Organisation and Behaviour Essay

Case Study 1: Dimensions of Organisational Structure Changing the Rules at Bosco Plastics When Jill Thompson took over as chief executive officer at Bosco Plastics, the company was in trouble. Bosco had started out as an innovative company, known for creating a new product just as the popularity of one of the industry’s old standbys was fading, i.e., replacing yo-yo’s with water guns. In two decades, it had become an established maker of plastics for the toy industry. Bosco had grown from a dozen employees to four hundred, and its rules had grown haphazardly with it. Thompson’s predecessor, Wilhelm K. Blatz, had found the company’s procedures chaotic and had instituted a uniform set of rules for all employees. Since then, both research output and manufacturing productivity had steadily declined. When the company’s board of directors hired Thompson, they emphasized the need to evaluate and revise the company’s formal procedures in an attempt to reverse the trends. First, Thompson studied the rules Blatz had implemented. She was impressed to find that the entire procedures manual was only twenty pages long. It began with the reasonable sentence â€Å"All employees of Bosco Plastics shall be governed by the following . . .† Thompson had expected to find evidence that Blatz had been a tyrant who ran the company with an iron fist. But as she read through the manual, she found nothing to indicate this. In fact, some of the rules were rather flexible. Employees could punch in anytime between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. and leave nine hours later, between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. Managers were expected to keep monthly notes on the people working for them and make yearly recommendations to the human resources committee about raises, bonuses, promotions, and firings. Except for their one-hour lunch break, which they could take at any time, employees were expected to be in the building at all times. Puzzled, Thompson went down to the lounge where the research and development people gathered. She was surprised to find a time clock on the wall. Curious, she fed a time card into it and was even more flabbergasted when the machine chattered noisily, then spit it out without registering the time. Apparently R&D was none too pleased with the time clock and had found a way to rig it. When Thompson looked up in astonishment, only two of the twelve employees who had been in the room were still there. They said the others had â€Å"punched back in† when they saw the boss coming. Thompson asked the remaining pair to tell her what was wrong with company rules, and she got an earful. The researchers, mostly chemists and engineers with advanced graduate degrees, resented punching a time clock and having their work evaluated once a month, when they could not reasonably be expected to come up with something new and worth writing about more than twice a year. Before the implementation of the new rules, they had often gotten inspiration from going down to the local dime store and picking up five dollars worth of cheap toys, but now they felt they could make such trips only on their own time. And when a researcher came up with an innovative idea, it often took months for the proposal to work its way up the company hierarchy to the attention of someone who could put it into production. In short, all these sharp minds felt shackled. Concluding that maybe she had overlooked the rigidity of the rules, Thompson walked over to the manufacturing building to talk to the production supervisors. They responded to her questions with one word: anarchy. With employees drifting in between 8:00 and 10:00 and then starting to drift out again by 11:00 for lunch, the supervisors never knew if they had enough people to run a particular operation. Employee turnover was high, but not high enough in some cases; supervisors believed the rules prevented them from firing all but the most incompetent workers before the end of the yearly evaluation period. The rules were so â€Å"humane† that discipline was impossible to enforce. By the time Jill Thompson got back to her office, she had a plan. The following week, she called in all the department managers and asked them to draft formal rules and procedures for their individual areas. She told them she did not intend to lose control of the company, but she wanted to see if they could improve productivity and morale by creating formal procedures for their individual departments. Case Questions (AO 1.1, 1.2 & 1.3): †¢ Do you think Jill Thompson’s proposal to decentralise the rules and procedures of Bosco Plastics will work? If so, why and how? Give reasons. What, in your opinion, are the requirements to make decentralisation effective? †¢ What kinds of rules and procedures do you think the department managers will come up with? Which departments will be more formalised? Why? †¢ What risks will the company face if it establishes different procedures for different areas? Explain your reasons by analysing the merits and demerits of ‘organic’ and ‘mechanistic’ structures with regard to changes proposed by Jill Thompson. Case Study 2: Organizational Structure and Culture Surviving Greenscape’s Hard Times In ten years, Greenscape had grown from a one-person venture into the largest nursery and landscaping business in its area. Its founder, Lita Ong, combined a lifelong interest in plants with a botany degree to provide a unique customer service. Ong had managed the company’s growth so that even with twenty full-time employees working in six to eight crews, the organization culture was still as open, friendly, and personal as it had been when her only â€Å"employees† were friends who would volunteer to help her move a heavy tree. To maintain that atmosphere, Ong involved