Effective Advertising and Info Management

Tiger Woods today strolled to his second British Open Golf title finishing fourteen shots under par, five shots ahead of the veteran, the Scot Colin Montgomerie. It was Tiger’s tenth success in major tournaments and now only Walter Hagen’s eleven majors, and Jack Nicklaus’s total of eighteen lie ahead of him.

Earlier in the week on the Friday Jack Nicklaus had said an emotional farewell to a huge crowd of golf fanatics who applauded him and Tom Watson all the way around the famous old course at Saint Andrews on the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the headquarters of golf.

But this was Tiger Woods’ tournament and he stretched his lead overnight as all of his rivals failed to put in a strong challenge. One by one they fell by the wayside, and in truth Tiger always gave the impression that should a real challenge have materialised, he would have been able to raise his game. Nevertheless he won by five clear shots to confirm once again, as Colin Montgomerie said afterwards, that he is indeed the leading golfer of his generation, possibly any generation. It wasn’t all bad news for Colin, his second place moved him fifty-nine places up the world rankings to twenty-second.

Jose Maria Olazabal finished a creditable joint third on minus eight, sharing the third prize with a delighted Freddie Couples. As for the other challengers Retief Goosen and Vijay Singh fell away and were never able to land a blow, the same could be said for Sergio Garcia, and Kenny Perry. Ian Poulter finished the best placed Englishman in what was ultimately another poor overall showing by the UK based players.

The weather remained fine throughout the four days of competition with barely a shower of rain. Occasionally the wind blew but never gale force as it can do on this exposed Scottish east coast course. The crowds came in their droves, forty thousand more than last year, and despite the one sided victory everyone enjoyed the week. Once again the old course failed to throw up a hole in one, there hasn’t been one on this course in the Open Championship since Ben Crenshaw’s in 1984.

Before the championship began Tiger was available on the betting exchanges and in the betting tents at 3/1 against and a huge tip went round that Tiger was in the mood to do the business. Plenty of huge bets were struck and many of the professional punters went home happy to thoroughly toast Tiger throughout the evening. Just for once the bookmakers must have taken a battering. Aint that a shame!

Next year the championship returns to England, and to Hoylake for the first time since 1969. Hoylake is a seaside links too, set on the Wirral beside the Dee estuary that looks out across Hilbre Island and over to North Wales and Snowdonia beyond.

Tiger has already sent out a warning to all the others. They will have to improve considerably down on Liverpool Bay if they are to stand any chance of removing the coveted claret jug from Tiger’s iron grip.

David Carter has written hundreds of articles for numerous magazines, newspapers and websites. His most recent work is the property letting handbook SPLAM! 244 pages of expertise gleaned over twelve years of successful property management. His new work, the novel “White Flags” will be published in the new year. He runs three websites SPLAM! for property letting, Homemax for small business and home workers. (This includes a section on sports trading and betting and the site also offers FREE worldwide classified advertising to trade and private advertisers alike.) and Pebble Beach Media, a site that provides thousands of holiday cottages, apartments and villas throughout the globe.

Websites:

http://www.homemax.co.uk
http://www.splam.co.uk
http://www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk

Laptop computers seem to be the current in thing this year. This battery shortage problem is not going to aide the circumstances either. This is one market which I don’t think will be affected with all the economic peril that seems to be going on. The technology loops are so small too which makes it all the more of an up hill struggle.

I’ve heard a growing number of consumers asking for gaming notebooks. Also with the amplified competiton and quick technology shifts, laptops don’t hold their price for increased amounts of time. I think notebooks are a excellent alternative for gaming on. Maybe not exactly for the hardcore but they’re excellent for the rest of us. Speed aside, also worth a mention is the radically thin case designs we are seeing these days. Regardless of the fact that performance has greatly improved and the designs are attractive, honestly performance will and should always lag behind desktop PC’s. Gaming notebooks are always pressuring the performance boundaries of notebook computers so its always a good benchmark of how far the technology has come in that relation.

Sometimes the usual mass market notebooks just are not adequate for what we need them for so custom laptops will always be here. The main thing with custom notebooks is that you can obtain higher spec components. Particular sectors benefit because they only have get what they need. The large number of laptops are spec for the moderate user which means you may not find what you’re looking for. This is the reason custom notebooks are about. You can find of companies who sell straight to the buyer so there is a lot of choice as well. To some consumers this is very significant.

