Small Business in Government Contracting Essay Sample free essay sample

Government getting can be an extremely moneymaking endeavor for the little concern owner. especially on the off chance that you fall in one of the minority bunches upheld by the government’s financial plans. The consolation of little concern is an of import finish of the specialists that is tended to by the Federal Acquisition Regulations. As expressed in Feldman ( 2012 ) . despite the fact that the government’s essential association in making sure about merchandise and enterprises is to get them on a competitory. best worth balance. the specialists has other than executed through the acquirement method strategies to ensure that different fundamental financial points are met. Along these lines. plans have been made which give explicit getting and sub-contracting inclinations to little concerns. minimal denied concerns. lady and veteran-claimed little concerns and little concerns situated in truly underutilized concern zones ( HUBZones ) . The most widely recognized technique by which the specialists gives propensity in its procurances to little concern concerns is by â€Å"setting aside† proposed contracts ; I. e. . saving. all or part of a proposed procurance for sole commitment by little concern just. So as to quantify up for these prejudicial plans. your little concern must run into specific requests and gauges to be qualified. be that as it may, we’ll get to those requests in a moment. So. in the event that you’re a little concern owner. keen on going engaged with specialists getting. what's more, perhaps even can be categorized as one of the ideal little concern gatherings. you deserve to larn progressively about how to procure associated with the specialists securing technique. First. let’s talk increasingly about the best getting gatherings. To get down with. you should be sure you qualify as a little concern so you can exploit important specialists undertaking chances saved for little concerns. To be qualified as a little concern. your anxiety must satisfy the Small Business Administration’s ( SBA ) size model for your industry. be worked for total compensation. be freely possessed and worked. also, be situated in the U. S. . doing significant parts to the U. S. financial framework. The SBA has a far reaching site with a device to help you do that finding. They other than have neighborhood workplaces that are an abundance of perception with free guide sing specialists undertaking counsel. proposals and the a little bit at a time guidelines on the most proficient method to gain began. Once you’ve decided you fulfill the size needs to be a little concern. let’s check whether your anxiety falls into any of the best temporary worke r norms. On the off chance that you are a certified little concern who is 51 % or progressively possessed and constrained by socially and monetarily denied people. what's more, are heavily influenced by such people for its bearing and everyday concern tasks. this is ordinarily known as a little distraught concern ( SDB ) . A portion of the focal points accessible to SDBs are: a financial worth rating convenience. a commitment rating factor and a monetary subcontracting affectation. Probably the best favorable position accessible to a SDB contractual worker is the option to partake in the SBA’s â€Å"8 ( a ) program† . Presently. for ladies claimed little concerns. there is a legislature wide end to introduce in any event 5 % of all government head agreements and subcontracts each monetary twelvemonth to ladies possessed little concerns. The gauges for ladies claimed little concerns is like the SDB in that they should be 51 % or progressively possessed and worked by at least one grown-up females. or then again. in the event that the house is publically claimed. at least one grown-up females must have 51 % of the firm’s stock. Every day activity and course of the house must be constrained by at least one of the grown-up females. Likewise for veterans. the Veterans Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Act of 1999 has a conclusion to spread out bing veterans help plans. especially for those with administration related disablements. who own in any event 51 % of and order a little concern. In addition to other things. the Act alters the Small Business Act to set up a legislature wide commitment end for little concerns possessed and constrained by administration debilitated veterans of 3 % of the whole estimation of head agreement and subcontract grants for each budgetary twelvemonth. FAR subpart 19. 14 started the Veterans Benefit Act of 2003 which made an obtainment plan for little concern concerns possessed and constrained by administration incapacitated veterans. There are numerous additional procurance inclinations yet the remainder of the little concern minority bunches we will go to here is the HUBZone little concerns. The HUBZone Empowerment Contracting Program was set up by Congress in the Small Business Reauthorization Act of 1997. This arrangement is proposed to flexibly embraced help to gauge up little concerns situated in â€Å"historically underutilized concern zones† trying to expand work possibilities. putting and monetary improvement in those nations. To run into the guidelines for emancipation as a HUBZone little concern you should be situated in a HUBZone. be 100 % claimed and constrained by U. S. residents and have in any event 35 % of your representatives populating inside the HUBZone. Counsel the SBA site to check whether your anxiety is as of now in a HUBZone or in the event that it is advantageous to go your anxiety to a close by area that falls in this class. Now. we have caught the part of every one of the main little concern minorities for you to cognize whether you might have the option to quantify up for at least one of the ideal getting gatherings. When your little concern has been qualified and enlisted as a little worry with the SBA and finding has been made on the off chance that you fall into at least one of the specific minority gatherings. you can get down to take a gander at specialists obtaining chances accessible to your little concern. A standout amongst other topographic focuses to make this is on the SBA site or at any of the Federal Business Opportunity sites. They will name the booked finding recommendations being requested for by the specialists and you can check whether they are explicitly looking for certain best gatherings to partake. Be sure you have the capable makings to indict the opportunity. keeping up in head that past open introduction is a benefit. The specialists needs to allow you to partake in the full and loosened rivalry for these agreements with ideal thought because of your position. Your neighborhood SBA office can help you discover which 1s you are best able to compete for and will direct you through the proposition methodology. Those enormous concern organizations got their beginning in specialists getting by get bringing down as a little concern and turning ; one proposition and ensuing agreement grant at a clasp. The U. S. specialists needs to be sure you get a similar possibility and has cleared the way to elevate you to make so. Presently. cognizing that you are prepared to get down viing for specialists contracts. we have to talk cash. Since such huge numbers of the present specialists contracts being offered are resolute fixed-value contracts with an advancement installment mechanical assembly. you should be set up to get through that first twelvemonth ; the one after you are granted the agreement. Indeed, even the greater organizations have cash issues. so. simply in light of the fact that you are a little concern. you ought to non consider this to be a detriment. This is one more nation where the SBA can help you turn up the entirety of the distinctive financing choices accessible for your little concern and really talk the upsides and downsides dependent on your impossible to miss situation. One choice is contract subsidizing and that happens when the specialists helps temporary workers in financing their agreements by doing occasional progression installments as agreement open introduction returns. Pro gression installments might be founded on either the expenses caused in the open introduction or on a for every centum or period of consummation. At the point when the specialists offers progression installments on an agreement. this really helps both huge and little worries to cover the disbursals as you continue through the time of open introduction. In any case, before the main installment is made and looking out for ensuing installments can be harrowing. so it is important to hold working capital developed to cover the holding up period. Government installments are a lot quicker than they used to be because of the Prompt Payment Act however you will require to see your bills are submitted rapidly and precisely to give them to complete them access cut and get installment to you. A second choice is advance warrants on the off chance that you are a temporary worker who needs to obtain cash to execute an agreement identified with national safeguard. Loan warrants are made by the Federal Reserve Banks in the interest of assigned â€Å"guaranteeing agencies† to empower contractual workers to acquire financing from private beginnings under agreements for the obtaining of provisions or administrations for the national barrier. As a little concern falling in the best getting class. an ensured credit could be great in securing beg an in specialists obtaining as it would give you that working capital you may non hold procured at this point. especially if your little concern hasn’t built up a major sufficient acknowledgment line to back up an unbarred advance. It is as often as possible astonishing to another little concern how quickly the disbursals aggregate from a mean specialists contract. To hold the specialists warrant your credit only may be the answer required. What's more, in the long run there is private financing. Temporary workers may back a specialists contract in much a similar way as they would fund a business contract †by acquiring subsidizing through a business bank or monetary foundation. This is the best strategy for financing from the government’s perspective. Since private subsidizing may require a contractual worker to assign the profits of the agreement to be financed as security for financess progressed.

