Compensation is one of the most critical aspects of a company's operations. Often, salaries and benefits represent one of the largest areas of expenditures for companies; that fact alone would make compensation critical. However, compensation also has a direct effect on a company's ability to attract, hire and retain high-quality individuals who enhance the company's performance. Compensation programs are rarely the only reason that an employee joins or leaves an organization, but dissatisfaction with a compensation program, or a compensation program that is considered substandard by employees can be a significant factor when employees decide to join or leave comp

Origins of AIDS/HIV are not known even though there has been considerable amount of discussion and research on the subject of origin. It is believed that it might have its origin in Haiti's rural area from where it spread to urban centers and then came to the US through gay men. But this was just a speculation, which is no longer valid since research in rural Haiti indicates that this virus was rare in that area and was actually spreading from urban to rural instead of being the other way around as has been theorized. It was also found that HIV might have been transported to Haiti from the US or Zaire from where bisexual or gay males brought the disease to Haiti. The most commonly accepted theory of origin of AIDS finds its roots in Africa. In the 1980s, green monkeys in African were found to be the carriers of HIV and it was felt that they had been infected human beings through bites and scratches. But even this theory is no longer accepted since the virus found in green monk

1. There are four steps to assessing the training needs of an organization: looking at the business, looking at the staff, identifying training needs and drawing up a training/development plan, and choosing the training vehicle ("Assess Your Training Needs"). Looking at the business provides a picture of how well the organization is doing in terms of achieving its long-term business goals, producing quality products, and working efficiently, as well as how happy clients and staff are with the current state of affairs ("Assess Your Training Needs"). The "look" at business should also include some analysis to determine the metric goals that the business should achieve, such as target production rate ("Assess Your Training Needs"). Determining what needs to be accomplished or improved enables HR to target the training. A look at the staff helps determine their training and development needs ("Assess Your Training Needs"). With the

1.Find and Keep the Customers You Want: The Customer Insight Mandate – Alton L. Adams (Accenture) Nowadays, it is not enough just to know the wants and needs of customers but rather organizations must endeavor to gain insights or in depth understanding on how best to serve their customers. Accenture starts off with the importance of not only customer retention but continued acquisition as well to unsure business survival and "develop much more intimate relationships with those customers." Even with the rise of methodologies and systems related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), "capabilities for developing insights on customers-and successfully acting on those insights-are still lacking." To achieve this "requires significant shifts in organization and culture, sophisticated technologies and analytical capabilities, and the discipline to continuously monitor and measure the results of all marketing activities." The constant change and the

Blue Martini Lounge is a chain of four martini bars located across Florida. The company offers a large assortment of martinis as well as a variety of appetizers and light snacks, to its customers. The organization has focused its competitive efforts on providing the highest quality experience and customer service to its guests ("Blue Martini", 2006). For this reason, improving processes within the organization is critical to their success.

To Whom It May Concern: The staffing and the maintenance of staffing information in our company is fraught with problems and needs to be revamped. The many tasks associated with tracking personnel data; employee hours; paperwork such as I-9 forms, applications, and that associated with disciplinary actions; consulting forms; and compliance information are not confined to handling by HR personnel but are spread across the organization, with various people throughout the organization having responsibility for the information. Not only is this arrangement conducive to the information's being lost, misused, or stolen, since it is not being secured properly, it makes it very difficult for anyone to get a big picture view of the information. Vital information that one person in the company needs may be hidden away on someone else's computer or in a file drawer, and this makes it difficult to track employees and their information. To obtain all of the information the company po

The opening of Euro Disney in Paris, France requires a marketing strategy that fits the French culture as tightly as America's Disneyland and Disney World fit ours. In America, Disney theme parks provide a type of escapism that is predicated on a familiarity with traditional children's stories such as "Cinderella" and Disney cartoon characters suc

1. The downsizing of middle management has affected supervisory development significantly. Not only has the organizational structure changed as a result of downsizing, but the supervisors that are left afterward have been forced to regroup and operate differently. In many cases, the middle managers who left were the highest paid, and therefore the most experienced, so the remaining supervisors had to operate witho

1. The Sherman Antitrust Act is most directly associated with the competitive, economic, and legal environmental forces. The Act was established in response to businesses in the late 1800s that formed trusts, or "anti-competitive agreements" that allowed them to gain market dominance by cutting their prices drastically and forcing other competitors out of business ("The Sherman Antitrust Act"). These trusts accomplished this either by buying out competitors, forcing them to sign long-term contracts, or making them buy unwanted products in order to receive goods that they did want ("The Sherman Antitrust Act"). When the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, it outlawed tru

