Democracy in the US

Each of us is aware that change is everywhere we look. No segment of society is exempt. We as the public are dealing with the advent of continuous and ever increasing change. Change in technology, change in resource availability, change in national demographics, change in workforce diversity, change in simply every facet of the organizational environment and context in which public institutions must operate. Change, as the saying goes, has truly become the only constant. The challenge for organizations is whether they can become flexible enough, fast enough. And will they do it on terms set by the organizational culture, and then adapt and succeed in the face of it or will they challenge the status quo and attempt to transform the prevailing culture. What follows is the story of a public organization, which is trying to change the context under which it performs rather than be changed by that context. In the realm of Philosophy, as Erasmus of Rotterdam, the first truly great humanist of the modern age once said, â€Å"The intent suffices in a great design†. Erasmus, no doubt was right. However, beyond simple intent, or to phrase it in the current vernacular, vision, action is required to bring the vision to life. In any age, there are those individuals willing to challenge the status quo, whether it is in the field of politics, science, business, or public administration. If these individuals are to enjoy a measure of success, they must be willing to take an inordinate amount of risk and withstand criticism, indifference and cynicism from every quarter. Most importantly, they must have the capacity to envision a great design and then transform that vision into action. A skeptic would find little or no relationship between philosophy and the modern practice of the public. A purist would probably go further and find offensive the very idea of comparing these two seemingly opposed disciplines. One, grounded in the metaphysical pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and the other, a pragmatic and practical effort to conduct the public's business, appear to be at opposite ends of an intellectual continuum. Closer examination reveals that both disciplines share similar characteristics and both pursue parallel aims. Philosophy and public administration seek to understand human motivation, philosophy for the sake of pure knowledge, and public administration to harness this understanding to practical ends. Human apprehension and resistance to change is but one aspect of this understanding that is shared by both disciplines. The idea of a flatter, more horizontal organization, one with a minimum number of organizational layers separating the front line employees from senior management is by no means new. Organizations, if one can call them that, in the early years of the industrial revolution consistently reflected an absolute minimum number of layers. Indeed, a face to face relationship often existed between ownership or management and the employee or worker. As methods of production grew increasingly complex and the principles of scientific management were applied, more and more layers of organizational structure were created. Organizations being ongoing entities, these layers tended to become permanent features of the organizational landscape, often well beyond the time where they†re original intent and usefulness has become obsolete. The private as well as the public sectors has found that the pressures of operating successful enterprises in an ever-changing competitive world, demand new management approaches. A realization has emerged that a principal impediment to the rapid response to a changing environment is organizational structure.    The organization, which was to emerge, was to strive to become boundaryless, free from the confines of the hierarchical past, and organized around processes rather than functions. We desired to become a customer-oriented, fast, focused, flexible, friendly and fun organization. But here again the government felt as though they need to step in. We carefully blended concepts from a diverse variety of management thinkers. As we met in community meetings, every idea and suggestion that complemented our vision of the future organization was documented on video and considered. If we valued the people as assets, then we had to come to respect them. Our habits and organizational routines stripped people of initiative and pride. People frequently did â€Å"leave their brains in the parking lot† as a way of coping with the nature of the anything. They did it because the message we sent through all of our command and control structures, most notably, that people shouldn't do anymore than what the job description said. And we reinforced this with compensation systems that rewarded this behavior. We had to set these human resources free. The people of the U.S. needed to feel that they had a right to exercise the freedom to think and the freedom to act. We would work very hard to demonstrate we were credible on this point. Until we could free all of our assets and apply them to the services we render, it was hopeless to believe that our customer focus could be evident. Individually, we hope to achieve meaningful and lasting contributions. To do this, we must first look inward and objectively determine what our strengths and weaknesses are. Ideally, we should be able to use the benefits of the former to slowly erode the drawbacks of the latter. Persistence and patience, coupled with the use of character, should allow us to achieve this end. Organizations, however, rely on the interdependent actions of the individuals that comprise it. Therefore, if these individuals hope to enact any significant changes they must first ensure that there is a commonality of purpose, a shared vision. Importantly, this vision must be embraced by and apply to each and every one of the members. In this fashion, interdependence and commonality of purpose can be achieved. Governments have found that they can legislate laws that define what is acceptable and what is not just as proven by Alexis de Tocqueville. This definition of acceptability is accompanied with a corresponding punishment. Governments draft, approve and enforce laws. They cannot, however, hope to legislate morals or morality. They have tried, and they have failed. That laws cannot prevent human beings from killing each another is not tragic. It is only one's conscience, based on the moral principles under which we were raised, that prevent us from breaking the law. The laws of the land say we must be punished, but the same laws are powerless to prevent us from killing does this sound just to you. Laws are the manifestation of the moral principles we all learned as children. They are the shared morality, the ethics, of a nation. We felt the need to create a code of ethics based on simple common sense principles derived from a general consensus. This was of paramount importance in our quest. To that end, we adopted our foundational principles. We choose to define empowerment, as the freedom to think and the freedom to act, with the appropriate knowledge of the responsibilities linked with the exercise of power. The first principle, to treat each other with respect and dignity, was embraced by all as the most important guiding principle. The second, that sharing is not a weakness, required a huge shift in perception. To view sharing as strength, rather than as a weakness, becomes very important in the context of the chaos of large-scale change. Without these principles, we could not proceed to fundamentally re-invent ourselves. There are a number of desired talents that any organization needs from its members in order to achieve excellence. Competence, becomes a de facto assumption, for without it the attainment of our goals and objectives is doomed to failure. However, competence, by itself, does not constitute the only element in this formula. Character is the catalyst that binds all the diverse organizational elements into a coherent whole. In fact, character is probably considerably more desirable than competence. Most organizations believe that you can teach skills to create or supplement competence, but you can not teach, dictate, or prescribe character. The third essential talent is intuition. We each have an inner voice which, when combined in the presence of character and competence allows us to do great things. This is a sadly an often ignored reality of leadership. Perhaps one day soon the people of today†s times will start seeing what minority groups of the government would just prefer we not.