Anorexia Nervosa - Includes Bi Essay -- essays research papers fc

Anorexia Nervosa      In America, young ladies are given the message at a youthful age that so as to be glad and effective, they should be slender. Given the worth which society puts on being dainty, it isn't astonishing that dietary problems are on the expansion. Each time you stroll into a store, you are encircled by the pictures of thin models that show up on the fronts of style magazines. A great many adolescent young ladies are starving themselves day by day with an end goal to accomplish what the style business considers to be the â€Å"ideal† figure. The normal model weighs 23% not exactly the normal lady. Keeping up a weight 20% beneath your normal body weight fits the measures for the passionate dietary issue known as anorexia. Most models, as indicated by clinical norms, fit into the classification of being anorexic (Thompson, Colleen).      Anorexia has been known and perceived by specialists for at any rate 300 years. Most scientists concur that the quantity of patients with this perilous ailment is expanding at a disturbing rate. The Rice Counseling Center characterizes anorexia as â€Å"an enthusiastic turmoil described by an extraordinary dread of getting fat, absence of confidence and twisted self-perception which brings about self-incited starvation†. As per data given by the Counseling Center at the University of Lawson 2 Virginia, the advancement of this malady for the most part starts at 11 years old or 18. Altogether, these ages match with new periods of a girl’s life, the beginning and completion of pre-adulthood. Ongoing assessments propose that out of each 200 American young ladies between this age range, one will create anorexia somewhat. The illness creates over some undefined time frame during which the victim changes her eating designs from ordinary or close to typical to an exceptionally limited eating regimen (S.C.A.R.E.D. Site). This procedure can take anyplace from months to years. Clinically, an anorexic is analyzed by having a body weight 20% underneath the normal body weight of a solid individual at a similar age and tallness of the dietary problem quiet. The anorexic regularly gets terrified of putting on weight and even of food itself. The patient may feel fat, despite the fact that their body weight is well underneath the ordinary load for their stature. Some likewise feel they don't merit joy out of life and will deny themselves of circumstances offe... ...ily, companions, and the reasons she may have fallen into an example of self-starvation. As a patient gets familiar with her condition, she is regularly additionally ready to attempt to enable herself to recoup. In treating anorexia nervosa, it is critical to recollect that prompt achievement doesn't ensure a lasting fix. At times, considerably after fruitful emergency clinic treatment and come back to typical weight, patients endure backslides. Follow-up treatment enduring three to five years is prescribed if the patient is to be totally restored (Cove, Judy). Lawson 6 Works Cited Thompson, Colleen. â€Å"Society and Eating Disorders.† Mirror 19, October 1998. On the web. Accessible http://www.mirror-mirror.org/society.htm Accessed 23, October 1998. Saunders, Janice. â€Å"Anorexia and Bulimia.† S.C.A.R.E.D. On the web. Accessible http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/3901/index.html Accessed 23, October 1998. Inlet, Dr. Judy. â€Å"Anorexia Nervosa General Information.† Mental Health Net Online. Accessible http://www.cmhc.com Accessed 23, October 1998. Pearson, Nanett. â€Å"A Personal Recovery Story: Starving for Attention.† Attention On the web. Accessible http://www.laureate.com/attention.html Accessed 31, October 1998.