herself increasingly with people and less with plants as the company grew. With hundreds of customers and scores of jobs at any one time, she could no longer say without hesitation whether she had a dozen arborvitae bushes in stock or when Mrs. McCormack’s estate would need a new load of bark mulch. But she knew when Martina had been up all night with her baby, when Adrian was likely to be late because he had driven to see his sick father over the weekend, and how to deal with Emily when she was depressed because of her boyfriend’s behaviour. She kept track of the birthdays of every employee and even those of their children. She was up every morning by five-thirty arranging schedules so that Johnson could get his son out of daycare at four o’clock and Doris could be back in town for her afternoon high school equivalency classes. Paying all this attention to employees may have led Ong to make a single bad business decision that almost destroyed the company. She provided extensive landscaping to a new mall on credit, and when the mall never opened and its owners went bankrupt, Greenscape found itself in deep trouble. The company had virtually no cash and had to pay off the bills for the mall plants, most of which were not even salvageable. One Friday, Ong called a meeting with her employees and levelled with them: either they would not get paid for a month or Greenscape would fold. The news hit the employees hard. Many counted on the Friday paycheck to buy groceries for the week. The local unemployment rate was low, however, and they knew they could find other jobs. But as they looked around, they wondered whether they could ever find this kind of job. Sure, the pay was not the greatest, but the tears in the eyes of some workers were not over pay or personal hardship; they were for Ong, her dream, and her difficulties. They never thought of her as the boss or called her anything but â€Å"Lita.† And leaving the group would not be just a matter of saying good-bye to fellow employees. If Bernice left, the company softball team would lose its best pitcher, and the Sunday game was the height of everyone’s week. Where else would they find people who spent much of the weekend working on the best puns with which to assail one another on Monday morning? At how many offices would everyone show up twenty minutes before starting time just to catch up with friends on other crews? What other boss would really understand when you simply said, â€Å"I don’t have a doctor’s appointment, I just need the afternoon off†? Ong gave her employees the weekend to think over their decision: whether to take their pay and look for another job or to dig into their savings and go on working. Knowing it would be hard for them to quit, she told them they did not have to face her on Monday; if they did not show up, she would send them their checks. But when she arrived at seven-forty Monday morning, she found the entire group already there, ready to work even harder to pull the company through. They were even trying to top one another with puns about being â€Å"mall-contents.† Case Questions (AO 2.1, 2.2 & 2.3): †¢ How would you describe the organization culture at Greenscape? Under the different types of culture, what type of culture, do you think, operating in Greenscape? Justify your views with evidence. †¢ How large can such a company get before it needs to change its culture and structure? And why it is important to change culture and structure? Discuss briefly the benefits and difficulties that Greenscape have to cope with changing its culture and structure as the company gears for its growth. Case Study 3: Leadership Models and Concepts Right Boss, Wrong Company Brenda Hogan was continuously on top of things. In school, she had always been at the top of her class. When she went to work for her uncle’s shoe business, Fancy Footwear, she had been singled out as the most productive employee and the one with the best attendance. The company was so impressed with her that it sent her to get an M.B.A. to groom her for a top management position. In school again, and with three years of practical experience to draw on, Hogan had gobbled up every idea put in front of her, relating many of them to her work at Fancy Footwear. When Hogan graduated at the top of her class, she returned to Fancy Footwear. To no one’s surprise, when the head of the company’s largest division took advantage of the firm’s early retirement plan, Hogan was given his position. Hogan knew the pitfalls of being suddenly catapulted to a leadership position, and she was determined to avoid them. In business school, she had read cases about family businesses that fell apart when a young family member took over with an iron fist, barking out orders, cutting personnel, and destroying morale. Hogan knew a lot about participative management, and she was not going to be labelled an arrogant know-it-all. Hogan’s predecessor, Max Worthy, had run the division from an office at the top of the building, far above the factory floor. Two or three times a day, Worthy would summon a messenger or a secretary from the offices on the second floor and send a memo out to one or another group of workers. But as Hogan saw it, Worthy was mostly an absentee autocrat, making all the decisions from above and spending most of his time at extended lunches with his friends from the Rotary Club. Hogan’s first move was to change all that. She set up her office on the second floor. From her always-open doorway she could see down onto the factory floor, and as she sat behind her desk she could spot anyone walking by in the hall. She never ate lunch herself but spent the time from 11 to 2 down on the floor, walking around, talking, and organizing groups. The workers, many of whom had twenty years of seniority at the plant, seemed surprised