Learning
Essays

This essay presents short answers to questions about the careers of two entrepreneurial CEO: Milton Hershey of Hershey's Chocolate and Sam Walton of Wal-Mart. There are 10 questions about each CEO that cover their early life and the development of their respective companies.

Technology management arrangements of developing countries vary from those of first world ones. The requirement for skill in these states is not growing from within, but somewhat cropping up from new wares imported from…

Globalization is the sum and synergy of their continued presences. Thus, globalization, a process, takes on concrete historical features, rather than floating as a vague abstraction high above actual, even everyday life.

Wyeth represents a "hidden gem" in the pharmaceutical business. This report seeks to show how difficult experiences since 1997 have resulted in Wyeth emerging as a financially successful firm with one of the deepest…

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, many observers in the West were heard to lament the passing of the "good old days" of the Cold War when the enemy was clearly known and its geographic borders…

According to Karl Moore, in "The 'Marketing Concept' -- RIP," the marketing approach that has ruled since the 1960s, "the customer knows best," should be buried and the old concept of the "advertiser knows best" should…

Rupert Smith, the Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2007)

Demographics: Male, 13 years old, Chinese heritage, healthy otherwise, scores in 90th percentile in most intelligence tests; non-violent, intensely curious, we will call him Lon

Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning theory have all had a major impact on education theories and strategies. This essay reviews these three theories of learning and then provides real-life examples of each. Particular attention is paid to the core elements of each theory, including positive and negative reinforcement, positive and negative punishment, and attention, retention, production, and motivation.

Alcan's growth as a global conglomerate in the aluminum and metal fabrication industry follows a similar trajectory of many companies whose business models forced rapid, highly distributed business models at the expense Information Technologies (IT) management systems consistency and performance. Alcan's IT management systems and underlying infrastructure have become balkanized as the company has grown into four separately functioning and highly autonomous business units. In evaluating the key success factors of successful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations in multisite locations, the most critical factor overall is creating a unified, well synchronized system of record across all ERP instances (Hanafizadeh, Gholami, Dadbin, Standage, 2010). A second key success factor for multisite ERP implementations is the ability to negotiate a very low level of maintenance pricing with ERP vendors in the form of multisite or use-based pricing instead of the traditional per-seat model (Law, Chen, Wu, 2010). A third key success factor in the implementing multisite ERP systems is the ability to create a shared set of analytics, financial reporting metrics and measured of shared collaboration performance across all sites (Nour, Mouakket, 2011). Alcan has none of these best practices in effect during the time periods of the case study. They are conversely creating very high costs of maintenance for themselves, paying $500M in software costs and fees to SAP, tolerating up to 400 systems dedicated to just pricing alone, and attempting to manage well over 1,000 systems throughout the four divisions. As the company continues to grow and attempts to move into new markets where unifying all four divisions is necessary, they will find their IT systems are more of a liability than an asset in their current configuration. Coupled with the escalating costs of keeping each of the four divisions under maintenance with SAP, the ongoing high costs of integration, there is the threat of compliance violations to industry safety and quality requirements in addition to Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) financial reporting requirements. All of these factors taken together point to the need for more effective IT management strategy that takes into account the critical success factors for ERP system integration in a highly decentralized organizational structure. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the pros and cons of the current Alcan IT management system, in addition to evaluating the pros and cons of the new Alcan IT enterprise architecture as proposed by Robert Ouelette. The final section of the paper discusses if moving from the current Alcan IT management system to a new structure is advisable or not.