American Government Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

American Government - Essay Example Numerous migrant families have a dream of looking for a superior future for their children and have frequently have grievous conditions outside their ability to control. Subsequently, illicit outsiders should be capable conceded pardon since it gives foreigners new chances, benefits the American basic beliefs, and improves the economy. Prior to plunging into the lawfulness of the issue, it is critical to get why and how unlawful migration is a disputable issue. The popular saying that American streets are cleared with gold is a belief system that is bolstered and accepted by many. Each country has a motivation behind its creation and freedom. The untold story of America is bit distinctive as America was established upon the standards of opportunity. America’s custom to expand upon circumstance has been the zenith point that has made it uncommon throughout the years. Without a doubt, it is additionally one of the key attributes that has made people the whole way across the world to move to America. A nation where openings are pervasive and independence is proliferated is genuinely a component that makes this nation extraordinary. Instances of migration achievement rage from Albert Einstein to Barack Obama. Henceforth, America keeps on being uncommon as a result of the chances, firm confidence in changing busi ness as usual, and decent variety that it has celebrated throughout the hundreds of years. This is the reason America bids to illicit worker, since it permits them to relocate here and look for an open door that was never present in their country. Most importantly, it is fundamental to comprehend that American residents feel qualified for protect any intrusion that would influence their American dream. Most Americans have an extremely clear understanding that most illicit foreigners come to America looking for a superior life and are happy to buckle down for a lower pay. This frailty has been a point of convergence of Americans for a long time. Unmistakably this antagonistic vibe is fabricated in light of these issues that

Slavery in the Bahamas

What is subjugation? Africans became slaves in a few unique manners. Depict three manners by which Africans became slaves. (10 imprints) Slavery is the demonstration or foundation of which an individual is held. So in this manner, that individual is a slave. A slave is somebody who is held without wanting to and compelled to work without pay. Subjugation was available in West Africa before the Europeans went there; the main distinction was that the dark individuals were captives to other dark individuals. In 1493 the Portuguese guaranteed three islands in the Gulf of Guinea and created African estate subjugation. The Africans were first tried for work in tropical warmth, and when they were discovered appropriate, the primary arrangement of slaves went to Portugal and from that point to the New World. After that the Portuguese managing African slaves changed. The principal recorded transportation of African captives toward the West Indies was in 1501 however it was still too soon for ranch subjugation and in this manner can't be viewed as the start of the slave exchange. The slave exchange was done for roughly 300 years. It started in 1508 and finished in 1808. This denoted the official start of the transoceanic slave exchange. One way that an African may turn into a slave is during slave assaults. A run of the mill strike would occur in the night when all the locals were resting. The town hovels would be determined to fire deliberately by the Europeans and the townspeople would run out shouting. While attempting to get away from they were captured and attached to a slave coffle. The individuals who were youthful and sound were taken and the individuals who were debilitated and old were abandoned. Another way that Africans would become slaves is on the off chance that they needed to take care of obligations. On the off chance that a man killed somebody, he could turn into a slave as a method of paying for what he did. Regardless of whether I youngster took something, they could turn into a slave until the obligation was paid off. A third way that an African could turn into a slave is if there was a starvation. On the off chance that they had bounty kids, and very little food to take care of them, they could place their kids in another family unit to be taken care of. Their youngsters would then need to work for their food, having no way out on the grounds that they need to eat. There is numerous different ways that you the Africans became slaves however I just referenced a couple. The individuals who were caught in innate assaults were taken to the coast in a coffle and their excursion from that point started.

CP9 Podcast with Steven Anderson from Sendachi about Company Transformations

CP9 Podcast with Steven Anderson from Sendachi about Company Transformations INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi today we are here with Steven from Sendachi. Hi Steven, who are you and what do you do?Steven: Yes. Hi Martin, well thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. I can give you a little bit of a background of myself. I was born and raised in Seattle, which is where I currently live with my wife and five beautiful children. Well, I guess they are not children anymore most of them are adults now.But again born and raised here. I have been a programmer my whole life. I started very early on with punch cards, Cobalt, Fortran, and Pascal. At one point in time I was fortunate enough to be a software development engineer at Microsoft. So I was there for a number of years. I shipped quite a few products for them.I left and started starting companies at that point. So first one that I was involved in was a professional services organization centered around technology for enterprises, large enterprise, but quite a few of them in the financial sector. And that company was sold a little after two years. Then with a coworker from Microsoft I started another company. It was actually the industries first storage virtualization company. Over the course of a couple year period we grew that and were eventually were successful in selling that one as well. I started getting invited in on doing turnarounds on companies. So companies or organizations that were distressed and needed some retooling. I was able to do that a couple of times.So all told, Ive been a CEO four or five times now, maybe more, a CTO three times, and a COO three times. Sometimes in larger organizations. More often than not in smaller organizations that are trying to get larger. I still write code pretty much every day.   So Im a technical by nature and would like to remain that way obviously, but I think human aspect of entrepreneurship has also been more appealing to me. The concept of business and how dynamic the problems are and challenges and opportunities are around individuals a nd how they think about things. How they think about solving problems. Thats a little bit about me. I dont know if there is anything else I can tell you right after that.Martin: Maybe lets start by how did you come up with this name Sendachi?Steven: Sendachi, so I am half Japanese and my mother was from Tokyo. The name Sendachi is actually a Japanese word that has no direct one to one English correlation, but it is actually a concept that is a combination of several different ideas. Its a guide, a teacher, and a pioneer. So somebody who kind of goes out in front and leads others from the position helping them obtain their goals. So that is really our business model. We are working with clients here, transforming them, by showing them, not by just telling them, but actually getting in there and working out projects with them on very real problems that they are trying to solve. And by working with them pairing with them we are able to give them some lift. You know, show them how to ma ke a permanent change in their organization. So the concept of the Sendachi is one we exemplify on a day to day basis here.Martin: What is Sendachi? I mean the company.Steven: What we do is we are a technology services firm. We help organizations, actually become for effective I guess. Help them do more with less. It is an interesting time in technology right now. There is a lot of new tools that are available for companies that are IT by nature and even those that are not IT by nature. If you are in business you are really a software company in disguise regardless of what you make. Technology empowers everything.So for us we come in and help organizations work with smaller teams. Actually ship more often. Do that at lower costs at higher degrees of efficiency, I mean higher degrees of quality. Really if you were to sum it up we teach each people to do more with less.BUSINESS MODEL OF SENDACHIMartin: Okay cool. So if I am thinking about the business model what type of customers are you serving and is it really some kind of a technical product you are delivering or is really more like a consulting business?Steven: Well let me back up. The customers that we help are all over the board. So we work with some of the largest and oldest brands in the world. So these are fortune ten organizations that are global. We also work with smaller organizations too. Its really not a particular size of company that gets value from us or a particular vertical. Its more like a Padula type of problem that we can help companies with again it is doing more with less.So we are across the board. We do everything from strategy, you know, how does the company think about themselves? How do they think about their problems? How do they think about solving those problems? All the way down to they need to develop something and they need to develop it with new tools, new technology, new methodologies. We can span everything in-between and again using that model of working alongside them, pai ring up with them and showing them how to do it through activity. So thats us. Thats the client base we are after.The value proposition is really let us help you get something done you are struggling with. You know a lot of customers will show up and say: We need six Java developers. Can you do that for us? The answer is always: Sure. But what are you trying to have them do? Why are you asking for help in this respect?, because you can probably hire those people on your own. There is something else that is going on here. There is some root cause here. That is causing you to believe or impacting that in a way that you need six more Java developers, but maybe you dont. Maybe its a change in your methodology or a change in your tools kit that actually can get you to accelerate to the point where you dont need those six other developers and we can show you how to do that.So the term consultancy, we tend not to think of ourselves as a consulting company. Now thats become a bit of a dirty word in an our industry. Consulting, it   feels like it doesnt has any value associated with it. So we are kind of billing ourselves as the anti-consulting consulting company. We are more teachers where we can come in and sure we can help you with the work, but we are going to help you do the work. I think by and large most consultancies fall into one of two camps. They are going to come in