Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Florida State, First Impression :: Essays Papers

Florida State, First Impression When I decided to come to Florida State, surprisingly enough it wasn't for the parties. I was actually excited about coming here and studying (don't ask me why). Every other school I looked at I judged them according to how much of a party school they were and what the girls looked like. Then I end up at the #1 party school with a 5:1 ratio of girls to guys. In fact when I came here I wasn't even planning on rushing a Fraternity. When I got here though it was a whole different story. I can remember the week before school started, walking down the hall of my dorm and seeing newspaper clippings on all the doors. After a few days I got curious and decided to read one of them. It was an article about how our University was named the #1 party school for 1999-2000. The last time we had this title was in 1996. Our school has ranked in the top five biggest party schools four times in the last six years, and in 1996 it was ranked #1. For those first one or two weeks of school, everyone was making a big deal about it. I even saw it brought up on MTV News, and Comedy Central. Both shows were ripping on Sandy D'Alemberte about the comments he had tried to make to save the face of his school. His comments about the title were that it was unfair because it was not done in any type of scientifically correct manner. Another one of his arguments was that an interviewer from the Princeton Review had not been to the campus since 1997 so there was no definite way th at they could have information from students about the present social life at the school. The only information the media had to judge this on was feedback they got from student surveys, which are not the most dependable way to get information. So how exactly is this title decided? Does someone go around to different parties and decide it based on how good the parties are? Is it decided by the number of kegs bought in a set amount of time in Tallahassee?

Monday, January 13, 2020

Dear Board of Directors Essay

Upon implementing a Broad Differentiation strategy, Andrews Company desired to have highly demanded products in each of the market segments, hold the majority market share compared to our competitors and increase the value of our firm by the year 2021. We believed that this strategy could get us to that point and we have successfully done so. The start up of Andrews Company proved to be more difficult than anticipated due to high costs in marketing and R&D, investing in automation of sensors and due to our decision to take out most of our loans in the early stages of our product, leading to negative profits for the first two years. However, Broad Differentiation lucratively brought Andrews market share up to 30.93% outweighing the competition (Exhibit 1). Andrews Company will continue to implement this strategy with the goal to hold high demand, continue cutting costs with total quality management initiatives and by reevaluating our capacity and production issues, which will be discussed throughout the course of our analysis. Research and Development Proper allocation of funds towards research and development proved to be of high importance, allowing customers to have access to better-quality products. Andrews Company effectively adjusted each product to their proper ideal spot on the perceptual map by using the segment centers and ideal spot offsets annually. This allowed Andrews to gain optimal market demand, leading to us being able to charge a higher price than competitors later on, thus obtain higher profit among other initiatives. Our high demand was essential in offsetting the costs associated with investing in marketing and promotional budgets, buy/sell capacity and automation of products. Marketing By investing insistently in promo and sales in all the market segments, we were able to increase accessibility and market demand. It was Andrews’s goal to have our products be in the minds of customers of all types and charge a premium for our excellent designs. Another advantage Andrews had over our competitors was that we forecasted at our potential market share, rather than our actual, based on the presumption our customers will be loyal to our brand and we would continue to invest in marketing expenditures. Once we feel comfortable that we hold enough market share, we can then start to cut costs in this department. Finances Monitoring spending and Andrews finances was perhaps the most vital part of our success. In the earlier years of our company we took out large quantities of long-term debt to help finance investment in automation and lowering the cost of producing sensors. Each year Andrews experienced a steep increase in sales, while variable costs gradually increased (Exhibit 2). The extra debt we took out early on we believe to have assisted with the dramatic increase in profits each year (Exhibit 3). One thing Andrews could have done to also assist with the increase in profits was to issue stock, which would have helped raise more capital to invest in capacity capabilities. However, we felt that issuing stock would have diluted the price. We successfully raised our stock price to $281.95 by the end of 2021 (Exhibit 4). A 723% increase from the start of 2014. Production A barrier for further success of Andrews Company was production versus capacity. While production was upwards of 18,000+, capacity only resulted in roughly 11,000. Each year we gradually invested more and more in automation and capacity due to our rising profits, which allowed us to improve our margins (Exhibit 5). We should have properly invested in capacity in the earlier rounds to help bridge the gap between capacity and production. However, Andrews’s strategy was to focus on correctly adjusting our products on the perceptual map to their ideal spots and we planned to never invest so much so that this could not happen. TQM and Human Resources In 2017, Andrews met labor demands and we paid our employees a higher rate than competitors. This tactic was able to put some of the other employees in competitive firms to go on strike for several days, resulting in a higher market share and a better reputation among customers and potential employees. Andrews also spent money each year on training employees for a maximum of 80 hour and recruiting spend of about $4.5 million each year, increasing our productivity index to 129.9% by the end of 2021. At the beginning of 2016, Andrews made an executive decision to invest in total quality management. Of a budget of $4 million, we allotted $1.5 million in 2016 and 2017, then another $600 thousand in 2018. After this amount was spent, we would have seen diminishing returns and opted to cap out at $3.6 million. The substantial investment allowed us to reduce labor and material costs, while increasing demand, thus allowing us to steadily increase profits each year, especially during this three-year span when competitors did not spend enough in TQM. The Future of Andrews Andrews Company will continue to use its method of broad differentiation in the upcoming years and plans to issue stock in order to help with investing in capacity issues that we’ve had in the past. We will continue to spend on marketing, research and development and compensating our employees adequately in order to keep our high market share. Distinguishing our products will continue to be of the utmost importance, offering clientele a superior design. Appendix

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Radha, as the only one of all the characters in the novels...

Radha, as the only one of all the characters in the novels is a true representing of the modern Indian woman. In her study of the imaginary of Indian women in literature, Rajan states that The image of the new Indian woman is of course derived primarily from the urban educated middle-class woman (Rajan 130) and describes her as attractive, educated, hardworking, and socially aware (Rajan 131). In spite of her origin as a daughter of a middle class traditional family, while studying and in the years following her education, Radha became well aware of her possibilities. Living in a large city away from home, having a job and later even a lover, she likes to think of herself as of an independent young woman who can freely decide about†¦show more content†¦This dilemma is inevitably the theme of the novel—and Saadiyas pursuit of freedom can be seen as a variation on the theme. The closer to the ideal of a housewife Radha gets, the more she feels the need to escape. The more boundaries she crosses, however, the more she tends to get back to her role of a wife. The longing for adventure as well as the guilt she feels while pursuing it is the main driving power that makes her sway between her duty to Shyam and her attraction to Chris. The two men stand for a safe yet dull and tiring life full of stereotypes in which she is unable to realise herself fully on one hand and an exciting yet strange life full of the unexpected that makes her feel alive again. She feels trapped by the expectation that are applied to her, such as having a baby or being a glossy, silly wife (Nair 61) and struggles to find a way out so that she could breath freely. While Chris gives her, at least in her eyes, the space she needs in able to breathe freely, Shyam expects her to behave in the way his situation requires, denying her own individual choices. His expectations (Does she ever consider that such silly acts have repercussions? Besides, what will my friends and their wives say if they find out? We have a place in society. A standing that Radha has always treated rather carelessly) stand in a contrast to Radhas feelings. (nair 70)12 This makes her decide to break the conventions once