Motivated Innovation

In the simplest of terms, companies hire employees during periods of economic growth and let go of employees during recessions. While this is fundamentally accepted, do companies get carried away with hiring and firing decisions? Is laying off employees shortsighted? Over the past 10-12 years, advanced knowledge of supply chain logistics and the successes of top retail companies--some of which have gone on to fail--have led a number of companies to focus on maximizing efficiency to maximize profit. These companies have looked to meet optimal employment levels to cut costs, avoiding money spent on idle resources. This makes sense to an extent, but a number of companies have reduced employment levels to the bare minimum, running daily business with "skeleton crews"--i.e. the minimum number of employees needed. Efficiency is important, but an overemphasis on efficiency can be detrimental to a company's long-term health. When company management reduces its staff to the ab...

From elementary education to collegiate education, teachers and students review a number of subjects and fields individually and separately from each other. This helps students build fundamental understanding of each individual subject for future use in career and life endeavors. While studying subjects separately remains critical to the education process, students need to understand that learning material separately does not necessarily mean the material should be or will be applied separately in real-life situations. In business and in life, actions have reactions, results, and consequences. When considering different subjects, a decision from one specialty/one department can have an impact on other specialties/departments. For example, the development of new software programs by an IT department can help a sales team improve customer relationship management (CRM), help a medical staff better diagnose medical conditions, help a library staff more easily track the movement of books ...