and do an assessment and give you a very nice looking Power Point and a set of instructions, and wish you well. Good luck implementing this. Or they are going to be on the opposite end, which is just let us do the work for you and we will kind of hand you this black box when all is said and done.Neither of those really generate the value that they should or the client that real change that getting them past that inflection point about getting them to think about their problems differently. So thats where we step in. We kind of sit in that middle space in-between to two and approach it from more of a holistic view, but also a very value centric view. We dont do time and materials. So dont do billable hours like other consultancies do, because we believe thats a wrong based financial metric. It is centering on the wrong things. Right, so I am getting compensated for the time spending with you not the value that I am creating for you. So it is a bit inverted. We get paid for the value we create.Martin: If I am thinking of you as a business teacher, how are you working with those teachers? Are they employed by you or are you working with freelancers?Steven: We hire only full time employees here. So our staff is all W2 or salary employees. They are not freelancers. We have a very high bar that need to be met in order for people to come in. So absolutely everybody in the organization is I joked earlier about how I still write code every day. We are all very, very technical. We have all shipped a lot of product. Some of the largest most security systems in the world were designed by people on my team. Designed and delivered by people on my team. They are polyglots in the true sense of the word. Not just technical polyglots, in other words, familiar in other languages. They are familiar with solving multiple types of problems, business problems, strategy problems, architectural problems, technical problems. So that is a rare breed. That type of person is particularly hard to find. They gravitate toward though solving hard problems and that is what we are able to give people here. Our customers hand us the hardest things they have and expect us to fix them and that is what we do.Martin: Cool, Steven when you started out with Sendachi what type of problems or industry did you focus on in the first place?Steven: Well, I was invited in to this company. It preexisted me. So the company that it was prior to Sendachi had a different name. It was called Clutch and even prior to that it was called LG Consulting and it was located in here in Seattle. I have known the founders for a long time, fifteen years great guys, but it was really staff augmentation, so it was about answering that call for six Java developers. And honestly that is a tough racket to be in, it is highly commoditized, the margins are getting compressed, the talent is mercenary. So you are in that in that independent contractor mindset where the switching cost is low. You can go anywhere. It is not really a company in the more traditional definition of things. Its more of a collection of independent agents. Its hard, its hard to create value for your clients that way. So they invited me in to come and do something different with the company.Thats when we started targeting more of the transformation, this teaching model, more fixed fee, value based pricing for what we did, higher level of skill set, or the talent that we brought to the table. Then we changed it from LG Consulting to Clutch. Then most recently, just a couple of months ago we were part of a merger between us, Clut ch, and another company out of London called Contino. I mean it was a combination of those two companies that became Sendachi.Martin: Understood. Can you walk me through the process of a customer coming to you or you to the customer and then you are setting a point for the value that you are trying to deliver?Steven: Absolutely, there are really three different entry points for all of our customers.The first one and a majority of what we see is centered around we are trying to build something, but we cant that can manifest in I need six Ruby developers or I need Java developers or I need six .Net developers.The second entry point is really around we have done some transformation. We have begun our journey, but we need to accelerate that. We need added velocity to that transformation.The third one is based around what we call the compasable stack. The composable stack is comprised of all this new technology that you have in the world. If you envision this as a multi-layered cake. Its really got four layers to it.At the top layer of the cake is your application.Just below that layer there is a new design pattern Microservices Architecture. Its actually not that new anymore, but its becoming more prevalent. Microservices means that everything is unzipped from everything else, very module, and allows you to scale in a very flexible way. So you can change your code without having to knock the whole thing over. You can develop and test in smaller pieces. It is much more effective. So that is the second layer of the cake.The third layer of the cake is virtualization and this is now taken on a new identity in the form of containerization. So you have heard about companies like Docker and Mesosphere   and Kubernetes who are providing a different form of abstraction there that allows your application to scale horizontally infinitely. So its very easy to put an application in to containers and allow then to scale to satisfy the world if you need to.   Then scale back dow n again as well.Then below that is the new data center, which is really the cloud.So we help people when they have questions about any part of that tool chain. So maybe they are trying to deploy Docker. We can help them with that. Maybe they are trying to re-architect their applications into Microservices. We can help them with that as well. Those are kind of the three areas. Trying to build something, trying to accelerate my change, trying to get my arms around the composable stack, and the way we satisfy those entry points is really around four different product offerings. If you want to call them products, they are really services, but we productize them a bit.The first one is a retained development team. So we can come in and we can be that onsite teaching presence for you and help you build something or help you accelerate your transformation, or train you, facilitate the learning around the pieces of the composable stack. And that would happen on a month by month basis for as long as you need it.The second product that we offer is a project based piece of work. So you are trying to build something explicit and we can build that with you, again not for you, but with you. We are going to use your talent here as well. So we will pair up cause at the end of this we dont want to hand you like I mentioned earlier the black box. We want to give you something you have the keys too. So you can continue to add value to it and move things forward yourself.The third product that we offer is training so we can give you training and specific tools in specific design or design patterns, development architect design patterns, methodologies as well.The fourth is an assessment. So we can start sometimes end with giving you a summation of where you are at right now. So we come in and immerse ourselves. Learn about your organization. Learn about where your current skills are at. Learn about where your culture is currently centered around and then give you a road map. Give y ou some recommendations of how you can move forward. So three different entry points, four different products to service those entry points.Martin:  Great, Steven! Thanks for all those clarifications.When I am looking at this consulting business or industry in general I totally see your point of the majority of consulting companies being commoditized. When I am looking at Sendachi what seems to me very similar is that it is based on intellectual capital and on top of that you are trying to enable a company to achieve their goals while the traditional consulting companies are more of the we will finish it specific project for a task for you then hand it over. How do you still then try to remain your competitive advantage and protect yourself from being commoditized, because other consulting companies could basically do the same? Open up a new unit within the same company and then work for the similar client basis?Steven: I hope they do, actually. I do hope that the rest of the consu lting companies out there try and model themselves after us, because what do they say? Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right. So I also believe though that this is something that the world needs. The way that consulting in general has worked for a long time period of time is not to the advantage of the client. It is not generating the type of value it needs to for the customer. So the model that we have undertaken is all again really value based. If we do not create the value for the client we do not charge for it. And I would love for other companies to try to do that as well. I would love for them to do that. I think its disruptive. I think it is the most disruptive thing that we do, which is this again a teaching model as opposed to just developing software or developing solutions for clients. It is really enabling them for a future that hopefully at some point does not include us. We are trying to with the taking on with every engagement reach an end point with the cl ient where they no longer require our services. That means that we have done a good job. That we have done what we set out to do.So if other consulting companies came to the table and started doing that I would be overjoyed. It actually puts the onus back on me or back on us to reinvent ourselves into something new again. So competitive pressure, I dont know where companies get this mistaken idea that competitive pressure is a bad thing. It is actually a great thing. You should always be evolving. Whether or not what you are doing is remaining vital in the market place. You should constantly be reinventing yourself. If you are not doing it someone else is going to do it for you. So I would love the competition. I would love for people to follow us. You know follow in our footsteps. Change their business models. Start coming after us. I think that would be a good pressure, a good healthy pressure for us.Martin:  Steven, you once said that the top down culture change never works. Can you elaborate on that a little?Steven: It does. In a I can tell you that going to your organization and saying this is going to be our new culture is completely academic. It is disassociated from the reality of your business. You hear people put out their 10 core values or whatever the case may be. By and large most employees look at that little placard that there and they put it somewhere on their desk where they never look at it again. Culture doesnt change that way.Culture changes at the ground level and moves its way up. So you dont design culture, you nurture culture. It designs itself. So when we come in and we work with our clients, we are dealing directly with most cases. The teams that are actually living these jobs day to day. Not the executives, we are getting permission from the executives, but the real culture change happens