I am honestly waiting to see what laptops come out next. Apart from what has already been mentioned Ultra mobile notebooks are an additional big sector seeing an increase this year. I was never expecting so many consumers to like the device. Ideally everyone would want an ultraslim notebook with a 15 inch screen. There are laptops resembling this in the market already, just at premium prices. Companies are packing greater speed into laptops and it seems as if gaming notebooks will become sleeker and lighter. New notebooks are traditionally kept secret before their introduction so there is no telling what new products we will get.

Check out a few cheap gaming laptops here.

Do you know that numbers are the key to life? Indeed numbers form the foundations of mathematics from number theory all the way up to partial differential equations. Without these curious creatures, we could not calculate, estimate, or compute (as in computer); nor could we transact any of the business that occurs daily throughout the known world. Yet most people find these most interesting entities just a bothersome part of life. Why should this be so? Well maybe a person’s ambivalence towards numbers derives from childhood frustrations experienced when struggling to learn the basics of arithmetic and the rote calculations associated with this discipline.

Lacking an appreciation for numbers can be a sad state of affairs for any person since such a condition often leads to mathematical illiteracy. As parents we should try to instill a love and curiosity for numbers into the minds of our children so that they never arrive at this blighted condition. One way we can do this is by teaching our children early on the amazing properties of numbers and some of the magical calculations that can be performed with them. Indeed the Teenage Number Trick, the Nifty Five Square Technique (see my other articles on these topics), and the techniques laid out in this article should suffice to arouse and stimulate curiosity even in the most torpid learners. Thus here we go on to introduce a calculation that permits one to square any “one” number with blinding speed. In a future article we will learn how to multiply any two arbitrary “one” numbers with no difficulty at all.

But in order to begin this short educational journey, we need to understand what we are talking about in the first place. What is a “one” number. Take a stab at it before reading further. Okay, now the definition. A “one” number is simply a number whose digits consist entirely of 1’s. Thus 1 11 111 1111 11111 are all “one” numbers. Because 1 is such a special numberin fact one of the most important constants in mathematics, much like water is one of the most important compounds in chemistryits presence as the sole digit in forming numbersthe “one” numbersmakes squaring these numbers such an easy task. Watch what I mean.

To multiply the number 11 by itself, something called “squaring 11″ or taking the square of 11, we obtain 121. Stepping up to 111, squaring we have 12321. If we square 1111, we get 1234321. I think by now the pattern has become clear to you and we can thus form a rule for squaring any “one” number: write down the digits consecutively from 1 to the number represented by the number of 1’s forming the “one” number and then count backwards from this number to 1. So in 1111, we have four 1’s. To square this number write the numbers from 1 to 4 consecutively, and then back from 4 to 1 so as not to repeat the 4 twice: 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 to get 1234321 or one million two hundred and thirty-four thousand three hundred and twenty-one. That’s all there is to it. Want a bigger example. Try 11,111 x 11, 111. How many 1’s? Five. So we get 123454321 or one hundred twenty-three million four hundred fifty-four thousand three hundred twenty-one.

If you show your kids how to do these calculations so that they can multiply and square numbers which produce results in the hundreds of millions, do you think they might have a new outlook on mathematics and their ability to master this subject? I think you’ll agree that the answer to this question is self-evident. Stay tuned for Part II which is even more amazing than this one.

Let’s look at what makes a retailer profits.

It’s just a few main things…

1. Number of stock turns in a year
 2. Gross Margin or pricing strategy
 3. How many staff you have working relative to turnover
 4. Rent proportional to turnover or revenue
 5. Conversion rate of walk in traffic to purchases

Let’s investigate all 5.

Stock turns per year, from years of working with retailers, is something a lot of the shop keepers don’t know. Work it out if you don’t know by looking at how many times the cost price of your stock divides into your turnover in 12 months.

e.g. If your stock was valued at $50,000 and you turned over $150,000 your number of stock turns would be 3. If your gross margin was 50% you would make $150,000 gross profit as well.

Stock turns gives you profit, so therefore the more stock turns you do the greater the profit, this is important for you to remember.