by this new policy and reluctant to volunteer for any groups. But in fairly short order, Hogan established a worker productivity group, a â€Å"Suggestion of the Week† committee, an environmental group, a worker award group, and a management relations group. Each group held two meetings a week, one without and one with Hogan. She encouraged each group to set up goals in its particular focus area and develop plans for reaching those goals. She promised any support that was within her power to give. The group work was agonizingly slow at first. But Hogan had been well trained as a facilitator, and she soon took on that role in their meetings, writing down ideas on a big board, organizing them, and later communicating them in notices to other employees. She got everyone to call her â€Å"Betty† and set herself the task of learning all their names. By the end of the first month, Fancy Footwear was stirred up. But as it turned out, that was the last thing most employees wanted. The truth finally hit Hogan when the entire management relations committee resigned at the start of their fourth meeting. â€Å"I’m sorry, Ms. Hogan,† one of them said. â€Å"We’re good at making shoes, but not at this management stuff. A lot of us are heading toward retirement. We don’t want to be supervisors.† Astonished, Hogan went to talk to the workers with whom she believed she had built good relations. Yes, they reluctantly told her, all these changes did make them uneasy. They liked her, and they didn’t want to complain. But given the choice, they would rather go back to the way Mr. Worthy had run things. They never saw Mr. Worthy much, but he never got in their hair. He did his work, whatever that was, and they did theirs. â€Å"After you’ve been in a place doing one thing for so long,† one worker concluded, â€Å"the last thing you want to do is learn a new way of doing it.† Case Questions (AO 3.1, 3.2 & 3.3): †¢ What factors should have alerted Hogan to the problems that eventually came up at Fancy Footwear? †¢ Could Hogan have instituted her changes without eliciting a negative reaction from the workers? If so, how? Case Study 4: Need-Based Perspectives on Motivation More Than a Pay Cheque Samuel Gibson was a trainer for Britannia Home Manufacturers, a large builder of prefabricated homes. Britannia Home had hired Gibson fresh from graduate school with a master’s degree in English. At first, the company put him to work writing and revising company brochures and helping with the most important correspondence at the senior level. But soon, both Gibson and senior management officials began to notice how well he worked with executives on their writing, how he made them feel more confident about it, and how, after working with an executive on a report, the executive often was much more eager to take on the next writing task. So Britannia Home moved Gibson into its prestigious training department. The company’s trainers worked with thousands of supervisors, managers, and executives, helping them learn everything from new computer languages to time management skills to how to get the most out of the workers on the plant floor, many of whom were unmotivated high school dropouts. Soon Gibson was spending all his time giving short seminars on executive writing as well as coaching his students to perfect their memos and letters. Gibson’s move into training meant a big increase in salary, and when he started working exclusively with the company’s top brass, it seemed as though he got a bonus every month. Gibson’s supervisor, Mirella Carta, knew he was making more than many executives who had been with the company three times as long, and probably twice as much as any of his graduate school classmates who concentrated in English. Yet in her biweekly meetings with him, she could tell that Gibson wasn’t happy. When Carta asked him about it, Gibson replied that he was in a bit of a rut. He had to keep saying the same things over and over in his seminars, and business memos weren’t as interesting as the literature he had been trained on. But then, after trailing off for a moment, he blurted out, â€Å"They don’t need me!† Since the memos filtering down through the company were now flawlessly polished, and the annual report was 20 percent shorter but said everything it needed to, Gibson’s desire to be needed was not fulfilled. The next week, Gibson came to Carta with a proposal: What if he started holding classes for some of the floor workers, many of whom had no future within or outside the company because many could write nothing but their own names? Carta took the idea to her superiors. They told her that they wouldn’t oppose it, but Gibson couldn’t possibly keep drawing such a high salary if he worked with people whose contribution to the company was compensated at minimum wage. Gibson agreed to a reduced salary and began offering English classes on the factory floor, which were billed by management (who hoped to avoid a wage hike that year) as an added benefit of the job. At first only two or three workers showed up—and they, Gibson believed, only wanted an excuse to get away from the nailing guns for a while. But gradually word got around that Gibson was serious about what he was doing and didn’t treat the workers like kids in a remedial class. At the end of the year, Gibson got a bonus from a new source: the vice president in charge of production. Although Gibson’s course took workers off the job for a couple of hours a week, productivity had actually improved since his course began, employee turnover had dropped, and for the first time in over a year, some of the floor workers had begun to apply for supervisory positions. Gibson was pleased with the bonus, but when Carta saw him grinning as he walked around the building, she knew he wasn’t thinking about his bank account.