The staffing plan for Kellogg's is predicated on the state of the industry, the position of Kellogg's within the industry, the number and type of staff already on board, and the rate of attrition. The state of the cereal industry in the 2000's is not impressive. Although the United States has "the fourth highest per capita consumption rate of cereal in the world," with more than 2.7 billion packages sold each year, growth in the cereal industry has been "slow to non-existent in the early 2000s" ("American Industries: Cereal Breakfast Foods"). In 2002, ten of the top 15 cereal producers reported losses, and the ready-to-eat cereal category fell to $8.1 billion in 2001, a drop from the 1995 level of $8.6 billion ("American Industries: Cereal Breakfast Foods"). Spending within the industry is declining, with marketing budgets shrinking by 37% ("American Industries: Cereal Breakfast Foods"). Despite these disappointing

When investigations find that college athletes are given special treatment as far as grades are concerned, and that they even have courses made up for them that they don't have to attend, it does not look good for the future of any college athlete who is graduating. However, there may be hope for the college athlete, even if he or she does not get hired by professional sports teams. First of all, colleges vie for the best high school athletes, whether or not they have a good grade point average. Having a winning team or an almost winning team can increase the chances of recruiting more winning athletes. Statistics show that when a college becomes a near-winner, admissions to that college increase: The results suggest that teams that barely won performed no better the following year compared to teams that barely lost. However, the colleges that barely won experienced a greater increase in the number of SAT scores that were sent to them the following year relative to the colleges

Introduction Today, Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States and its citizens enjoy a good standard of living, with top-notch schools, a world-class university and many amenities that are never seen by the millions of tourists that continue to flock to this gambling resort in the Nevada desert. What makes the colorful stories about how Las Vegas came to be what it is today, as captured in motion pictures such as "Casino," all the more compelling is the fact that these stories are, by and large, true. In fact, notorious organized crime figures such as Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel were largely responsible for founding what would become modern Las Vegas, but billionaire Howard Hughes helped to transform it into the corporate Disneyland the city has become in the 21st century. This paper provides a review of the relevant literature to determine how these organized crime figures and others seized the opportunity represented by

Introduction The philosophy of religion is an issue that has been a topic of discussion for some time. Among those that work with this issue and are fascinated by it, there are many different individuals that think along very different lines. Among these people are Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Both of these individuals will be discussed here in an effort to show how they are similar and how they are different when it comes to some of the ideas and theories that they have and that they find important. In order to do this, each individual will be addressed separately so that there can be a conclusion at the end which ties them together and discusses how they thought about the world around them and the religious issues of their times. By doing this it will be much easier to understand and think about what each man had to say so that the work that they did can be analyzed and examined in light of who they were and the time period that they lived in. Who someone feels tha

This two page paper argues the benefits of mandatory drug testing on the job. The writer explains the issues of limiting liability and discouraging drug use by employing a mandatory drug test policy. There were two sources used to complete this paper.

Love is a complex emotion. It may encourage a person to write poetry or it may drive him to the point of murder. With emotions ranging from extremely positive to completely negative, love has turned into a rather complicated subject of debate and thus we often find authors and poets asking the critical question, what really is love? The debate ranges from academic to anecdotal but love has occupied an important place in literature and that's exactly forms the crux of two short stories, 'Where are you going, Where have you been" and "What do we talk about when we talk about love?" by Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Carver respectively. In Oates' story we come across a kind of love that is unspoken yet strong. Throughout the story, one feels as if the protagonist, Connie, is not close to her family and doesn't really care about them. "Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up s

Organ donation is at the top of the list of current bioethical consideration, as the potential for gain is evident through countless stories of success, and the potential concern from the bioethical community and the public continues to grow as donation technology outgrows availability for potential donors. The successful development of transplantation is one of the most miraculous accomplishments of modern medicine. Unfortunately, the ability to deliver this medical miracle is limited by a severe and steadily worsening shortage of organs. 1 According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, as of 31 March 1996, more than 45,000 persons in the United States were on the national waiting list for transplantation 2 ; this list grows by several hundred each month. It is estimated that eight of these people will die each day while waiting for transplantation. 3 Even more tragic is the realization that many of these deaths are preventable. Because only about 40 percent of potential cadave

At the heart of many environmental issues are the philosophical and ethical standards that guide people in their responses to the environment. Whether or not a given individual will act responsibly toward the environment is a function of his feeling of responsibility for and commitment to environmental concerns. Three concepts stand out as governing philosophies that impact environmental concerns-environmental pragmatism, ethical relativism, and ethical pluralism. Environmental pragmatism is an offshoot of philosophical pragmatism that puts an environmental spin on it (Mintz). This concept is treated thoroughly in a collection of essays, Environmental Pragmatism, by Andrew Lig

A number of trends in the business environment have evolved a new strategic role for human resources and human resource management. These trends include increased competition, globalization of markets, reshaping of organizations from hierarchical to flattened structures that eliminate middle management, greater diversity in markets and the workforce, and the drive to reduce costs while increasing productivity. As such, human resources represent a strategic resource for organizations hoping to leverage the people factor to gain competitive advantage. As McWilliams, Van Fleet and Wright (2001) assert, "One of the keys to successful competition in the global market is the effective development of human resources to achieve competitive advantage" (p. 2). As such, through the strategic management of the labor force, human resource managers are able to create competitive advantage in a sustainable manner. This is the new strategic role of human resources and human resource man