when you start showing people how to do it differently and showing them that it works, gets them too proselytize that. It gets them to be evangeli sts for that.So when we come in and show them a new way of working we have custom designed for them in most cases. There is no one size fits all here. We will come in and we will create or craft something that is unique to their needs based on where they are at in the world today. Then they can embody that. We can show them how to embody that. Once that spreads virally through the organization your culture is well on its way to being changed. Much more so than a C-level person saying this is what our culture should look like. You know it just doesnt happen like that.Martin: Besides having the latest tools and tricks what else is needed in order to create a really great accelerating company?Steven: We are in a paradigm right now where the separation of roles is starting to break down. So having a discrete QA team for instance, or a separate release management team is not in the best interests of the organization to try and reach velocity. I’m not saying, by the way, that you short governance or compliance, those are security for that matter. Those are just part and parcel. You have to have those things in every one of your development disciplines. But they’re not so much separate disciplines now, as they are indoctrinated,   they’re put directly into development efforts as they’re going on, so we’re seeing world where the roles are becoming very, very blended as opposed to siloed, the way that they were before.So in this new world, where everything is a bit more blended, you have to change your organizational structure. You have to change your culture, as we have talked about. You have to start thinking about your job differently. You have to start thinking more about solving your customers’ problems as opposed to just shipping the user story or building the functional speck. You have to worry more about: “Is this going to create the value that our business expected it to?” And that’s key, right. We see every one of our customers move in that direction. And that is a hard change, you know, for a lot of companies that are out there, and that’s what we’re really helping them with, this kind of getting over that difficult part of the change.Martin: And what does this organizational structural change look like?Steven: A lot of times, again what you’re seeing is the breaking down of separate QA teams. QA gets folded into the development team. A lot of times you’ll have developers who do slightly different things, and they can even rotate in this. You can have a developer who is more software creation oriented, or you can have a developer who is more QA oriented; they can work very closely together. You can have developers who do their own unit testing, doing all of their own tests, as a matter of fact, as opposed to handing it over to a QA team who then bangs on it.Release Management is starting to change, at least maybe even potentially disappear, because you’re getting tools that allow for the code that a develope r writes to be automated in terms of moving it through the rest of the process all the way out to your production, so it’s not hand carried any more. You’re seeing software packages, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, that are out there, that allow for code to be migrated out into production, pretty effortlessly, pretty seamlessly.So now it becomes more about strategy and discipline than about activity, which is where it should be. So you’re starting to see development teams taking on more ownership for the entire ecosystem, without having these siloed separate teams that a kind of doing different functions and that’s causing velocity increase, and equality increase quite honestly.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM STEVEN ANDERSONMartin: Cool. Steven, let’s talk about your learnings over the years, so because you have been the founder of   a company, you have been CEO’s and CTO’s. What have you learned that you can share with other people thinking about starting a company?Steven: Well, t his is my one bit of advice. You need to do it because it is hard. None of this is easy. You need to love the fact that it is very difficult to do. You need to be passionate about solving the problems that you’re going to be faced with. You can’t see them as burden, you have to see them as opportunity.Really at the end of it all, you’re trying to learn more about yourself. What are you capable of? What are you able to step up to the plate and take a swing at? What are you able to ascend into, you know, in terms of your accomplishments? So making it easy doesn’t teach you anything about yourself. It might be, kind of enjoyable, but the art of it is making the difficult enjoyable, because you know that it’s changing you and you’re learning more about yourself. So that would be my advice. Don’t do this because you think you’re going to make money. You might, but really the important thing is, do it because you love tackling hard problems cause it’s changing you and te aching you about yourself.Martin: Great. What have you learned about yourself during that inner journey?Steven: You know, I’ve learned what my core is really centered around, although I can do the operational functions in the company and I understand finance as well, I really like the visionary part of things. I really like being the disrupter, you know putting together a strategy that has the potential of changing a market, is important to me, and then the people aspect of things. I love being able to create an environment where people are able to see more about themselves, you know, realize another aspect of their personalities or their potential. That’s very-very important to me, so I guess I am a teacher. That’s where maybe the Sendachi thing came from is maybe it started with me. I was a teacher for two years. I loved it. You know I loved being a part of the process of having that light bulb go on for people and I’m still trying to provide that for people in my professi onal life, both for clients and for the people, the talent that we have here in the company.Martin: Great. How are you doing this in your own company in terms of enlightening your employees?Steven: Well, we have a very distributed type of dynamic here. So, you know in terms of building a strategy for the organization, I mean the overall arc of that story sits with me, but in terms of interpreting it for a client all the way down to the engagement level, we are pretty democratic with that. We allow teams to be able to come up with solutions for the pricing of the solutions, for the execution of those solutions. We have a… I wouldn’t call it a commissions plan, but we have a profit sharing plan, that everybody in the company, really with the exception of myself and a couple of other people, are able to take advantage of, and that allows for a feedback. If they’re being successful, and they’re creating some value for the client and the client’s happy, they’re going to get r ewarded for that in direct correlation to that. And it doesn’t happen on a once a year type of annual review basis, it happens in real time.So we have here a lot of very entrepreneurial, I guess, infrastructure, or dynamic put into place for anybody who’s here. I would love nothing more, than for two to three years from now, for everybody who’s currently sitting inside the organization has learned enough and been empowered enough that they can go out and start their own company. I hope they do that. I hope that that’s one of our great stories that we can tell is that we’re sort of an entrepreneurial incubation factory for people to get a taste of what it’s like in a somewhat safe controlled environment and they can go out and do it on their own. Have the courage to go out and do it on their own. I think that would be profound success for us if we were able to do that.Martin: Great. Thank you so much for your time, Steven.Steven:  Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.T HANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 9th episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi today we are here with Steven from Sendachi. Hi Steven, who are you and what do you do?Steven: Yes. Hi Martin, well thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. I can give you a little bit of a background of myself. I was born and raised in Seattle, which is where I currently live with my wife and five beautiful children. Well, I guess they are not children anymore most of them are adults now.But again born and raised here. I have been a programmer my whole life. I started very early on with punch cards, Cobalt, Fortran, and Pascal. At one point in time I was fortunate enough to be a software development engineer at Microsoft. So I was there for a number of years. I shipped quite a few products for them.I left and started starting companies at that point. So first one that I was involved in was a professional services organization centered around technology for enterprises, large enterprise, but quite a few of them in the financial sector. And that company was sold a little after two years. Then with a coworker from Microsoft I started another company. It was actually the industries first storage virtualization company. Over the course of a couple year period we grew that and were eventually were successful in selling that one as well. I started getting invited in on doing turnarounds on companies. So companies or organizations that were distressed and needed some retooling. I was able to do that a couple of times.So all told, Ive been a CEO four or five times now, maybe more, a CTO three times, and a COO three times. Sometimes in larger organizations. More often than not in smaller organizations that are trying to get larger. I still write code pretty much every day.   