Grind Time

Grind Time It all started on Monday night. I had a big French III essay due Tuesday morning, and Sam 07 also had quite a bit of work to do, but since were both seniors, rather than get down to business, we goofed off in our suite lounge. Once Sam finally went to bed around 3:00, I was able to start working, andI stayed up until 5:00 to finish my essay. Shockingly, I was pretty tired for my 9:00 AM lecture on Tuesday morning. ( but I still went to it!) As a preventative measure, I purchased a medium cup of coffee from Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square and drank it during the beginning of class. I am not a coffee person. I rarely drink coffee. I do not like the taste of coffee. I oftentimes burn myself when pouring coffee. When I make appointments to get coffee with someone, I do not actually get coffee. Coffee = bad! Here is my first page of 14.05 notes. Notice that my handwriting is not that bad. Here are pages two and three, four and five, six and seven, and eight and nine. Nine pages! I have never before been this prolific in a 9:00 AM lecture. Maybe I should start drinking coffee every single morning except I have no idea what I wrote towards the end of class. Something about capital mobility, I think. Can YOU figure out what I wrote?? Maybe Im better off drinking less coffee and getting more hours of sleep. This reminds me of the Undergraduate Mathematics Association (UMA) shirts A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. Erdos I would have liked to make up for lost sleep on Tuesday or Wednesday night, but as luck would have it, my gigantic CI-M paper for 14.05 is due tomorrow (Thursday) morning. In their junior and senior years, generally, students take subjects that are Communication Intensive in the Major (CI-M). These subjects are integral to each students major program. CI-Ms involve instruction and practice in the forms of communication specific to the professional and academic culture of the discipline. Sounds like its time for more coffee!! This time, I went to nearby Toscaninis to work on my paper. I ordered a latte (partially because I need caffeine, and partially I wanted the free wireless), and the guy who was working there made a heart on the top =) It was really awww at the time but now it is nearly 4:00 AM, I just finished formatting my footnotes, and Im ready to sleep for the next 12 hours. Except I have 14.05 lecture again at 9:00 AM! How on earth will I stay awake in class?!?! I have an idea.

Explore the Way Shakespeare Present Strong Feelings in His...

In my opinion there are many different types or kinds of strong feelings, from hate to anger and romance to love. Shakespeare has and always will be one of the greatest writers of all time at expressing these types of feelings. Shakespeare portrays these in many different poetic styles and genres, for example in his sonnets. However he is also known for expressing his feelings towards love in over 30 of his plays through the genres of romantic comedy and tragedy. In one of his plays, â€Å"Much Ado About Nothing†, Shakespeare uses many different types of love; through a family, a well connected town, soldiers returning from war and lovers. Taking one aspect of this, the lovers, I pick out one male role in particular, Benedick. Who appears†¦show more content†¦The way these lines bounce off one another highlights the compatibility of Beatrice and Benedick, although at this point in the pay, both vehemently deny any interest in the opposite sex, as Benedick declares â€Å"I love none†, to which Beatrice counters, â€Å"I had rather hear a dog bark than swear a man loves me.† However if you look at the contrast of the way he speaks of her in Act 1 Scene 1, when they are refusing to show their love to each other, saying, â€Å"What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?† and in Act 2 Scene 3 when their friends have cunningly and cruelly set them both up, â€Å"‘any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks.’ If I do not take pity of her I am a villain! If I do not love her, I am a Jew.† You can see the contrast of how his pent up love hidden away between their banter, changed to a maturing sense of over gratitude and honest romantic love towards her even as she is being mean unto him. There is also a sense of overlap between Shakespeare’s sonnets and some of his plays. In Much Ado for example, there is a very strong connection, in my opinion, between the first meeting of Claudio and hero in Act 1 Scene 1 and Sonnet 18. In Act 1 Scene 1, Claudio on first sight of hero falls deeply in love, so much so he describes her as â€Å"the sweetest lady that I ever looked upon.† Also he rebukes Benedick’s single minded view by saying â€Å"Can the world buy such a jewel?† this has a very strong connection towards the entireShow MoreRelatedWilliam Shakespeare s Much Ado About Nothing And King Lear3685 Words   |  15 PagesName: Instructors’ Name: Course: Date: Analysis of Shakespeare’s powerful female characters in the play â€Å"Much Ado about Nothing† and â€Å"King Lear Introduction Shakespeare is seen to value the role of women as his plays often portray women as heroines. These women have strong characters that endear them to readers. Readers in our current world, and especially women, are encouraged to be self-assertive in demand for equal treatment in our society. This has been the tradition for women in the WesternRead MoreThe Relationship between Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing1888 Words   |  8 PagesIn this Shakespearean comedy ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ two similarly obstinate characters of Beatrice and Benedick are presented between the rather normal relationship of characters Hero and Claudio. Shakespeare presents Beatrice and Benedick’s obstinacy towards the rather obligatory act of marriage and also their particularly similar personalities that cause reason for their familiar act of squabbling; he does this whilst also presenting two characters that are completely interested in marriage andRea d MoreMuch Ado About Nothing By William Shakespeare2685 Words   |  11 PagesMuch Ado about Nothing is a humorous play by William Shakespeare set in the city of Messina located in southern Italy. The acts have two main locations; Leonato’s house and his orchard. The others were sidelines; the church and the street where Dogberry and Verges discovered the villainy. Many scenes take place inside the several rooms of Leonato’s house, including scene 4 of Act 3. The main emergence of Benedick and Beatrice’s love story takes place in the orchard, without which the play is incompleteRead More The Role of Women in Hamlet in William Shakespeares Play Essay2041 Words   |  9 PagesThe Role of Women in Hamlet in William Shakespeares Play Gertrude and Ophelia, the only two women in Hamlet, reflect the general status of women in Elizabethan Times. Women were suppressed by the males in their lives (brothers, fathers, and partners) and were always inferior. Ophelia and Gertrude have little or no power due to restricted legal, social and economic rights that were found in Elizabethan society. The male characters in Hamlet reflect this sexist view pointRead MoreComparing and Contrasting the Relationships of Beatrice and Benedick, and Hero and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing2098 Words   |  9 PagesIn Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing, written in the early 15th century, the relationships between Benedick and Beatrice and Hero and Claudio are the key to the play and create a lot of tension and comedy. The two relationships are interesting in different ways, and this essay will explore this in terms of the language used, the plot, characterisation and how the two relationships stand thematically. Beatrice