The introduction of technological innovations in healthcare in recent years has provided healthcare professionals with a wide range of powerful new tools and procedures that can help people live longer, healthier lives. The importance of these innovations has ranged from life-saving surgical procedures to the merely cosmetic such as with some plastic surgeries. While many plastic surgery procedures have been shown to benefit people physically, emotionally and socially, there have been enough adverse clinical outcomes to be concerned. Indeed, some observers have questioned the legitimacy of some plastic surgery procedures, especially for adolescents, because of the potential risks involved as well as the other ethical considerations involved. This paper provides an overview of plastic surgery and how it can be beneficial for many people, followed by a discussion of the potential hazards associated with the practice. A summary of the research and salient findings are presented in th

J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe is a postmodernist and postcolonial retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee keeps some the main characters in Robinson Crusoe's novel- Cruso and an African named Friday, but makes two very important additions: the two authors of the novel are Susan Barton, a white woman who is shipwrecked on the island, and Mr. Foe, whose name is an obvious allusion to Daniel Defoe. The two new characters radically change the meanings inscribed in the book: first of all, Coetzee introduces a feminine figure in the man-centered, exclusivist world of Robinson Crusoe. With the presence of Susan Barton Coetzee also revises the image of the fallen woman as represented in the other two novels by Defoe: Moll Flanders and Roxana. Coetzee's revision of these other two books works as a feminist reading of Moll Flanders and Roxana, but as of Robinson Crusoe as well. Also, the presence of the author of Robinson Crusoe in the novel makes Coetzee's b

Gimpel the Fool by Issac Bashevis Singer is set in an Eastern European town, amongst a community of Orthodox Jews. Gimpel the fool is born an orphan, and from the beginning of his life he is taken advantage of, by his schoolfellows and later by other townspeople, who tell him terrible lies, like his dead parents have risen from the grave, and then laugh when he seems to believe them.

1. Abstract For several years now, abortion cases have filled the media and courts of law with numerous arguments in favor and against it. Advocates of the procedure base their arguments upon women's right to chose for themselves, whereas disclaimers of abortion state the unborn fetuses' rights to be brought to life and given a chance to live. The latest issue with abortion regards a highly disputed method of terminating unwanted pregnancies: "partial-birth abortion" - known medically as both intact dilation and evacuation or D and X."1 The method is generally used to terminate second trimester pregnancies and medical doctors believe it to be a rather safe procedure. However, justices disagree and fought to have the procedure banned on the territory of the United States. In 2003, the Congress of the United States found the method cruel (as it implies that "the fetus is partially delivered intact and its skull is then collapsed"2) and banned th

Addiction is a common focus of psychology studies, as substance abuse and psychological function are related on many levels. Alcohol addiction, in particular, brings about many issues since it is more socially acceptable and easily available than other drugs. Cognitive Theory and therapy options have recently proved effective in explaining and treating alcohol addiction. Cognitive theory is related to behavioral theory and often uses similar means during treatment. Cognitive theory differs, however, from 12-step Theory that suggests that alcoholism is an incurable disease. Cognitive Theory addresses alcohol addiction and other substance addiction in terms of both neuroscience and psychology. Tools including human brain imaging, drug intervention trials, and cognitive testing are used to pinpoint the reasons behind addictive behavior (Li, 2003). Li (2003) explains that the link between brain function and addiction occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain. There, the confluence of pleasure-related chemical receptors become accustomed to the flooding of pleasure associa

The historical figure of Wilma Mankiller, the first female leader of the Cherokee nation, is of great importance to the understanding of the cultural identity struggle of the Native Americans. Her biography is highly revelatory for the rebuilding of the Cherokee nation after what was called the Trial of Tears or the Cherokee Removal during the years 1838-1839, because many of the methods she used in her leadership emphasized the importance of the interdependence between the members of the Cherokee communities and the rebuilding of the nation through the reaffirmation of its cultural identity and its traditional resources. Wilma Mankiller's historical role is many-sided. Thus, in addition to the role she played in solving the racist issues connected with the identity of the Cherokee people, she also set an important example as a female leader of her people, therefore contributing to the feminist movement. Alongside with these facts, Mankiller also proved that a powerful and in

Whenever people get organized, they are usually able to accomplish far more than they can individually, and organized crime is no exception. Indeed, organized crime remains a multibillion dollar global enterprise today, and it is reasonable to suggest that it is not going away anytime soon. In the meantime, critics argue that mainstream media, including motion pictures such as "The Godfather" trilogy, television series such as "The Sopranos," radio, and the music recording industry – especially hip-hop, have all contributed to a glamorization of the organized criminal lifestyle in way that are harmful to the nation's youth. This paper provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature to determine whether these assertions concerning the glamorization of organized crime by the mainstream media are true, and if so, what can be do to minimize their impact. An analysis of the relevant literature from conflict theory, interactionist th