5 The characteristics of ‘good’ information Have you ever seen a set of published accounts for a company? If you haven’t or, even if you have, take a look at some now. (They are often called the annual report.) A large range of information is available online at your fingertips. Some of it is useful, most of it is not. Accountants are increasingly having to deal with growing quantities of information and many are having to search for relevant information as part of their jobs. Some of these activities are designed to dev
5.3 The selection interview The aim of the selection interview is to determine whether the candidate is interested in the job and competent to do it. A selection interview also has the following functions: to explain the work of the organisation, the job and any features such as induction and probation to set expectations on both sides, including a realistic discussion of any potential difficulties (if appropriate) to enable the candidate to assess w
5.1 The interview as a selection method: pros and cons Traditionally, the interview has been the main means of assessing the suitability of candidates for a job. Almost all organisations use the interview at some stage in their selection process. Similarly, most applicants expect to be interviewed. Interviews are useful for assessing such personal characteristics as practical intelligence and interpersonal and communication skills. The interview can be used for answering applicants’ questions, selling the organisation and negotiating terms and
Activity 10: Critical reflections on Hofstede Allow 60 minutes for this activity. You have spent most of this unit working with Hofstede's ideas. He is one of the pioneers of the study of national culture and its impact on organisations, and his work has been very influential. My aim so far has been to help you understand Hofstede's cultural dimensions and to become familiar with how they can be used to analyse one of the main environments within which organisations operate. National culture is also one of the factors
3.6.1 Saying thank you and acknowledging current contribution Probably the single most important way of retaining people's support and goodwill is to say thank you promptly and to demonstrate that you have noted and valued whatever it is they have contributed. If you do not have the systems to guarantee that supporters are thanked appropriately, then you cannot seriously expect to move anyone anywhere – be it up a pyramid, into a kite or round a matrix.
References 4.2.3 Restating the problem If your analysis of the problem and its possible causes is thorough, it should enable you to rewrite the problem statement to include the causes. If you can clarify your objective by defining a desired end-state, you are more likely to produce a good solution. 3.1 Introduction Communication on project work is the glue that holds everything together! (Young 1998) The success of a project is principally determined by its stakeholders, including sponsors and project team, and you can only know how you are doing by keeping channels of communication open. In this section, we examine briefly some of the issues involved in communicating with all people involved with the 2.2.1 Gathering information Successful control of a project depends on the flow of information, so it is important to have systems in place to make sure that you get feedback on what is happening. If the project team is meeting regularly to review progress, monitoring becomes more dynamic and changes to the plan can be achieved by consensus. Involving the team not only helps to keep everyone on target – it also builds commitment. Monitoring is the most important activity during the implementation phase of a proj 1.2.1 Target dates The overall plan will indicate the start dates for each group of activities, or each task. A useful way of focusing activities on achieving outcomes is to provide clear dates for completion of stages and of final outcomes. If there are a number of different types of team, these may start and finish tasks at different times. Where the work of one team depends on another having completed in time, there are important issues to consider. Although a good control system will provide information abo 3.2 Inputs Some inputs are used up in the process of creating goods or services; others play a part in the creation process but are not used up. To distinguish between these, input resources are usually classified as: transformed resources – those that are transformed in some way by the operation to produce the goods or services that are its outputs transforming resources – those that are used to perform the transformation process. Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce materia 2.7.1 Drawing a multiple-cause diagram We can draw a multiple-cause diagram to explore and to communicate the complexity of a system, and to recognise that the effect of a particular system is normally the result of a number of different causes. Examine the example shown in Figure 17 of the multiple c 2.6 Mind mapping The term mind mapping was devised by Tony Buzan for the representation of such
things as ideas, notes and information, in radial tree diagrams — sometimes also called
spider diagrams. These are now very widely used — try a web search on ‘Buzan’, ‘mind map’
or ‘concept map’. 2.4 Systems thinking ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ is a good place to start thinking about systems. A car is more than its individual components. We can think of a football team as being more than a collection of individual players or a family being more than a group of people who share the same name. Each of these examples – the car, the football team and the family – can be seen as systems. Individual parts of a system are connected together in some way for a purpose. Example 2.3 Influence diagrams An influence diagram shows the influences, from within the organisation or from outside it, which bear on a person or unit. 2.2 Input-output diagrams An input-output diagram shows the inputs to a system or to an operation and the outputs from it. 1.5 Matrices A matrix is an arrangement of ‘cells’ in rows and columns. A spreadsheet is a simple example of a matrix. Each cell is described by its position in a column, normally denoted by an alphabetical letter, and in a row, normally denoted by a number. So ‘cell B6’ on your spreadsheet is the one which occupies column B and row 6. The size of a matrix is described by the number of rows and the number of columns (in that order). A ‘two-by-two’ matrix has two rows and two columns. A â 3.3 The importance of understanding motivation Personal characteristics in Figure 1 combine both psychological and personal factors. Two important factors which drive behaviour are motivation and attitudes. MacFadyen et al. (1998) (see Author(s): 4 Conclusion This unit looked at the question of whether the financial markets are efficient in the sense that prices demanded are fair and reflect all known and relevant information about investments. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis defines such efficiency at three levels, depending on how much information is in fact incorporated into prices. The weak form states merely that the current price already reflects all information incorporated into previous prices, so that each successive price move is a reac