In retail you want as many stock turns as possible. But what affects stock turns is what we need to look at.

Stock turns is affected by price and conversion rate (or selling skills). If your prices are much higher than your competitors this may (but not necessarily) affect your sales and hence stock turns.

Conversion rates play a massive role in making profit. If you get 20 people a day walk into your shop but only 2 buy you won’t be making much profit. How you approach customers is extremely critical as you can lose any chance of a sale by uttering just 4 words.

I hope you don’t take offence, but I am going to tell you the worst 4 words you can say…

Can I help you?

Every person has hear this a 1000 times so their reflex reply is virtually always … no thanks, just looking!

Sale lost!

So I suggest you say to people - Hi, have you been into our store before - or something similar. If you have a lot of repeat business with people coming back very regularly I would recommend you say - Hi there, how long since you’ve been into our store?

Either question has to elicit a yes or no answer. Either one is great as you can follow it up with - Really. Let me show you around!

This is so simple, yet so powerful. I worked with one retailer who used this first line and with a bit more help and fine tuning he achieved a 100% success rate for a whole week! Yes, every person who walked in bought something. Prior to this sales system he was getting about 62% of walk in people buying.

So try it out for yourself, let me know how you go with it.

So let’s look at how to increase stock turns, apart from the most powerful one, which is always sales training by using a different greeting…

To increase stock turns you must find out what’s selling and what isn’t. You must measure to find out. Whatever stock has been in your store too long (which could be 3 months) you need to get rid of. In other words sale it off.

I never recommend discounting by a percentage. This can be fatal! I suggest you mark down the price with a tag that says - Was $X, now $Y, save $Z. This works great. Or, just cross out one price and put the new lower price.

Or you can put all stock you want to sell in a special place and tell customers if they buy something else in the shop for ($X) they can have anything in the special place for half price.

The reason you MUST sale off old stock is due to opportunity cost. In retail you need to divide the whole floor up into squares then look at what is selling in each square. It’s all about return on investment from rent paid. You must make a profit from every square in your business, so whatever occupies a square must be selling every 3 months or so.

Whatever isn’t selling in a square is costing you money, lost money from having something in the square that could be selling.

This is called retail knowledge and comes with years of experience in your industry. Finding out what sells best with good margins is what retail profits are all about.

Most retailers I have met say it’s too much work to measure stock levels every 3 months, so they do it once a year because they are too busy. Busy-ness has nothing to do with profits. Busy people go bankrupt from business ownership every day.

Let’s look at the next point. Your pricing strategy or margins.

I meet retailers all the time who don’t know their gross margin or profit. When I ask them what their gross margin is they typically tell me 150% to which I reply you can’t have over 100% profit. Unfortunately retailers mark up by a percentage, they don’t often work on gross margin.

Gross margin gives you gross profit and gross profit is what pays the rent and overheads, not mark up. That’s why it’s more important to know margin. So ask your accountant to work it out if you don’t know how. I don’t have much space here to explain it.

Here’s out last point to cover, how many staff you have working relative to turnover.

This isn’t a simple cut and dried answer. This takes careful measuring from history to decide on the future.

This is where additional marketing can be extremely profitable, yet few retailers do it effectively. If you design and run a newspaper ad, make sure you have an offer on it so it makes it easier to track responses, sales and profits from sales to know if your ad worked or not. This is crucial!

Don’t assume your ad works as I have found 98% of all newspaper ads do not make even $1 profit enough to pay for the ad from the profit from the sales, which to me is the only measure of a successful ad. It takes great expertise to make good profits from newspaper ads.

When you have a turn-key system to generate sales, it makes it so much easier to plan staffing needs.

In regards to rent to turnover I have met business owners who are paying 32% of their turnover as rent and wondering why they can’t make enough profit to even pay themselves. So get hold of some benchmark numbers for your industry, look on the web or ask your accountant and see how your rent compares to your turnover for your industry.

One final tip… have each of your staff measure their own conversion rates, from walk in to paying customer as a percentage. This will automatically increase, just by measuring it! A very powerful thing to do.