A world without Law would be a world without Sin Essay

According to one of the Holy Books, the Bible, when God created the first man and woman, He knew as the author and finisher of man that he has mind, a conscience which is 2-sided. It could be destructive or constructive, it could embrace good or shun evil, it could love or hate based on the outline that he knows what is wrong and or right. That was the basic reason why God warned them or gave a strict Law against the act that lead to the very first sin, which is the eating of the fruit of knowledge. Hence, if there wasn’t any Law, the first and subsequent sins wouldn’t have existed. A car, an example of mechanical robot, will have no idea why it was created, which is a reason why a manual will be attached to it by the manufacturer for the use of the possible user[s]. We are all created for a purpose but the significant difference between Man and Machine is the choice and will power. These two tools can be shaped with Law[s] to guide man from being a weapon of personal and group calamity. And when there is no Law[s], then man can do whatever and anything he likes to suit his personal desire at the expense of others which would mean â€Å"No-Sin†. †¦At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. —- Aristotle It can be said man would be reckless, irresponsible, wild, thoughtless, uncontrolled or careless in a world without law. He would be pitiless when the taste for pleasure clouds his sense of reasoning. The mentality that anything he does is not wrong; just-do-it lingers in the mind of man in a world without Laws because there will not be any form of punishment. It would be a world of no hope for the poor. Government which is supposed to organize the society would not be in existence; there would not be anything like the Legislature to make laws, Executive to administer the laws and Judiciary to interpret the laws. Since the germane objective of Law is to maintain order in a society, the government agencies to carry out crime investigations and the professionals called Lawyers would have no space in a world without laws. Therefore, there will be a paradigm shift where jungle justice takes over the expected capacity of law. Discoveries and inventions will set the world in a state of entropy. Classified experiments such as cloning, stem cell growth and Nuclear weapons would know no limit. The world would be overpopulated for their will not be birth control regulations; strange diseases would be epidemic and pandemic. I can conveniently conclude that the world will fall apart without the law [which is tantamount to a world without sin].

Canadian criminal system of justice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Canadian criminal system of justice - Essay Example The Criminal Code of Canada and other legislation laws such as the Criminal Justice for Youth Act, the Conditional Act and Correlation Release Act, as well as Canadian Rights and Freedoms Charter, offer the basis upon which the system of criminal justice functions, and so do United States Code of Criminal and other legislation pieces. In both nations, system of criminal justice offers an impartial crime response rather than the public taking criminal matters into their hands, (Boydell and Ingrid 82). Judicial independence is a precondition to justice is witnessed in American and Canadian systems of law. The two nations originates from the system of shared law, even though, they have diverse systems of justice. The judicial system of Canada is unified system all courts form the same system and the Canadian Supreme Court exercises the final authority all over the nation, (Kraska 42). Additionally, the United States has two distinct and sovereign systems of justice whereby the federal s ystem of justice imposes federal law and systems of the state ate powerful over the state law interpretation. Historically, racial, class and gender differences have pervaded the justice administration in United States and Canada. For instance, for crucial historical and political explanations, grounded on treaty claims and fiduciary role of the aboriginal peoples Crown, aboriginal people are excluded from administration policy purposes as an ethic group together with the immigrants and their people.

