e-lifeandwork: Learn New Skills Online | Online Courses & Real-World

The primary goal of cost analysis is to determine the true (full) costs of each of the programs (services and/or products) under consideration. After that, you can use this information to: Identify and prioritize cost-cutting opportunities. + Step 1: Recognize the price of maintaining the status quo.... + Step two is to figure out how much something will cost. + Step 3: Make a list of the advantages. + Step 4: Give the costs and benefits a monetary value. + Step 5: Create a budget and revenue forecast timeline. + Comparing costs and benefits is the sixth step. How do you write a cost-benefit analysis for a business case? + Step 1: Define the Cost-Benefit Analysis' Scope and Purpose. + Step 2: Define the Basic Assumptions.... + The third step is to identify the qualitative advantages and disadvantages of a project or investment option. + Step 4) Create an investment, cost, and benefit forecast. Why is cost-benefit analysis needed? Using a cost benefit analysis, b...

Speaker 1: (00:00) Prices at the gas pump and the supermarket are bringing home the big headlines about inflation and those headlines have been screaming about the highest inflation rate in 30 years, a 6.2% jump in the consumer price index and price hikes are even higher on individual items like gas, groceries, and automobiles. The truth is right now, many Americans have more buying power than there are goods to buy. So inflation, the question is, did bad policies create that situation? And can it be turned around any time soon? Johnny is Alan gin, economics professor at the university of San Diego and professor gin. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Where are San Diego and seeing the biggest consumer price increases Speaker 2: (00:48) Food at home is up, uh, nationally, uh, over 5%. Um, if, if you're looking at the individual components of that index in particular, what I would call the proteins have been up considerably. So in the category, meat, poultry, fi...

Eighteen months into the COVID-19 pandemic, just about everyone who works in front of a screen has experienced some degree of "Zoom fatigue." What's worse, all of those videoconferences don't always add up to true collaboration, a new study confirms.  According to Cisco's new Hybrid Work Index, more than 61 million meetings take place globally every month. Yet, in any one of them, only 48% of participants are likely to speak. The lack of participation speaks to the need for a broader range of collaboration tools, including the sort of asynchronous meeting products that vendors like Cisco, Slack and Zoom are rolling out.  The Hybrid Work Index, which Cisco plans to release quarterly, draws on millions of aggregated and anonymized customer data points from Cisco's collaboration (Webex), networking (Meraki), internet visibility (ThousandEyes) and security (Talos, Duo, Umbrella) platforms. The data is supplemented by third-party research surveying over 39,0...

To maintain his life and well-being, an individual must have at his disposal an adequate amount of consumer goods. These goods, however, are not readily available. Without tools at his disposal and by means of his bare hands, the individual can only obtain from nature very few goods for his survival. For instance, take an individual John, stranded in a forest. In order to stay alive, he can only pick up some apples from an apple tree. Apples are the only good available to him that can sustain him. Let us say that by working twenty hours a day, he manages to secure twenty apples, which keep him alive. The twenty apples that John has secured from nature is his subsistence fund, which sustains him (see also on this Rothbard)[1]. John realizes that if he had a special stick this would allow him to become more productive. His daily production of apples could be forty apples (i.e., double his current production). The problem, however, is that the stick is not available—it must be made. T...

That’s not to say I hadn’t talked to strangers before that, because I had. I’m the son and brother of highly social small-­business owners, and I’m a journalist, so talking to strangers has been both a way of life and a livelihood for me. And yet, a few years ago I noticed I wasn’t doing it much anymore — if at all. Between balancing a demanding job and a really demanding small child, I was often tired, distracted, and overscheduled. The prospect of striking up conversations with random strangers in coffee shops, or bars, or on the bus started to feel daunting. Eventually, I just stopped doing it. This was a coping strategy, of course. I was overwhelmed, so something had to go. And talking to strangers can, as it turns out, be taxing. Psychologists have found that just making small talk with a stranger can be cognitively demanding, tiring, and even stressful. That makes sense. You don’t know the person, you don’t know where the conversation is going, so you must pay closer attentio...

As the pandemic slowly begins to wind down, economists are taking the pulse of small business. Their performance is critical to the overall U.S. economy, with small businesses employing nearly half of the workforce, creating two-thirds of net new jobs and accounting for 44 percent of economic activity. A survey by Clutch identified the four greatest financial challenges they faced in 2020: +Revenue. Thirty-one percent said their main financial challenge was a decline in revenue. Forty-five percent of businesses with up to 10 employees experienced reduced revenue. +Surprise expenses. Unforeseen business expenses were the main challenge for 11 percent of small businesses. +Financial expertise. One in 10 said their biggest challenge was lacking the expertise or experience necessary to manage business finances. +Assets. A lack of capital was the biggest challenge for 8 percent of small businesses. In a separate survey, Huckleberry, a small-business insurance provider, looked...

In August 2019, 181 corporate executives of the Business Roundtable made headlines by redefining a corporation’s purpose, extending it beyond maximizing shareholder value to include a “fundamental commitment to all stakeholders” inclusive of employees, customers, and communities. Both criticism and applause followed the announcement. Then 2020 brought a global pandemic, rampant wildfires, a collective reckoning with systemic racism, and a corresponding economic crisis—events that disrupted business and society in unprecedented and interconnected ways. What it means for companies to commit to all stakeholders is being put to the test like never before. While businesses have a lot more to do to fully embrace the ideals of the Business Roundtable’s ambitions, they are increasingly opting to invest capital for social impact as one way to “walk the talk.” Over the last 12 months, several companies have launched investment strategies to advance social-and-environmental causes alongside st...

Post written by Leslie Willcocks, Emeritus Professor of Work, Technology and Globalization at LSE’s Department of Management.  Businesses today face a digital catch-22. Unless they succeed at digital transformation, they will become irrelevant. But digital transformation is costly, difficult and the required investment may be more urgently needed elsewhere in the short-term.  Why is digital transformation still so difficult today? After all, it has been on many executive agendas for a decade or more.  Many organizations digitize – convert something into a digital format usable by computers – or even digitalize and deploy digital data and technologies to improve business operations. For example, automating a procurement process, and using algorithms to make procurement decisions and analytics software to provide insight. But this only impacts procurement; it is not digital transformation, though many might think, or hope, it is. To succeed at digital transformation...

With the economy being as uncertain as it is today, it’s no wonder that a lot of business owners are looking for ways to improve cash flow for their companies.  Here are a few tips that you can use to manage and track the money that flows in and out of your business:  1. Factoring Invoices  Invoice factoring is an innovative, business-friendly alternative to traditional bank-backed financing methods. It gives your small business immediate access to the working capital you require, without debt to pay or any other strings attached.   Take a look at the following factoring benefits:  Save Time And Money: When you’re factoring invoices, a private factoring company purchases your pending invoices, or invoices that haven’t been paid yet by your customers. The factoring company pays a percentage of the total receivable amount, and takes on the burden of collecting payment from your customers. This saves your business significant time and money that you would’ve...