and Benedick are interesting due to Shakespeare’s use of language. ConfusionRead MoreThe Dramatic Importance of Act 1 Scenes 1 and 2 of William Shakespeares Twelfth Night4384 Words   |  18 PagesShakespeares Twelfth Night The title Twelfth Night seems to suggest that Shakespeare, who wrote the play around 1602, wanted it to be performed on the twelfth day after Christmas; the festival of the Epiphany. This day formally marked the end of the Christmas season, which at the time was celebrated as a special festival. In addition to eating, drinking and generally over indulging, the performance of plays was a common feature on this day. He may have written this romanticRead MoreBritish Arts5612 Words   |  23 Pagesoften used to refer to those arts which use space, but not time, for their appreciation. For example, this is what is covered by the subject ‘art’ in schools. The word â€Å"culture† has several meanings. It can be used in its anthropological sense to mean ‘way of life’. But many people also use it as a synonym for ‘the arts’. Dance usually refers to modern artistic dance forms; ballet usually has a more traditional feel, unless we say modern ballet. A novel is a long story, e.g. 200-300 pages, a short prose

Logos A Non Denomination Church Essay - 805 Words

LOGOS: Logos is a ministry here on campus that meets on Sunday mornings from 9:45-11:00 am in Polling. Logos is a non denomination church that started at Spring Arbor between six and eight years ago. With the church being located in the lobby in Polling, the â€Å"sanctuary† was set up more like you were going to have a guest speaker or a bible study in the space. At the front of there was a keyboard, guitar, a hand drum, and a few microphones. In the middle of the room they had placed seven or eight round tables. Two long tables with snacks and drinks were found in the back of the room. The congregation was very friendly and welcomed me with open arms. I had meet with Pastor Mark before service had started to get a little better understanding of the typical Sunday goes and he told me that they were on the more relaxed side and go with the flow. I asked where he would like me to be and he told me to find a place I felt comfortable and to sit and enjoy the service. Once service started Pastor Mark went to the front of the room and opened service with a welcome and announcements. After announcements Pastor Mark told everyone that he was going to change things up for this Sunday. So instead of worshiping first he gave his sermon. Pastor Mark preached on Paul and how even in all his pain and suffering, Paul still had joy. Once the sermon was finished, Pastor Mark showed us a short clip relating to the message and then we split off into prayer groups, based on gender. AfterShow MoreRelatedGroup Experience : Alcoholics Anonymous1441 Words   |  6 Pagesother stay on the path towards sobriety. They are not affiliated with any other organization, denomination, or institution and the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking (Fisher Harrison, 2013). They meet at least once a week, if not more to support one another and to share their experiences, struggles, and successes. I attended an AA meeting held at the St. Stephens Catholic Church in El Paso, Texas. I was a little apprehensive as I have never attended a meeting like thisRead MoreAlcoholics Anonymous : A Anonymous1442 Words   |  6 Pagesother stay on the path towards sobriety. They are not affiliated with any other organization, denomination, or institution and the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking (Fisher Harrison, 2013). They meet at least once a week, if not more to support one another and to share their experiences, struggles, and successes. I attended an AA meeting held at the St. Stephens Catholic Church in El Paso, Texas. I was a little apprehensive at first because I have never attended a meetingRead MoreReligious Sensitivities Between Religion And Art Beckons Controversy And The Wrath Of Family And Community2647 Words   |  11 PagesMuseum in Moscow. This is one of 4 renderings, two digital prints and 2 acrylic on canvas paintings. 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Students signature (name typed here is equivalent to a signature):Read MoreEssay on Against United States Currency Mentioning God2731 Words   |  11 Pages In God We Trust should be removed from United States currency. The mention of God, which is a religious belief, misrepresents those United States citizens who do not hold this belief. In Source D, Jon Murray, President of the non-profit organization American Atheists, argues that the motto In God We Trust inscribed on the mint violates the Free Speech, Free Exercise, and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment. It violates Free Speech by the inability to erase or eliminate the inscriptionRead More An Analytical Approach to Truth and Religion Essays6441 Words   |  26 Pagessuperiority of European culture — and of the tendency to view all other cultures from ones own perspective. One does not believe any more in easy discrimination between a false myth and a true logos, especially because the European culture which binds truth with religion has no counterparts in non-European religions which are interested in morality and religious practices rather than in the religio us doctrine. There are a number of reasons for diminishing interest in the problem of truth ofRead MoreCulture and Religion8004 Words   |  33 Pagesparticular cultural context. Christian Faith is received, lived, expressed and transmitted on the basis of a culture. 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The remainder of the population is comprised mostly of Jews, along with some Muslims and Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics. Supernatural beliefs are based in the Catholic Church and mixed with older beliefs

Mass Media’s Effect on Indian Society Free Essays

string(147) " in itself guarantee that there will be no distortion—it does not insist on the real possibility of distortionless cross-cultural communication\." Christian History in Cross-Cultural Perspective A great deal of Donald A. McGavran’s insight can be traced to the unique advantage he had of growing up in India as a third generation missionary. by Ralph D. We will write a custom essay sample on Mass Media’s Effect on Indian Society or any similar topic only for you Order Now Winter T here before McGavran’s eyes were not only the expectable ethnic and linguistic divisions of the sub-continent (in which every given geographical area has its own area culture)—what is called horizontal segmentation. He early encountered the vertical segmentation of the world’s most rigidly stratified system of social classes.The very fact that India’s castes long constituted a highly visibly quasi-official structure meant that his perspective as he traveled in other parts of the world remained highly sensitized to social barriers (those barriers arising from other than racial and linguistic differences), even in places where no overt social categorization of such things existed. No wonder he has been accused of reading into a situation social differences that did not exist. In some such cases he has merely pointed out differences people wished to ignore. As a matter of fact, many nations too long have looked down on India’s overt social prejudice without recognizing their own covert castes. In any case, one of the durable common denominators among those associated with McGavran in the amorphous church growth school of thought is a parallel sensitivity to the central importance of the profound cultural diversity within the community of mankind. This sensitivity is the basis of what may be called here cross-cultural perspective.Cross-cultural perspective is what makes