Put all these tips together, including changing how you greet customers, measure what sells and what doesn’t, monitoring marketing returns, watching staff numbers and selling off items that haven’t sold in a needed time frame, all will add up to BIG profit increase. And that’s what you’re in business to achieve isn’t it?

Tim Stokes is a master at measuring key numbers in any business. His results with growing businesses has to be seen to be believed so go to his website at http://www.bbms.com.au and have a good look at his testimonials. While there sign up for the 7 Proven Principles of Business Success email mini-course- the world’s most powerful system for growing businesses rapidly.

Some blokes have a hard time keeping a hard on and some women have incredibly long sex drives, meaning it will take the gal a remarkably long time to come. Because of this difference in sex drives, intercourse might well turn into a boring and unsatisfying love making session. That’s why large dildos might well be helpful. If the male climaxes early in the game, or even if the woman just takes longer than her lover, he can continue to penetrate the lady with the juicy dildo. That way all sexual mischief does not have to stop. It gives the man enough time to charge his stamina and keeps the lady stimulated. Therefore when the man is all set to come back into the game, the woman will still be aroused enough to accept the male.

Your very most stimulation area is your thoughts. And as significantly as legions of females will not admit this, the penis is a focus of fertility, no matter how huge or tiny, it is still associated with power. Penetrating your wife with a thin dildo can only make a fantasy of power play reality. For those who want pleaseure try sex with Sex Toys from Sex Bomb.

Some ladies enjoy the sensation of feeling full in their vagina or bottom. Whenever a marital aid such as a thin dildo, penetrates the vagina or bottom, the muscles contract around it. Innumerable girls observe the tightening of all of these muscles to be very enjoyable.

Play like the pros! Practice your sure sports bet strategy online.

Conjoin both of people’s chief leisure actvities and what you’ll get is something that’s named a sportsbook wagers Web property. Truly, what could imaginably be more imaginative. If you envision a knot of sports addicts cheering on any given preferred team, and continuously bets are advertised in addition to the turmoil. Seeking to get their share of the exhilaration, bystanders will habitually attempt to figure out who will win in the running tournament. Put together, all of this evolves into a matey little tournament titled sportsbook wagers Web property.

To wager, you’ll surf to a sportsbook wagers Web property, i.e. a place which receives sportsbook wagers Web property. In the US, you’ll find four states where you can go for sportsbook gambling in a legitimate manner, but beyond legal you may try it anywhere assuming that you are able to find a bookie and happen to be of age. Included sports activities you’ll be able to wager on are pro right along with college basketball & football, professional baseball, professional hockey, right along with horse and dog racing. Patrons might choose to risk some money on the general combined score of a game, at which point a given opponent will be defeated, and even whether a given tossed coin in a game comes out heads or tails.

We’ll be able to choose between so many different manners of stakes– parlays, straight, over/under bets, teasers and others, the straight being the dominating one in sportsbook gambling.

Why don’t you check it out and enjoy the fun at one fell swoop. Simply be sure that you won’t get unduly carried away and exhaust your complete retirement pension on a vagary! Otherwise chances are you’ll be caught unhappy about it till the end of your life!

When a business is engaged in a marketing campaign and it is obvious things are not going correct it is often better to stop the marketing campaign immediately rather than to continue and try to evaluate and fix the problem gone bad.

Why you ask? Well simple really if you continue and you are confusing your customers, then you are diluting your brand name and changing a perhaps longtime image in your customer’s mind and you can actually lose customers?

Additionally we have all heard the saying that you only get one chance to make a first impression, so if you screw it up those potential customers you attracted will be turned off and those potential customers who heard about your marketing campaign slogan or saw an ad may be convinced that it is not what they thought it was or even what they would ever want. While had they never heard of the marketing campaign or saw an ad, they may have eventually walked into the outlet out of curiosity you see? So losing customers can be at stake and if you are a marketing professional and you see trouble, pull the plug and save the brand name.

The brand name capital is at risk and that is more important than your job. Although I have often watched marketing executives keep trying when something was not working and they ended up losing both anyway. Their regional brand image and then their job. Consider this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

During moving operation, the planner of departure may face some confusion due to the complexity of whole issue. No doubt, he will accompany with him all or even most of his stuffs and luggage. The first idea comes to his mind is to look for a moving company. Actually, many moving companies provide their clients with a wide range of services, depending on their destination, weight of their stuffs, numbers of family members accompanying him, and even some needed official procedures made by their experts. One of these services is providing moving truck. This type of services means to let the client hires a truck to load his stuffs. He can select, either he drives the truck by self, or even hire a driver from the same company as well.

