies and programs as well. It needs to provide more effort to satisfy their stakeholders. Amazon maintains the CSR to target the interest and requirement of the stakeholders (Bergvall?Kreborn and Howcroft 2014). Most of the E-commerce organizations face major challenges and pressure from the stakeholders and to avoid this problem, Amazon has d esigned an effective CSR program to gratify their stakeholders. The groups of stakeholders of Amazon are as follows: Consumers: The designed CSR provides high level of priority to its consumers. It has considered that consumers are their primary determinant to increase the business success. The mission and vision statement of Amazon implies this clearly as it highlights the centrality of the consumers. Amazons CSR has advanced communication and information strategies for secured transaction, logistics and product delivery as well (Varia and Mathew 2014.). By maintaining the competition among the sellers Amazon provides fair price with a maximum benefit. In order to ensure the consumer convenience, Amazon maintains advanced pricing and marketing mix business strategy. Employees: Employees are the group of significant determinants to Amazon as the organizational performance is dependent on their individual performances (McCreary and Kelly 2014). They provide high compensation, special training and development programs to develop their skills. Communities: It also maintains CSR for communities because they play important roles to change the perception regarding the services and products of the consumers. The interest of the community includes development support through education, environmental conservation and healthcare communities. 11.Competitive Advantages in Terms Of Porters Five Forces Amazon competes with many online organizations including smaller to larger online retail stores. Strong focus on the external market helps Amazon to enhance their resilient and conditional changes in the business organization (Amazon 2015). While evaluating the intensities of Amazon, the five factors that came under consideration include: Competitive rivalry: It competes against many large to medium online retail industries throughout the world. Most of the retail firms are found to be very much aggressive in nature and thus they exert a strong range of competition to Amazon. The major competitors of Amazon are Walmart, Flipkart, Myntra and many others. Due to high availability, Amazon has faced strong force of substitutes (Girotra and Netessine 2013). In order to achieve competitive advantages, they must adapt strategic priorities in terms of long terms competitive solution. Bargaining power of the buyers: The mission and vision statement of Amazon implies that, due to the consumer centric approach the consumers are capable to access a large set of category regarding sells and services. Bargaining power of the sellers: The suppliers control the availability while supplying materials to Amazon as per the requirements of the E-commerce operation (Mathew and Varia 2014). Amazon experiences moderate range of intensity for the bargaining power. Threat of the new entrants: The consumers of Amazon could easily access as per their needs and high availability of products help them to compete against medium to large business organization. Threats of the substitution: Many new business organizations are innovating everyday which provides potential threat to the online retails business of Amazon (Madduri et al. 2014). The consumers of the business organization could easily switch from one firm to the other whenever they want. Based on the external factors it has been found that, due to minor strategic issues, Amazons performance as an online retail industry is getting affected currently. Figure 2: Porters Five Forces for Amazon (Source: Madduri et al. 2014, pp-2269) From the overall discussion it could be concluded that, the marketing tools and technology used by Amazon are very much effective from the business perspectives and the goal of the business organization is becoming very much straight forward. From the Middle East and Arab word regional aspect it is found that due to the efficiency of the logistics, most of the people are interested in online shopping. Amazon is capable to grab a large set of consumers from this region only. The advanced and innovative business strategy and price range is comparatively lower than the other retail online organizations. It helps to increase the business revenue structure and due to this Amazon is capable to gain competitive advantages from the marketplace. In order to convert the analogue information to digital information application of digitization technology is the simplest way. Not only this but also Amazon.com is capable to prosumers also. The term prosumers means those consumers who are very much brand conscious. The products and services served by Amazon helps to build a consumer centric business and thus the revenue model of the organization are growing day by day. In order to simplify the Service work Flow (SWF) the implementation of AWS SDK a component of Java is found to be very effective and beneficial from the business perspectives. On the other hand, the electronic consumer unit and the Amazon Web service provide different offerings to the organizations. Sometimes, if the consumer electronic numbers are not found in the exact location that time, the Amazon has turned into the Amazons profit generating unit References Amazon, E.C., 2015. Amazon web services.Available in: https://aws. amazon. com/es/ec2/(November 2012). Bergvall?Kreborn, B. and Howcroft, D., 2014. Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour.New Technology, Work and Employment,29(3), pp.213-223. Bernstein, D., 2014. Containers and cloud: From lxc to docker to kubernetes.IEEE Cloud Computing,1(3), pp.81-84. Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O.A., Pavlou, P.A. and Venkatraman, N.V., 2013. Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights. DaSilva, C.M., Trkman, P., Desouza, K. and Lindi?, J., 2013. Disruptive technologies: a business model perspective on cloud computing.Technology Analysis Strategic Management,25(10), pp.1161-1173. DaSilva, C.M., Trkman, P., Desouza, K. and Lindi?, J., 2013. Disruptive technologies: a business model perspective on cloud computing.Technology Analysis Strategic Management,25(10), pp.1161-1173. Fernandes, D.A., Soares, L.F., Gomes, J.V., Freire, M.M. and Incio, P.R., 2014. Security issues in cloud environments: a survey.International Journal of Information Security,13(2), pp.113-170. Fokaefs, M. and Stroulia, E., 2014. Wsdarwin: Studying the evolution of web service systems. InAdvanced Web Services(pp. 199-223). Springer New York. Girotra, K. and Netessine, S., 2013. OM forumbusiness model innovation for sustainability.Manufacturing Service Operations Management,15(4), pp.537-544. Irani, L., 2015. Difference and dependence among digital workers: The case of Amazon Mechanical Turk.South Atlantic Quarterly,114(1), pp.225-234. Kalin, M., 2013.Java Web Services: Up and Running: A Quick, Practical, and Thorough Introduction. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.". Klaus, P., 2013. The case of Amazon. com: towards a conceptual framework of online customer service experience (OCSE) using the emerging consensus technique (ECT).Journal of Services Marketing,27(6), pp.443-457. Madduri, R.K., Sulakhe, D., Lacinski, L., Liu, B., Rodriguez, A., Chard, K., Dave, U.J. and Foster, I.T., 2014. Experiences building Globus Genomics: a next?generation sequencing analysis service using Galaxy, Globus, and Amazon Web Services.Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience,26(13), pp.2266-2279. Mathew, S. and Varia, J., 2014. Overview of amazon web services.Amazon Whitepapers. McCreary, D. and Kelly, A., 2014. Making sense of NoSQL.Shelter Island: Manning, pp.19-20. Puthal, D., Sahoo, B.P.S., Mishra, S. and Swain, S., 2015, January. Cloud computing features, issues, and challenges: a big picture. InComputational Intelligence and Networks (CINE), 2015 International Conference on(pp. 116-123). IEEE. Sheng, Q.Z., Maamar, Z., Yao, L., Szabo, C. and Bourne, S., 2014. Behavior modeling and automated verification of Web services.Information Sciences,258, pp.416-433. Sheng, Q.Z., Qiao, X., Vasilakos, A.V., Szabo, C., Bourne, S. and Xu, X., 2014. Web services composition: A decades overview.Information Sciences,280, pp.218-238. Slagel, J., Mendoza, L., Shteynberg, D., Deutsch, E.W. and Moritz, R.L., 2015. Processing shotgun proteomics data on the Amazon Cloud with the Trans-Proteomic Pipeline.Molecular Cellular Proteomics,14(2), pp.399-404. Sultan, N., 2013. Knowledge management in the age of cloud computing and Web 2.0: Experiencing the power of disruptive innovations.International journal of information management,33(1), pp.160-165. Varia, J. and Mathew, S., 2014. Overview of amazon web services.Amazon Web Services. Viennot, N., Garcia, E. and Nieh, J., 2014, June. A measurement study of google play. InACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review(Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 221-233). ACM. Yadav, S., 2013. Comparative study on open source software for cloud computing platform: Eucalyptus, openstack and opennebula.International Journal Of Engineering And Science,3(10), pp.51-54. Zarras, A.V., Vassiliadis, P. and Dinos, I., 2016, June. Keep calm and wait for the spike! Insights on the evolution of amazon services. InInternational Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering(pp. 444-458). Springer International Publishing. Zheng, X., Martin, P., Brohman, K. and Da Xu, L., 2014. CLOUDQUAL: a quality model for cloud services.IEEE transactions on industrial informatics,10(2), pp.1527-1536.

An Overview and History of the Compass

An Overview and History of the Compass The compass is an instrument used for navigation; it generally has a magnetic needle that points toward the earths magnetic North Pole. The magnetic compass has been in existence for nearly a thousand years and is the most common type of compass. The gyroscopic compass is far less common than a magnetic compass. The Magnetic Compass In order to adjust a magnetic compass to due or true north and toward the geographic North Pole, one must know the amount of magnetic declination or variation that exists in a specific region. There are online maps and calculators available that provide the difference in declination between true north and magnetic north for every point on the globe. By adjusting ones magnetic compass based on the local magnetic declination, it is possible to ensure that ones directions are accurate. The Gyroscopic Compass The History of the Compass Compasses were originally developed when lodestones, a mineral that has naturally magnetized iron ore, were suspended above a board with the ability to pivot and turn. It was discovered that the stones would always point in the same direction, and align themselves with the north/south axis of the earth. The Compass Rose The 32 points were originally drawn to indicate winds and were used by sailors in navigation. The 32 points represented the eight major winds, the eight half-winds, and the 16 quarter-winds. All 32 points, their degrees, and their names can be found online. On early compass roses, the eight major winds can be seen with a letter initial above the line marking its name, as we do with N (north), E (east), S (south), and W (west) today. Later compass roses, around the time of Portuguese exploration and Christopher Columbus, show a fleur-de-lys replacing the initial letter T (for tramontana, the name of the north wind) that marked north, and a cross replacing the initial letter L (for levante) that marked east, showing the direction of the Holy Land. We still commonly see the fleur-de-lys and cross symbols on compass roses today, if not just the simple letter initials for the cardinal directions. Every cartographer designs a compass rose a little differently, using different colors, graphics, and even symbols. Multiple colors are often used simply as a means of easily distinguishing the many points and lines on a compass rose. 360 Degrees Uses of the Compass Most people use a compass casually, for instance with hiking or camping. In those situations, basic compasses like the thumb compass or other orienteering compasses that are clear and can be read over a map are suitable. Many casual uses where travel is over a short distance require basic markings for cardinal directions and a basic level of understanding compasses. For more advanced navigation, where large distances are covered and a slight variation of degrees would offset your course, a deeper understanding of compass reading is required. Understanding declination, the angle between true north and magnetic north, the 360 degree markings on the compass face, and your course-of-direction arrow combined with individual compass instructions requires more advanced study. For simple, easy-to-understand, beginners instructions on how to read a compass, visit compassdude.com.