possible contextualization. Cross-cultural perspective goes to the very heart of Christian theology and historiography as these disciplines have developed across the centuries, since it sheds new light on the problem of unity versus uniformity in historic dimensions. Examples of the Problem A number of years ago representatives of the Lutheran World Federation went to great lengths to persuade the Batak Christians of Northern Sumatra to subscribe to the â€Å"Non- Altered† Augsburg Confession.One millennium earlier, on another mission frontier in the middle of another island (not nearly as large as Sumatra) a small group of men earnestly tried to persuade a Celtic Christian leader that he ought to subscribe to the Roman way of acting out the Christian faith. In these two cases the external advocates of uniformity were only partially successful, since the group being persuaded possessed a good deal of autonomy and naturally preferred its own way of doing things.In both cases, unfortunately, the external advocates were not themselves readily able to distinguish between the universal and the particular elements in their own faith. Historically speaking, as in the period preceding the Protestant Reformation, advocates of a foreign formulation of Christianity are at first successful and do not until much later face the insurgent nationalism of the surviving cultural tradition which may eventually demand its own indigenous Christian formulation.In the Philippines, for example, the Roman tradition swept in along with a colonial power, and while the Roman witnesses to the faith are to be credited with the fact that a great amount of painstaking and quite enlightened mission work was conducted throughout the whole of the Philippines, there event ually came a time when an immense sector of the Philippines church under Bishop Aglipay declared its independence from Rome in much the way that Luther had. To this day the Philippine Independent Church endures to this day as the largest non-Roman church in the country.These are only a few of many possible examples which demonstrate one of the most unique and surprising things about Christianity—that it is by nature a faith that both welcomes and encourages cultural pluralism. In this sense, if Christianity must be called a religion at all, it is the only world religion of this kind. This little understood fact is clearly perceived only by means of what is also rare: cross-cultural perspective. First, let us discuss what cross-cultural perspective is, and then proceed to indicate some of the bright new hues which Christian history takes on when viewed from cross-cultural perspective.A Biblical-Historical Analysis Cross-cultural perspective is not a new skill forced upon us by the sudden smallness of the modern world. You might say that God has always had cross-cultural perspective since He was the One who was pleased to create the diverse ta ethne—the various tribes and tongues and families of mankind. But fallen man has never clearly seen things from God’s point of view. It is almost a truism that the languages of man, apart from those affected by Christian insight, rarely if ever possess words for mankind in the generic sense.Typically, languages divide the world into us and them. We are the humans and those others are the non-humans. We are the Jews and they are the Gentiles. Even the most INTERNATIONALJOURNALOFFRONTIERMISSIONS, VOL 12:3 JUL. -SEP. 1995 128 Christian History in Cross-Cultural Perspective the Roman emperor worship. The third prominent strand was the Greek philosophical concept of the Word (logos). Each one of these key words in the Bible is thus paralleled by an identically pronounced word in the corresponding non-Christian environment. These parallels between the Bible and the ancient world have been disputed by some who feel it is desperately important to maintain that early Christianity in all its forms was entirely unique. But those who would attempt to chip away at specific parallels between Christian and pagan forms are not only fighting a losing battle, but—in terms of cross-cultural perspective—are also fighting the wrong battle. For one thing, we must not suppose that the message of Christianity, clothed in the new garments of the Greek world, was damaged by this new clothing.This supposition is the consistent and understandable, but erroneous assumption of many Jews (even many Christian Jews) in ancient times and still of today. Some Christian scholars have stumbled on the cultural differences and classified Paul’s gospel a new religion rather than the essential Jewish revelation in Greek clothing. The attempt to employ cross-cultural perspective does not in itself guarantee that there will be no distortion—it does not insist on the real possibility of distortionless cross-cultural communication. You read "Mass Media’s Effect on Indian Society" in category "Papers"However, we must not be startled that so many pagan words or forms were employed, or that it seems really possible for the Christian message in its essential integrity to be faithfully transmitted. Even those who are most eager to detect the employment of new forms must admit that the new forms are generally given a new twist and a modified meaning. Where no modification has taken place, the unmodified meaning of the adopted forms is not necessarily something which is in conflict with Christian truth.We are not suggesting that there is something so magical about the Christian message that post-biblical attempts to clothe it in new words and forms have always been successful. This is very important to say. The fact that contextualization or â€Å"reclothing† can be accomplished, that it has been done, that it must be done, does in no way imply that the task is easy, or that it involves no dangers, nor does this mean that beyond the Bible there have never been any mistakes in the process. As a matter of fact, there are likely always mistakes in the process, mistakes which may take centuries even partially to rectify.This fact is the reason why the various national churche s of the world today must be dependent upon each other: they all are involved in some misunderstandings—but not the same ones, and in symbiotic fellowship together their inadequacies tend to point each other out. No Simple Task There seems to be neither a simple nor an infallible way to determine whether a given utilization of a pagan form has been proper or entirely successful. Here we see the openendedness of the continuing need to evangelize and to re-express the faith.The adoration of the Virgin as a case in point, which first gained momentum in the context where the cult of the virgin Diana was already prominent, may not have been as helpful an employment of pre-existing ritual and belief as the comparatively harmless adoption of December 25th as the birthday of a Son in place of a celebration for the sun. Yet however safely removed the celebration of a December 25th Christmas now is from any original pagan connotations, it must be noted that we are still obligated to a constant and unrelenting attempt to obtain or maintain an authentically Christian meaning for the celebration.The Christian celebration of a Christmas on December 25th is probably neither harmed nor hindered by the fact that it was once another sort of festival. Even if it has been a totally new creation by Christians, its continuing Christian usefulness would not thereby be guaranteed by a supposedly â€Å"pure† origin. In other words, suppose that 2,000 years ago the entire language and culture of early Christianity had been cut out of new primitive tribes employ this semantic distinction. Yet man has not always been content with this kind of implicit blasphemy. We recall how exercised Alexander the Great was over the diversity of his