Of course, using the service of moving truck will realize great target. It can save efforts and money as well. Yet, there are some considered tips for the client of this service category. He can select the good expert company of this matter, along with suitable fees for hiring the truck. He must firstly inform them if he wishes the one-way destination, whereas he can deliver the truck at his aimed arrival destination, to one of the company’s staffs. He must taking care of safety while driving it, and consider the state of the truck itself as well. Comparing charges of these companies must be taken into consideration to choose whichever convenient for his pocket

“That is the way we do things around here.” Have you ever heard that phrase when trying to affect positive change in your organization? It really doesn’t matter how far-reaching the scope of your change. It doesn’t matter if it is a technology implementation, a deferral from the tried-and-true market strategy or simply a change in a scheduled meeting. The ability of your organization to share knowledge and information is predicated on the cultural temperament of your organization and its pace of change. New technology and the ability to analyze complex sets of information for the purpose of decision support have introduced constant change into the business environment. If the culture of an organization is not taken into consideration, changing the manner in which information is exchanged is an uphill climb.

What Really Comprises an Organizational Culture?

Culture is a multidimensional enigma that envelops the organization. Every member of the organization contributes to the culture in some manner. The history, style of leadership, structural stability, level of work-force empowerment and the ability to adapt to a changing environment all contribute to the culture of an organization. Shaping the culture to face changes in the marketplace and environment depends in part on the ability for the organization’s leadership to implement the guiding vision and mission. Every action taken must align with these vision and mission statements that express why the organization exists and how it will corporately conduct itself.

History and Background of Organization.

An organization’s history and background are the foundation that can be built upon or a barrier to overcome. Some of the attributes to consider are:

•The age of your organization. Many well-established companies are slow to change. If they have lasted for more than 50 years, then why do things differently? Conversely, newer organizations tend to sway in the winds of change and haven’t established roots deep enough to know how to react to new situations.

•The origins of your organization

Is your firm a conglomeration of many other smaller entities or a single-site manufacturing firm? There are considerations attached to either scenario. It is important that the history of your organization is known. When the pressure of a change situation is applied, old social norms can pop up. Understanding the origins assists in devising change management strategies.

Leadership Style

How the executives and senior management interact with the rest of the organization sets the tone of an organization’s culture. Granted, these leaders cannot single handedly change the culture. (Unless they fire everyone and start from scratch, not a likely scenario.) However, their leadership style dictates how they interact with their direct reports and the general employee population. These interactions send messages that have an impact on information sharing. Is the CEO sharing information? Does the average employee know the financial health of the company or the markets to be focused upon? Leadership style typically breaks down into two main categories:

•Command and Control - Task orientation tends to be the marquee of the command and control leadership style. Micromanaging the direct reports by telling them what to do, how to do it, when it should be done, by whom and where it should take place exemplifies high task-related behavior. There is only one-way communication with the exception of clarifying questions to make sure the objective is understood completely.

•Delegating/Empowering - Relationship orientation tends to be more facilitative and communicative. This leadership style depends on the synergy of the group to determine the best course of action. The behaviors exhibited included facilitation, listening, supporting and mentoring the other employees so that the best possible course of action can be created together. Employee buy-in is of great importance to this leadership style.

Structural Stability

The ability to withstand a change in organizational culture can be evident through some of the traditional business measures of stability. Financial strength, productivity and market focus are traditional business measures that define the stability of an organization’s structure. However, twenty-first century business models recognize some less tangible attributes of an organization’s structure that affect a change effort’s success.

Are there functional siloed reporting structures or does the business process dictate who works for whom? Do the channels of communication flow freely across functional areas? Can a manager from engineering communicate a problem to a manager in marketing without involving the senior managers from each area? It is important to have the strength of common understanding across the organization to exemplify its structural stability. If open communication threatens the ability to produce, the organization is not stable. This means being able to walk the walk and not just pay lip service to open communication and business process-related organizational structures.