Quotes About Long Distance Relationships

Quotes About Long Distance Relationships It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder- this is probably why lovers who are apart spend most of their time thinking about each other. If you are living away from your beloved, then there might be a long distance love quote below that will provide you with some comfort. Making Long Distance Work Many people who have been in long distance relationships have confessed that it is tough to stay committed when your partner lives across time zones and continents. Practical considerations such as the difference in time zone, cultures, lifestyle, and attitude draw couples apart. Lack of physical contact  also contributes to the gnawing chasm between two lovers. So are long distance relationships practical? Should couples who live apart reconsider their career or lifestyle choices so that they can accommodate the relationship? Rationale dictates that to keep a relationship alive and energetic, lovers need to be together as often as possible. So you can schedule a recess in your work or study routine to factor in a romance holiday. Make sure to keep aside all other work obligations when you are with your sweetheart. Long distance love can work if both partners are willing to accept the difference in lifestyle. Here are some long distance love quotes that can help stoke the flame of passion. Quotes on Long-Distance Romance George Eliot: What greater thing is there for two human souls that to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.Anonymous: Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.Thomas Fuller: Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.Robert Dodsley:One kind kiss before we part,Drop a tear and bid adieu;Though we sever, my fond heartTill we meet shall pant for you.Francois de la Rouchefoucauld: Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.Roger de Bussy-Rabutin: Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.Richard Bach: Can miles truly separate you from friends? If you want to be with someone you love, arent you already there?Anonymous: Absence makes thy heart grow fonder.Anonymous: I hate the stars because I look at the same ones as you do, without you.Anonymous:A part of you h as grown in me.And so you see, its you and meTogether forever and never apart,Maybe in distance, but never in heart. Khalil Gibran: And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.Jon Oliva:If I go awayWhat would still remain of me?The ghost within your eyes?The whisper in your sighs?You see... BelieveAnd Im always there.Kay Knudsen: Love is missing someone whenever youre apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because youre close in heart.Hans Nouwens: In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged.George Eliot: That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.Anonymous: If the only place where I could see you was in my dreams, Id sleep forever.Pam Brown: Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.Edward Thomas: The simple lack of her is more to me than others presence.

Why should the indigenous languages of Panama be preserved Research Paper

Why should the indigenous languages of Panama be preserved - Research Paper Example bout a half of the indigenous populations of the state, and are thus an important facet of the existing agitation for state recognition and subsequent preservation of indigenous languages. A majority of these tribes do inhabit administrative regions – Comarca indigenas – that are present in areas with considerable Indian populations (Indigenous Groups of Panama, 2014). Concerning these administrative regions, three main comarcas exist, which are equated to a province. Two others, which are smaller, are subordinate to another of the state’s provinces, hence being considered as equating to a municipality. The sheer presence of these five regions of administration, supporting the minority populations, which make up Panama’s indigenous people, ought to be enough reason for government concern and consideration. This is in respect to not only considering, but also protecting and further enhancing the rights of these indigenous populations; of which one avenue would be the preservation of their languages and/ dialects. These indigenous languages include the Ngà ¤be-Bugle and Kuna languages (spoken by the majority), in addition to the Embera, Wounaan, Naso-Teribe, and Bri-bri languages (Major Languages of Panama, 2014). Comprising of seven indigenous nations living within the Republic of Panama, as the agency – IWGIA (2012) provides, these include the Bugle, Kuna, Ngabe, Wounaan, Bri-bri, Embera and the Naso Tjerdi. As a minority, they have and continued being fundamentally influenced by the Spanish Influence traceable to the reign of the Spanish Empire in Latin America. As a result, Spanish (Latino) is the most-widely spoken of languages, not only in the Panama Republic, but the larger Latin American region. With the advent of Spanish colonization and influence role, the Catholic Church’s reach attesting to this being the fact that majority of Latin Americans are Catholics. This religious influence, augmented by Spanish socio-cultural, political and economic

Hydraulic fracturing in the USA Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hydraulic fracturing in the USA - Essay Example Fracking open up fractures in the rocks allowing oil and gas to flow. Drilling alone cannot be used to extract trapped shale gas in thin layers between the rocks. Therefore, gas and oil producers in the United States have deployed hydraulic fracturing to facilitate the mining into large shale natural gas and oil deposits. The use of the hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas and oil has ensured a long-term energy security outlook in the United States. This is due to the ability to exploit the shale. In this regard, the crude oil reserves have been bolstered by 11% and led to 47% surge in gas reserves across the United States. Fracking has reduced dependence on foreign energy sources, and as results the cost of energy has reduced helping to revive the economy. Therefore, there is a direct reduction of importation of natural gas. With hydraulic fracturing, there has been an expansion in the employment sector especially in the United States. The industry engaging on natural gas and oil production has employed more than 1.2 million people in the United States. Extracting underground minerals using hydraulic fracturing has some negative effect on water. The mining process requires millions of gallons of water. Therefore, water gets trucked around the shale and directed into the well; thus there is a diversion of water from other uses by the neighboring communities (Schultz, 2012). Moreover, some hazardous chemicals mixed with water may find the way into the fresh water aquifers especially if there exist poorly constructed wells. This endangers the health of organisms using such water. Hydraulic fracturing process together with the injection of wastewater into deep wells practice, cause minor earthquakes to shale exploitation areas. The survey of geologists of the United States has revealed that some tremors from hydraulic

World religion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

World religion - Essay Example This yoga holds very importance in both the religions. Tantrism is associated with the religious scriptures known as the Goddess Shakti. She is the sacred feminine in Hindu religion, whom people worship. Hindu considers it as anit-vedic in character. In Hinduism traditionally it contains four parts; Metaphysical knowledge of religion known as Jnana, meditative practices knows as yoga, ritual practices and religious and ethical practices of conduct named as Charya. Today in Hinduism this yoga traditionally exists in Saurya, Shiva, Shakta, Ganapatya and Vaishnava. Tantrism came into being in Buddhism around the 3rd century till 12th .In Buddhism, Tantric is also known as Vajrayana. It is different in Buddhism because of its rituals. Rather than the meditation their goal is to achieve the Godhead, with Upaya/skills.Vajrayanais difficult and complicated than the Hinduism because of its rules and complications in language, to read.It is performed in Buddhism for the followers to experienc e the true Buddha nature, before they tend to achieve the enlightenment(Dolls of India - The Role of Tantra in Hinduism and Buddhism) In the psychological study of religion, considering postmodernity, Erickson has given very much importance to the religion in every stage of life. He has done the biographies on Gandhi and Martin Luther, which have proved his thoughts in the matter of religion. Erick stated that for human personality development, religion plays an important role because it is only primary way where virtues are promoted with each stage of life, on the basis of culture. Erick’s theory couldn’t attain much benefit from systematic empirical study but it left the influential effect on the human minds(Schachter). Whereas considering the postmodernity Jones states that today the world is moving within the new sets of modernity. The thoughts of people are changing as a strong reflection of modern themes, specially the youth ministry. Jones says that youth ministry should

Old Spice Advert Analysis

Old Spice Advert Analysis The Old Spice advert is a short 33sec advert, which introduces a well toned, sporty and attractive looking man to the viewer (the quintessential dream man). The on-screen protagonist asks the female audience to look back and forth between himself and their own partner which essentially requires the female audience to compare their partners with the on-screen protagonist. The advert provides three scenarios that cleverly sum-up what every woman is supposedly meant to be aspiring towards: being connected to an attractive, well-built man; success and high social status and not having to wake up and find their coffee cold! This is done by introducing the protagonist in the shower explaining to the viewer that even if their man is not as attractive and well-built as he is, he can at least smell like him if he changes from using lady-scented shower gel to the more manly, Old Spice shower gel. Of course, an understanding of women and their olfactory systems adds to the interpretation of the advert by hinting that even the slightest smell of Old Spice could possibly allow women to remove themselves from their current relational predicament and dream of partners similar to our on-screen protagonist. The narrative then moves to a scene aboard a small, but luxurious motor-yacht. Once again, the female audience is asked to look back and forth in order to engage in some form of comparison. The women are asked to locate themselves aboard this motor-yacht but now with a man that their man could smell like. Further references to wealth (diamonds) and realised dreams (tickets to that thing you love) are implied. However, before one distances oneself from the advert due to the sheer outlandish nature of the advert (and hence the marketing gurus losing their target market), the protagonist is suddenly located on a white horse (reference to a knight in shining armour?).More importantly, he mentions that he is, after all, on a horse- a seemingly possible task for even the most ordi nary man, which bodes well with the final phrasing: Anything is possible with Old Spice. Genre The text selected is clearly a commercial advertisement: a tele-communication advert. Advertisements are meant to persuade an audience, in this case, the female audience, to take up some form of action. It is common knowledge that a large majority of women are in control of the monthly grocery shop, so it is rather clever that this advert is aimed at persuading women to buy toiletries geared towards their man. This is accomplished by appealing to the female audiences emotions. Due to the rise of Hollywood, many women tend to find themselves escaping to a dream-like existence with their dream partner. What this advert does, is allow women to venture into this world and in doing-so, gives them a very strong reason to purchase the product. Audience This particular advert could possibly offer a connection with women who feel trapped or disillusioned with their current situation or state of affairs. If that interpretation is perhaps too deep, it could literally, also be appealing to women who merely want a means of escape to a world that they dream of but will never actually have access to. It offers a world full of material success, social esteem, and endless happiness. Most of us today would love to be high-flyers who could jet off to dreamy island retreats where we are indulged in all the things we love including diamonds and a beautiful, sexy man at our beck and call. However, most of us will never have that so Old Spice is offering a cheaper alternative allows your man to at least smell like he is worth a million dollars. In our opinion the rhetorical situation includes three aspects: audience, purpose, and context In this case, the target audience is women who shop for their partners, or possibly the metrosexual man. It is intended to make the women want a man like Isaiah Mustafa and therefore, purchase the shower gel because if he will never look like him, he can at least smell like him. Construction This is a very cleverly put-together TV advert. It firstly, makes use of a very well-know actor, namely, Isaiah Mustafa, to appeal to the female audience. Secondly, and most importantly, this commercial is made with only one shot yet it portrays three totally different scenes (discussed in more detail in the mise-en-scene discussion below). The first is a shower/bathroom scene, followed by an outdoor scene on a motor yacht and the third is of the actor on a white horse. It is a colour TV commercial with no sub-headings or non-diagetic sound. This is rather unusual as most TV commercial adverts make use of non-diagetic sound to create an atmosphere that will enhance the persuasive quality of the advert. Even though this advert is made with only diagetic sound (the voice of the actor), it is more than enough to entice the female audience as Isaiah Mustafa was clearly equipped with a very manly, sexy and appealing voice (and that is not only my opinion!). Mise-en-scene: The construction of the shots within this advert is very clever and deceiving. Seeing as it offers three totally different scenes, one would think that it required several differing shots put together by various editing techniques. However, this advert appears to have only one shot. It starts with an establishing shot which is a wide angle, long shot used to set the bathroom/shower scene. The camera then slowly zooms in until it settles on a medium shot emphasising the physique of the protagonist. The camera then gives an illusion of tilting downwards which would be in line with the request for the viewer to look down but in actual fact it is stationer. The illusion of the camera tilting down seems to have been perfected by the removal of part of the mise-en-scene (shower/bathroom set). Once the bathroom set has been removed, the medium shot becomes a long shot which re-establishes the location of the next scene. The camera then dollys to the right as it follows the ac tor to the right side of the boat. The camera angle is still eye-level. The camera then zooms in to a medium shot and after a few seconds zooms out again to show the actor now sitting in a horse. The clothing used in the advert ingeniously adds to the various settings portrayed in the advert. A towel is wrapped around more formal white chinos to portray a bathroom scene. This is then removed as the advert moves to the motor yacht scene. Institutions The advert was put together for Old Spice in an attempt to increase/boost sales of their Old Spice shower gel.