new far-flung domain. He launched one of history’s most novel experiments when he married off thousands of his own soldiers to Middle Eastern maidens. The Romans allowed a great diversity in their empire for practical reasons, but they never solved the problem of diversity on a theoretical level, and never surmounted the ethnocentrism of their hierarchical political structure.It is not surprising that the Roman mentality, perhaps bolstered by the earlier Alexandrian idealism would encourage the development of a culturally monolithic Christianity. There have been great arguments about where the center of Christendom should be located—Rome, Constantinople, Rheims, Canterbury—but the assumption is always that there has to be some one specific place as a center. This in turn implies cultural uniformity. One of the most striking uniquenesses of the Bible is that it both recognizes the endemic xenophobia of Jew against Greek and nation against nation, but it goes on to propose a breath-taking solution.It says in effect that God can not only speak Hebrew, but Greek; that is, God was not only able to reveal Himself among and to the Hebrews in their language and culture, but the essential revelation was just as capable of being clothed in the words and cultural forms of the pagan Greeks. Striking Parallels Literally hundreds of parallels can be traced between almost everything that is said or done in the early Christian tradition and what is found in the environment of the ancient world. In its theological terminology, for example, Christology became a strong rope of three weak strands.One strand derived from the Hebrew apocalyptic concept of a Messiah. Another was the term for Lord (kurios), which had long been employed by the mystery cults of Eastern origin and also in INTERNATIONAL J OURNAL OF FRONTIER MISSIONS Ralph D. Winter cloth such that there were no possibility of tracing any Christian word or form to any pre-existing language or culture. Today, two thousand years later, would we have a purer or safer form of God’s revelation (truth) in our hands? Would it necessarily be closer to the message which God is speaking to mankind?Would not even these brand new forms and words be susceptible to the loss of their Christian meaning? The answer must be yes. Therefore, we come full circle to the observation that pagan forms can as easily gain new Christian meaning as newly minted â€Å"Christian† forms could lose their originally pure meaning. It would appear that God is not in the business of replacing cultures but transforming them. We discover something else by means of cross-cultural perspective: the Bible is providentially multicultured internally.Suppose God had allowed a written revelation to be encapsulated in a single culture, whether Hebrew or Greek, would not that kind of monocultural revelation have been, 1) much more seriously subject to a mere mechanical external transmission, 2) less successfully i nterpreted as a universal faith, and indeed, 3) would not its internal meaning have been less reliably understandable than it is in the case of a multicultured Bible such as we have, which helpfully portrays truth in cultural transition?It is not always possible to be sure of the reasons God has had in what He has done, but it is tantamount to a linguistic theorem that if the same truth is propounded by two different men in two different languages and cultures as totally dissimilar, say, as Hebrew and Greek, that the result will inevitably be more reliably interpretable 2,000 years later. Anthropologically sophisticated missionaries today are applauded in their straightforward attempts to allow people to be culturally authentic in their expression of their Christian faith.Is it not then curious that we could be disturbed to discover that a similar openness to various cultural forms existed in the ancient world as the Christian movement took upon itself Greek, Roman, and Celtic garme nts? Why is it a good procedure for a careful missionary linguist today to select key words from a primitive vocabulary in order to express Christian faith, but it is not so easy to conceive of the New Testament epistles being written as the result of such a process? If we believe this process in the New Testament was carried on under unique inspiration, does that mean we are not to see the process itself as an example 29 value of the Bible is therefore not merely that it constitutes the one inspired case of truth transmitted cross-culturally. It is of special strategic and missionary value as it stands as an inspired example, not only of the gospel in two different cultures, but as an inspired example of the process whereby a cross-cultural bridge of communication may be built between two cultures. The New Testament as Example Every book written on the subject of the New Testament—indeed every student of the New Testament— is forced to observe the clash of cultures in the period of the early church.Some expositors have tried to make Paul out to be the originator of a â€Å"new religion† by treating the changes as evidence of heresy. Others have treated the changes as the result of a new dispensation in which God himself takes a new approach in certain things. Some may agree that new forms were employed while effective communication of the same basic message took place. In the latter case, however, their discussions often focus more attention on the details of the new formulations than they do on the nature (and limits) of the contextualization process whereby those new formulations were achieved.That is, their emphasis does not seem to anticipate the necessity later on in mission history of similar crosscultural reformulations to take place, and therefore they deprive themselves of the great value of the Bible in casting light on those later reformulations. Indeed our whole attitude subtly and profoundly changes toward what happened within the pages of the New Testament once we sense the essential repeatability— and the necessity for repetition—of the process whereby Paul bridged over to the Greek culture. In a parallel way Luther demanded that there be a bridge to the Germanic culture area and helped to build that bridge.Just as Paul defended the Greek Christians against Roman formulations which, in effect, became We must not suppose that the message of Christianity, clothed in the new garments of the Greek world, was damaged by this new clothing. to us? Indeed, is it not our very conviction regarding its inspiration that makes it so valuable an example? Quite confidently then, we may look on the experiences of the early church as a divinely preserved, full-blown case study of the missionary adaptation of the Christian message to Greek linguistic and cultural forms.We misunderstand God’s intent if we suppose that the precise words chosen in that particular feat of communication were somehow better (in their unmodified pagan usage) than other words that may be chosen in a parallel way in other cultures. The inspiration of the Bible thus does not lie in the contemporary secular meaning of the key words employed but in the unique use the biblical makes of otherwise quite ordinary words. Least of all must we feel that the procedure of dipping into pagan vocabularies was illicit. We must confidently expect that such borrowing was done, and for the same reason we must confidently continue to recommunicate and to retool contemporary words and forms as we meet new cultures in other places around the world today. We must do the same as we face new developments in our own culture with the change of generations. The great VOL 12:3 JUL. -SEP. 1995 130 Christian History in Cross-Cultural Perspective movement is therefore the story of a long succession of encounters between a universal faith and many particular contexts.Rather