best practices

Examples of best practices in the following topics:

• Keeping the Audience in Mind

• Frederick Taylor

  • These include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or merely to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation.

• The Importance of Delivery

  • Act poised and confident; don't let your nerves get the best of you.
  • When rehearsing, identify your weak spots, practice fixing them, as well as practice hitting the crucial points in your speech.
  • Do your best to avoid fidgeting, pacing, looking at the floor, and over using "um", "uh", or "and. " Try to breathe easy and pace your speech.

• Corporate Policies

  • There is often a disconnect between a company's ethics policies and its actual practices.
  • Sometimes there is a disconnection between the company's code of ethics and actual practices.
  • At worst, whether or not such conduct is explicitly sanctioned by management, the policy is duplicitous; and, at best, the code is merely a marketing tool.

• Direct Investment

  • FDI is practiced by companies in order to benefit from cheaper labor costs, tax exemptions, and other privileges in that foreign country.
  • One theory for how to best help developing countries, is to increase their inward flow of FDI.
  • However, identifying the conditions that best attract such investment flow is difficult, since foreign investment varies greatly across countries and over time.
  • A study from scholars at Duke University and Princeton University published in the American Journal of Political Science, "The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment into Developing Countries: Increasing FDI through International Trade Agreements," examines trends in FDI from 1970 to 2000 in 122 developing countries to assess what the best conditions are for attracting investment.

• Early Efforts in Social Responsibility

  • Businesses should use ethical decision-making practices to make responsible decisions and reduce the need for government involvement such as, for example, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which monitors business decisions and practices to prevent pollution.
  • Milton Friedman (1912-2006), an American economist and Nobel Laureate, later advocated that corporations exist only to maximize profit and behave in their own best self-interest.
  • He argued that corporations' attempts at social responsibility were "morally wrong," as social issues and concerns were best dealt with by government.

• The role of the astute manager

  • (Lovins, Hunter, The Economic Case for Climate Change) What this suggests is that if sustainable practices are a proven way to improve business operations they should be strongly considered – and since the role of a manager is to serve customers perhaps the best way to implement sustainability is through service.
  • If the manager says ‘no' because implementing the idea will involve additional work (as new practices often do in their initial stages), the manager is probably serving his or her incompetence.

• Introduction to Sustainable Production Locations

  • The term ‘industrial ecology' was coined in 1989 by Robert Frosch and Nicolas Gallopoulus to describe the practice of bringing manufacturing and service facilities together in a symbiotic manner.
  • In Canada, Burnside Park (Halifax, Nova Scotia) is perhaps the best-known example of an eco-industrial park with an estimated 1,500 businesses involved.

• TQM

  • Considering the practices of TQM as discussed in six empirical studies, Cua, McKone, and Schroeder (2001) identified nine common TQM practices:
  • It is in the company's best interest that its suppliers provide quality goods or services if the company hopes to provide quality goods or services to its external customers.
  • Examining the source of problems and delays and then solving those problems is what works best.
  • TQM practices ensure each person involved with a product is responsible for its quality.

• What is ethics?

  • It is best understood as a branch of ethics called applied ethics: the discipline of applying value to human behavior, relationships and constructs, and the resulting meaning.
  • Business ethics is simply the practice of this discipline within the context of the enterprise of creating wealth (the fundamental role of business).