Capitalism and the Joy of Working :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Enjoyment of work and creativity is more important to most people than higher pay. Employers cant pay to get more creativity because it is not just about the money. Something meaningful and challenging is generally more important for new workers coming into the workforce. No more is it the hope of reaching fame or making money that drives the workforce. It’s the opportunity to do the work that is enjoyed. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and author of Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life, has found through his research that for some people, paying them to do things they enjoy actually reduces their interest in doing those things. Another theory is that if you take your hobby and turn it into a career you wont enjoy it as much.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Capitalism plays a key factor in creativity because the workforce needs to be stimulated in order to produce good results. â€Å"Cracking the whip† on an assembly line stifles creativity in the workplace and most workplaces are not assembly lines like they were a while back. Leaders that work under an authoritarian model stifle creativity and innovation. This will ultimately lead to low productivity and low turnover within the workforce. The â€Å"good life† just doesn’t happen anymore. There aren’t millions of people working in assembly lines and in automobile manufacturing plants .. people are creating their happiness and most of it is a direct result on how they spend their time while they are punched into a clock.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When what we do at work is meaningful people don’t get bored or distracted, they get so involved they forget to eat. The world, and capitalism, needs creativity and innovation and without it would breed a lull in change and technology. Obviously, change and technology are what drives our capitalistic society.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  I remember my father always telling me that in order to appreciate and value the things you have you have to work for them yourself. I think the same holds true for business ventures. Having a personal interest and a personal bank account on line drives one to succeed possibly all the more than k working for a set paycheck.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Wealth and prosperity are created with capitalism. Freedom, self-interest and competition make for a healthy environment engulfed in capitalism. Freedom is the rights to exchange products and capital. Self-interest is the right to pursue ones own happiness (which after all is the American way) which transforms into pursuing ones own business and use it to appeal to the consumers.

Understanding the Development Strategy of a Five Star Hotel

â€Å"Reflecting on My Group† Yuvakumar Naga Sindhura (n6994059) The purpose of this essay is to understand the development of strategy for a five star resort hotel. The process of development within the team and the understanding of the conflicting ideas. The strategy was meant to be developed for a fictitious resort hotel which consists of 150 rooms, with no specific location. A group consists of two or more individuals who work and interact with each other to achieve a common goal (Bartol, Tein, Mathews, & Martin, 2005). I worked with Ehsan, Armeen, in order to brainstorm and discuss possible strategies that could be possibly developed for the upcoming resort hotel. As a group we were unproductive as my members were unable to move without a location in mind and hence stagnated in formulating a strategy, which proved to be a major issue. Hence leading Inkpen (1996) (as cited in Bauerschmidt, 1996) to demonstate the presence in the absence of strategy. Mintzberg (1973) as cited in (Selveg, 1987) focuses mainly on the purpose of the decisions, who is involved in making them, how preferences are evaluated, and types of environments ideal for the mode. Therefore Mintzberg thus laid prominence on the process by which strategies surface, rather than on their content. But a personal strategy has been developed providing a direction for growth and success. My personal strategy formulated is an all-season resort destination of choice for visitors and residents, specializing in world-class alpine skiing and recreation facilities with a local historic and cultural focus, nestled amongst pristine forest terrain and rugged mountain ranges. This essay discusses and reflects upon our collective involvement and the processes and stages that we progressed. In this essay we shall explore Tuckmans(1965) stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning), also defining the inputs, practices, processes and outcomes of working together in a group, along with the explanation and application of group cohesiveness, relevant member roles and leadership values which were supposed to be apparent within my group but lacked as everyone had opinions to what the leader had to say. As group members begin carrying out tasks and activities, eventually a team is evolved. Teams go through five stages of development as identified by Tuckman (1965), as cited in (Miller, 2003). Mostly all our meeting were held in class, our group had five undeceive individuals who only spent time discussing and brainstorming on what should be done first like the strategy, mission, vision or the values, rather than making a beginning. Therefore no progress was seen, even though worksheets were given during every class to guide us accordingly. Strategy was anticipated but was not fully present in the conflict of making one and it is believed that in this process the notion of strategies are in transition (Bauerschmidt, 1996). Therefore identifying group tasks and goals and building relations with each other was minimal. Tuckman(1965), as cited in (Miller, 2003) states that during this stage it is important that team members learn about each other, recognise the attitudes of other members and establish the goals and purpose of the group. During the regular interactions in the group meeting, we developed a positive relationship with each other, which is one of the key points suggested by (Tiosvold, Hui, Ding, & Hu, 2003) who supports the traditional idea that relationships are crucial for effective team performance. As a group we had different attitudes, values and cultural backgrounds, which could have thought to cause conflict within the team, but indecision was the highlight throughout, as some others in the group were skeptical of whether they were going the right direction, hence their opinions were not voiced and ideas were not shared both ways. It became a one way flow of ideas or discussion. But we experienced positive and friendly attitudes and exchange of ideas on varied topics, mostly apart from the topic of presentation and the assignment, thereby increasing our knowledge. As a group we experienced minimal cohesiveness. Cohesion in a group involves the level of purpose and commitment to the team among members (Dwyer, 2005). But due the difference in understanding and the mode of communication, the group ended up splitting into half, getting into sides where individuals understood each other. Cohesion is also linked to the input of knowledge and skills in a group, a group should have similar cultural backgrounds in order to be effective, to which I agree as all the members of our group came from different cultural backgrounds, with different values, efficiency and effectiveness, hence direction lacked in rder to achieve our goal. Groups with diverse attitudes and backgrounds are alternatively said to be more creative and flexible and make better decisions (Bartol et al. , 2005). I further refined the personal strategy formulated previously to develop a clearer direction for the growth and development of the organisation. The revised version of the strategy is an all-season resort destination of choic e for visitors and residents, specializing in world-class alpine skiing and recreation facilities with a local historic and cultural focus, nestled amongst pristine forest terrain and rugged mountain ranges. Offering personalised attention and facilities to physically unwind. It has been found in literature that the content and process of strategy emerge as two distinctly separate, but related concepts, and there appears to be no direct underlying relationship between strategy content and the process of strategy making but there is rather a relationship arising from and which is attributable to the holistic nature of an open social system (Van de Ven 1979 as cited by Seveg, 1987). Next stage of group development is storming; this is the stage when intra-group conflict and hostility can arise. All members of our group worked well together, but with a lot of challenging conflict. I believe we lacked the values of leadership skills, which did not give us the reinforcement to perform better. The ability to influence and develop individuals of a team, in order to achieve a worthwhile vision which meets the current needs of everyone and everything required by the form of work (Cacioppe, 2001 as cited in Volckmann 2005). Leadership skills portrayed at least by a member is required for a team to stay focused and move towards their goals. Leaders appear everywhere, depending on the circumstances that require them to exert leadership (Wheatley, 2005). This was least reflected by the chosen leader or the other members of the team. A self-managed team is an unsupervised group of people responsible for a task; they are given complete control over group membership and behaviors. Our self-managed team as in all other teams consisted of differing group-task roles, group roles fall into three categories; task, maintenance and self-orientated. Group-task related members help the group develop and accomplish its tasks and goals; and the group-maintenance, members within my group provided differences of opinions constantly but had a good level of interpersonal relationships with members, which to a level fostered group harmony but still resulted in ineffective group work (Bartol et al. , 2005). As my group progressed to the norming stage our relationships, goals and plans were still unclear, but we had to head off our ways to complete the assignment. Even though most of everything that we were supposed to do was unclear for us, we came to a consensus decision where the expression of cognitive conflict among members of the group is encouraged without allowing an explicit group interaction (Priem, Harrison and Muir, 1995). We then progressed to the performing stage of group development. This stage entails the development of interpersonal relationships, problem solving and achievement of performance, but was our performance a successful one? It is evident that there was lack of clarity throughout, but good level of interpersonal skills were maintained, however problem solving as a team lacked. At this stage I personally thought of revising my strategy for th resort management as it was long. The all-season resort destination specializing in world-class alpine skiing and recreation facilities with historic and cultural focus, nestled amongst pristine forest terrain and rugged mountain ranges away from the hustle bustle of daily life. Offering our customers personalised attention and facilities to physically unwind. After trying to put our heads to the requirements of our assignment we tried one last time to gather thoughts together thereby entering the adjourning stage, this involves goal accomplishment and the ultimate movement away from the group (Miller, 2003). We met together for the final time and reflected upon what we gathered and if what we gathered was sufficient and appropriate for our assignment. Overall, as a group we came to the mutual agreement that we as a team had no goal to achieve and our time was insignificantly wasted as we lacked an understanding of what we were to do and how we were to go about it. In conclusion the final strategy personally created was what remained for the organisation. As a group we departed our directions in order to formulate a strategy for the upcoming resort hotel. According Tuckman (1965) as cited by (Miller,2003) stages of team development we were unable to fit as we really did not understand our task at hand.

The legacy of Pharaonic EgyptThe Legacy of Pharaonic Egypt essays

The legacy of Pharaonic EgyptThe Legacy of Pharaonic Egypt essays In his scholarly work,The Legacy of Pharaonic Egypt, G. Mokhtar investigates individuals expanded the scope of their intellectual and technical abilities by contributing significantly to the following areas: astronomy, mathematics, and architecture. Ancient Egyptians used astronomy for making their calendars, positioning the pryamids, and telling time at night. Ancient Egyptians used astronomy in their calendars because there life revolved around the annual flooding of the Nile. This resulted in three seasons, the flooding, the subsistence of the river, and harvesting. Astronomy was also used in positioning the pyramids. They were aligned very accurately, the eastern and western sides ran north and the southern and northern sides ran west. The pyramids were probably originally aligned by finding north or south, and then using the midpoint as east or west. This is because it was possible to find north and south by watching stars rise and set. Ancient Egyptians also used astronomy to create a catalogue of the universe in which five constellations were recognized. They also were able to discover 36 groups of stars called decans. These decans allowed them to tell time at night because the decans would rise 40 minutes la ter each night. The mathematics of Egypt, especially arithmetic and geometry, enabled Ancient Egyptians to be able to count the number of bricks that would be needed to build a pryamid. It also allowed them to find the area of a field, the volume of grain in a silo. Knowledge of arthimetic, algebra, and geometry also proved to be of great importantance in calculating the area of land eroded or added each year by flooding. Probably the most famous architectural structure in all of Egypt, the pyramids are still one of the worlds best architectural achievement, even though they were built many centuries ago. These structures can be as tall as 482 feet (147 m) high. The Pyramid towers over ...

