A Wake-Up Call

Gregor, Alison. "Fuel for the City That Never Sleeps." New York Times 12 10 2011, B8. Print.

Alison Gregor’s article, Fuel for the City That Never Sleeps, in The New York Times on October 12, 2011 explains the growth of the small coffee chain industry in New York City. Many of the small coffee chains in the city have grown in recent years. The article mentions that “some see the growth of local coffee shops as a reaction to the flood of Starbucks stores.” This point is very important to analyze. At first many small coffee shops went out of business due to Starbucks. But, many people then became overwhelmed with the outrageous number of Starbucks stores. Many of these people stopped going to Starbucks and turned around to small family owned coffee shops. It seems like sometimes too much of one thing is not good for anyone and Starbucks is a great example.

I have been told by many people that some businesses are just better left small. I agree with this very much because a lot of the personal touch is lost when small firms become huge corporations. Coffee shops for example are a place for people to get together and take a small break from their stresses in life. It is nice to go into a neighborhood café and say hi to the same person each morning and have a little chat with them to start your day. New York has seen a large growth in this industry recently. Many small coffee chains have opened new locations around New York. Some of them had a hard time to stay alive during the peak of Starbucks. But, many of those coffee shops are back on their path and going strong.

It is hard not to go out and pass a couple different Starbucks stores. Some places in town even had stores across the street from each other. Personally I think these tactics were not very efficient for Starbucks. If someone is craving a coffee from Starbucks I imagine it would not be a big deal to cross a street or walk one more block. I think we can compare the growth of Starbucks with that of Wal-Mart. Both of these companies have grown a lot and a known worldwide. In contrast, Wal-Mart is now opening new “Marketplace Stores” that offer a much personal experience for their customers. I believe Wal-Mart has learned that many potential customers prefer going to smaller grocery store where they feel more important. The idea of going into a large superstore scares a lot of people. They don’t want to go into a superstore and take a long time to find what they need, be tempted to buy unnecessary items, and feel like the attention is not on them. Starbucks can take a similar approach to their situation in order to keep the personal touch alive. This is why many smaller coffee shops are seeing a rise in their success. People are just not comfortable enough to walk into a Starbucks anymore because they have become this corporate monster in the coffee industry.

Embezzlement in Business

"How an Embezzle Stole Millions from a Small Company." Strategic Finance 92.7 (2011): 13,13-14,61. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.

The scholarly journal “How an Embezzler Stole Millions from a Small Company” focuses on the embezzlement of Koss Corporation by Sujata “Sue” Sachdeva. Sachdeva was the “trusted 15-year veteran VP of finance, secretary, and principal accounting officer” at the company. She pleaded guilty to embezzling $34 million from Koss in a time period of about five years. This was almost half of the company’s pretax earnings. Former Koss senior accountant, Julie Mulvaney, was also charged for helping Sachdeva in the embezzlement. American Express was the first to notice something suspicious happening after receiving numerous payments for Sachdeva’s credit cards from a business account, Koss Corporation.

The idea that this type of activity was going on for a long time with no one questioning it at any company is stunning. Companies have external auditors come in each year and audit the books to make sure all internal controls are correct. Grant Thornton was the auditing firm in charge of the auditing of Koss’ books and they failed to find anything on this. It is very odd how the journal entries that covered up Sachdeva’s fraud were never questioned. There was no supporting documentation for these journals and no one took a second look.

All this nonsense comes down to the separation of duties. It is sometimes harder in smaller companies that do not have many personnel, but it’s not impossible. The biggest rule it that people who have signing authority cannot be the people doing to bank reconciliation. Of course this will not eliminate fraud but it will help minimize it. There will always be instances like the one mentioned about Koss in the journal were two or more people are involved. But most likely, the more people involved the harder it is to commit fraud. Accountants also have a big role in fraud detecting. It is very easy to make journal entries to cover up money that is missing from the company. Mulvaney did just that. She would make journal entries and overstate assets, expenses, and cost of sales and understate liabilities and sales. It was very clever of her to do this, but accountants need to remember that what they practice will stay with them forever.

The journal also talks about how Sachdeva also stole from the petty cash fund in addition to cashier’s checks, traveler’s checks, wires, etc. Companies need to keep very close eye on their petty cash funds and how much they keep in them. One good rule is to keep a minimum balance in the petty cash fund. The more money there is lying around as petty cash, the more tempting it is to employees to take for themselves. Having separation of duties can avoid many problems like this. If one person is responsible for keeping the cash while another person is responsible for the record keeping of the cash, there is a smaller possibility one of them may steal some.

Employee Empowerment & Job Satisfaction

 "The Effects of Employee Empowerment on Employee Job Satisfaction." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 23.6 (2011): 784,784-802. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 26 Sep. 2011.

Empowerment can be defined as giving people the power to do something. In the scholarly journal “The Effects of Employee Empowerment on Employee Job Satisfaction” a study was conducted to find if psychological and behavior empowerment effects job satisfaction. The study found that there is a relationship between both psychological and behavior empowerment and job satisfaction. This study was conducted on hotels in Turkey, but the overall result can be applied to just about all industries.

Thinking about myself personally at work, I enjoy being able to make choices and contributing my ideas to the business. Therefore, it makes sense to me that employee empowerment leads to job satisfaction. The journal states that employee empowerment “gives rise to organizational commitment, motivation, performance, and customer satisfaction.” By giving employees empowerment, they are much more willing to play an active role in the organization they work for. Employees like to be taken seriously when they try to contribute ideas, but many organizations ignore their employee’s ideas. As a supervisor at work, I understand that it is hard to always let employees take charge. But, I can say from experience that there are many things we do differently at work that help get our job done faster and much more efficiently because we have listen and taken into consideration employee ideas. The thought of knowing that you have a voice in the organization makes you feel important and this is what I try to do at work every day.

The study found that 78.4 percent of the respondents were not content with their wages in the hotel business. Even though this study was focused on the hotel industry, there are many people in different fields that are not content with their wages. This dissatisfaction leads to poor productivity at work. It is important to reward employees financially when they are doing a good job, this keeps them motivated. On the other hand, many employers find it hard to compensate their employees because they are not being as productive as they can be. This is all just a big cycle that is hard to break away from. But, I believe it is the employer’s responsibility to let his employees know that he/she is willing to compensate their hard work. The employer needs make it known to his employees that they are a special part of the organization.

The study also found that employees in the hotel industry are “deprived of the opportunity to undertake different tasks.” The study suggests that managers “enforce implementations such as job enrichment and/or rotation.” I find myself getting very bored at work when doing the same thing over and over again. In my opinion, getting bored with what you are doing makes you do it a lot slower and less efficient. Whenever I can do something different, even if it’s a small phone call, I go ahead and do it to distract myself for a while. Once I come back to what I was originally doing, I find errors I had not noticed at first and this gives me the opportunity to fix them. I feel like just about everyone experiences this when they are at work, school, home, etc. The idea is to give employees different options of work if available. One week they can be working on one project, the next on a different project, whatever suits the business/industry. But, there are small things that management can do different to keep employees working hard and being efficient. Some of these implications may cost some extra money (wages), but if the employee knows why they are being compensated they will turn around and thank the company with their work.