So Im a technical by nature and would like to remain that way obviously, but I think human aspect of entrepreneurship has also been more appealing to me. The concept of business and how dynamic the problems are and challenges and opportunities are around individuals a nd how they think about things. How they think about solving problems. Thats a little bit about me. I dont know if there is anything else I can tell you right after that.Martin: Maybe lets start by how did you come up with this name Sendachi?Steven: Sendachi, so I am half Japanese and my mother was from Tokyo. The name Sendachi is actually a Japanese word that has no direct one to one English correlation, but it is actually a concept that is a combination of several different ideas. Its a guide, a teacher, and a pioneer. So somebody who kind of goes out in front and leads others from the position helping them obtain their goals. So that is really our business model. We are working with clients here, transforming them, by showing them, not by just telling them, but actually getting in there and working out projects with them on very real problems that they are trying to solve. And by working with them pairing with them we are able to give them some lift. You know, show them how to ma ke a permanent change in their organization. So the concept of the Sendachi is one we exemplify on a day to day basis here.Martin: What is Sendachi? I mean the company.Steven: What we do is we are a technology services firm. We help organizations, actually become for effective I guess. Help them do more with less. It is an interesting time in technology right now. There is a lot of new tools that are available for companies that are IT by nature and even those that are not IT by nature. If you are in business you are really a software company in disguise regardless of what you make. Technology empowers everything.So for us we come in and help organizations work with smaller teams. Actually ship more often. Do that at lower costs at higher degrees of efficiency, I mean higher degrees of quality. Really if you were to sum it up we teach each people to do more with less.BUSINESS MODEL OF SENDACHIMartin: Okay cool. So if I am thinking about the business model what type of customers are you serving and is it really some kind of a technical product you are delivering or is really more like a consulting business?Steven: Well let me back up. The customers that we help are all over the board. So we work with some of the largest and oldest brands in the world. So these are fortune ten organizations that are global. We also work with smaller organizations too. Its really not a particular size of company that gets value from us or a particular vertical. Its more like a Padula type of problem that we can help companies with again it is doing more with less.So we are across the board. We do everything from strategy, you know, how does the company think about themselves? How do they think about their problems? How do they think about solving those problems? All the way down to they need to develop something and they need to develop it with new tools, new technology, new methodologies. We can span everything in-between and again using that model of working alongside them, pai ring up with them and showing them how to do it through activity. So thats us. Thats the client base we are after.The value proposition is really let us help you get something done you are struggling with. You know a lot of customers will show up and say: We need six Java developers. Can you do that for us? The answer is always: Sure. But what are you trying to have them do? Why are you asking for help in this respect?, because you can probably hire those people on your own. There is something else that is going on here. There is some root cause here. That is causing you to believe or impacting that in a way that you need six more Java developers, but maybe you dont. Maybe its a change in your methodology or a change in your tools kit that actually can get you to accelerate to the point where you dont need those six other developers and we can show you how to do that.So the term consultancy, we tend not to think of ourselves as a consulting company. Now thats become a bit of a dirty word in an our industry. Consulting, it   feels like it doesnt has any value associated with it. So we are kind of billing ourselves as the anti-consulting consulting company. We are more teachers where we can come in and sure we can help you with the work, but we are going to help you do the work. I think by and large most consultancies fall into one of two camps. They are going to come in and do an assessment and give you a very nice looking Power Point and a set of instructions, and wish you well. Good luck implementing this. Or they are going to be on the opposite end, which is just let us do the work for you and we will kind of hand you this black box when all is said and done.Neither of those really generate the value that they should or the client that real change that getting them past that inflection point about getting them to think about their problems differently. So thats where we step in. We kind of sit in that middle space in-between to two and approach it from more of a holistic view, but also a very value centric view. We dont do time and materials. So dont do billable hours like other consultancies do, because we believe thats a wrong based financial metric. It is centering on the wrong things. Right, so I am getting compensated for the time spending with you not the value that I am creating for you. So it is a bit inverted. We get paid for the value we create.Martin: If I am thinking of you as a business teacher, how are you working with those teachers? Are they employed by you or are you working with freelancers?Steven: We hire only full time employees here. So our staff is all W2 or salary employees. They are not freelancers. We have a very high bar that need to be met in order for people to come in. So absolutely everybody in the organization is I joked earlier about how I still write code every day. We are all very, very technical. We have all shipped a lot of product. Some of the largest most security systems in the world were designed by people on my team. Designed and delivered by people on my team. They are polyglots in the true sense of the word. Not just technical polyglots, in other words, familiar in other languages. They are familiar with solving multiple types of problems, business problems, strategy problems, architectural problems, technical problems. So that is a rare breed. That type of person is particularly hard to find. They gravitate toward though solving hard problems and that is what we are able to give people here. Our customers hand us the hardest things they have and expect us to fix them and that is what we do.Martin: Cool, Steven when you started out with Sendachi what type of problems or industry did you focus on in the first place?Steven: Well, I was invited in to this company. It preexisted me. So the company that it was prior to Sendachi had a different name. It was called Clutch and even prior to that it was called LG Consulting and it was located in here in Seattle. I have known the founders for a long time, fifteen years great guys, but it was really staff augmentation, so it was about answering that call for six Java developers. And honestly that is a tough racket to be in, it is highly commoditized, the margins are getting compressed, the talent is mercenary. So you are in that in that independent contractor mindset where the switching cost is low. You can go anywhere. It is not really a company in the more traditional definition of things. Its more of a collection of independent agents. Its hard, its hard to create value for your clients that way. So they invited me in to come and do something different with the company.Thats when we started targeting more of the transformation, this teaching model, more fixed fee, value based pricing for what we did, higher level of skill set, or the talent that we brought to the table. Then we changed it from LG Consulting to Clutch. Then most recently, just a couple of months ago we were part of a merger between us, Clut ch, and another company out of London called Contino. I mean it was a combination of those two companies that became Sendachi.Martin: Understood. Can you walk me through the process of a customer coming to you or you to the customer and then you are setting a point for the value that you are trying to deliver?Steven: Absolutely, there are really three different entry points for all of our customers.The first one and a majority of what we see is centered around we are trying to build something, but we cant that can manifest in I need six Ruby developers or I need Java developers or I need six .Net developers.The second entry point is really around we have done some transformation. We have begun our journey, but we need to accelerate that. We need added velocity to that transformation.The third one is based around what we call the compasable stack. The composable stack is comprised of all this new technology that you have in the world. If you envision this as a multi-layered cake. Its really got four layers to it.At the top layer of the cake is your application.Just below that layer there is a new design pattern Microservices Architecture. Its actually not that new anymore, but its becoming more prevalent. Microservices means that everything is unzipped from everything else, very module, and allows you to scale in a very flexible way. So you can change your code without having to knock the whole thing over. You can develop and test in smaller pieces. It is much more effective. So that is the second layer of the cake.The third layer of the cake is virtualization and this is now taken on a new identity in the form of containerization. So you have heard about companies like Docker and Mesosphere   and Kubernetes who are providing a different form of abstraction there that allows your application to scale horizontally infinitely. So its very easy to put an application in to containers and allow then to scale to satisfy the world if you need to.   Then scale back dow n again as well.Then below that is the new data center, which is really the cloud.So we help people when they have questions about any part of that tool chain. So maybe they are trying to deploy Docker. We can help them with that. Maybe they are trying to re-architect their applications into Microservices. We can help them with that as well. Those are kind of the three areas. Trying to build something, trying to accelerate my change, trying to get my arms around the composable stack, and the way we satisfy those entry points is really around four different product offerings. If you want to call them products, they are really services, but we productize them a bit.The first one is a retained development team. So we can come in and we can be that onsite teaching presence for you and help you build something or help you accelerate your transformation, or train you, facilitate the learning around the pieces of the composable stack. And that would happen on a month by month basis for as long as you need it.The second product that we offer is a project based piece of work. So you are trying to build something explicit and we can build that with you, again not for you, but with you. We are going to use your talent here as well. So we will pair up cause at the end of this we dont want to hand you like I mentioned earlier the black box. We want to give you something you have the keys too. So you can continue to add value to it and move things forward yourself.The third product that we offer is training so we can give you training and specific tools in specific design or design patterns, development architect design patterns, methodologies as well.The fourth is an assessment. So we can start sometimes end with giving you a summation of where you are at right now. So we come in and immerse ourselves. Learn about your organization. Learn about where your current skills are at. Learn about where your culture is currently centered around and then give you a road map. Give y ou some recommendations of how you can move forward. So three different entry points, four different products to service those entry points.Martin:  Great, Steven! Thanks for all those clarifications.When I am looking at this consulting business or industry in general I totally see your point of the majority of consulting companies being commoditized. When I am looking at Sendachi what seems to me very similar is that it is based on intellectual capital and on top of that you are trying to enable a company to achieve their goals while the traditional consulting companies are more of the we will finish it specific project for a task for you then hand it over. How do you still then try to remain your competitive advantage and protect yourself from being commoditized, because other consulting companies could basically do the same? Open up a new unit within the same company and then work for the similar client basis?Steven: I hope they do, actually. I do hope that the rest of the consu lting companies out there try and model themselves after us, because what do they say? Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right. So I also believe though that this is something that the world needs. The way that consulting in general has worked for a long time period of time is not to the advantage of the client. It is not generating the type of value it needs to for the customer. So the model that we have undertaken is all again really value based. If we do not create the value for the client we do not charge for it. And I would love for other companies to try to do that as well. I would love for them to do that. I think its disruptive. I think it is the most disruptive thing that we do, which is this again a teaching model as opposed to just developing software or developing solutions for clients. It is really enabling them for a future that hopefully at some point does not include us. We are trying to with the taking on with every engagement reach an end point with the cl ient where they no longer require our services. That means that we have done a good job. That we have done what we set out to do.So if other consulting companies came to the table and started doing that I would be overjoyed. It actually puts the onus back on me or back on us to reinvent ourselves into something new again. So competitive pressure, I dont know where companies get this mistaken idea that competitive pressure is a bad thing. It is actually a great thing. You should always be evolving. Whether or not what you are doing is remaining vital in the market place. You should constantly be reinventing yourself. If you are not doing it someone else is going to do it for you. So I would love the competition. I would love for people to follow us. You know follow in our footsteps. Change their business models. Start coming after us. I think that would be a good pressure, a good healthy pressure for us.Martin:  Steven, you once said that the top down culture change never works. Can you elaborate on that a little?Steven: It does. In a I can tell you that going to your organization and saying this is going to be our new culture is completely academic. It is disassociated from the reality of your business. You hear people put out their 10 core values or whatever the case may be. By and large most employees look at that little placard that there and they put it somewhere on their desk where they never look at it again. Culture doesnt change that way.Culture changes at the ground level and moves its way up. So you dont design culture, you nurture culture. It designs itself. So when we come in and we work with our clients, we are dealing directly with most cases. The teams that are actually living these jobs day to day. Not the executives, we are getting permission from the executives, but the real culture change happens when you start showing people how to do it differently and showing them that it works, gets them too proselytize that. It gets them to be evangeli sts for that.So when we come in and show them a new way of working we have custom designed for them in most cases. There is no one size fits all here. We will come in and we will create or craft something that is unique to their needs based on where they are at in the world today. Then they can embody that. We can show them how to embody that. Once that spreads virally through the organization your culture is well on its way to being changed. Much more so than a C-level person saying this is what our culture should look like. You know it just doesnt happen like that.Martin: Besides having the latest tools and tricks what else is needed in order to create a really great accelerating company?Steven: We are in a paradigm right now where the separation of roles is starting to break down. So having a discrete QA team for instance, or a separate release management team is not in the best interests of the organization to try and reach velocity. I’m not saying, by the way, that you short governance or compliance, those are security for that matter. Those are just part and parcel. You have to have those things in every one of your development disciplines. But they’re not so much separate disciplines now, as they are indoctrinated,   they’re put directly into development efforts as they’re going on, so we’re seeing world where the roles are becoming very, very blended as opposed to siloed, the way that they were before.So in this new world, where everything is a bit more blended, you have to change your organizational structure. You have to change your culture, as we have talked about. You have to start thinking about your job differently. You have to start thinking more about solving your customers’ problems as opposed to just shipping the user story or building the functional speck. You have to worry more about: “Is this going to create the value that our business expected it to?” And that’s key, right. We see every one of our customers move in that direction. And that is a hard change, you know, for a lot of companies that are out there, and that’s what we’re really helping them with, this kind of getting over that difficult part of the change.Martin: And what does this organizational structural change look like?Steven: A lot of times, again what you’re seeing is the breaking down of separate QA teams. QA gets folded into the development team. A lot of times you’ll have developers who do slightly different things, and they can even rotate in this. You can have a developer who is more software creation oriented, or you can have a developer who is more QA oriented; they can work very closely together. You can have developers who do their own unit testing, doing all of their own tests, as a matter of fact, as opposed to handing it over to a QA team who then bangs on it.Release Management is starting to change, at least maybe even potentially disappear, because you’re getting tools that allow for the code that a develope r writes to be automated in terms of moving it through the rest of the process all the way out to your production, so it’s not hand carried any more. You’re seeing software packages, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, that are out there, that allow for code to be migrated out into production, pretty effortlessly, pretty seamlessly.So now it becomes more about strategy and discipline than about activity, which is where it should be. So you’re starting to see development teams taking on more ownership for the entire ecosystem, without having these siloed separate teams that a kind of doing different functions and that’s causing velocity increase, and equality increase quite honestly.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM STEVEN ANDERSONMartin: Cool. Steven, let’s talk about your learnings over the years, so because you have been the founder of   a company, you have been CEO’s and CTO’s. What have you learned that you can share with other people thinking about starting a company?Steven: Well, t his is my one bit of advice. You need to do it because it is hard. None of this is easy. You need to love the fact that it is very difficult to do. You need to be passionate about solving the problems that you’re going to be faced with. You can’t see them as burden, you have to see them as opportunity.Really at the end of it all, you’re trying to learn more about yourself. What are you capable of? What are you able to step up to the plate and take a swing at? What are you able to ascend into, you know, in terms of your accomplishments? So making it easy doesn’t teach you anything about yourself. It might be, kind of enjoyable, but the art of it is making the difficult enjoyable, because you know that it’s changing you and you’re learning more about yourself. So that would be my advice. Don’t do this because you think you’re going to make money. You might, but really the important thing is, do it because you love tackling hard problems cause it’s changing you and te aching you about yourself.Martin: Great. What have you learned about yourself during that inner journey?Steven: You know, I’ve learned what my core is really centered around, although I can do the operational functions in the company and I understand finance as well, I really like the visionary part of things. I really like being the disrupter, you know putting together a strategy that has the potential of changing a market, is important to me, and then the people aspect of things. I love being able to create an environment where people are able to see more about themselves, you know, realize another aspect of their personalities or their potential. That’s very-very important to me, so I guess I am a teacher. That’s where maybe the Sendachi thing came from is maybe it started with me. I was a teacher for two years. I loved it. You know I loved being a part of the process of having that light bulb go on for people and I’m still trying to provide that for people in my professi onal life, both for clients and for the people, the talent that we have here in the company.Martin: Great. How are you doing this in your own company in terms of enlightening your employees?Steven: Well, we have a very distributed type of dynamic here. So, you know in terms of building a strategy for the organization, I mean the overall arc of that story sits with me, but in terms of interpreting it for a client all the way down to the engagement level, we are pretty democratic with that. We allow teams to be able to come up with solutions for the pricing of the solutions, for the execution of those solutions. We have a… I wouldn’t call it a commissions plan, but we have a profit sharing plan, that everybody in the company, really with the exception of myself and a couple of other people, are able to take advantage of, and that allows for a feedback. If they’re being successful, and they’re creating some value for the client and the client’s happy, they’re going to get r ewarded for that in direct correlation to that. And it doesn’t happen on a once a year type of annual review basis, it happens in real time.So we have here a lot of very entrepreneurial, I guess, infrastructure, or dynamic put into place for anybody who’s here. I would love nothing more, than for two to three years from now, for everybody who’s currently sitting inside the organization has learned enough and been empowered enough that they can go out and start their own company. I hope they do that. I hope that that’s one of our great stories that we can tell is that we’re sort of an entrepreneurial incubation factory for people to get a taste of what it’s like in a somewhat safe controlled environment and they can go out and do it on their own. Have the courage to go out and do it on their own. I think that would be profound success for us if we were able to do that.Martin: Great. Thank you so much for your time, Steven.Steven:  Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.T HANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 9th podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Steven for joining me this week. Until  next time!