Dearborn, MI Veterans Disability Lawyers Attorneys

Dearborn, MI Veterans Disability Lawyers Attorneys Dearborn Veterans Disability AttorneysBenefits for Michigan VeteransFew firms have the dedication and skills necessary to handle claims before the Department of Veterans Affairs. Disability Attorneys of Michigan is a firm with a strong reputation for providing excellent service.Our Dearborn Attorneys are dedicated to representing Veterans in their fight for the federal disability benefits they so rightfully deserve. Whether you have been denied disability, or you believe you deserve a higher rating, Disability Attorneys of Michigan can handle your appeal at any stage of the process.With Attorneys accredited to handle cases before the Department of Veterans Affairs, Board of Veterans’ Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, you can trust that you will get the highest level of representation possible.We fight for disabled veterans who had the courage to fight for us!Agent OrangePost Traumatic Stress Disorder â€Å"PTSD†Traumatic Brain Injury à ¢â‚¬Å"TBI†Disability Compensation for Service ConnectionNon Service Connected Pension BenefitsSecondary Service Connected ClaimsDependency and Indemnity CompensationIndividual Unemployability and more!When disabled veterans should appealThere are several different time limits to filing an appeal with an adverse decision from VA.If you received a Rating Decision from the Department of Veterans Affairs†¦You have the option to file a Notice of Disagreement to appeal this decision. A Notice of Disagreement must be filed within 1 year from the date of the mailing of the VA notice to the claimant of the adverse Rating Decision.If you received a Statement of the Case†¦You can file a VA Form 9, Appeal to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. The VA Form 9 must be filed with the VA Regional Office within 60 days of receipt of the Statement of the Case, or within the remainder of the one-year period from the date of mailing of the Rating Decision by the VA Regional Office, wh ichever period ends later.If you received a denial from the Board of Veterans’ Appeals†¦If you disagree with the final decision from the Board of Veterans’ Appeals and want to appeal, you must file a Notice of Appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims within 120 days after the date the Board of Veterans’ Appeals mailed a copy of its final decision. That date which is stamped on the front of the decision.Read Our Client Testimonials:Erika has been absolutely amazing from beginning to end. She always took the time to answer all of my questions and kept me informed of any new aspects as we went through the appeal process. She is also an extremely understanding compassionate person. Even if I had not won my appeal, I would still give her a glowing recommendation. -Deanna, Dearborn MIMy family and I couldn’t have been happier with the Disability Attorneys of Michigan. Specifically, Erika went above and beyond to explain everything thoroughly and ensure a successful outcome. Erika’s compassion not only for her work, but for families that she works with is second to none. Erika and DAM are highly recommended. Michael, Dearborn MI Dearborn is located in Wayne County and is part of the Detroit metropolitan area. Dearborn is the eighth largest city in the State of Michigan. Dearborn has a population of 98,153 and is home to the largest Muslim population in the United States.Wayne County Legal Resources:Dearborn Area Chamber of Commerce One of the five core initiatives is community promotion which will showcase Dearborn community as a great place to live, work and play in an effort to promote and increase local business.The Henry Ford The Henry Fords mission is to provide unique educational experiences based on authentic objects, stories, and lives from America’s traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and innovation. Our purpose is to inspire people to learn from these traditions to help shape a b etter future.Ford Community Center The Ford Community Center offers fitness activities, cultural arts and entertainment, and senior activities.Practice AreasSocial Security DisabilityVeterans Disability WATCH OURLATEST VIDEOS WHAT DO OURCLIENTS SAY? FREQUENTLY ASKEDQUESTIONS My family and I couldnt have been happier with the Disability Attorneys of Michigan. Our lawyer went above and beyond to explain everything thoroughly and ensure a successful outcome. Her compassion not only for her work, but for families that she works with, is second to none. I highly recommend DAM. Dearborn, MI Veterans Disability Lawyers Attorneys

Knowledge management questions Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Knowledge management questions - Assignment Example People establish knowledge through observation, patterns of recurrence and finally generalizing and abstraction. He also explained the phenomena in nature which cannot be perceived by the senses as those which can be explained by the intuition (AMDS 8800 Study Notes; Barnes 72-74). Aristotle’s objective to establish and to define the different knowledge is related to epistemology, a branch of philosophy that if focused on the establishment of knowledge. This is important for knowledge managers to be able to know and be conscious of the importance of the knowledge they manage. Specifically, Aristotle’s view helped the knowledge managers appreciate and then segregate the different forms and classification of knowledge. His focus on the rules of the inductive and deductive thinking established the rules and guidelines for critical analysis of the different knowledge systems. Aristotle’s contribution in the foundations of scientific method specifically the importance of empirical basis in the establishment of knowledge is essential on the development of the body of knowledge presently used (AMDS 8800 Study Notes; Barnes 72-74). The message of Aristotle’s view then is for knowledge managers to be conscious of the different types of knowledge, skills and capabilities generated by different people and to appreciate and analyze them through critical study of important empirical evidences. Knowledge Management (KM) is a business model that is focused on the interdisciplinary management of knowledge in an organizational framework and objectives on the basis of disciplines such as business, economics, psychology, and information management. It is focused on the different issues related to people, technology, and processes. The process of KM involves accessing â€Å"knowledge from outside sources, then embedding and storing knowledge in the business processes, products and services.† These are then translated to the databases and documents,

Introduction, Vision, Mission, Goals and Obsjectives of Continental Research Paper

Introduction, Vision, Mission, Goals and Obsjectives of Continental Airlines - Research Paper Example UAL has the world’s widest global route, because it can travel in the U.S., Asia?Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America (UAL, 2011, p.4). UAL has 5,600 flights a day to â€Å"more than 370 U.S. domestic and international destinations† from the Company’s usual routes at â€Å"Newark Liberty International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Denver International Airport, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Hopkins International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, A.B. Won Pat International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, and Washington Dulles International Airport† (UAL, 2011, p.4). When regional operations are added, United has around 3,200 flights a day to more than 235 domestic and international places since January 1, 2012 (UAL, 2011, p.4). UAL’s present strategy is â€Å"unbundling† existing products and services, enhancing value?added products, and providing customers with greater flexibility and choice in choosing the products and services they are ready to buy (UAL, 2011, p.38). The company also aims to invest in technology that helps assist customers with efficient self-service tools and enables the company to make high-quality operational decisions, while decreasing operating costs (UAL, 2011, p.38). UAL posted a net income of $840 million in 2011, which is 232% higher in 2012 (UAL, 2011, p.32). ... One of UAL’s existing goals is to earn â€Å"$1.0 billion to $1.2 billion in net annual synergies on a run?rate basis in 2013, including between $800 million and $900 million of annual revenue synergies from its merger† (UAL, 2011, p.4). In order to attain this goal, its objectives are to expand customer options, to attain greater scope and scale, to optimize fleet operations, and to expand services (UAL, 2011, p.4). UAL also wants to control fuel prices through hedging future fuel requirements (UAL, 2011, p.14). Nonetheless, the Company’s hedging programs may employ noteworthy amounts of cash, because of the posting of cash collateral in several instances, so it might not be effective in controlling fuel costs and may be restricted due to market conditions and other reasons (UAL, 2011, p.14). Moreover, considerable reductions in fuel prices may augment the costs related with the Company’s fuel hedging arrangements to the degree that it uses swaps or colla rs (UAL, 2011, p.14). Swaps and sold-put alternatives (which belongs to a collar) may obligate the company to pay to the counterparty upon decision on the contracts, if the cost of the commodity hedged goes below the agreed upon quantity (UAL, 2011, p.14). Falling crude and other prices may result to significant amounts of collateral to pay for these swaps (UAL, 2011, p.14). Furthermore, UAL aims to reduce operational costs by promoting website use for customers and enhancing the capabilities of the company website (UAL, 2011, p.7). It seeks to improve availability of new services and ease of access at its website (UAL, 2011, p.7). Moreover, UAL is pursuing different actions to decrease its carbon

Painting and architecture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Painting and architecture - Essay Example Baroque paintingBaroque painting is mainly related to the underlying Baroque cultural movement mainly identified with the underlying Absolutism, the renowned Counter-Reformation and corresponding Catholic Revival. It is mainly characterized by massive performance, rich, Deep color and deep light and dark shadows(Bohn &Saslow, 2013). Moreover, it depicts the moment prior to an event. Baroque painting style commenced within Rome, Italy and subsequently spread to other parts of Europe. Similarities and contrast between Baroque and Renaissance architectureBoth Baroque painting and Renaissance architecture style commenced in Italy then subsequently spread to other parts of Europe. Baroque and Renaissance arts are interrelated in regard to painting and architecture in that they both utilize distinctive classical forms, which are used in books, valuable objects and oil painting(Bohn &Saslow, 2013). Both of the arts balance the good proportion within the architecture and sculptures. Moreover , both baroque painting and corresponding Renaissance architecture are the main classical forms that were utilized within the Renaissance in attracting distinct attention on the clarity and corresponding realism.Conversely, Renaissance architecture mainly utilizes Classical art in which the Roman and corresponding Roman and Greek art whilst Baroque painting commence by breaking away from corresponding Classical art and utilizes numerous curves and flowery patterns.

Huffman Trucking Essay Example for Free

Huffman Trucking Essay Huffman Trucking is a large organization that provides transportation of goods and services to its customers. In order to better serve these customers and to compete and stay at a high level above other suppliers, Huffman Trucking management enlisted the assistance of Team B to upgrade their companies systems to be able to create, maintain, and report on a database, which tracks the servicing of Huffman Trucking vehicles. Huffman Trucking has a number of business needs that should be met. The system should not require more than a few days of supervision to learn. It should be usable on modestly priced computer systems. Most of all, it should be simple and convenient for the users. The current system is not meeting business objectives because they are not able to tracks the servicing of the vehicles at Huffman Trucking. Huffman employees usually scan alphabeticly for vehicles . This is a fairly simple procedure if the exact name of the vechilce is available. However, many new employes may only know the few words of the vechile type. A tracked vehicle could possibly be misfiled, which requires a full stock review to find it. With the new shipment of vechicles need maintanes every month, it is close to impossible for a counter employee memorize Project Requirements There are two different types of requirements for this project. One is the technical requirements of the chosen database system and another is the business requirements of the Huffman Trucking. The business requirements  define the boundaries. Starting college can be like entering an entirely new world. You have more freedom than youve ever had before and you are in total control over your own life. This increased responsibility however can make you susceptible to some serous pitfalls. Read the following article to learn what habits to avoid in order to have a successful college career. Business Accounting Project Overview Huffman Trucking is a large organization that provides transportation of goods and services to its customers. In order to better serve these customers and to compete and stay at a high level above other suppliers, Huffman Trucking management enlisted the assistance of Team B to upgrade their companies systems to be able to create, maintain, and report on a database, which tracks the servicing of Huffman Trucking vehicles. Huffman Trucking has a number of business needs that should be met. The system should not require more than a few days of supervision to learn. It should be usable on modestly priced computer systems. Most of all, it should be simple and convenient for the users. The current system is not meeting business objectives because they are not able to tracks the servicing of the vehicles at Huffman Trucking. Huffman employees usually scan alphabeticly for vehicles . This is a fairly simple procedure if the exact name of the vechilce is available. However, many new employes may only know the few words of the vechile type. A tracked vehicle could possibly be misfiled, which requires a full stock review to find it. With the new shipment of vechicles need maintanes every month, it is close to impossible for a counter employee memorize Project Requirements There are two different types of requirements for this project. One is the technical requirements of the chosen database system and another is the  business requirements of the Huffman Trucking. The business requirements define the boundaries in which the project team has room to operate in. Huffman requires that the new system be relatively inexpensive with little ongoing maintenance required. The new system should not require many hours of training in order to use. The new system should also be usable  gout of the box. h Given these business requirements.