ETHICS IN THE PROFESSION Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

ETHICS IN THE PROFESSION - Essay Example â€Å"Investments involve the transfer of necessary, existing risk from one party to another. This doesn't mean that every investment is good or wise or safe, of course† (Rodeback). However, many others are of the view that investments cannot be considered as an unethical activity since most of the investments are used in the constructive purposes of the nation. They believe that there is no point in keeping the extra money in shelf and it is better to deposit it in legitimate channels. This paper makes a case study to analyze whether investments are ethical or not. Investments can be classified into three broad categories; private investments, entrepreneurial investments and social investments. In private investments, a person is lending his resources for buying ownership in enterprises for the sake of that person’s own enrichment. In other words, the motives of the investor are selfish. Such investors will invest their money based on the chances of getting more return s. For example, share trading is one of the major private investment channel in which many of the greedy individuals invest their money for maximizing their returns. However, the risks associated with such investments are more even though the chances of higher returns are high. It is often quoted that 90% of traders lose, which leaves only 10% of traders as consistent winners. The 90% of traders that lose in the markets are those for which trading is just another form of gambling whereas for the winning 10% it is a business (Wreford) From the above statistics, it is clear that both the winners and the losers in trading approached the trading activity with a wrong intention. The winner treated trading as another form of business and the loser approached it as another form of gambling. Business is always motivated by profit-making and thus it becomes unethical. On the other hand, many other people invest term deposits which offer fixed returns on maturity. Such deposits are safer even though the investor may get only a fixed amount of return. Non-greedy investors may invest in such investment schemes and we cannot argue that their activity is unethical since their motives were not selfish. In short, investments which offer high returns with higher risk are unethical whereas investments which offer fixed returns with minimum risks are ethical in my opinion. In other words, investments which generate high levels of risks can be considered as unethical investments. Entrepreneurial Investment is the second category of investment. In this type of investments, a party is lending or giving resources to enterprises for the sake of the success of that enterprise. The success of the enterprise will indirectly influence the economic success of a nation. For example, recently big organizations in America collapsed as a result of recent recession and subsequently, American economy also showed signs of destruction. Many people lost their employment because of the destruction of organizations and economy. If an investor invests in such organizations, the chances of recovery for that organization may increase even though the investor’s chances of losing money will also be increased. The recovery of the organization may help employees to protect their employment. In other words, the investor helped the organization and its employees immensely by putting his own

Term Paper2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Term Paper2 - Essay Example There will be performance at Penn State Downtown Theatre centre Jan 4, Monday 2013. Tickets will be on sale at 6.00pm, Monday, Jan 4, in Bryce Jordan centre. Andrew York, the Granny winning classical guitarist will thrill classical movie lovers. The venue will be at Playhouse theatre Jan 28, Friday. Tickets will be on sale at 4.00pm, Friday, Jan 28, in Pennsylvania centre stage. Actors from Nommo performing arts company who specialize in Shakespeare’s plays, will perform ‘Romeo and Juliet’, due to public demand, at 9.00pm, Friday and Saturday, Feb, 13 and 14 in Penn State’s Schwad auditorium. Tickets will be on sale at 8.00am, Friday, Feb 13, in Penn State’s auditorium. As she is in her worldwide tour thrilling fans, she will perform at 8.00pm, Friday, March 10 at Eisenhower auditorium. Tickets will be on sale at 10.ooam, Thursday, March 9 and 10, at Eisenhower auditorium. There will be an amazing performance by the award winning Russian American kids’ circus at 5.00pm, Thursday, March 17, at Penn State Downtown theatre centre. Tickets will be on sale at 9.00am, Thursday, March 17, at Pennsylvania arts ticket centre. Orchestra lovers will be thrilled by the talented Shanghai Chinese Orchestra at 9.00pm, Friday, April 20 at Eisenhower auditorium. Tickets will be on sale at 10.00am, Thursday and Friday, April 19 and 29, at Eisenhower auditorium. Fans will be thrilled by this group’s technical prowess, versatility and expansion vision at 7.00pm, Thursday, May 3 at Bryce Jordan centre on campus ground. Tickets will be on sale at 8.00am, Thursday, May 3, at Arts ticket centre. There will be a performance by students of Penn state’s college of arts, and architecture centre for performing arts, at 7:30 p.m. Friday May 20, and 2 p.m. Saturday May 21. Tickets will be available at10.00am in Penn state’s college. Paintings of the entire undergraduate students in Penn State’s school of drawing and visual arts painting program

