All4Change

Growth including foreign exchange, but excluding divestitures and acquisitions is often referred to as core growth. Organic growth is growth that comes from a company's existing businesses and includes growth over a period that results from investment in businesses the company owned at the beginning of the period. What it excludes is the boost to growth from acquisitions, and the decline from sales and closures of whole businesses. It can also relate to the act of closing down cost centres through established organic methods.

Inorganic Growth is the rate of business, sales expansion etc. by increasing output and business reach by acquiring new businesses by way of mergers, acquisitions and take-overs. This kind of growth also takes place due to government directives, leading to enhancement of business in some identified priority sector/area. The inorganic growth rate also factors in the impact of foreign exchange movements or performance of other economies. It is also a faster way for companies to grow compared with Organic growth.

Organisational change management processes include techniques for creating a change management strategy (readiness assessments), engaging senior managers as change leaders (sponsorship), building awareness of the need for change (communications), developing skills and knowledge to support the change(education and training), helping employees move through the transition (coaching by managers and supervisors), and methods to sustain the change (measurement systems, rewards and reinforcement).

Some change theories are based on derivatives of the Kübler-Ross model from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's book, "On Death and Dying." The stages of Kubler-Ross's model describe the personal and emotional states that a person typically encounters when dealing with loss of a loved one. Derivatives of her model applied in other settings such as the workplace show that similar emotional states are encountered as individuals are confronted with change.

Other approaches to managing change:

• Appreciative Inquiry, a collaborative approach to organisational change, is partly based on the assumption that change in a system is instantaneous ('Change at the Speed of Imagination')
• Scenario Planning: Scenario planning provides a platform for doing so by asking management and employees to consider different future market possibilities in which their organisations might find themselves.
• "Organize with Chaos", by Robin Rowley and Dr. Joseph Roevens. Essentially, change-efficiency can improve greatly when management realise that "People do not resist their own ideas". Open, information-sharing teams and networks, knock power hierarchies flat when it comes to rapid innovation and change. The authors describe Change as a creative cyclical process where some events can be managed, but others must be deliberately 'under'managed and left alone to self-organise, ripen, and eventually improve the business naturally. By looking at how things change in Nature, the authors observed that major changes in the environment can precipitate a ubiquitous process of transformation. Essentially the system moves away from efficient Control and refinement and disintegrates into creative Chaos. As all the various dormant mutations and experiments begin to assert themselves in the evolutionary soup, many fail, but a few of them 'fit' successfully and may reproduce. Thus, they move through a transformational phase, back into a higher level type of Control. Watching the system as a whole, it appears to move through four distinct cyclical phases, which run like this: ENHANCE / PERTURB / ATTRACT / EXCITE. In practice, Management can ENHANCE (a response to events shifting in the environment, or the "change field"). PERTURB (self-organising perturbations occur spontaneously; old ways disintegrate, etc.) Under-management and executive silence reigns here if the natural process is not to be prematurely collapsed. The system then moves into a creative, 'free for all' state of Chaos. ATTRACT (eventually new people, groups, ideas and/or actions emerge, cluster and maybe resonate. EXCITE (time, energy, resources and management can now be applied to enable the new systems to synergise and develop. Profits occur as higher order control and efficiency rule temporarily. Then, depending on the stabilty of the environment, or market competition, it all starts over again as a continuous cycle of change.

Costs such as depreciation, amortization, and overhead are ambiguous. Revenue may also be ambiguous when different products are sold as a package, or "bundled". Within US business, the preferred term for profit tends to be the more ambiguous income.

Gross profit is profit before Selling, General and Administrative costs (SG&A), like depreciation and interest; it is the Sales less direct Cost of Goods (or services) Sold (COGS).

Net profit after tax is after the deduction of either corporate tax (for a company) or income tax (for an individual).

Operating profit, also known as EBIT, is a measure of a company's earning power from ongoing operations, equal to earnings before the deduction of interest payments and income taxes.

There are commentators who see benefit in making adjustments to economic profit such as eliminating the effect of amortized goodwill or capitalizing expenditure on brand advertising to show its value over multiple accounting periods. The underlying concept was first introduced by Schmalenbach, but the commercial application of the concept of adjusted economic profit was by Stern Stewart & Co. which has trade-marked their adjusted economic profit as EVA or Economic Value Added.

Optimum Profit - This is the "right amount" of profit a business can achieve. In business, this figure takes account of marketing strategy, market position, and other methods of increasing returns above the competitive rate.

Accounting profits should include economic profits, which are also called economic rents. For instance, a monopoly can have very high economic profits, and those profits might include a rent on some natural resource that firm owns, where that resource cannot be easily duplicated by other firms.

These actions often follow a specific methodology or strategy to create successful results. A sampling of these are listed below.

The organisation may be a for-profit business, a non-profit organisation, a government agency, or any other ongoing concern. Most BPI techniques were developed and refined in the manufacturing era, though many of the methodologies (like Six Sigma or Lean) have been successfully adapted to work in the predominantly service and manufacturing based economy of today. While there are differences in the challenges that each type of industry poses, the fact remains that the core principles of BPI and how they apply to business improvement remain portable across industries and functions.

It should be noted that BPI focuses on "doing things right" more than it does on "doing the right thing". In essence, BPI attempts to reduce variation and/or wastage in processes, so that the desired outcome can be achieved with better utilisation of resources.

BPI works by:

• Defining the organisation's strategic goals and purposes (Who are we, what do we do, and why do we do it?)
• Determining the organization's customers (or stakeholders) (Who do we serve?)
• Aligning the business processes to realise the organisation's goals (How do we do it better?)

The goal of BPI is a radical change in the performance of an organisation, rather than a series of incremental changes (compare TQM). Michael Hammer and James Champy popularised this radical model in their book "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution" (1993). Hammer and Champy stated that the process was not meant to impose trivial changes, such as 10 percent improvements or 20 percent cost reductions, but was meant to be revolutionary (see breakthrough solution).

Many businesses in the 1990s used the phrase "reengineering" as a euphemism for layoffs. Other organizations did not make radical changes in their business processes and did not make significant gains, and, therefore, wrote the process off as a failure. Yet, others have found that BPI is a valuable tool in a process of gradual change to a business.

There are four roles within a business Management system: Business Leader, Process Owner, Operational Manager, and Process Operator. The responsibilities of each of these roles are unique, but work together as a system. Some employees in an organization may perform as many as all four of these roles over the course of a day, week, month, or year.

Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organisation ("Black Belts","Green Belts", etc.) who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (cost reduction or profit increase).

Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centered around creating more value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes in order to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker, has focused attention on how it has achieved this.

Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimising flow; it is a present-day instance of the recurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas. As such, it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes such ideas as the folk wisdom of thrift, time and motion study, Taylorism, the Efficiency Movement, and Fordism. Lean manufacturing is often seen as a more refined version of earlier efficiency efforts, building upon the work of earlier leaders such as Taylor or Ford, and learning from their mistakes.

Strategy is distinct from tactics. In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: the terms that it is fought on and whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.

In Business, clarification is used to make a statement more clear. It refers to a statement, strategy or intention that has been made but may be subject to a misunderstanding or unfair assumption. A clarification is not the same as a correction, which corrects factual errors in a published story or statement.

All4Change believes that most companies know what their strategy is. They have often spent time and money developing it. However, the communication and cascading of what the strategy means down through the company is frequently ignored. Strategy Clarification is making sure that all staff, suppliers and customers understand the strategy and know what impact that will have on them. In many companies not even the senior executives are fully aligned and understanding of their own Company’s strategy.