High Technology Semiconductor Company Acquisitions

High Technology Semiconductor Company Acquisitions The fast rate of technological change was one of the most important trends in the 1990s and this brought an increasing complexity and cost to the development of new technologies. Companies used their innovative assets as a major source of competitive advantage to quickly introduce new products and adopt new processes (Sen and Egelhoff, 2000). Acquisitions are completed in many industries for reasons that are aligned with the dominant competitive driving forces for that industry. In the area of high technology and seminconductors, the competitive drivers are short product life cycles and process advancement. Process advances are required to both support the incremental changes to existing products and to allow the creation of radically new one. The number of acquisitions rapidly increased through the decade for several reasons: the product life cycle was getting shorter; participating in the creation of industry and product standards was crucial; early entry helped capture market shar e; and R D risk could be reduced. Hagedoorn (1993) found the reduction in innovation time and acquisition of needed technologies as the most important reasons for one company to pursue another. Several researchers have written about the radical and incremental innovation capabilities, their distinguishing factors and the important consequences to the corporation. It has also been argued that large firms are effective with incremental innovations and small firms are better at radical innovations. (Ettlie, Bridges, and OKeefe, 1984; Dewar and Dutton, 1986; Christensen, 1992). Corporate decision to acquire or not acquire another company embodies a high level, serious management strategy decision toward repositioning a company in the competitive landscape. The decade from 1990 to 2000 was chosen as an important time for acquisition activity. There was frequent activity in acquisitions during a time of stable economic conditions creating good conditions for analysis. In 1990, the dollar value of all acquisitions and mergers in the United States was two percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2000, the value reached over 15% of the GDP (Mergerstat, 2003). In the first 10 months of 2000, in the technology sector alone, there were 2,019 acquisition and merger deals worth $573 billion (Reason, 2000). This occurred despite studies done in the 1980s and 1990s that found little positive effect financially for the acquiring company. The magnitude of the activity strongly suggests that some positive relationship could be found if examined in a different way o r using new metrics. This research uses a different methodology by exploring a single industry, selecting profitability growth as the metric from theoretical industry driving forces and analyzing profitability over time as a statistical repeated measures model using SPSS software. The results from this work may have strategic implications for remaining competitive in high technology, high-velocity industries. It should be noted here that the term acquisition, mergers and acquisitions and M A will be used interchangeably in this research and are defined in Appendix A along with other important terms. In high technology industries, such as semiconductors, a firm interested in new product innovation must aggressively invest to stay at the leading edge. Creating or acquiring new offerings can be dependent on a combination of efforts directed either internal or external to the company. Internal efforts include primarily Research and Development (R D) or newly formed affiliates, termed greenfields (Vermeulen Barkema, 2001; Sonenclar, 1984; Bradley Korn, 1981). External efforts can take the form of acquisition or mergers to best capture the intellectual property (IP) that is maintained in the categories of trade secret and proprietary know-how. Acquisitions, when done well, appear to have the advantage of capturing this kind of IP as compared to the other forms of external efforts. Acquisitions also potentially offer faster repositioning with less risk and lower cost than pursuing internal company endeavors (Singh Montgomery, 1987). A high technology companys success hinges on crea tion of innovative ideas, availability of creative personnel, speed of new product execution and cost effectiveness. Mergers and acquisitions are a highly favored management avenue for growth and competitive positioning. The importance of this management consideration and the impact of mergers and acquisitions continue to expand with billions of dollars involved. The importance in the technology sector becomes apparent when looking at the 724 firms that made their initial public offering (IPO) in 1992, but were not acquired or merged. Of these companies, 58% were selling at less than their IPO price six years later (Small Business Statistics, 2000). Product and service offering must constantly evolve and change (Thompson Strickland, 2001). High velocity innovation is fundamental to the growth and survival of high technology businesses. Organizations that are successful have a regular stream of unique products and services. Hewlett-Packard had over 50% of revenue in 1999 coming from products introduced in the previous two to four years. In high technology companies, the highest profit levels come from the newest products. Consequently, it is imperative to accelerate the innovation cycle, often through mergers and acquisitions, and this is critically important to remaining competitive. Entrepreneurial firms consistently outperform larger firms in both market and earnings growth on the Inc. 500 and Forbes 200 lists (Imparato Harari, 1994). There are several potential reasons for making an acquisition that have been identified and studied in the literature. In addition to the reasons for actually acquiring, there are a number of factors following the event that will influence the degree of success or failure that these efforts may experience. These elements that play a part in determining the outcome have been the focus of studies that are summarized in the Literature Review. WHAT MAKES HIGH-TECH COMPANIES AND THEIR ACQUISITIONS UNIQUE Both the popular business press as well as recent academic research seems to uniformly accept the unique nature of high-tech stocks. Kohers and Kohers (2000) state: The high-growth nature of technology-based industries distinguishes them from other types of industries. In addition to their high-growth potential, however, another distinctive feature of high-tech industries is the inherent uncertainty associated with companies whose values rely on future outcomes or developments is unproven, uncharted fields (p. 40). In fact, many pure technology stocks are young companies, underfunded and without prospects for generating any cash flows in the near future. Nevertheless, despite the inherent uncertainty of high-tech industries, investors seemed to disregard most equity fundamentals when valuing technology stocks, especially during the market upturn in the late 1990s. As a result, even though high-tech stocks were in general extremely volatile, many of them were trading at remarkable pre miums. The exploding rate of growth in M A activity that involved high-tech industries can be partly attributed to those overly optimistic valuations. Puranam (2001) argues: On the acquirers side, booming stock market valuations have made acquisitions for stock feasible for several relatively small (revenue wise) firms, as well as the more established larger ones. On the targets side, an increasing preference for the ready liquidity offered, by an acquisition, as opposed to the paper profits from an IPO have created an environment conducive to acquisitions of small start-ups. At the same time many of these acquisitions were also motivated by the acquirers need to obtain critical technologies and expertise in order to quickly enhance their own technological competence. Despite the burst of the high-tech market bubble and the failure of most of these acquisitions, investors continue to show an extreme faith on these stocks. Americans still believe that technology can create a better world. Each time the U.S. tech sector falls into a trough, new technologies and companies emerge to lead it forward again (Business Week, August 27, 2001). PROBLEM MOTIVATING THIS STUDY This research effort seeks to understand the relationship between acquisitions and profitability by looking at the industrial sector for high technology semiconductor companies. Many prior studies have shown little financial benefit to the acquiring company in research conducted beginning in the 1980s and extending to today using a variety of variables, measures and company sample selection. These studies will be discussed in more detail in the Literature Review. The researchers Rumelt (1984), Ravenscraft and Scherer (1987), Porter (1987) and Kaplan and Weisbach (1990) separately found that acquisitions that could be categorized as unrelated, or diversifications, did not lead to profitability improvements, but most of these studies obviously included a cross-section of divergent industries. The importance of innovation and new products in high velocity, competitive environments is discussed in literature and high velocity innovation is fundamental to the growth, profitability and sur vival of these businesses (Thompson and Strickland, 1999; Betz, 2001; Burgelman, Christensen and Wheelwright, 2004). The competitive advantage of capturing intellectual property through acquisition has also been discussed more recently. More clear evidence is beginning to emerge concerning the drive to acquire technology and the unique features of doing so (Prentice Fox, 2002). This research examines the correlation between the event of acquisition and subsequent company performance and growth of profitability in the decade of 1990-2000. Practicing managers in the area of management of technology are faced with the challenge of high velocity innovation being a requirement to maintain competitive positioning (Thompson Strickland, 2001). Two methods for constant innovation include internal efforts, such as Research Development (R D), and external efforts, such as acquisitions, on which this paper focuses. Prior studies have been cross-sectional across different industries and analyzed the benefits gained in terms of patents and R D (Bettis 1981), stock price (Matsusaka, 1990; Schleifer and Vishny, 1990; and Lubatkin, 1982) or increase in company size versus the cost of acquisitions. These studies have not captured one of the most unique features of the high technology industry where innovation and new products are dependent on intellectual property (IP) that is maintained in the categories of trade secret and proprietary know-how. Because of this characteristic, the high technology industry would be expected to yield different results. The importance of IP and know-how has been an area of academic focus working to clarify the concept of absorptive capacity in the 1990s, but empirical work to tie these concepts to firm performance was not pursued (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Barney, 1991; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The use of patents as a measure, as used in prior research (Acs and Aud retsch, 1988; Pakes and Griliches, 1980; Hitt, Hoskisson, Ireland and Harrison, 1991), does not capture the IP benefits in these categories or measure the success resulting from these external efforts. Acquisitions, when done well, should be expected to have an advantage on capturing this kind of IP. Acquisitions potentially offer faster positioning with less risk and lower cost than internal company endeavors which include primarily Research and Development (R D) (Gulati, 1995; Singh Montgomery, 1987). STUDY OVERVIEW This research effort focuses on one high technology industrial sector of semiconductors and studies the correlation between acquisitions, profitability, survivability and RD intensity over time. Many prior studies (Rumelt, 1984; Ravenscraft and Scherer, 1987; Porter, 1987; and Kaplan and Weisbach, 1990) have shown little financial benefit to the acquiring company, but most of these studies included a cross-section of divergent industries. The importance of innovation and new products in high velocity, competitive environments is widely discussed in literature. High velocity innovation is fundamental for the theory of growth, profitability and survival of these businesses. The competitive advantage of capturing intellectual property through acquisition has also been discussed more recently. More clear evidence is beginning to emerge concerning the drive to acquire technology and the unique features of doing so (Prentice Fox, 2002). This paper researches the correlation between the ev ent of acquisition and subsequent company performance, survivability, the growth of profitability and R D spending. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ON HIGH-TECH COMPANIES Most research on high-tech companies is relatively recent and has its origin in various business fields. Chaudhuri and Tabrizi (1999) study the practices of 24 high-tech companies involved in acquisitions, and try to identify the key factors in capturing the real value in high-tech acquisitions. They conclude that in order to make a successful acquisition managers need to move beyond the traditional model of acquisitions where the people acquired are secondary to physical assets and brands. High-tech acquisitions need to focus on the people since technological capabilities tied to skilled people are the key to long-term success in these industries. Arora, Fosfuri and Gambardella (2000) examine how the growth of markets for technology affected the corporate strategies of the leading companies, which can now sell technologies that they do not use in-house and increase their potential returns to R D. They argue that globalization, along with the low transportation costs of technologies, has made large R D intensive companies realize that they have the potential to exploit their technology on a very large scale by licensing. However, in deciding how to exploit their technology small firms and technology-based startups face a different set of challenges. According to the authors they need to trade off the costs of acquiring capital and building in-house production, distribution and marketing capability against the rents that would be lost or shared with their partners in a licensing deal. Also, the authors argue that integration may reduce the innovative potential of the firm, because the acquisition of the complementary assets in evitably increases the size of firms and induces important changes in the culture of the firm and in the speed and fluidity of information flows. Finally, they claim that evaluating technologies and being able to use them requires substantial in-house scientific and technological expertise and therefore internal and external R D can be reviewed as complements and not substitutes. Liu (2000) focuses on a different issue by examining the markets reaction to innovation news announcement made by the U.S. biotech firms during the 1983-1992 period. He finds that the average AR to the announcements is as high as 3.98 percent for a three-day event window and biotech stocks trading volumes almost double on the day of the news announcement. The announcement period ARs are negatively related to firm-size and underwriter reputation, while positively related to the firms technology depth as measured by R D intensity. However, during the months following the announcement the average three-month post announcement AR is 2.73 percent. The negative drift in stock prices appears to be mainly driven by the firms weak science and technology (less R D intensive), firms with high