than to try to condense or even list all such encounters in Christian history in which the Christian mission has endeavored to cross cultural bridges, it may be well to explore the varied experiences of a single ethnic group outside of the Mediterranean world, one concerning which we have at least some continuous evidence. While no one example is ideal, it should not be surprising that we would choose a society beyond the furthest reaches of the Roman legions, living in island isolation as well. Such might be the minimal conditions that would provide a laboratory of investigation concerning the possibility of local diversity being compatible with a universal faith. It has been said that: †¦ Ireland was the only head-taking, cattle-raiding culture to be converted to Christianity while retaining its tribal economic and social structure†¦ (Scott, 1967:193). Nearly all general accounts of the period tend to be unevenly biased in favour of the Germanic-speaking invaders†¦The reasons for this are complex, but the main one is probably that, until the present century, almost no major historian of the period had any know-ledge of, or indeed interest in, the story of the Celtic-speaking peoples of early Britain. legalistic in the Hellenistic situation, so Luther stoutly defended the Germans against the imperialism of a Roman formulation. Bultmann and Fletcher, in their demythologizing and â€Å"situation ethics,† have groped ineffectively but with the same problem, trying to achieve aspects of a new formulation for our generation. With greater clarity of purpose, I feel, Leslie Dewart has noted the distance the modern world has drifted away from Greek thought and has called for a massive â€Å"dehellenization† of the present-day Roman tradition to communicate to a no-longer Hellenic world, and so on. In a significant development, American scholars in the colonial period thrust away the tradition of studying the pagan classics in college and embraced Hebrew as the divine language, which they expected to be spoken in heaven; college presidents delivered commencement addresses in Hebrew. Specifically, this latter was a case of attempted restoration rather than reformulation.But in the process of rejecting Hellenistic molds, some real Americanization did take place under the guise of Hebraicization. Thus the process of cultural reformulation has gone on again and again down through history but has not always been clearly recognized as a necessary or wholesome process. Cross-Cultural Analysis of Christian Hi story Thus the early moments of the Christian movement expose it and sanction a crosscultural perspective in which the diversity of cultural forms is not seen as an obstacle to the expansion of the faith or even a nuisance.We do well, therefore, not to consider human diversity a part of the problem of the Christian mission but an essential feature in an exciting solution. This solution is for all mankind the wholesome fullness of God’s redemption which ideally reaches man in all his diversity (without condemning the diversity itself), resolving the profound alienation between man and God which is the source of all man’s sufferings and evil. The outward sweep of the ChristianIndeed, with the continuing hostilities in the north, feelings on the Emerald Island are running so high that it is not possible even now to speak of events that happened fifteen centuries ago without being enmeshed in arguments that have misleading emotional overtones. Nevertheless, it is the worldwide experience of the emerging new nations that had brought into being so many parallels that many ancient questions long considered closed may be resurrected with new impetus and insight.Ours is preeminently the age in which the minority voice is going to be heard. At this point, however, cross-cultural perspective may likely be considered a bias in favor of the Irish tr adition. This may as well be confessed. We will certainly get nowhere if we do not recognize mechanisms of prejudice of one kind or another. In one sense cross-cultural perspective precisely consists of the ability to anticipate, to recognize and to tolerate prejudice between disparate cultures. The Irish situation is rich with examples of prejudice.Jerome may or may not have been reporting accurately when he recalled an encampment of Irish cannibals from his experience in Gaul (D’Alton, 1936:36), nor can we credit him with objective charity when he referred to the famous Celtic scholar Pelagius as an â€Å"Irish dog. † What is apparently incontrovertible is that some of the Irish became Christians at a fairly early date and that they were for a long time, mainly for geographic reasons, beyond the power of emperor or pope. These were the conditions that fostered, or at least allowed, considerable indigeneity in their resulting Christianity.Harold Cook (1971:46) quotes O’Donovan with approval, saying: This of course is a reference to the period of the early expansion of Christianity. There are many su ch societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have undergone similar experiences. Indeed, the relevance of this ancient example to modern times provides part of the impetus of our discussion. The primary literature alone highlighting the whole Irish experience is voluminous. A brief treatment can only sketch the basic outlines of the encounter of this people with Christianity.It may also be noted that only comparatively recently has the subject itself undergone the kind of objective scholarly study it has long merited. Anglo-Saxon scholarship, for reasons which may appear more clearly below, has to be supplemented in such studies by French, German and Norwegian scholarship, the whole â€Å"Irish question† seemingly having postponed objective English investigation of the subject. Speaking of this tendency, Charles Thomas (1965:259) explains that: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FRONTIER MISSIONS Ralph D. Winter Patrick engrafted Christianity on the pagan superstitions with so much skill hat he won the people to the Christian religion before they understood the exa ct difference between the two systems of belief and much of this half-pagan, halfChristian religion will be found not only in the Irish stories of the Middle Ages, but in the superstitions of the peasantry of the present day. 131 them manuscripts and learning in even greater abundance than had the steady stream of Irish missionaries. This exodus greatly enhanced the curious development whereby the Irish system of private confession became the â€Å"Roman† confessional, the Irish collar the â€Å"Roman† collar, and the Irish orthography, the â€Å"Carolingian† minuscule.To this day the â€Å"Roman† alphabet, except for upper case letters, is really Irish not Roman. Even Irish manuscript illumination became known for a time as â€Å"Anglo-Saxon† (Zimmer, 1891:16). In many other ways Irish Christian virility first saved the Roman tradition and then itself became labeled â€Å"Roman. † The Irish have been generalized as savage in the fourth and fifth centuries, and as saints in the sixth, seventh, and eight centuries. Then, with the destruction wrought by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries the shattered remains of Irish Christianity became looked upon as mu ch too rebellious a deviation from the Roman tradition. This view perhaps underlay the reasoning behind the pope’s â€Å"gift† of Ireland to the Norman conquerors in 1164, which for the first time sent what could be called Roman(ized) force across the Irish sea. As a result, a drastically heightened antagonism between the Irish and the English (whether Anglo-Saxon or Norman) laid the basic for a final ironic twist at the time of the Reformation. Now the Irish, in order to continue to differentiate themselves from the now suddenly