What do Apple, Coca Cola and IKEA have in common?

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Only a few of the leading organizations around the world achieved what is called world class excellence. Examples include Apple, Amazon.com, IKEA or Coca Cola. By definition world class excellence is the highest business performance at a global level that stood the test of time, and just those who perform at the top 5% box from a global perspective are regarded as the world class companies. Why don’t we have a look what it takes to attain this so called world class excellence?
Operational Excellence
All world class organizations demonstrate their excellence through exceptionally high standard in operational performances. Operations function in an organization is responsible for fulfilling customer requests through procurement, production and delivery of products and services. It is therefore central to the organization because it produces goods and services that define its reason for existence. The level of performance depends on many factors including quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
Strategic Fit
In any world class organizations, or those on the journey to achieve it, there must be the right strategies at play.
Right strategies are those intermediate the firm with the industrial environment; fit the organization’s capabilities to the stakeholder’s objectives; and matches the internal resources to the market opportunities. Such “fitness” of strategic positioning of a firm is the indispensible ingredient of any successful stories.

Capability to Adapt

Organizations that meet the challenges with the right responses are regarded as success. But when faced with new challenges, all too often, the old successful pattern of response no longer work. The continuing success calls for new and innovative responses that can effectively meet the new challenges — that equate adaptation. Capability to adapt should be part of an organization’s ‘DNA’ that needs to be designed and hard-wired into the business structure and processes

Unique Voice

The Unique Voice means the unique organizational voice. It represents something unique that the organization created and practices in achieving its business success. Unique Voice is as a combined representation of any unique business policy, process and operation that fit particularly well to the organization’s specific circumstance and delivers the winning performance as the result. Research shows that all world class organizations became so by having something unique, something that they do differently from their competitors and as a result they bring about market success. The world is littered with evidences of such uniqueness such as in IKEA.
IKEA is a world leading furnishing company. Its unique voice is a bundle of signature practices that creates the value by enabling customer’s own value creating activities. It offers a brand new division of labor. If the customer agrees to take on certain key tasks traditionally done by manufacturers and retailers – assembly of products and their delivery to customer’s home, then IKEA promise to deliver well-designed products at substantially lower price.

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Good vs. bad bosses:

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No manager was born in his/her role as a leading character in a company. Many of them started as employees with fewer responsibilities. Therefore it is important for them to remember where they started and what they expected from their own managers. So, let us have a look at what exactly employees want from their work experiences.

Old vs. new perspective

The prevalent thinking about rewarding employees up until about 25 years ago was to motivate them using the tools at the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. These are physiological needs including basic needs such as food or shelter and security needs such as job security. The thinking was that as long as the employee was paid adequately, had decent benefits and reasonable job security, then that would be enough. That mode of motivating is no longer suitable. Today’s employees want far more out of their work and from their leaders.

Employers want leadership attention

A McKinsey Quarterly survey in June 2009, found the following results. “The respondents view three noncash motivators – praise from immediate managers, leadership attention (for example, one-on-one conversations), and a chance to lead projects or task forces – as no less or even more effective motivators than the three highest-rated financial incentives: cash bonuses, increased base pay, and stock or stock options.”

This may come as a surprise to some managers, but not to the leaders. Leaders already know this and have been using these tools as motivators for years. This type of leadership style requires excellent communication and interpersonal skills. The smart and effective leader is honing those skills constantly.

Trust
Trust is an important component of leadership and the workplace environment. More is being written about establishing relationships of trust in the workplace. Here are some ideas based on the work of Cloke & Goldsmith (2005):

Discover your future career at Monsanto

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Are you an engineering, business or IT student? Monsanto, one of the world’s leading agricultural technology companies, committed to innovation, focused on working with farmers to produce more with less natural resources, is reaching out to students and graduates! Monsanto offers exceptional careers so if preserving our planet is what moves you and personal and professional development is what excites you then take your career to Monsanto and see where it can take you!Discover
If that wasn’t enough, then you should know that Monsanto ranked 14 on the Top 25 World’s Best Multinational Workplaces list by the Great Place to Work® Institute and consistently ranks high on Computerworld, Forbes, Science Magazine and other lists as a great place to work.

What is Monsanto
Did you know people around the world depend on agriculture and the hard work of farmers for their most basic needs? With global population expected to grow by 40 percent in the next few decades, agriculture will need to become more productive and more sustainable in order to keep pace with rapidly increasing demands!
That is why sustainable agriculture is at the core of Monsanto. The company is committed to developing the technologies that enable farmers to produce more crops while conserving more of the natural resources that are essential to their success.
Producing more. Conserving more. Improving lives. That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto is all about.

Why work for Monsanto
“There’s a buzz at Monsanto – an energy that’s catching. This is an organization where you define your boundaries”. – says one of Monsanto employees. And it’s true – Monsanto is proud of their winning culture, team-oriented, non-hierarchical and entrepreneurial.

Excel 2010 Advanced: What you ought to know about lookup functions in Excel

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Knowing your way around Excel will definitely improve your work-rate and overall efficiency. But how skilled are you really in Excel? Below you can find an extract of the eBook “Excel 2010 Advanced” which you can download for free. Take a look and see whether you find the provided information useful. Read, download and bring your Excel skills up to a new level!
Insights into lookup functions
Excel can produce varying results in a cell, depending on conditions set by you. For example, if numbers are above or below certain limits, different calculations will be performed and text messages displayed. The usual method for constructing this sort of analysis is using the IF function.
However, this can become large and unwieldy when you want multiple conditions and many possible outcomes. To begin with, Excel can only nest seven IF clauses in a main IF statement, whereas you may want more than eight logical tests or “scenarios.” To achieve this, Excel provides some LOOKUP functions. These functions allow you to create formulae which examine large amounts of data and find information which matches or approximates to certain conditions. They are simpler to construct than nested IF’s and can produce many more varied results. Below you can take a closer look at three of the most common Lookup functions: the Vector Lookup, Hlookup and Vlookup.  
Before you actually start to use the various LOOKUP functions, it is worth learning the terms that you will come across, what they mean and the syntax of the function arguments.
Vector Lookup
A vector is a series of data that only occupies one row or column. LOOKUP will look through this row or column to find a specific value. When the value is found, a corresponding “result” in the adjacent row or column is returned. For example, column D of a spreadsheet may contain figures, and the adjacent column E contains corresponding text. LOOKUP will search for the requested figure in column D and return the corresponding text from column E.

How to get rid of your inner demons and build a high opinion of yourself

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Having a low opinion of ourselves can affect our behaviour, happiness and the quality of our relationships. What needs to be done here is doing an inside job with our assertion. This is a key to our success; otherwise, we put a sticking plaster on the matter and never really move forward. We continue the inside-out approach with this deep-rooted issue.
In this article author, facilitator and business coach Karen Davies introduces different ways of how to build your self-esteem, from the inside, and diminish your assertive challenge.

A real life example
I worked with a client who had difficulties with his boss. He was condescending, over-powering and impatient. His demands made my client feel uncomfortable, compromised and small. Whenever his boss instructed him to do something, he felt a fear of failure and pressure to get the job done. This was particularly tough for him as a perfectionist, and consequently he put so much energy into pleasing his boss that he often let his colleagues down, who also needed his input.