Book to Market (B/M) ratios and large firms. In explaining his findings the author proposes an expectation error hypothesis. According to this hypothesis it is hard for investors or even managers to prec isely evaluate the economic value of innovations which in turn leads to the possibility of forming erroneous expectations. In high-tech industries the erroneous expectation is reflected in the investors over-optimism towards high-tech firms innovation news. Eventually, the stock prices adjust itself to reflect the firms fundamentals, especially its technology depth. The author attributes the observed evidence to the costly information required to value a high-tech firms innovation. Prentice and Fox (2002) provide a comprehensive review of the merger and acquisition process while focusing on the distinctive characteristics of high-tech companies. They argue that technology mergers are different from traditional mergers because of the importance that must be placed on people and their ability to innovate. Targets must be evaluated on intangible assets such as intellectual property and human capital. At the same time managers need to consider the issues of retention, culture and integration strategy from the beginning of the merger process to ensure success. There are two studies that are most relevant to this research. The first one is by Kohers and Kohers (2000) who examine the value creation potential of 1,634 mergers in the various high-tech areas between 1987 and 1996. They find that acquirers of high-tech targets experience significantly positive Ars at the time of the merger announcement, regardless of whether the merger is financed with cash or stock. Othe r factors influencing bidder returns are the time period in which the merger occurs, the ownership structure of the acquirer, the ownership status of the target and the high-tech affiliation of acquirers. They conclude that the market appears to be optimistic about such mergers and expects that acquiring companies will enjoy future growth benefits. The second related study is also by Kohers and Kohers (2001) who examine the post-merger performance of acquirers that purchase high-tech targets in order to determine whether the high expectations regarding the future merits of these investments are actually justified. Their results indicate that compared to non acquirers, acquirers perform poorly over the three-year period following the high-tech takeover announcement. Furthermore, glamour bidders show significantly lower long-run ARs, while value bidders do not experience significant post-merger ARs. Also, glamour bidders with a higher risk of agency problems show even worse post-merger performance while institutional ownership in the acquiring firm has a positive influence on acquirer long run ARs. Overall, the authors conclude that the market tends to exhibit excessive enthusiasm toward the expected benefits of high-tech mergers but many of these benefits do not materialize. CHAPTER 3 HYPOTHESES, METHODOLOGY AND DATA SOURCES STATEMENT OF HYPOTHESES Previous research in the literature has generally found little financial benefit for the acquiring companies that were associated with occurrence of the acquisition activity (Rumelt, 1974; Ravenscraft and Scherer, 1987; Porter, 1987; and Kaplan and Weisbach, 1990). Consequently, the first and second questions for this study are focused using the single industry of semiconductors, are stated in the null hypothesis format. First, firm profitability growth rates are compared in two groups, one that does acquire and one that does not. Secondly, individual firm profitability growth is examined before and after an acquisition event looking for a change in growth rate that is significant. Hypothesis 1 (H1): There will be no significant difference in profitability growth when firms making acquisitions are compared to firms not making acquisitions in the high-tech sector. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Acquiring firms making acquisitions are expected to have no significant change in profitability growth before and after the acquisition event. The literature yields less empirical work in analyzing the relationship between merger and acquisition actions and the longevity of a corporation. Theory certainly recognizes the close link between competitive capability and company survival. For the high technology industry of semiconductors, high velocity innovation is a requirement for remaining competitive. Research questions three and four are also stated in the null hypothesis format. Company longevity, or survival rate in number of year, is compared in two groups also, where one group does acquire and one does not. Lastly, an individual firms spending rate on R D is examined before and after an acquisition event looking for a significant change in the rate compared to the trend for the company. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Firms making acquisitions are expected to have no difference in survivability in this industry than firms who do not make acquisitions. Hypothesis 4 (H4): A companys R D intensity will show no significant change following the event of acquisition within this industry. SELECTION OF VARIABLES This research was conducted in a concentric approach by starting with one independent and one dependent variable initially to define the relationship and guide the next treatment in the study. As work continued, variables were selected and the methodology expanded to assess both within-subject and between-subject effects. The variables used in this study for Hypothesis 1 (H1) include profitability growth rate and a dummy variable to represent the presence or absence of the event of acquisition. The event of acquisition is represented by a dummy variable with a zero (0) representing no acquisition and with a one (1) representing an acquisition event. An acquisition event is identified by using a firms reported cash flows attributed to acquisition as stated in the Compustat database. The profitability growth rate is calculated from the total gross profit margin reported by year and cumulated over three years, then averaged to reduce fluctuations and facilitate identification of trends. The variables used for H2 analysis of profitability growth rate before and after an acquisition were the dummy variable for the presence of acquisition, the gross profit margin percentage (GPM %) calculated as a three (3) year cumulative average growth rate (CAGR) to smooth fluctuations and better identify a trend. This relationship was studied for three (3) years prior to the actual acquisition and five (5) years following the action. As the study progressed, a second dummy variable was used for company size to separate the effect of this independent variable as well. A repeated measures matrix was designed with two dummy independent variable as well. A repeated measures matrix was designed with two dummy independent variables, each with two levels and one dependent variable with repeated measures over nine years for a 2 x 2 x 9 repeated measures analysis using the SPPS software. The variables used for H3 analysis of acquisition relation to firm longevity were the acquisition dummy variable and the data from Compustat for the number of years that the company did financial reporting during the period of this study. H4 looks for the effects between acquisition and RD spending or intensity by using the acquisition dummy independent variable and R D intensity as the dependent variable. R D intensity is calculated using the R D expense reported as such by the companies and in the Compustat database. This Compustat item represents all costs incurred during the year that relate to the development of new products or services. This amount is only the company`s contribution and includes software and amortization of software costs and complies with Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) standards. This item excludes customer or government-sponsored research and development (including reimbursable indirect costs) and ordinary engineering expenses for routine, ongoing efforts to define, enrich, or improve the qualities of existing products. Methodology This study encompasses the time period of ten years from 1990-2000, inclusive. Semiconductor companies were selected as an entire group according to their NAICS/SIC codes. Using the Standard Poors Compustat database, there are 153 semiconductor companies included that were identified as active companies at the end of the calendar year 2000 by Compustat. These companies are listed in Appendix B. Active reporting for one year. Companies are designated as inactive and reclassified in the Compustat database when it is no longer actively traded on a stock market exchange due to bankruptcy, becoming a private company, leveraged buyout or merging. The research effort started with analysis one independent variable and one dependent variable in order to initially establish what the relationship was that existed, if it was significant and how to proceed with analysis. Exploratory work on Hypothesis 1 showed that there was a statistically significant and positive correlation between acquisitions and gross profit margin (GMP) growth broadly over the decade which differs from prior research. Hypothesis 2 moves toward a more detailed analysis of this finding. Consequently, in this chronology of discovery, the next step presented in Section 4.2 look at one dependent variable of profit margin growth and two independent variables of company size and acquisition activity. 3-way ANNOVA and regression treatments of the data are conducted using the data analysis tool available under Microsoft Excel Software looking at individual years in the ten year study period. The results show significance again and suggest that other interactions betwe en variables would yield additional understanding. The next step in the research was set up to look at one dependent variable, again gross margin (GPM) growth, repeatedly measured over time for each subject or company was entered for the nine (9) years 1995-2000 inclusive to capture acquisition effects giving 2 x 2 x 9 repeated measures design. The two independent variables were used in the dummy format with non-acquires given a code zero 0 and acquires assigned at one (1). Company size was the second dummy variable with firms less than $100M in sales per year coded zero (0) and if greater than $100M in sales, assigned a one (1). The statistical analysis using a repeated measures design analyzed the variable interactions and their relationship to GPM growth using the SPSS software. These results are presented in Section 4.5 Repeated Measures Analysis that was done using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics were an important first treatment of the data sets created. This includes the values for the following parameters: mean, median, range variance, standard deviation, kurtosis, and skewness. This treatment looks at characteristics of the data and the degree of normal distribution. The 3-way ANOVA investigations and regression treatment of the data were initially done using the data analysis tool software available in Microsoft Excel. Generally, the data sets for this study vary somewhat from the classical normal distribution, but ANOVA and MANOVA (multivariate ANOVA) within a repeated measures analysis are considered robust to violations of the normal distribution assumption (Maxwell Dealney, 1990; Stevens, 1996) SPSS Advanced Models 11.0 software was used to create general linear models of the data and conduct analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) for the multiple variables in this model with repeated measures. The factors or independent variables were used to divide the population of 153 active semiconductor companies into groups. There were two independent variables used that were designated as dummy variables. The first variable of acquisition separated companies that did complete acquisitions from those that did not complete acquisitions during the decade of study. The second variable grouped the companies by size of sales at the end of the decade by either greater than $100 million or less than $100 million. Then the general linear model procedure was used to test the four null hypotheses, as stated above, regarding the effects of the independent variables on the dependent variable of gross profit margin growth as a repeated measure over the perio d 1992-2000. The investigation included looking at interactions between factors as well as the individual factors and the effects and interactions of covariates. This model specifies the independent variables as covariates for regression analysis. The SPSS repeated measures model creates a matrix for the sums of squares due to the model effects, gives the approximate F statistics and estimates parameters in addition to testing hypotheses. When an F test shows significance, SPSS performs post hoc tests to evaluate the differences between the means. This yields a predicted mean value for the cells of the model. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to named variables to study the portion of variance in the each variable that could be identified as explained and unexpected with regard to the event of acquisition. A covariance tool was also used when looking at the variables described above such as acquisition occurrence, company size and profitability growth changes. This compares whether the two ranges of data move together à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å" that is, whether large values of one set were associated with large values of the other (positive covariance), whether small values of one set were associated with large values of the other (negative covariance), or whether values in both sets were unrelated (covariance near zero). DATA SOURCES Standard Poors Compustat database was used for data collection in this research. The database contains fundamental financial, statistical and market data derived from publicity traded companies trading on the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, OTC and Canadian stock exchanges. The calendar year for a company is the year in which the fiscal year ends and is the time period used as standard in this research. Companies with fiscal years ending in January through May are assigned by Compustant into the year in which the fiscal year begins. Companies with fiscal years that end in June through December are assigned to the year in which the fiscal year ends. The EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval) System database maintained by the United Stated Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) was also used. The EDGAR data is also collected from the same sources that are used to generate the Compustat database. Data from these controlled and verifiable sources were corroborated and augmented with information collected from semiconductor trade journals, company annual reports and the Mergers Acquisitions Journal that tracks statistics in this area. CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION HI à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å" ACQUISITON AND PROFITABILITY RELATIONSHIP A strong positive relationship was found to exist between the presence of acquisition activity and the growth in gross profit margin (GPM) by the end of the ten year study period. The statistical analysis is detailed below and is a departure from previous findings. This finding addresses the central question of this research endeavor to look for a relationship between acquisition events and profitability growth within the one industry of semiconductors. A positive financial effect is found and opens the path for additional analysis in this direction. Consequently, this information forms the foundation for the additional work presented in this research. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON ANALYSIS GOING ON >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> High Technology Semiconductor Company Acquisitions High Technology Semiconductor Company Acquisitions The fast rate of technological change was one of the most important trends in the 1990s and this brought an increasing complexity and cost to the development of new technologies. Companies used their innovative assets as a major source of competitive advantage to quickly introduce new products and adopt new processes (Sen and Egelhoff, 2000). Acquisitions are completed in many industries for reasons that are aligned with the dominant competitive driving forces for that industry. In the area of high technology and seminconductors, the competitive drivers are short product life cycles and process advancement. Process advances are required to both support the incremental changes to existing products and to allow the creation of radically new one. The number of acquisitions rapidly increased through the decade for several reasons: the product life cycle was getting shorter; participating in the creation of industry and product standards was crucial; early entry helped capture market shar e; and R D risk could be reduced. Hagedoorn (1993) found the reduction in innovation time and acquisition of needed technologies as the most important reasons for one company to pursue another. Several researchers have written about the radical and incremental innovation capabilities, their distinguishing factors and the important consequences to the corporation. It has also been argued that large firms are effective with incremental innovations and small firms are better at radical innovations. (Ettlie, Bridges, and OKeefe, 1984; Dewar and Dutton, 1986; Christensen, 1992). Corporate decision to acquire or not acquire another company embodies a high level, serious management strategy decision toward repositioning a company in the competitive landscape. The decade from 1990 to 2000 was chosen as an important time for acquisition activity. There was frequent activity in acquisitions during a time of stable economic conditions creating good conditions for analysis. In 1990, the dollar value of all acquisitions and mergers in the United States was two percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2000, the value reached over 15% of the GDP (Mergerstat, 2003). In the first 10 months of 2000, in the technology sector alone, there were 2,019 acquisition and merger deals worth $573 billion (Reason, 2000). This occurred despite studies done in the 1980s and 1990s that found little positive effect financially for the acquiring company. The magnitude of the activity strongly suggests that some positive relationship could be found if examined in a different way o r using new metrics. This research uses a different methodology by exploring a single industry, selecting profitability growth as the metric from theoretical industry driving forces and analyzing profitability over time as a statistical repeated measures model using SPSS software. The results from this work may have strategic implications for remaining competitive in high technology, high-velocity industries. It should be noted here that the term acquisition, mergers and acquisitions and M A will be used interchangeably in this research and are defined in Appendix A along with other important terms. In high technology industries, such as semiconductors, a firm interested in new product innovation must aggressively invest to stay at the leading edge. Creating or acquiring new offerings can be dependent on a combination of efforts directed either internal or external to the company. Internal efforts include primarily Research and Development (R D) or newly formed affiliates, termed greenfields (Vermeulen Barkema, 2001; Sonenclar, 1984; Bradley Korn, 1981). External efforts can take the form of acquisition or mergers to best capture the intellectual property (IP) that is maintained in the categories of trade secret and proprietary know-how. Acquisitions, when done well, appear to have the advantage of capturing this kind of IP as compared to the other forms of external efforts. Acquisitions also potentially offer faster repositioning with less risk and lower cost than pursuing internal company endeavors (Singh Montgomery, 1987). A high technology companys success hinges on crea tion of innovative ideas, availability of creative personnel, speed of new product execution and cost effectiveness. Mergers and acquisitions are a highly favored management avenue for growth and competitive positioning. The importance of this management consideration and the impact of mergers and acquisitions continue to expand with billions of dollars involved. The importance in the technology sector becomes apparent when looking at the 724 firms that made their initial public offering (IPO) in 1992, but were not acquired or merged. Of these companies, 58% were selling at less than their IPO price six years later (Small Business Statistics, 2000). Product and service offering must constantly evolve and change (Thompson Strickland, 2001). High velocity innovation is fundamental to the growth and survival of high technology businesses. Organizations that are successful have a regular stream of unique products and services. Hewlett-Packard had over 50% of revenue in 1999 coming from products introduced in the previous two to four years. In high technology companies, the highest profit levels come from the newest products. Consequently, it is imperative to accelerate the innovation cycle, often through mergers and acquisitions, and this is critically important to remaining competitive. Entrepreneurial firms consistently outperform larger firms in both market and earnings growth on the Inc. 500 and Forbes 200 lists (Imparato Harari, 1994). There are several potential reasons for making an acquisition that have been identified and studied in the literature. In addition to the reasons for actually acquiring, there are a number of factors following the event that will influence the degree of success or failure that these efforts may experience. These elements that play a part in determining the outcome have been the focus of studies that are summarized in the Literature Review. WHAT MAKES HIGH-TECH COMPANIES AND THEIR ACQUISITIONS UNIQUE Both the popular business press as well as recent academic research seems to uniformly accept the unique nature of high-tech stocks. Kohers and Kohers (2000) state: The high-growth nature of technology-based industries distinguishes them from other types of industries. In addition to their high-growth potential, however, another distinctive feature of high-tech industries is the inherent uncertainty associated with companies whose values rely on future outcomes or developments is unproven, uncharted fields (p. 40). In fact, many pure technology stocks are young companies, underfunded and without prospects for generating any cash flows in the near future. Nevertheless, despite the inherent uncertainty of high-tech industries, investors seemed to disregard most equity fundamentals when valuing technology stocks, especially during the market upturn in the late 1990s. As a result, even though high-tech stocks were in general extremely volatile, many of them were trading at remarkable pre miums. The exploding rate of growth in M A activity that involved high-tech industries can be partly attributed to those overly optimistic valuations. Puranam (2001) argues: On the acquirers side, booming stock market valuations have made acquisitions for stock feasible for several relatively small (revenue wise) firms, as well as the more established larger ones. On the targets side, an increasing preference for the ready liquidity offered, by an acquisition, as opposed to the paper profits from an IPO have created an environment conducive to acquisitions of small start-ups. At the same time many of these acquisitions were also motivated by the acquirers need to obtain critical technologies and expertise in order to quickly enhance their own technological competence. Despite the burst of the high-tech market bubble and the failure of most of these acquisitions, investors continue to show an extreme faith on these stocks. Americans still believe that technology can create a better world. Each time the U.S. tech sector falls into a trough, new technologies and companies emerge to lead it forward again (Business Week, August 27, 2001). PROBLEM MOTIVATING THIS STUDY This research effort seeks to understand the relationship between acquisitions and profitability by looking at the industrial sector for high technology semiconductor companies. Many prior studies have shown little financial benefit to the acquiring company in research conducted beginning in the 1980s and extending to today using a variety of variables, measures and company sample selection. These studies will be discussed in more detail in the Literature Review. The researchers Rumelt (1984), Ravenscraft and Scherer (1987), Porter (1987) and Kaplan and Weisbach (1990) separately found that acquisitions that could be categorized as unrelated, or diversifications, did not lead to profitability improvements, but most of these studies obviously included a cross-section of divergent industries. The importance of innovation and new products in high velocity, competitive environments is discussed in literature and high velocity innovation is fundamental to the growth, profitability and sur vival of these businesses (Thompson and Strickland, 1999; Betz, 2001; Burgelman, Christensen and Wheelwright, 2004). The competitive advantage of capturing intellectual property through acquisition has also been discussed more recently. More clear evidence is beginning to emerge concerning the drive to acquire technology and the unique features of doing so (Prentice Fox, 2002). This research examines the correlation between the event of acquisition and subsequent company performance and growth of profitability in the decade of 1990-2000. Practicing managers in the area of management of technology are faced with the challenge of high velocity innovation being a requirement to maintain competitive positioning (Thompson Strickland, 2001). Two methods for constant innovation include internal efforts, such as Research Development (R D), and external efforts, such as acquisitions, on which this paper focuses. Prior studies have been cross-sectional across different industries and analyzed the benefits gained in terms of patents and R D (Bettis 1981), stock price (Matsusaka, 1990; Schleifer and Vishny, 1990; and Lubatkin, 1982) or increase in company size versus the cost of acquisitions. These studies have not captured one of the most unique features of the high technology industry where innovation and new products are dependent on intellectual property (IP) that is maintained in the categories of trade secret and proprietary know-how. Because of this characteristic, the high technology industry would be expected to yield different results. The importance of IP and know-how has been an area of academic focus working to clarify the concept of absorptive capacity in the 1990s, but empirical work to tie these concepts to firm performance was not pursued (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Barney, 1991; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The use of patents as a measure, as used in prior research (Acs and Aud retsch, 1988; Pakes and Griliches, 1980; Hitt, Hoskisson, Ireland and Harrison, 1991), does not capture the IP benefits in these categories or measure the success resulting from these external efforts. Acquisitions, when done well, should be expected to have an advantage on capturing this kind of IP. Acquisitions potentially offer faster positioning with less risk and lower cost than internal company endeavors which include primarily Research and Development (R D) (Gulati, 1995; Singh Montgomery, 1987). STUDY OVERVIEW This research effort focuses on one high technology industrial sector of semiconductors and studies the correlation between acquisitions, profitability, survivability and RD intensity over time. Many prior studies (Rumelt, 1984; Ravenscraft and Scherer, 1987; Porter, 1987; and Kaplan and Weisbach, 1990) have shown little financial benefit to the acquiring company, but most of these studies included a cross-section of divergent industries. The importance of innovation and new products in high velocity, competitive environments is widely discussed in literature. High velocity innovation is fundamental for the theory of growth, profitability and survival of these businesses. The competitive advantage of capturing intellectual property through acquisition has also been discussed more recently. More clear evidence is beginning to emerge concerning the drive to acquire technology and the unique features of doing so (Prentice Fox, 2002). This paper researches the correlation between the ev ent of acquisition and subsequent company performance, survivability, the growth of profitability and R D spending. CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ON HIGH-TECH COMPANIES Most research on high-tech companies is relatively recent and has its origin in various business fields. Chaudhuri and Tabrizi (1999) study the practices of 24 high-tech companies involved in acquisitions, and try to identify the key factors in capturing the real value in high-tech acquisitions. They conclude that in order to make a successful acquisition managers need to move beyond the traditional model of acquisitions where the people acquired are secondary to physical assets and brands. High-tech acquisitions need to focus on the people since technological capabilities tied to skilled people are the key to long-term success in these industries. Arora, Fosfuri and Gambardella (2000) examine how the growth of markets for technology affected the corporate strategies of the leading companies, which can now sell technologies that they do not use in-house and increase their potential returns to R D. They argue that globalization, along with the low transportation costs of technologies, has made large R D intensive companies realize that they have the potential to exploit their technology on a very large scale by licensing. However, in deciding how to exploit their technology small firms and technology-based startups face a different set of challenges. According to the authors they need to trade off the costs of acquiring capital and building in-house production, distribution and marketing capability against the rents that would be lost or shared with their partners in a licensing deal. Also, the authors argue that integration may reduce the innovative potential of the firm, because the acquisition of the complementary assets in evitably increases the size of firms and induces important changes in the culture of the firm and in the speed and fluidity of information flows. Finally, they claim that evaluating technologies and being able to use them requires substantial in-house scientific and technological expertise and therefore internal and external R D can be reviewed as complements and not substitutes. Liu (2000) focuses on a different issue by examining the markets reaction to innovation news announcement made by the U.S. biotech firms during the 1983-1992 period. He finds that the average AR to the announcements is as high as 3.98 percent for a three-day event window and biotech stocks trading volumes almost double on the day of the news announcement. The announcement period ARs are negatively related to firm-size and underwriter reputation, while positively related to the firms technology depth as measured by R D intensity. However, during the months following the announcement the average three-month post announcement AR is 2.73 percent. The negative drift