What Is Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to pursue their own self-interest, and no one has any obligation to promote anyone else’s interests. It is thus a normative or prescriptive theory: it is concerned with how people ought to behave. In this respect, ethical egoism is quite different from psychological egoism, the theory that all our actions are ultimately self-interested. Psychological egoism is a purely descriptive theory that purports to describe a basic fact about human nature. Arguments In Support of Ethical Egoism Scottish political economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723 - 1790). Hulton Archive/Getty Images   Everyone pursuing his own self-interest is the best way to promote the general good. This argument was made famous by Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) in his poem The Fable of the Bees and by Adam Smith (1723-1790) in his pioneering work on economics, The Wealth of Nations.   In a famous passage, Smith wrote that when individuals single-mindedly pursue â€Å"the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires† they unintentionally, as if â€Å"led by an invisible hand,† benefit society as a whole. This happy result comes about because people generally are the best judges of what is in their own interest, and they are much more motivated to work hard to benefit themselves than to achieve any other goal. An obvious objection to this argument, though, is that ​it doesn’t really support ethical egoism. It assumes that what really matters is the well-being of society as a whole, the general good. It then claims that the best way to achieve this end is for everyone to look out for themselves. But if it could be proved that this attitude did not, in fact, promote the general good, then those who advance this argument would presumably stop advocating egoism. Prisoners Dilemma Another objection is that what the argument states is not always true. Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, for instance. This is a hypothetical situation described in game theory.  You and a comrade, (call him X) are being held in prison. You are both asked to confess. The terms of the deal you are offered are as follows: If you confess and X doesn’t, you get six months and he gets 10 years.If X confesses and you don’t, he gets six months and you get 10 years.If you both confess, you both get five years.  If neither of you confesses, you both get two years. Regardless of what X does, the best thing for you to do is confess. Because if he doesn’t confess, you’ll get a light sentence; and if he does confess, you’ll at least avoid getting extra prison time. But the same reasoning holds for X as well. According to ethical egoism, you should both pursue your rational self-interest. But then the outcome is not the best one possible. You both get five years, whereas if both of you had put your self-interest on hold, you’d each only get two years. The point of this is simple. It isn’t always in your best interest to pursue your own self-interest without concern for others. Sacrificing your own interests for the good of others denies the fundamental value of your own life to yourself. Ayn Rands Objectivism This seems to be the sort of argument put forward by Ayn Rand, the leading exponent of â€Å"objectivism† and the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  Her complaint is that the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, which includes—or has fed into—modern liberalism and socialism, pushes an ethic of altruism.  Altruism means putting the interests of others before your own.   This is something people are routinely praised for doing, encouraged to do, and in some circumstances even required to do, such as when you pay taxes to support the needy.  According to Rand, no one has any right to expect or demand that I make any sacrifices for the sake of anyone other than myself. Ayn Rand, 1957. New York Times Co./Getty Images A problem with this argument is that it seems to assume that there is generally a conflict between pursuing your own interests and helping others.  In fact, though, most people would say that these two goals are not necessarily opposed at all.  Much of the time they complement one another.   For instance, one student may help a housemate with her homework, which is altruistic.  But that student also has an interest in enjoying good relations with her housemates. She may not help everyone in all circumstances, but she will help if the sacrifice involved is not too great.  Most people behave like this, seeking a balance between egoism and altruism. More Objections to Ethical Egoism Ethical egoism is not a very popular moral philosophy. This is because it goes against certain basic assumptions that most people have regarding what ethics involves. Two objections seem especially powerful. Ethical egoism has no solutions to offer when a problem arises involving conflicts of interest. Many ethical issues are of this sort. For example, a company wants to empty waste into a river; the people living downstream object. Ethical egoism advises that both parties actively pursue what they want. It doesn’t suggest any sort of resolution or commonsense compromise. Ethical egoism goes against the principle of impartiality. A basic assumption made by many moral philosophers—and many other people, for that matter—is that we should not discriminate against people on arbitrary grounds such as race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or ethnic origin. But ethical egoism holds that we should not even try to be impartial. Rather, we should distinguish between ourselves and everyone else, and give ourselves preferential treatment. To many, this seems to contradict the very essence of morality. The golden rule—versions of which appear in Confucianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—says we should treat others as we would like to be treated. One of the greatest moral philosophers of modern times, ​Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), argued that the fundamental principle of morality (the â€Å"categorical imperative,† in his jargon) is that we should not make exceptions of ourselves. According to Kant, we shouldn’t  perform an action if we cannot honestly wish that everyone would behave in a similar way in the same circumstances.