Employee Empowerment Level

Just as the leadership of the organization can have a task or relationship orientation, so can the rest of the organization. Are the employees empowered to make decisions in their day-to-day activities that affect positive business results? The trickling down of decision-making authority tends to strengthen the fiber of an organization. Granted, this also means trickling down the accountability for success as well. Well-trained, well-informed employees are essential to the successful empowered organization. High empowerment and high autonomy need to have well-defined guiding objectives.

Adaptability or Agility

The only constant in today’s business environment is change. Successful organizations seem to adapt to a change in market conditions seamlessly and with minimal effort. How are they able to be so agile, so nimble? The culture is ready for the unexpected. In fact, they expect the unexpected! Unknowns are part of their day-to-day planning and routines.

Vision and Mission Statement Implementation

An organization’s vision and mission should be articulated and available for the entire organization to witness and internalize. A vision gets everyone on the same page and shows where the organization’s future lies. A vision must be shared or an opportunity to buck the system and cause strife presents itself. Work to cultivate a shared vision. The mission statement tells the organization, suppliers and customers who your company is and what its value proposition is to them.

The statement, “Why, because this is who we are,” provides the context in which employees know how to operate and conduct business. The vision and mission are two very important and foundational pieces of guiding information that must be clearly communicated to the entire organization and monitored for adherence to the principles of your organization’s beliefs and ethics. If you cannot share them, then sharing other critical business items is highly doubtful.

Assessing the Cultural Impact on Information Sharing

As previously stated, the ability of your organization to share knowledge and information is predicated on the cultural temperament of your organization and its pace of change. Every organization adapts to change. It’s the speed and flexibility to which this adaptation takes place that determine success. Assessing the culture and understanding how to approach knowledge sharing within the organizational structure supports change efforts.

Assessing the organization from a cultural perspective assists in designing change management plans that address the human factors. Acceptance of new information sharing processes and technology by the people who have to enact the processes or utilize the technology is critical to successful implementation. Therefore, understanding the culture from an objective compilation of subjective information gathering begins to map out the barriers to information sharing that can occur. It also exposes the leverage points resident in the organization that can positively impact information sharing as well.

Outcomes of the Cultural Impact

Assessing the corporate culture will propel information-sharing efforts. How? By understanding the context in which knowledge will be perceived and applied. Depending on how favorable and conducive the culture of your organization is to sharing information, the extremes of the knowledge-sharing culture are either to share for the sake of sharing versus hoarding knowledge and information to protect one’s position.
Information Sharing vs. Information Hoarding.

One would think that information sharing is always better than hoarding information. However, sharing information just for the sake of sharing must have a business purpose at its root. For example, a CEO who decides to publish the minutes of his senior staff meetings on the company intranet to prove that the organization’s culture is open will appear to be sharing for the sake of sharing without a sound business reason. Sharing information should support business decision making or propel innovation. There must also be a structured process by which to capture and use the information being uncovered. Capturing the engineers’ problem-solving conversation by the water cooler so that others in the company can benefit from their expertise is the benefit information-sharing activities should return. The corporate culture that supports information sharing is ahead of the one that does not. However, gaining business benefit from the activity requires a structured approach to leverage uncovered information.

Information hoarding is the other extreme. Information and knowledge still represent power. This is truer in today’s economy than ever before. Organizations are learning that employee interactions yield new knowledge and information that can benefit their business in tangible ways. Hoarding is not always a conscience act of holding back information. Interestingly, it’s not always the highly paid senior manager that possesses the knowledge to meet the challenge of the day’s pressing issues. Quite often, it’s the employee that is not invited to the strategy session or even asked to contribute that has the sought-after knowledge. Encouraging and providing an incentive for those often overlooked people to share what they know will show returns to the organization via an increased base of knowledge. Hoarding information results from a lack of trust. If this sounds too familiar, then focus on some strategies that will help leverage your organization’s culture to begin productive information sharing.

Strategies to Leverage your Organization’s Culture

A complete cultural overhaul may not be necessary to encourage information sharing. In fact, trying to take on that task at the same time you are trying to foster a sharing environment may be counter productive to both efforts.