in stock prices appears to be mainly driven by the firms weak science and technology (less R D intensive), firms with high Book to Market (B/M) ratios and large firms. In explaining his findings the author proposes an expectation error hypothesis. According to this hypothesis it is hard for investors or even managers to prec isely evaluate the economic value of innovations which in turn leads to the possibility of forming erroneous expectations. In high-tech industries the erroneous expectation is reflected in the investors over-optimism towards high-tech firms innovation news. Eventually, the stock prices adjust itself to reflect the firms fundamentals, especially its technology depth. The author attributes the observed evidence to the costly information required to value a high-tech firms innovation. Prentice and Fox (2002) provide a comprehensive review of the merger and acquisition process while focusing on the distinctive characteristics of high-tech companies. They argue that technology mergers are different from traditional mergers because of the importance that must be placed on people and their ability to innovate. Targets must be evaluated on intangible assets such as intellectual property and human capital. At the same time managers need to consider the issues of retention, culture and integration strategy from the beginning of the merger process to ensure success. There are two studies that are most relevant to this research. The first one is by Kohers and Kohers (2000) who examine the value creation potential of 1,634 mergers in the various high-tech areas between 1987 and 1996. They find that acquirers of high-tech targets experience significantly positive Ars at the time of the merger announcement, regardless of whether the merger is financed with cash or stock. Othe r factors influencing bidder returns are the time period in which the merger occurs, the ownership structure of the acquirer, the ownership status of the target and the high-tech affiliation of acquirers. They conclude that the market appears to be optimistic about such mergers and expects that acquiring companies will enjoy future growth benefits. The second related study is also by Kohers and Kohers (2001) who examine the post-merger performance of acquirers that purchase high-tech targets in order to determine whether the high expectations regarding the future merits of these investments are actually justified. Their results indicate that compared to non acquirers, acquirers perform poorly over the three-year period following the high-tech takeover announcement. Furthermore, glamour bidders show significantly lower long-run ARs, while value bidders do not experience significant post-merger ARs. Also, glamour bidders with a higher risk of agency problems show even worse post-merger performance while institutional ownership in the acquiring firm has a positive influence on acquirer long run ARs. Overall, the authors conclude that the market tends to exhibit excessive enthusiasm toward the expected benefits of high-tech mergers but many of these benefits do not materialize. CHAPTER 3 HYPOTHESES, METHODOLOGY AND DATA SOURCES STATEMENT OF HYPOTHESES Previous research in the literature has generally found little financial benefit for the acquiring companies that were associated with occurrence of the acquisition activity (Rumelt, 1974; Ravenscraft and Scherer, 1987; Porter, 1987; and Kaplan and Weisbach, 1990). Consequently, the first and second questions for this study are focused using the single industry of semiconductors, are stated in the null hypothesis format. First, firm profitability growth rates are compared in two groups, one that does acquire and one that does not. Secondly, individual firm profitability growth is examined before and after an acquisition event looking for a change in growth rate that is significant. Hypothesis 1 (H1): There will be no significant difference in profitability growth when firms making acquisitions are compared to firms not making acquisitions in the high-tech sector. Hypothesis 2 (H2): Acquiring firms making acquisitions are expected to have no significant change in profitability growth before and after the acquisition event. The literature yields less empirical work in analyzing the relationship between merger and acquisition actions and the longevity of a corporation. Theory certainly recognizes the close link between competitive capability and company survival. For the high technology industry of semiconductors, high velocity innovation is a requirement for remaining competitive. Research questions three and four are also stated in the null hypothesis format. Company longevity, or survival rate in number of year, is compared in two groups also, where one group does acquire and one does not. Lastly, an individual firms spending rate on R D is examined before and after an acquisition event looking for a significant change in the rate compared to the trend for the company. Hypothesis 3 (H3): Firms making acquisitions are expected to have no difference in survivability in this industry than firms who do not make acquisitions. Hypothesis 4 (H4): A companys R D intensity will show no significant change following the event of acquisition within this industry. SELECTION OF VARIABLES This research was conducted in a concentric approach by starting with one independent and one dependent variable initially to define the relationship and guide the next treatment in the study. As work continued, variables were selected and the methodology expanded to assess both within-subject and between-subject effects. The variables used in this study for Hypothesis 1 (H1) include profitability growth rate and a dummy variable to represent the presence or absence of the event of acquisition. The event of acquisition is represented by a dummy variable with a zero (0) representing no acquisition and with a one (1) representing an acquisition event. An acquisition event is identified by using a firms reported cash flows attributed to acquisition as stated in the Compustat database. The profitability growth rate is calculated from the total gross profit margin reported by year and cumulated over three years, then averaged to reduce fluctuations and facilitate identification of trends. The variables used for H2 analysis of profitability growth rate before and after an acquisition were the dummy variable for the presence of acquisition, the gross profit margin percentage (GPM %) calculated as a three (3) year cumulative average growth rate (CAGR) to smooth fluctuations and better identify a trend. This relationship was studied for three (3) years prior to the actual acquisition and five (5) years following the action. As the study progressed, a second dummy variable was used for company size to separate the effect of this independent variable as well. A repeated measures matrix was designed with two dummy independent variable as well. A repeated measures matrix was designed with two dummy independent variables, each with two levels and one dependent variable with repeated measures over nine years for a 2 x 2 x 9 repeated measures analysis using the SPPS software. The variables used for H3 analysis of acquisition relation to firm longevity were the acquisition dummy variable and the data from Compustat for the number of years that the company did financial reporting during the period of this study. H4 looks for the effects between acquisition and RD spending or intensity by using the acquisition dummy independent variable and R D intensity as the dependent variable. R D intensity is calculated using the R D expense reported as such by the companies and in the Compustat database. This Compustat item represents all costs incurred during the year that relate to the development of new products or services. This amount is only the company`s contribution and includes software and amortization of software costs and complies with Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) standards. This item excludes customer or government-sponsored research and development (including reimbursable indirect costs) and ordinary engineering expenses for routine, ongoing efforts to define, enrich, or improve the qualities of existing products. Methodology This study encompasses the time period of ten years from 1990-2000, inclusive. Semiconductor companies were selected as an entire group according to their NAICS/SIC codes. Using the Standard Poors Compustat database, there are 153 semiconductor companies included that were identified as active companies at the end of the calendar year 2000 by Compustat. These companies are listed in Appendix B. Active reporting for one year. Companies are designated as inactive and reclassified in the Compustat database when it is no longer actively traded on a stock market exchange due to bankruptcy, becoming a private company, leveraged buyout or merging. The research effort started with analysis one independent variable and one dependent variable in order to initially establish what the relationship was that existed, if it was significant and how to proceed with analysis. Exploratory work on Hypothesis 1 showed that there was a statistically significant and positive correlation between acquisitions and gross profit margin (GMP) growth broadly over the decade which differs from prior research. Hypothesis 2 moves toward a more detailed analysis of this finding. Consequently, in this chronology of discovery, the next step presented in Section 4.2 look at one dependent variable of profit margin growth and two independent variables of company size and acquisition activity. 3-way ANNOVA and regression treatments of the data are conducted using the data analysis tool available under Microsoft Excel Software looking at individual years in the ten year study period. The results show significance again and suggest that other interactions betwe en variables would yield additional understanding. The next step in the research was set up to look at one dependent variable, again gross margin (GPM) growth, repeatedly measured over time for each subject or company was entered for the nine (9) years 1995-2000 inclusive to capture acquisition effects giving 2 x 2 x 9 repeated measures design. The two independent variables were used in the dummy format with non-acquires given a code zero 0 and acquires assigned at one (1). Company size was the second dummy variable with firms less than $100M in sales per year coded zero (0) and if greater than $100M in sales, assigned a one (1). The statistical analysis using a repeated measures design analyzed the variable interactions and their relationship to GPM growth using the SPSS software. These results are presented in Section 4.5 Repeated Measures Analysis that was done using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics were an important first treatment of the data sets created. This includes the values for the following parameters: mean, median, range variance, standard deviation, kurtosis, and skewness. This treatment looks at characteristics of the data and the degree of normal distribution. The 3-way ANOVA investigations and regression treatment of the data were initially done using the data analysis tool software available in Microsoft Excel. Generally, the data sets for this study vary somewhat from the classical normal distribution, but ANOVA and MANOVA (multivariate ANOVA) within a repeated measures analysis are considered robust to violations of the normal distribution assumption (Maxwell Dealney, 1990; Stevens, 1996) SPSS Advanced Models 11.0 software was used to create general linear models of the data and conduct analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) for the multiple variables in this model with repeated measures. The factors or independent variables were used to divide the population of 153 active semiconductor companies into groups. There were two independent variables used that were designated as dummy variables. The first variable of acquisition separated companies that did complete acquisitions from those that did not complete acquisitions during the decade of study. The second variable grouped the companies by size of sales at the end of the decade by either greater than $100 million or less than $100 million. Then the general linear model procedure was used to test the four null hypotheses, as stated above, regarding the effects of the independent variables on the dependent variable of gross profit margin growth as a repeated measure over the perio d 1992-2000. The investigation included looking at interactions between factors as well as the individual factors and the effects and interactions of covariates. This model specifies the independent variables as covariates for regression analysis. The SPSS repeated measures model creates a matrix for the sums of squares due to the model effects, gives the approximate F statistics and estimates parameters in addition to testing hypotheses. When an F test shows significance, SPSS performs post hoc tests to evaluate the differences between the means. This yields a predicted mean value for the cells of the model. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to named variables to study the portion of variance in the each variable that could be identified as explained and unexpected with regard to the event of acquisition. A covariance tool was also used when looking at the variables described above such as acquisition occurrence, company size and profitability growth changes. This compares whether the two ranges of data move together à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å" that is, whether large values of one set were associated with large values of the other (positive covariance), whether small values of one set were associated with large values of the other (negative covariance), or whether values in both sets were unrelated (covariance near zero). DATA SOURCES Standard Poors Compustat database was used for data collection in this research. The database contains fundamental financial, statistical and market data derived from publicity traded companies trading on the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, OTC and Canadian stock exchanges. The calendar year for a company is the year in which the fiscal year ends and is the time period used as standard in this research. Companies with fiscal years ending in January through May are assigned by Compustant into the year in which the fiscal year begins. Companies with fiscal years that end in June through December are assigned to the year in which the fiscal year ends. The EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval) System database maintained by the United Stated Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) was also used. The EDGAR data is also collected from the same sources that are used to generate the Compustat database. Data from these controlled and verifiable sources were corroborated and augmented with information collected from semiconductor trade journals, company annual reports and the Mergers Acquisitions Journal that tracks statistics in this area. CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION HI à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å" ACQUISITON AND PROFITABILITY RELATIONSHIP A strong positive relationship was found to exist between the presence of acquisition activity and the growth in gross profit margin (GPM) by the end of the ten year study period. The statistical analysis is detailed below and is a departure from previous findings. This finding addresses the central question of this research endeavor to look for a relationship between acquisition events and profitability growth within the one industry of semiconductors. A positive financial effect is found and opens the path for additional analysis in this direction. 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