The winter holiday season is a good time to refresh the spirit of collaborative negotiation. What can be better for the holidays than fostering situations that benefit everyone involved as much as possible? Negotiators with the spirit of the season still ask for a discount when doing that holiday shopping or end-of-year deal, but remember [...]
- COBE Home
- Graduate Programs Home
- EMBA Home
- About the EMBA Program
- Experience EMBA
- Admission Process
- Information Request
- Attend an Open House
- Academic Calendars
- Links
- EMBA News
- Contact Us
- EMBA InfoSite
Category Archives: Timely Tips
Doing Business in Emerging Markets
September 28, 2010 – 2:26 pm
As the second year EMBA class prepares to travel to Hanoi, Vietnam for its International Residency in October class members are studying about Vietnam’s exploding economy, culture, and doing business in Vietnam before they leave the United States. In preparation they are scouring business publications and newspapers for the latest news to help them with [...]
Creation and Protection of Trade Secrets
March 24, 2010 – 2:39 pm
In January 2010 a federal judge in Pennsylvania issued an injunction prohibiting a senior vice president of Bimbo’s Bakeries USA, Inc. from taking an executive position at Hostess Inc. The key issue in the case involved the famous “nooks and crannies” in Thomas’ brand English muffins (made by Bimbo’s). The court ruled that Chris Botticella’s [...]
Marketing “Value” To Your Customers
February 18, 2010 – 10:20 am
When shopping, do you always pick the cheapest alternative? Most of us would say no. When making a purchase for your organization, do you always pick the cheapest alternative? Again, most of us say no.
How then, do we choose? Typically, people pick the option they think will give “The biggest bang for the buck.” Or [...]
Qualitative Research Tools
December 19, 2009 – 3:10 pm
Designing and selling the “best” product isn’t enough if your customer doesn’t see the product the same way you do. Even managers, salespeople and other company reps who interact frequently with customers don’t always know what their customers are thinking or what they want. Managers are busy attending to business, so they don’t have time [...]
Keeping the Dialog Open When Working In Groups
October 12, 2009 – 11:06 am
When brainstorming in a group setting a good technique for keeping the discussion going is to adopt the phrase “yes… and” instead of “but” or “no… but.” A good way to put this into practice is to decide beforehand to use “yes… and” whenever the conversation moves from one person to another. It might feel a [...]
Using Net Present Value to evaluate long-term projects
June 22, 2009 – 3:06 pm
Definition
Net present value (NPV) is defined as the total present value (PV) of a time series of cash flows. It is a standard method for using the time value of money to appraise long-term projects.
Formula
Each cash inflow/outflow is discounted back to its present value (PV). Then they are summed. Therefore NPV is the sum of [...]
Benefiting From Change – Cross Functional Work Teams
May 20, 2009 – 3:20 pm
The idea of cross-functional work teams – where employees from different parts of a company work together to develop new products – often conflicts with the status quo. But it doesn’t have to.
Business firms tend to organize people by skill areas: marketing people work together, finance people work together, and production people work together. So [...]
Professional Selling
May 12, 2009 – 3:49 pm
Managers often say they need help teaching their salespeople to close–they just aren’t converting prospects to customers. As many of our Executive MBA participants pointed out in last month’s session, closing often isn’t the problem.
Professional selling is a series of steps and many models, such as the one below, indicate that “closing” is a very [...]
Bad Slide vs. Good Slide
May 12, 2009 – 3:47 pm
Make your presentations memorable by improving your PowerPoint slides. In an attempt to provide information, presenters often create cluttered slides. This distracts the audience from your message; they try to decipher the slides instead of listening to you. Create powerful, simple visual slides and put number-heavy tables and wordy descriptions in a handout. The audience [...]