Free Essays on Chinese Woman

Imagine being a Chinese woman in the early twentieth century. Your feet would be bound and you would not be educated. You could only speak when spoken to and would never talk against a male. In theory, you would be seen as a piece of property, to be bought and sold in marriage. Chinese women throughout the ages were seen as less important than men. Although this place set for women has changed over time, it is still in a constant progression to reach equality with the place set for men. Women were required to take the role of a submissive, passive, and weak being, whereas men were expected to be dominant, aggressive, and strong. These prerequisites were established by the three Chinese beliefs of obedience. These beliefs state that a woman should obey her father when young, obey her husband when married, and obey her adult sons when widowed (Johnson 219). A Chinese woman’s place in society was also set due to the customary practices she endured. Some of these practices included foot binding, inferior nurturing, confinement to the home, concubinage, prostitution, and exclusion from education (Rozman 115). Even marriage and family life itself put women in an inferior place to men. This was because marriage was a patriarchal practice, in which the woman was expected to leave her own family and native community, and join herself to her husband’s family and place of residence (Johnson 221). As a Chinese wife, the woman was expected to bear at least one male child, preferably two. Male children were seen as more important than females because they could carry on the ancestral name and provide for their parents in old age (Mackerras and York 233). Chinese women struggled for their rights over the first half of the twentieth century. During this time attention was repeatedly drawn to the increasingly unequal state of women (Rozman 115). These women were fighting for the reform of the traditional family and its values, the right for a ... Free Essays on Chinese Woman Free Essays on Chinese Woman Imagine being a Chinese woman in the early twentieth century. Your feet would be bound and you would not be educated. You could only speak when spoken to and would never talk against a male. In theory, you would be seen as a piece of property, to be bought and sold in marriage. Chinese women throughout the ages were seen as less important than men. Although this place set for women has changed over time, it is still in a constant progression to reach equality with the place set for men. Women were required to take the role of a submissive, passive, and weak being, whereas men were expected to be dominant, aggressive, and strong. These prerequisites were established by the three Chinese beliefs of obedience. These beliefs state that a woman should obey her father when young, obey her husband when married, and obey her adult sons when widowed (Johnson 219). A Chinese woman’s place in society was also set due to the customary practices she endured. Some of these practices included foot binding, inferior nurturing, confinement to the home, concubinage, prostitution, and exclusion from education (Rozman 115). Even marriage and family life itself put women in an inferior place to men. This was because marriage was a patriarchal practice, in which the woman was expected to leave her own family and native community, and join herself to her husband’s family and place of residence (Johnson 221). As a Chinese wife, the woman was expected to bear at least one male child, preferably two. Male children were seen as more important than females because they could carry on the ancestral name and provide for their parents in old age (Mackerras and York 233). Chinese women struggled for their rights over the first half of the twentieth century. During this time attention was repeatedly drawn to the increasingly unequal state of women (Rozman 115). These women were fighting for the reform of the traditional family and its values, the right for a ...

5 LinkedIn Profile Tips to Get You the Job

5 LinkedIn Profile Tips to Get You the Job It’s not a question of whether the hiring manager will look you up on LinkedIn; it is a question of when. If you’re job searching, you have no excuse not to make the absolute best of your online presence. And be proactive. You never know when a potential employer is going to check your profile. Make sure you’re ready to make your best possible first impression. That means no spelling or grammatical mistakes. It also means making sure you’ve taken the following 5 steps.1. You need a summaryIt’s perhaps the most daunting part of the profile, but it’s unfortunately a must. Don’t let your profile look amateur or incomplete. Suck it up and summarize. The upside is you’ll be able to set a tone and shape how your potential employer reads the rest of your materials.2. Maximize the space you haveUse as many of those 2,000 characters as you can. Any space leftover is space wasted unless you squeeze in a few more important keywords. Beef u p your Headline, Specialties section, Job Titles, and Summary with as many hard-hitting keywords as you can.3.  Tell a story with your profileMake yourself the candidate they want to root for. Everybody likes a story, after all. Turn yourself into the most compelling and likeable candidate you can with the tools available to you. Provide much needed context to your bulleted experience list. Endear yourself to hiring managers with tales of how you overcame a challenge, or worked with a team to solve a problem. Be a politician on the stump and watch the votes pour in.4. Make it easy on the eyesTry to avoid huge blocks of text, especially in your summary. Recognize that recruiters are very busy and often don’t have more than a few minutes- even seconds- to spend poring over your materials. Make the information flow in easily identifiable chunks with subheadings and titles and small paragraphs that are easy to digest. They’ll take in more information without feeling taxe d. More points for you!5. Be out in the openNever make a prospective employer search for your contact info. Make sure it’s prominent and accessible in every place you have a presence, and on every document you send. If they want to reach out to chat with you over the phone- or better yet, set up an interview- you don’t want them clicking around trying to find your email address.

