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Blood is Not Always Thicker than Water: A Family Business Case Study
Get PDFAccording to the US Census Bureau, 90% of businesses in the U.S. are family-owned or controlled. Unfortunately, the succession rates for family-owned businesses are dismal. Only 30% survive a transfer from the founder to a child and only 11% survive a second transfer to the third generation. Two major factors that contribute to this are lack of succession planning and failure to deal with family conflict, both of which are management failures and are often intertwined. Failure to properly manage the family fosters a sense of unfairness, unequal workload, and perhaps a free-rider problem among family members. This not only causes management issues in the business, but friction among family members, which potentially leads to unethical, and sometimes illegal, actions. This case study details such a very successful family-owned business founded by a father and managed by him and his two sons. However, conflicts appear with the third generation. One grandson does the unthinkable, i.e., embezzles from the family business. Rather than stop him, his brother and father join in. To complicate factors more, 60% of the stock is controlled by the family and 40% is publicly traded. Although there were some red flags, no one notices thereby failing in their duties to the corporation. This case also deals with the issue of succession; should the business be divided by family groups or distributed equally among the third generation? Students are required to identify ethical dilemmas, find the lapses in judgement by each party involved, and recommend managerial actions that should have been taken to prevent this situation
Teaching Negotiation Skills: A Cross-Cultural Hiring Role-Play Activity
Get PDFAs social beings, negotiation skills are important for both our personal and professional lives, from resolving an argument with a spouse to negotiating the terms of employment. Skilled negotiators in business are able to resolve differences before they escalate and are value maximizers for their organizations when dealing with suppliers, clients, and co-workers. Mastering negotiations also leads to better relationships in people’s personal lives as they navigate conflict resolution in a more trustworthy and thoughtful manner.
Teaching negotiation skills though role-playing in a safe academic environment allows students to gain much needed confidence, which is critical for success as they further their careers. Negotiations will impact salary trajectory, collegiality and fit in the workplace, and the level of trust built between the employee and her/his organization. The typical student has little to no work experience and inherently enters the workforce with no formal negotiation training.
We introduce a novel negotiation role-play which incorporates the resolution of cultural differences in employment practices, which are becoming ever more prevalent as workplaces become more diverse. This case study is meant to provide experiential opportunity to understand diversity in the work place and the need to be sensitive to cultural differences. This role-playing exercise includes a teaching note and handouts for the participants (HR director and a prospective employee) involved in the negotiation
Balanced Negotiations: An Online Negotiation Training for Women
Get PDFResearch has identified consistent differences in the processes and outcomes of negotiation between women and men (Mazei et al., 2015; Stuhlmacher & Walter, 1999), but there has been little investigation into different types of negotiation trainings specifically for women (Barkacs & Barkacs, 2017; Kulik et al., 2020). This study developed and evaluated an online evidence-based negotiation training for women. Using a pretest-posttest randomly assigned control group design, 95 early career female participants completed three short self-guided online training modules. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), with pretest scores used as a covariate to reduce error variance, found that the intervention had a significant effect on increase perceptions of malleability of negotiation skills, increased feelings of negotiator self-efficacy, increased setting of specific and complex goals, and reduced fear of backlash. The intervention was not found to have a significant effect on negotiator anxiety or the choice to continue past the study to participate in an optional Zoom negotiation. The implication of these findings for practitioners, academics, and future research are discussed
The Ecological Meaning of the Presence of God in Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Reflections and Translations Based on Elizabeth Bayley Seton: Collected Writings Volumes 3a & 3b
Get PDFIn her third interpretation of Elizabeth Seton’s spirituality within the framework of ecological theology, Sun Hae Kim examines volumes 3a and 3b of Elizabeth’s writings. These volumes cover Elizabeth’s entire life. The presence of God was “the mystery that not only sustained her throughout her life but also united her vision of the entire universe of natural creation and humanity into one.” Kim also puts Elizabeth’s views of creation, humanity, suffering, and death within the context of three ecological theologians: Hildegard of Bingen, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth A. Johnson. According to Elizabeth, God’s presence “consecrates every part of the universe”; caring for the earth—which is God’s body according to Johnson—is, as Kim says, “an act of obedience to the Creator, who wants all life to flourish.” At the end of time, Elizabeth looked to “the complete transformation of the earth,” which for her involved our salvation and “the glory of the natural world.” Death and suffering, as a part of the natural world, are a part of ecology in which God is present as well. Moreover, “suffering is a mystery that humbles and unites both humans and non-human living beings of the earth.
Interposition based container optimization for data intensive applications
Get PDFReproducibility of applications is paramount in several scenarios such as collaborative work and software testing. Containers provide an easy way of addressing reproducibility by packaging the application\u27s software and data dependencies into one executable unit, which can be executed multiple times in different environments. With the increased use of containers in industry as well as academia, current research has examined the provisioning and storage cost of containers and has shown that container deployments often include unnecessary software packages. Current methods to optimize the container size prune unnecessary data at the granularity of files and thus make binary decisions. We show that such methods do not translate efficiently to scientific data files, where only a subset of data may be accessed across several files. In this thesis, we propose a method of looking at this problem at the granularity of bytes. Instead of keeping track of which files are accessed, we keep track of the portions of files accessed in the form of file offsets. This I/O lineage allows us to package only relevant parts of data files, significantly reducing the storage and sharing cost of containers. Results show the generality of our method across different data formats and reduction approximately equal to the amount of data fetched into memory
INVESTIGATING THE SALINITY TOLERANCE OF THE SWORDTAIL (Xiphophorus hellerii)
Get PDFThe swordtail, Xiphophorus hellerii, is a freshwater fish species native to Mexico and Central America and is commonly used in the tropical aquarium trade. Swordtails have been shown to have limited survival in 6 ‰ salinity (Nanda et al., 2016), suggesting they may have a greater salinity tolerance than previously expected. Using a gradual acclimation method, we examined the salinity tolerance and swim performance of this species. Freshwater-reared female swordtails were housed in 29-gallon aquaria. A control group was held in freshwater throughout the experiment. For the experimental group, the salinity was increased by 2 ‰ every week until 30 ‰. Critical swimming speed (Ucrit) was determined repeatedly for each individual fish (every second week) for both control and salinity acclimated (at 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 28 ‰) fish to assess the impact of increased salinity on swimming performance. The critical swimming speed was stable throughout the study for the control group. An initial increase in swim performance was seen at 4 ‰ salinity from the beginning of the experiment but then decreased to control levels by 8 ‰ and was not different from control rates for the remainder of the experiment. Gill Na+/K-—ATPase (NKA) activity was measured at the end of the experiment. There was a 64% increase in NKA activity for the experimental group over the control. Based on these results, swordtails can tolerate much higher salinity than originally thought, with minimal impact on their swimming performance and are able to increase their NKA activity to adapt to the higher salinity environment