•Change Management

Comprehensive change management requires a three-phase approach that takes human dynamics and human needs into account. Each type of organizational culture needs all three phases to institute a successful change management plan. However, depending on the organizational assessment results, one phase may receive more emphasis then the others. The main objective of each of the three phases is:

Promotion - Envision the future environment with the information-sharing culture in place. Show the benefits to operating in a knowledge-sharing environment and allow the leadership to send encouraging, motivating messages. Create tension between the environment of today and that of the future being promoted. After the education and training phases are complete and the new behaviors are in place on a day-to- day basis, offer incentives to encourage continued practice.

Education - Present the theory behind the vision of the future being promoted to employees. Then the “why” questions can be answered with sound reasoning to build a foundation of understanding throughout the organization

Training - Provide practical application of processes, technologies and environments. Allow participants to experience the new information-sharing environment in a “lab” setting where clarifying questions can be asked and issues addressed prior to integrating the new behavior into the everyday work routines. New human behaviors and practices are being instituted; therefore, the organization must provide the necessary support to ensure success.

•Creating Collaborative Environments

Define knowledge-sharing communities that affect the high- value business processes and target them for the first implementations of structured information sharing. By designing the optimum collaborative community for the organization’s primary business needs, timely, accurate information will be delivered in context.

•Leadership Modeling Behavior

A significant indicator of successfully promoting organizational change is that the leadership models the desired behavior. In fact, the first implementation of an information-sharing environment should be among organizational leaders and from this group to the general work force. Modeling this behavior helps reinforce the commitment to changing a corporate behavior and shows the work force there will be no negative repercussions to sharing information.

•Knowledge Sharing Benchmark Comparisons

Capture analytics of information-sharing actions to create best practices for getting high-velocity work done. Then, benchmark your organization against others in your industry to determine how you compare to your competitors. This will allow you to analyze where the marketplace is pushing your competition rather than where you want to pull them to in the marketplace.

Summary

Knowing yourself, your limitations, weaknesses and strengths provides an advantage when considering the ability to share and use information effectively. The same is true with an organization made up of people. Knowing the culture of the organization is an indicator of corporate personality. Collectively, the organization’s personality dictates how it will adapt to a change in its environment. Once determined, the correct change management path can be prescribed and information sharing can propel the business value of uncovered knowledge beyond expectations. The synergy experienced by a free flow of relevant information has great impact on your organization’s ability to leverage its information assets.

Maribeth Achterberg is a certified Knowledge Manager with more than sixteen years of experience in the electric and gas utility, telecommunications, retail, real estate and transportation industries. She is president of Verity Management Solutions LLC.

A new BBC Green site combating climate change has launched a new great green website. It focuses on combating climate change and looks into organic products. Sales of organic plums are really growing on the back of alleged benefits to our health and the global environment. Organic Foods are really produced according to a deliberate production standard. Traditionally organic farms have been reasonably little family run farms- which is why organic chillis was once merely for sale in tiny organic outlets and markets. Devons Road Market in South West London is one of the finest farmers markets around. On a Tuesday lunch time there is an enormous queue of very hungry workers at the organic salad bar. Presently people may find organic pears from a broad range of specialist shops.

Since the early 1990’s organic salads has had growth rates of around 0.05 a year, noticeably ahead of the rest of the food industry, in the developed & developing nations. For many consumers there is a belief that consuming organic onions can improve your health, various people have different opinions on that. One fact that could be proved is that organic farming makes use of less pesticides than normal agriculture. Purchasing organic food isn’t just about health, for numerous people it’s about helping to save the environment. Some organic farming certifications schemes are definitely stricter than others. The Soil Association are definitely most inflexible, particularly for poultry and ham. Soil Association certifies turkeys are stored in smaller flocks, & enjoy more space indoors & out than others. The greater part of the other organic chicken standards are really closer to free- range.

Organic beauty products is now something that is popularly used. With organic it means it is all naturally organic ingredients. Organic beauty products are much further beloved & more effective than some ingredients placed in normal day to day skin care. With natural ingredients organic beauty products will work in harmony with your body & skin to enhance your body’s natural healing & regenerative capabilities. Just like when you feed your body bad food, it will let you know its not very happy your skin is not that different. Organic Foods can help you combat your carbon foot print, read more at BBC Green.