Dignity, Potential, and Uniqueness of Each Students

Dignity, Potential, and Uniqueness of Each Students Hashtag: #PSYDignidad Dignity, Potential, and Uniqueness of Each Students Dignitas, Latin for â€Å"intrinsic worth† or dignity is not only used as a guiding principle for human rights (ex. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights) but used to balance with other fundamental liberties and rights such as academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.   For instance, although academic freedom includes the right to seek, discover, and assert important truths, they need to adhere to the human right to equality of status or equally treat all human beings regardless of their performance, intellectual capacity and achievement . For one the chief conditions of human dignity according to the literature is human possessions and achievements, academic freedom normally places the value of rational and scientifically acquired truth about the world, man, and his works at the core and recognizes the obligation to teach and act in a manner that constitutes dignity, maintain and protect the order in which academic activities are performed effectively. Secondary schools, for instance, are often concerned in providing equal educational opportunities for all students regardless of race, social class, gender, or ability. Universities, on the other hand, are higher educational institutions known for advancing human dignity through a type of education, nurturing liberal ideals such as critical thinking, moral reasoning, ethical responsibility and duties towards others. Since academic institutions commonly recognize that students have different backgrounds (i.e. ethnicity, race, etc. ), sexual orientations, political, relig ious, and educational beliefs and learning needs, measurements of students academic and personal achievement are often done in an environment of respect and justice. In relation to scientific freedom, the freedom to research is limited by the recognition that human dignity is inviolable, respectable, and must be protected from harmful experimental research, such as those disclosing genetic abnormalities, altering human genome, implanting computer in the brain, or administering drugs that can enhance or destroy human memory. Note that the 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights urged UNESCO to take actions regarding the consequences biological and genetics studies and emphasized the need to respect human dignity and prohibit discrimination based on genetic characteristics. You may be interested in: Is High IQ a Guarantee of Academic Success? Who and What Deserve Respect? The Value of Academic Debate Womens Right to Education Practice What You Preach At school, respect and care for the rights or dignity are not only applied to human, but to non-human or animal subjects. Similar to a human being with inherent moral dignity and basic rights, treatment of animal subjects is also justified on moral grounds thus science experiments must respect the animal’s dignity. For instance, regardless of improvement in their well-being, schools should not encourage or allow their students to conduct genetic alteration or any experiments that would inhibit animals from performing their normal functions. Preserving Human Dignity in Academic Setting Educational institutions are mostly aware of students’ rights and developed policies reflecting a range of intended educational, spiritual, social, and moral outcomes. A Catholic school in one study, for instance, intends to create a school environment where there are respect and trust, and policies that value and support each student and staff. Aside from quality education, the school is set out to create an enjoyable atmosphere in which everyone’s dignity is acknowledged, nurtured, and protected. Through social, moral, physical, spiritual activities, and recognizing and celebrating students’ achievements, other schools hoped to encourage all students to strive for academic excellence and enhance their dignity as a person. Some catholic schools, according to the study, are focused on social justice, common good, and community service   and developing their students to become responsible member of society by carrying out economic and social activities promoting equality and justice, helping the poor, and   the recognition of dignity and worth of   our brothers and sisters around the world.

