Pravab

LEAN MANAGEMENT In recent years, lean has become a powerful management philosophy that many of the companies have adopted but only few have actually achieved. This is because lean management is an ever ending journey and most of the companies have diverted their resources somewhere else after achieving lean (Trent, 2008). During his research with companies and cases, Trent found out that almost all the previous work in lean is towards manufacturing firms and the operations within manufacturing and explains that the managers should realize that lean practices goes beyond organizations to supply chain (Trent, 2009). Also researchers such as Sandelands (1994) and Avery (2003) asserted the importance of lean supply strategy outside the manufacturing firms. Lean is defined as ‘the systematic removal of waste by all members of the organization from all areas of the values stream’ where value stream mapping is mapping and analysing the activities in the processes (Womack and Jone...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452046/ 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.' Samuel Beckett ‘The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” Churchill Faulkner once said, "Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." Rose Kennedy once said, "Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them." The poet, W. H. Auden wrote, "Evil is always unspectacular, and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our table." Albert Pine said, "What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal." Abraham Lincoln once said "In the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." The author François de la Rochefoucauld wrote, "We are so accustomed to disguise ourse...

The Virgin Group At the age of 16, Richard Branson set up the student magazine. From the beginning his strategy was to identify the subjects that were neglected and not touched by well established companies and this gave him the competitive advantage (Pryce, 2009). In 1970, a mail order record was his new venture from where Virgin was founded. From that time on, he expanded virgin group into travel and tourism, mobile, leisure, mobile, finance etc and created a great empire – Virgin Empire consisting of more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries (Virgin, n.d. e). Branson has invested on companies with long term capital growth or which achieves long term value creation and feels this as the best approach for private companies (Pryce, 2009). Even when there were barriers in the virgin group journey, such as 1972-82 recessions, 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, Branson did not fall back. He continually expended the group into areas which were dominated by the big companies while select...