Child Labor Is An Practical Answer For Poor Families

Cocoa is made from the cacao bean, which that only grows in tropical environments. The only places where you can grow these beans are along the Ivory Coast (the West African countries along the coastline) and Central America. The victims of child labor are often 12 - 16 years old, but reporters have found children as young as 5 years of age at these farms. Children do not get to see their parents and families for years, or ever. Most farmers have never eaten chocolate in their entire lives. Although the cocoa farm owners make tons of money, they still pay their workers under $2 a day. This is way below the poverty line. As a result, child labor becomes the practical answer for poor families who work at these farms. There are two main ways how parents willingly make their children work at these farms. One is that they need more workers so they make their children help them. Another way is that the owners of these farms tell the parents to sell their kid to them. They say that it is easy work and they get food and an education. They then make them work from 4 A.M. to 4 P.M. This is a 12 hour work day for children. They usually are not able to break the poverty system because they are not educated. They sleep on wooden planks and are fed mashed corn with bread in limited amounts. The children’s growth will halt because of lack of sleep and malnutrition. Pesticides are used on the plants which with inhaling and touching can cause serious, sometimes permanent sideShow MoreRelatedIs Our Government Family Friendly? The United States Welfare System1654 Words   |  7 Pagesneed. It was created for the unemployed and underemployed to use in helping out with the needs of their families. This original program lasted until 1996, when the federal government stopped the federal aid to all poor and cut welfare to poor women with children. 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Non-reactive techniques, observation, and experimentation Free Essays

In research, the question, hypothesis, research design, data collection strategy, and data analysis procedures are rooted in previous literatures and identified before the project begins. Any changes in the proposed design while carrying out the research would be seen as weakening the validity of the research finding and, well, just bad research practice. An explanatory, also called classical experimental, design is seen as the most robust, since it follows procedures that meet the criteria for proving causality. We will write a custom essay sample on Non-reactive techniques, observation, and experimentation or any similar topic only for you Order Now It identifies independent and dependent variable, required random assignment of research subjects to experimental and a control group so that both groups are the same, describes procedures for manipulation of the dependent variable(s), and requires development of pretest and posttest instruments and time frames. If this design is implemented then threats to internal validity (proving causality) are removed. Descriptive designs address correlational relationships between independent and dependent variables, usually through large-scale surveys. Samples are preferably random (representative of the population being studied); however, these samples are not manipulated into control and experimental groups but are surveyed in their own settings using valid and reliable data collection instruments developed in advance of data collection. Such designs do not address threats to internal validity, but they are considered to have stronger external validity (generalizability of findings from the sample to the population of interest) than the explanatory design (Morris, 2006). The â€Å"Classical† Experimental Design All experimental designs are variations on the basic classical experimental design, which consists of two groups, an experimental and a control group, and two variables, an independent and a dependent variable. Units to be analyzed (e.g., subjects) are randomly assigned to each of the experimental and control groups. Units in the experimental group receive the independent variable (the treatment condition) that the investigator has manipulated. Contributors in the control group do not obtain the independent variable handling. Pretest and Posttest measures are taken on the independent variable(s), and the control group participants are measures at the same time as the experimental group, although no planned change or manipulation has taken place with regard to the independent variable in the control group. Researchers often use this design when they are interested in assessing change from the pretest to the posttest, as a result of a treatment or intervention. This design is also known as â€Å"pretest-posttest† or â€Å"before-after† design, to differentiate it from a posttest-only design in which one group receives a treatment, whereas the other group receives no treatment and serves as a control. The key difference in the posttest-only design is that neither group is pretested, nor only at the end of the study are both groups measured on the dependent variable. Some researchers favor this latter design over the classic two-group pre- and posttest approach because they are concerned that the pretest measures will sensitize participants or that a learning effect might take place that influences individuals’ performance on the posttest (Babbie, 2005). Ascertaining Causality between Variables Researchers challenge to establish cause-and-effect associations linking independent and dependent variables by experimental studies. An experiment characterizes a set of processes to decide the fundamental nature of the causal association linking independent and dependent variables. â€Å"Systematically changing the value of the independent variable and measuring the effect on the dependent variable characterizes experimentation†(Maxfield Babbie, 2004). Sometimes, the experiment appraises the outcome of arrangements of independent variable comparative to one or more dependent variables. Not considering the quantity of variables considered, and experiment’s crucial purpose challenges to methodically segregate the result of at least one independent variable connected to at least one dependent variable. Simply when this occurs can one choose which variable(s) truly clarifies the happening (Morris, 2006). To conclude causality, science necessitates that an alteration in the X-variable (independent, influenced variable) go before an adjustment in the Y-variable (dependent, variable predictable for change), with suitable deliberation for scheming other variables that may in reality root the relationship. Perceptive in causal aspects in associations among variables improves one’s perception about experimental data. Controlling all potential factors that influence those effects of the independent variable(s) on the dependent variable(s) requires considerable effort, knowledge about the main factors, and creativity (Lewis-Beck, Bryman, Liao, 2004). Conclusion In other words, the fact that a dependent variable and an independent variable are strongly associated cannot always be extended to a logical conclusion that it is the value of the independent variable that is causing the value of the dependent variable to be whatever it is. To achieve causality between variables, one must conduct an experimental study about these variables. Oftentimes, investigational outcome are not constant as they come out. Even though field studies supply purpose insight about probable causes for experiential phenomena, the need of full power innate in such study confines capability to deduce causality. Because neither dynamic treatment of the independent variable by the experimenter nor manage over probable overriding factors happen, no assurance survives that any experiential disparity in the dependent variable essentially resulted from difference in the independent variable (Maxfield Babbie, 2004). References: Babbie, E. R. (2005). The Basics of Social Research. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Lewis-Beck, M. S., Bryman, A., Liao, T. F. (2004). The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. New York: SAGE. Maxfield, M. G., Babbie, E. R. (2004). Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Morris, T. (2006). Social Work Research Methods: Four Alternative Paradigms. New York: SAGE. How to cite Non-reactive techniques, observation, and experimentation, Essays

Performance Management System

Based on your research into the pre-selected company, outline, analyse and evaluate the performance management system that the company is using to achieve its key strategic goals. You will need to research current theories and practices from literature as they relate to performance management systems. This research should be used to provide evidence that supports your evaluation and recommendations. Your report should: Provide a situational analysis of the company under investigation. Analyse and evaluate the current performance management system (PMS). Discuss the fit between the PMS and the company strategy. Make recommendations on how the PMS could be improved. The report requires: The use of information from the pre-selected organisation. The use of analytic tools to evaluate the PMS. A range of references from literature that should demonstrate breadth and depth of your research. The use of the wider literature to provide evidence for your evaluation and recommendations. The display of critical evaluation and diagnostic skills in the choice of the data included. The display of critical evaluation in the choice of the information sources used. Appropriate and accurate use of the Harvard Referencing System. Text books: at least 5 text books. At least 4 academic journal articles (found using EBSCO, Emerald, ABI/Proquest, Science Direct, Informit, PyscInfo etc.). 2 other sources of your choice: Blog, newspaper, magazine or other Internet source. No more than 1 reference may be general Internet based sources. Wikipedia is not to be used and does not count as an academic reference. Introduction Performance Management System is a solution that provides the meeting place for a large number of people and the management practiced by them, which also includes training and development of new individuals in the system and to the system itself. This is a sort of system which provides a platform for the development of an individual or the entire team with better and improved performance evaluation of the group or an organization, which results in an improved efficiency (Murphy Arvey, 1998). Performance Management Performance management is about bringing management teams and people together to form an environment where continuous growth is the only goal to be achieved, and is practised by all the individuals and teams of this environment. It is a long term evolution process, aimed at continuous improvement of the company or organization, by closely monitoring the performance of the individuals and the teams working day and night to build the company big, and then channelizing their efforts and energies in such a way that they become much more effective and influential to the organization. This is done with help of each team member (DeNisi Kluger, 2000). This is not an individual task or an overnight task, it requires both time and patience to witness the complete effect. There are four major parts of the PMS, they are as described below: Performance Review Cycle (PRC) It is an ongoing process, consisting of a series of meetings within the organization between the managers and the employees, related to the work done, role played, target achieved, problems faced and betterment solutions. Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) It is a process with strict time boundaries; it requires the improvement to be done, after it is identified where it is required. It is not to be confused with disciplinary process, as it has nothing to do with discipline. HR and Discipline Specific Professional Practices within the organisation Merging the discipline committee with the companys HRs the performance improvement is ensured within the organization by a number of ways. Relevant HSE performance measures (Hillgren Cheatham, 2000). There are many type of Performance Management Systems being used by different companies, some of them use manual ways for performance evaluation like making record files and then employing another skilled manpower to assess the performance of others on some set guidelines decided by them or designed by them from some outer agency, thus creating too much complexity in the process (Martin, Bartol Kehoe, 2000). Or, another way popular these days for the performance evaluation purpose, is the use of specialised system for the same task. These are developed according to some specific needs or can be customized according to individual business needs. ReviewSNAP, Taleo Perform, and Success Factors are few examples of these type of systems. Lets take the example of ReviewSNAP and look into it what it actually is. ReviewSNAP It is a system for mostly small and medium sized organizations with not such a huge data to handle. It can be customised according to specific business needs with features like goal setting and notes creation. Features like maintenance of the job description, employees self-assessment series, review due reminder, reporting and statistical dashboard. The dashboard, what is the current performance index of the organization and the managements role to improve it. ReviewSNAP is a simple application as it is a web-based system and requires no software maintenance. ReviewSNAP is a 4 in 1 professional system. It makes performance based appraisal easy to be implemented as the performance matrix is set and every individual is also aware of his performance, so this makes an efficient and transparent system (Weatherly, 2004). It provides better insight to an individual about his performance and improvements. Rewards are now easy to be implemented based on performance as the target is already set, if individuals meet the target they get the reward or else its a fare system. New content can be added to the system anytime, which can make it an ever growing system that never goes out of date even if the company policies change completely. Figure 1 Figure 2: (Weister, 2015) ReviewSNAP is fully automated performance management system very user-friendly, reliable and affordable software, used as a service solution to help companies align goals for greater results (Beatty, Schneier Shaw, 1995). It also enhances the communication as well as coach the individuals, increase employee engagement, and save time and money through improved efficiency. Case Study Union Bank Trust Company is a private bank situated in Nebraska that offers a variety of services like banking, lending, and investment and trust services. There are many branches of this bank which offer full service and loan production offices in Nebraska as well as Kansas. Along with Lincoln and Omaha, there are branches located in nineteen communities of Nebraska and the area near Kansas City Metro (Hillgren Cheatham, 2000). Throughout the world, it is ranked third largest private bank in Nebraska with bank assets of $2.6 billion and trust assets of $11.8 billion as of June 30, 2013. In 2011, UBT decided to curtail the ineffective and inefficient performance management practices which have become standard worldwide and started looking for some new and more efficient system to evaluate the performance of its employees. Chad Theis, first vice president of HR at UBT was also very unimpressed with the current practice of once in a year meeting of the managers with their employees, where they evaluate their annual performance and based on that provide them with a target to achieve in the next 1 year. Like other big companies, UBT also provided its managers with free decision making and evaluation techniques, but this caused non uniformity, as different managers had different way to evaluate the employees (Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology, 2003). Moreover, lot of times, the performance evaluation part was almost dropped down by simply being forgotten by bigger issues to handle. Even the managers of the company were not happy with this performance evaluation system as they themselves faced the problem in evaluating the employees in the annual cycle meeting and due to which the goals they set for them were hardly achieved by a very few of them. Also, they noticed that at the time of evaluation, the employees are also not very active in their part of participation, as they were also aware that it is more of a show-off than a real practice. This is when the managers at UBT decided to move out of its old methodology and observe something new. In this quest, they came up with the idea of 4 by 4 process. Both the managers as well as the employees felt the need of often meeting with each other to better understand each other. So, in this way, they conducted cycle meeting quarterly, where the management had an interaction with their sub-ordinates and discussion were carried out on their performance in this 3 month period and based on that rewards and goals were give n (Armstrong Baron, 2000). Now, after coming over with a new idea to understand the problem, they now needed an evaluation system which can evaluate the large dataset on their part. This is where they came across ReviewSNAP. According to Theis, the service first seemed a bit expensive on its part, but when he investigated deeper about the capabilities of the systems, he found that there are many services which can be used for the evaluation purpose and based on the number of services offered and the ease by which the system can be operated. The price was not enough to call the deal off, hence, the company decided to go with ReviewSNAP as the official Performance Management System for them. The biggest catchy factor for the company was the part of the system where they asked, what they actually needed in the system. It was totally customized in accordance to them after long discussion, where they discussed with the software developers to attain their needs. In fact, the company also helped them in getting what they required, as a service from them (Smither). From the time ReviewSNAP system got installed as an official PMS, it is observed that there is a marked growth in their performance, because of the reason that each employee knows their present as well as past performance. Regular cycle meetings are held so that employees can directly meet their superiors and discuss about their improvement. Now, the managers can also monitor the growth very easily and dont have to take much stress on this task of evaluation. The employees are also satisfied as the system working now is totally transparent and they themselves know where they stand in the performance matrix, what is their goal to be achieved, what is to be done to achieve it and what will be the reward for achieving the goal. The new system brought zeal in every employee to self-excel and perform well to achieve the goal and get the reward (Lee, Havigurst Rassel, 2004). Conclusion Examples like these make it clear that the performance management task has not lost its value, in fact it is regaining its true value of total manpower management and bringing out the best in everyone in order to benefit the organization more. Further changes can go on in the system in terms of more features to be included like business forecast. References Arvey, R. D., Murphy, K. R. (1998). Performance evaluation in work settings. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 141-168. Beatty, R. W., Baird, L. S., Schneier, E. C., Shaw (1995). Performance, Measurement, Management, and Appraisal Sourcebook. Amherst, MA: Human Resource Development Press. Cardy, R. L. (2003). Performance management: Concepts, skills, and exercises. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. DeNisi, A. S., Kluger, A. N. (2000). Feedback effectiveness: Can 360-degree appraisals be improved? Academy of Management Executive, 14(1), 129-139. Greguras, G. J., Robie, C., Schleicher, D. J., Goff, M. (2003). A field study of the effects of rating purpose on the quality of multisource ratings. Personnel Psychology, 56, 1-21. Hillgren, J. S., Cheatham, D. W. (2000). Understanding performance measures: An approach to linking rewards to the achievement of organizational objectives. Scottsdale, AZ: WorldatWork. Lee, J., Havigurst, L. C., Rassel, G. (2004). Factors related to court references to performance appraisal fairness and validity. Public Personnel Management, 33 (1), 61-78. Martin, D. C., Bartol, K.M., Kehoe, P. E. (2000). The legal ramifications of performance appraisal: The growing significance. Public Personnel Management, 29(3), 379-406. Smither, J. W. (Ed.). Performance Appraisal: State of the Art in Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. (2003). Principles for the validation and use of personnel selection procedures: Fourth edition. Bowling Green, OH: Author. Weatherly, L. A. (2004). Performance management: Getting it right from the start. SHRM Research Quarterly, 2, 1-10. Armstrong, M., Baron, A. (2000). Performance management.Human resource management, 69-84. Figure 1: Available at: https://lh4.ggpht.com/5rAYcEbw7QWOUYvid9IX9BomHIB1xm-E9-tUEF9w3cyBOKWrkmE3FGhZcI9kak1InBo9bQ=s161 [Accessed 10 Jan. 2015]. Figure 2: Weister, N. (2015). Employee Performance Reviews. Bridging the gap.. [image] Available at: https://www.reviewsnap.com/performance-management-infographic.cfm [Accessed 10 Jan. 2015].