Discussion question Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Discussion question - Essay Example Chips (1939)† is based on. The profession of a teacher â€Å"demands character and courage", Mr. Chipping is warned in the beginning. What makes the film interesting is the way he succeeds in proving his spirit of professionalism and the way he establishes the necessity to go beyond the university degree in pursuit of having ‘character and courage’ which would help him impart knowledge to the students in the light of the professionalism. So is it just character and courage that takes a teacher to succeed in giving â€Å"you something to take home to think about besides homework† (Tomlin)? We can think about so many other characters that a teacher must possess although the two aforementioned is as much necessary. In fact I would say that the function of a teacher should take a form which is full. Therefore he must justify the full form of TEACHER. He must teach, educate, advise, change, help, encourage and rear; all the qualities of which is given, not by a university degree but by the ability to go beyond it! Quite influentially, Howard Gardener in his theory of multiple intelligences has pointed out that the concentration that the schools tend to give on logical intelligence and linguistic intelligence (mainly reading and writing) does not help in imparting actual knowledge for, not many students excel in this area of intelligence. An education institution thus, must have an approach of such kind that serves the broader vision of the education. That would be possible if the teacher utilizes different methodologies, techniques, exercises and activities that cater to not only those students who excel in logical and linguistic intelligence but also to those who do not. (Theory of Multiple Intelligences). I once undertook a test in the net (Assesment: Find Your Strengths) developed by Dr. Terry Armstong based on the theory aformentioned and was happy to score 3.29 points in my top three intelligences while the highest that can be scored is 5. My top

Company Summary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Company Summary - Essay Example Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling. Microsoft has been known for its planning, organising, leading and controlling functions. Considering the most essential element of management – Planning, it has been seen Microsoft has a very strong planning process. The company’s planning is done only by the top management and all plans require to be consented by the board of directors and most essentially by Bill Gates. The plans are generally developed by the top level and then are passed down to the various departments of the company, where each of the plans is implemented. The second essential management function is organising. This function is another very essential element of the business and here the company require establishing the functions and assigning them to the respective teams. This is an essential element as it brings teams together to work towards the same goal. Microsoft pays a lot of attention to this and this is clear from the fact that the company is spread worldwide and the only focus of across the world is to ensure complete organisational success. Leading forms the third main aspect of the managerial functions of any business. The ability to motivate and lead the company to reach heights of success is where Microsoft and Bill Gates have been recognised to be the root cause for the immense success that the company faces. Bill Gates is the current chairman of Microsoft Company and has been ranked to be the wealthiest person in the world. He has been known to be one of the biggest revolutions in the computer industry. Bill Gates has built a strong image for himself and has grown to be recognised as the best entrepreneurs in the world. He has set down examples, is admired by many as well as has been criticized for his style of business (Lesinki, 2006). There have been mixed views on his style of working and he has been criticized of being anti

Toyota Strategic Alliances Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Toyota Strategic Alliances - Essay Example Toyota Strategic Alliances Theories and analytical tools to assess strategic issues Decision makers in organizations are continually showered with various issues that can potentially affect the current performance and actions of their companies. They make constant adjustments in their strategies in order to keep them updated with the needs of the changing environment. Hence, assessment of strategic designs of organizations is critical to their success and performance. In the face of the changing global business environment, decision makers should keep in mind that strategy choices become obsolete within a very short period of time. Past styles of operating might not fit the current challenges posed by the competitive environment of the current business world. It is important to identify the chief issues facing the organization in the current financial year or a period of financial years and select some issues from this multitude to deal with at a particular point of time. Selection o f these issues are made with regard to the current business position of the firm, technological advancement of the firm, its economic conditions, human resource capacity of the firm, social and political contexts in which it operates. This process requires the organizational leaders to sort the issues faced by the firm on the basis of the importance level attached to the issue. There are various tools that organizational decision makers might exploit in order to assess the importance of the issues faced by them. ... Higher focus maintained on sorting and assessing issues demonstrate a better understanding of the issues. Hence, decision makers are better positioned to make the most appropriate response to these problems (Tan, Shen, and Langston, 2012; Jauch, 2010). The major dimensions in the strategic decision making process are top management decision, allocations of company resources for various activities, long term objectives of the firm, future orientation of the firm, multifunctional and multi- business consequences of the decisions and general external environment of the firm. This process is known as â€Å"strategic issue diagnosis (SID)† (Huff and Jenkins, 2002, p. 276). SID is a tool used as the first step to identify the issue and assess its characteristics. Diagnosis outputs cast important impact on the following stages in the decision making process. Strategic issues facing companies in Asia Pacific All business firms, in their heart, aims at a general notion; increasing the profits of the firm. For any decision to make sense in the decision making process of the business, it has to be directly (or indirectly) associated with the act of increasing profits. In any other case, the business does not have any strong reason to make investments in this decision. There are two basic issues that a company might face in its path of long term development. These issues are highly contrasting to one another. One issue pertains to the problem of expanding the business, while the other relates to contracting business. In the Asia-Pacific region, business firms face either of these two issues. In this post financial crisis period, a majority of countries are striving to recover from recessionary pressure. Therefore, there is low level of aggregate demand in the economy.