Personal development through reflective practice Essay

Personal development through reflective practice - Essay Example ts on a monthly basis with all of the heads of service within the council Senior Management Group to make sure that all of the senior managers within the council have a regular opportunity to keep up to date with the latest changes and/or issues which are taking shape. Their stipulated task and the agenda is to Provide strategic advice to the council, ensuring that the policy objectives of the council are incorporated within the work programmers of services; Lead and/or manage the development of major strategies; Provide information and support to councilors, managers and staff; Manage the performance of the directors and heads of service to enable services to implement the councils policies efficiently and effectively; Oversee the development of working relationships between councilors and staff; Ensure the health of the organization (values, culture, expectations and structures);Provide the lead on corporate and inter-agency initiatives to achieve an integrated approach for issues which fall outside of traditional service delivery mechanisms; Co-ordinate the councils work with partner organizations and to establish working relationships with their representatives; Represent the council in local, regional and national debates and Deal with the re solution of conflict. The primary agenda of the counsel is to ensue that the children are developed to their full potential and are brought in a stable, safe and a secure environment. The real deal lies in improving upon their educational attainment and to help even the most vulnerable children and young people to groom them and become better individuals in the long run. Would be to Enabling all children and young people to fulfil their potential, Promoting their safety, care and stability, improving their educational attainment and to enable the most vulnerable children and young people in the Council to develop to their full potential The real strength of the department lies in the wide pool of staff knowledge

Strategic Operation Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Strategic Operation Management - Essay Example Zara has three major product lines, for men, women and children. It has a creative team consisting of sourcing specialist, designers and personnel for product development. The creative team of the company work on products for the current season and they are also engaged in selecting product mix and fabric for the products. Two basic collections are prepared by Zara every year that are the winter/fall collection and the summer/spring collection. The designers of Zara showcase their designs in renowned fashion programs and shows too (Zhelyazkov, n. d.). There is enormous workload of 1000 new design and fashion every month, which is managed by development and design team of 200 employees in Zara. All these employees work from their headquarters that is Spain. This signifies that every individual produces 60 different styles per year, which means approximately 2 styles in every week. This speed is maintained at every stage of product development, which catalyses the retail sales by 200,0 00 – 300,000 in a year. Though this process followed by the company is certainly not cost-efficient, but it is compensated through the high margin on the product (Dutta, 2003). The unique selling proposition (USP) of Zara is that it can take its designs from drawing board to the retail stores around the world in a span of just two weeks. The designs are initially sketched and dedicated through the Computer-aided (CAD) system, with the help of which samples are made by the skilled workers who are working within the design facility (Ferdows, 2003). All the sewing operations take place in the factories owned by the company. The product development structure stated in Figure 1 below is helpful in understanding the product designing and development or production process (Zhelyazkov, n. d.). Figure 1: Product Development Source: (Slack and Lewis, 2002, p. 247) Product development process involves input of operations resource, which includes developing capabilities and rapid change in technology. Moreover, considering the market requirements also play significant role in this process, this is what Zara actively does (Slack and Lewis, 2002). The product development phase beings with market research. This is combined with visiting universities campus and other venues such as discos for observing the fashion trend of the young leaders, sales reports and daily feedbacks (Dutta, 2002). Apart from this, significant investment in information technology and different communication infrastructure has been availed by the company for gathering information on customer demand. The sales managers and associates have customised handheld computers for informing the headquarters regarding daily sales report on real-time basis. The garment styling starts as soon as the designing team receive calls from stores regarding the needs and the team forecast the future demands with the help of these calls. The commercial manager sits with the designers to forecast design demand, fabric , cost and selling price (Dutta, 2002). Resource and Process implications In this section the sources and the processes would be discussed. The fabrics required in the company and other inputs are purchased from external suppliers. There are purchasing offices of Zara in Hong Kong and Barcelona. Apart from this, there are also sourcing personals in Spain, but Europe has been always the top