Nordstrom Case Study Essay Example for Free

Nordstrom Case Study Essay Answer 1: In the 1990s, Nordstrom had six co-presidents who were six cousins belonging to the family’s fourth generation. All six cousins took decisions jointly on major issues concerning the business. Thus, it was necessary that all six co-presidents agree on a decision or a plan for it to be acted upon. This was quite a difficult task as all of them often had differing opinions. Due to this many decisions were delayed or met with resistance by one or the other member. These six co-presidents were compared to a multi-headed hydra. Dismantling the hydra would prevent conflicts on future decisions and would also enable decisions to be taken quickly. It will also vest the ownership for the decisions onto one person. It will also enable a family member to be groomed for possibly leading the company one day. The possible disadvantages of dismantling the hydra is that the six co-presidents could have all contributed their knowledge and experience and have arrived at a better more informed decision. If equal power is vested in six people at the top, it enables them to share the workload. Answer 2: Creating departments around products will create independent profit and loss units for each product. The members of each department will have expertise on their products. They will know how to procure those products and effective sales and marketing techniques to sell those products better. This will narrow down their focus and they will concentrate only on the product that they are selling and will gain expertise on how to sell it best. The possible disadvantages of creating departments around products are that the employees will not have a complete picture of the entire business and where they stand. If in future, they are moved to another department, they will have to gain information about that product from scratch. Answer 3: The following changes prompted the move from mechanistic to organic organization. In the 1990s, the company met with stiff competition from its competitors. Its sales began to plateau. Its net income fell 2% and sales edged up only 1.9%. In the stores that had been open for a year, its sales dipped 1.1% after a 2.6% drop the prior year. Nordstroms shares fell from a 1999 high of 44 3/16 to under 20 in February. The customers and outsiders complained that top executives spent more time in seeking consensus of all co-presidents on issues and this was a reason for Nordstrom being slow in presenting new fashions for sales. Answer 4: In designing an organization to manage change, an additional structural change that Mr. Whitacre should consider is to start a competition among the departments. In this quarterly competition, the department that has the best sales and profits should be the winner and its members should be given some incentives. They should be asked to share the best practices with the other departments in order to help them manage change better. Employees should be rotated regularly from one department to another.

Dickinson and Her religion :: essays research papers fc

Dickinson and her Religion Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Dickinson’s Christian education affected her profoundly, and her desire for a human intuitive faith motivates and enlivens her poetry. Yet what she has faith in tends to be left undefined because she assumes that it is unknowable. There are many unknown subjects in her poetry among them: Death and the afterlife, God, nature, artistic and poetic inspiration, one’s own mind, and other human beings.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Dickinson was educated in a traditionally Protestant, provincial community and in a religious conservative schools and churches in Amherst and South Hadley. This affected Dickinson as a poet of religious concern, stimulating her to opposition as well as reverence. The Calvinist God she was taught to worship was an arbitrary God of absolute power. She struggles prodigiously in her writing against such an image of God, but also invokes it normally.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Emily Dickinson’s imagination is dynamic partly because she thinks of her mental world as always in flux and prefers not to adhere for long to any preconceived religious of philosophical doctrine. At different times she advances opposed positions on such central questions as the goodness of God, the reality of heaven, or the presence of the divine in nature. As a child of her culture, the fixed positions of her local Calvinism are inscribed in her mind and heart, while at the same time she distrusts them and seeks an alternative faith that will be truer to her moral conceptions. Since she takes different positions on religious questions, it has proved hard for commentators to summarize her religious perspective.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  At the start of her career she assembles her poems in fascicles and sets, thus giving them a separate existence as poems, while later she experiments increasingly with a style of letter writing in which the border between verse and prose tends to disappear, and she writes poetically wherever she wants to (Martin).

Fiction-writing mode Essay

Rhetorical modes are methods for effectively communicating through language and writing. Complete the following chart to identify the purpose and structure of the various rhetorical modes used in academic writing. Provide at least 2 tips for writing each type of rhetorical device. |Rhetorical Mode |Purpose – Explain when or why |Structure – Explain what organizational |Provide 2 tips for writing in | | |each rhetorical mode is used. |method works best with each rhetorical mode. |each rhetorical mode. | |Narration |The purpose of a narration is to| | Start with asking yourself if | | |tell stories. Narrations can be |Chronological order, which is a method of |you want to write a factual or | | |factual; story based on events |organization that arranges ideas according to|fictional story. Next, make a | | |as they happened in real life, |time, is the best organizational method for |plot summary, which is a | | |or fictional; made up or |narration. |paragraph or outline that | | |imagined | |describes only the main events | | | | |that drive the story forward. | | |The purpose of an illustration |Order of importance, which is a method of |First, decide on a topic that | |Illustration |is to clearly demonstrate and |organization that arranges ideas according to|you are interested in writing | | |support a point through the use |their significance, is the best |about. Secondly, vary the phases| | |of evidence. |organizational method for illustration. |of illustration you use. This | | | | |way, readers will stay engaged | | | | |in your writing and ideas. | |Description |The purpose of a description is |Spatial order, which is a method of |Does your writing follow a flow?| | |to make sure the audience is |organization that arranges ideas according to|Good writing is focused. Is | | |fully immersed in the words on |physical characteristics or appearance, is |writing written for a purpose? | | |the page. The writer describes |the best organizational them. |Good writing is grammatically | | |his or her world through sensory| |correct a

The Rise Of The Great Depression - 1283 Words

When you think about the late 1920’s-1930 in the economic sense the first and possibly only thing that would come to mind is the Great Depression. Started by the stock market crash of October 1929, it had put many of the investors into an economic downspin. This caused consumer spending and investments to drop dramatically, â€Å"investments fell nearly 80 percent between 1929 and 1933†^1. This also led many companies to go out of business forcing them to lay off their employees. At the peak of the Great Depression around thirteen million Americans were unemployed. This also included government employees. In fact â€Å"government workers, declined about 24 percent between 1929 and 1933 and remained 18 percent below it 1929 level in 1939†^2. Banks†¦show more content†¦The stock market crash was the first of chain events that would put the United States into the longest economic crisis it would ever see. The year of 1929 was an odd one due to the fact tha t businesses were expanding, but employees were still being under paid so much that due to business expansion the workers could not fuel it any longer. This is why the stock market crash was inevitable. Only due to the fact that companies profits were rising but employees were still poor leading to dropped spending on the consumers part. When stock holders got news of what was going on they started to pull and sell their shares. Sold shares â€Å"recorded 13 million on â€Å"Black Thursday† [and around] four days later another 16 million shares were sold after another wave of panic†. This led to a downfall of events, such as businesses started firing employees and the ones that were not fired got pay cuts. â€Å"Most Americans fell into debt leaving them to fall into foreclosures†. In the time of the Great Depression banks did not run on the guarantees with costumers. At this time most Americans had their life savings in the banks, and in the fall of 1931-1933 thousands of banks went under. Leaving millions of Americans to lose all they had to the banks failure. â€Å"President Hoover [tried to] help the banks by giving them loans [thinking that] the