Fluent Essays

This will be a blueprint as well as Executive summary for this paper.  Your BPPG, including the Executive Summary (which will typically be 2–3 paragraphs in length and no more than one page if single spaced)  Must be APA format within 5 to 6 pages excluding reference page and title page . Reference articles are listed below for references which is a must , as well as can use more scholar sources.   The rubric is listed in the attachment. Please follow the particular order from the rubric.What can you do now to integrate the experiences and insights you had in this course with your personal and professional development goals? What are the most important things you are taking from this course that will shape your future and enable you to make a positive difference? The Assignment: All components of the Assignment must be turned in as one document: The executive summary: Write an Executive Summary of the course (2–3 paragraphs) that addresses the following questions: 1. Which content and Assignments in this course improved your understanding of using accounting information to make decisions for your organization ( such as Analyze differences between cost, profit, and investment centers Analyze methods of performance evaluation of cost, profit, and investment centers Analyze standard costing in terms of improving efficiency Analyze material and labor variances (or one with which you are familiar)? · What impact has your improved understanding had (or you anticipate it will have) on the value you will bring to your role within an organization? · In what ways does the content from this course affect a managers ability to create positive change within an organization? · To what extent can the content from this course help you contribute to social responsibility and positive social change? · How have the content and Assignments changed the way you will use accounting information to make management decisions? · How have the content and Assignments shaped your goals now and how do you anticipate they will shape your goals in the future? · After considering what you have learned in the course, create a focused and succinct strategy for your professional or personal life that will enable you to improve profitability for an organization or improve your personal financial resources while demonstrating social responsibility. This strategy could take the form of increasing revenue or reducing expenses. As part of your strategy, be sure to include responses to the following: · List three areas you could focus on for your strategy relative to your own organization, an organization for which you would aspire to work, or your personal life. Describe the importance of each of the focus areas chosen, including how they will enable you to demonstrate social responsibility and positive social change. Provide examples with support from the resources. Describe how you will measure progress toward your success. · 3. Your action plan: Write a detailed action plan for one new goal for professional and personal development. (You will continue to build on the list of goals you selected in your previous course.) Include the following in your action plan: · Describe your specific goal for professional and personal development with an explanation as to why you selected this goal. Be sure to provide concrete and specific examples of why the goal is important, the extent to which this goal enables you to be an agent for positive social change, and the pers22M A N A G E M E N T A C C O U N T I N G Q U A R T E R L Y W I N T E R 2 0 1 0 , V O L . 1 1 , N O . 2 M ost companies now operate in an envi- ronment in which their products, mar- kets, customers, employees, and technology are constantly changing. In such circumstances, the appropriate organizational form becomes important, and a decen- tralized organization is very common. The essence of decentralization is the freedom managers have at vari- ous levels to make decisions within their sphere of responsibility. This frequently involves determining a transfer price system within the company, which has the potential to become the most important and possibly the most interesting problem of management control. Decentralization can simulate market conditions within a company between autonomously acting sub- units—i.e., they reflect competition. Managers in such subunits or “business units” have different degrees of autonomy and a range of company decisions for which they are responsible. The cost center manager is typi- cally responsible for costs, the profit center manager for costs and revenues, and the investment center manager for generating an adequate return on investment. Because of the decentralization of decision making, the role of performance measurement and performance assessment within these responsibility centers becomes important. These issues lead to discussion and system- atic analysis of transfer price functions between seg- ments.1 Companies often use transfer prices as substitutes for market prices either because market prices do not exist or because they do not facilitate internal trading and the synergies it creates. Even if synergies exist for internal trade, it is possible that mar- ket prices may not encourage this to happen. Thus top management often imposes a transfer price in order to benefit from these synergies. An added complication, however, is that sharing the synergistic benefits between responsibility centers is arbitrary, so the “correct” transfer price cannot exist. It is obvious that transfer prices affect the profit reported in each respon- sibility center, and, more importantly, companies can use transfer pricing to influence decision making. We will look at the functions and different types of transfer prices and their possible behavioral conse- quences. The analysis, which is from a managerial point Transfer Prices: Functions, Types, and Behavioral Implications TRANSFER PRICES AFFECT THE PROFIT REPORTED IN EACH RESPONSIBILITY CENTER OF A COMPANY AND CAN BE USED TO INFLUENCE DECISION MAKING. SHOWING A VARIETY OF EXAMPLES, THE AUTHORS DESCRIBE THE FUNCTIONS AND TYPES OF TRANSFER PRICES AND DISCUSS THE POSSIBLE BEHAVIORAL CONSEQUENCES OF USING THEM. B Y P E T E R S C H U S T E R , P H . D . , A N D P E T E R C L A R K E , P H . D . Winter 2010 VOL.11 NO.2 Winter 2010 23M A N A G E M E N T A C C O U N T I N G Q U A R T E R L Y W I N T E R 96 Harvard Business Review | October 2009 | hbr.org Ju d e B u ff u m | by Andrew Likierman Performance Measurement The Five Traps of 1524 Oct09 Likierman layout.indd 961524 Oct09 Likierman layout.indd 96 9/4/09 12:38:55 PM9/4/09 12:38:55 PM hbr.org | October 2009 | Harvard Business Review 97 IIN AN EPISODE of Frasier, the television sitcom that follows the fortunes of a Seattle-based psychoana-lyst, the eponymous hero’s brother gloomily sum-marizes a task ahead: “Diffi cult and boring – my favorite combination.” If this is your reaction to the challenge of improving the measurement of your organization’s performance, you are not alone. In my experience, most senior executives fi nd it an onerous if not threatening task. Thus they leave it to people who may not be natural judges of per- formance but are fl uent in the language of spread- sheets. The inevitable result is a mass of numbers and comparisons that provide little insight into a company’s performance and may even lead to decisions that hurt it. That’s a big problem in the current recession, because the margin for error is virtually nonexistent. So how should executives take ownership of per- formance assessment? They need to fi nd measures, qualitative as well as quantitative, that look past this year’s budget and previous results to determine how the company will fare against its competitors in the future. They need to move beyond a few simple, easy-to-game metrics and embrace an array of more sophisticated ones. And they need to keep people on their toes and make sure that today’s measures are not about yesterday’s business model. In the following pages I present what I’ve found to be the fi ve most common traps in measuring per- formance and illustrate how some organizations have managed to avoid them. My prescriptions aren’t exhaustive, but they’ll provide a good start. In any event, they can help you steal a march on rivals who are caught in the same old traps. 1524 Oct09 Likierman layout.indd 971524 Oct09 Likierman layout.indd 97 9/4/09 12:39:06 PM9/4/09 12:39:06 PM The Five Traps of Performance Measurement 98 Harvard Business Review | October 2009 | hbr.org Measuring Against Yourself The papers for the next regular performance as- sessment are on your desk, their thicket of numbers awaiting you. What are those numbers? Most likely, comparisons of current results with a plan or a budget. If that’s the case, you’re at grave risk of falling into the fi rst trap of performance measurement: looking only at your own company. You may be doing better than the plan, but are you beating the competi- tion? And what if the estimates you’re seeing were manipulated? To measure how well you’re doing, you need information about the benchmarks that matter most – the ones outside the organization. They will help you defi ne competitive priorities and connect executive compensation to relative rather