anti-Roman Anglo-Saxons on the larger island decided finally they would rather be Roman than Protestant.It is significant that the â€Å"gift† of Ireland to England was made by a pope who happened to be the only Englishman ever to be a pope. The Irish people thus represent in a tragic and classical sense the plight of the people in a minority culture who at best can only choose between the dominant flavors of their environment, lying low as the major powers clash, choosing first one and now a nother of the foreign traditions, whichever seems best to favor their local free expression. ndependence from Western Roman customs was the much more important discrepancy that was probably based somehow on Irish tribal structure: the Celtic form of monasticism. This too derived from the East, but if it had not had some kind of resonance with indigenous social structure it may not have been so durably opposed to the implantation of the Roman diocesan system of territorial bishops. Unlike those classical instances of Roman religion being planted by force in Saxony and in eastern Europe, in Ireland Rome’s physical power was always totally inadequate to enforce any kind of uniformity.Bede’s ostensibly pro-Roman account paints Augustine’s mission to England in bold strokes, but clearly records that the only force available to his mission (as he tried to win over the Celtic Christians) was what could be called threats about the afterlife coupled with the assumed prestige of the see of Peter—as against John the Beloved on whose word the Celts relied. Meanwhile, by the Synod of Whitby in the Seventh Century, Rome was handicapped profoundly by the centuries of confusion in the Mediterranean itself induced by the Barbarian invasions in the West and subsequent see-sawing between Gothic and Eastern Roman military power.Irish scholars, for whom Latin was never a native tongue, were finally needed to teach Latin in the city of Rome. (This would be like black African Christians coming to the United States to teach English in the year 2030, following one-half century of Chinese occupation of North America). For similar reasons, it was Irish scholarship traditions that were reinstated on the Continent—with the help (of course) of Anglo-Saxon scholars whose own scholarly formation, if not always their actual training, derived from Celtic centers of learning in Ireland or England.Eventually the Danish (Viking) invasions became a violent force inflicted against the Irish Christian tradition, but not a force conforming them to Roman Christianity except in the sense that their scholars fled to the Continent, taking with Cook goes on to summarize: This is what we should naturally expect. The remarkable thing is that this syncretistic tendency did not go further and pervert the basic Christian message. Perhaps it was the emphasis on the scriptures that provided the safeguard.It is certainly notable that in the last century after Patrick Ireland became a major center of Christian learning, even attracting students from the Continent. Moreover, it is beginning to send its own missionaries far and wide, even as far as Italy itself. In the attempt to understand early insular Celtic Christianity and specifically Irish Christianity, our chief problem is that the preservation of their story was, for one reason or another, constantly left in the hands of non-Irish groups. Pelagius and Bede Pelagius is a case in point.What we know of his teaching remains today primarily in the writings of his opponents against words of his disciples. Looking back we can recognize possible discrepancies in differing cultural connotations of the same Latin words, with the result that those of different backgrounds employed different explanations (theological formulations). If grace had a sinister meaning for Pelagius (as for example in the Theodosian Code) implying favoritism (Hughes, 1966:20,21) we can almost assume the need for honest divergence between Celtic and Roman theologians.Less significant theologically, perhaps, are the divergences between the Insular Celts and the Western tradition in the matter of tonsure and Easter date. In this case, the offending diversity was not homemade but came simply from the opposite end of the Mediterranean. Yet beneath these two tangible symbols of VOL 12:3 JUL. -SEP. 1995 132 The Tragedy and Irony The tragedy is that the Christian tradition itself has not more clearly Christian History in Cross-Cultural Perspective their potential contribution to the larger world is ideally fulfilled in t he present political structure. There is not space to mention the Basques, the Bretons, the Navajos, and other over-run minorities still encapsulated in the Western world, whose minority cultures are not treated with adequate cross-cultural perspective by secular political powers. However, the failure of secular rulers to view things with Christian cross-cultural perspective is no excuse for Christian strategists to ignore the heightened urgency of the whole problem as the world Christian family struggles to understand and accept both its unity and diversity.The ecumenical movement will become a tyrannical power if cross-cultural perspective does not prevent its projection of simplistic democracy as the only means for disparate Christian tradition to sit down in fellowship together. The Christian family is more complex than the small town in which a pure democracy has been made classical. Both union churches (single congregation) and united denominations can proceed with democratically correct procedures to trample on the minority cultures.Homogeneous churches in one social stratum in India are not the most likely instruments of evangelism within other strata holding drastically different customs and traditions. Only monolithic concepts of unity can blind us to the healthy diversity God has intended among his people and the peoples of the world. In Conclusion There is no particular value in opening ancient wounds and re-arguing issues long thought to be settled unless this holds promise for superior insight into the modern situation.Despite the outbreak of hostilities in Ireland and the continued existence of many unresolved problems of cultural diversity within the Christian tradition in the Western world today, it may still be possible that historical studies are the only studies which offer ready opportunity for the understanding of crosscultural perspective at an objective level and distance. Who knows what specific tensions in overseas countries may be resolvable only if parallels can be deeply and intelligently drawn between the present and conflicts long ago? At least it is with this profound hope that this has be written.Bibliography Cook, Harold R. 1971 â€Å"The Celtic Church in Ireland† from Historic Patterns of Church Growth, Chicago, Moody Press D’Alton, E. A. 1913 History of Ireland, London, The Gresham Publishing Co. Hughes, Kathleen 1966 The Church in Early Irish Society, London, Methuen ; Col. Ltd. Scott, William Henry 1967 â€Å"Celtic and the Conversion of Ireland,† International Review of Mission, Vol. LVI, no. 222 Thomas, Charles 1966 â€Å"Celtic Britain and the AngloSaxons† in The Dawn of European Civilization, edited by David Talbor Rice, New York, McGraw-Hill Co.Zimmer, H. 1891 The Irish Element in Medieval Culture, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons enunciated the principles inherent in crosscultural perspective. The Irish from early times have never been a tightly knit society. The very existence of rival clans and tribes and perpetual feuding favored the development of a Christianity which was by no means perfectly uniform in Ireland itself. It was not the Irish who were perplexed about achieving any kind of uniformity. Pluralism would not have been hard for them to understand.Kathleen Hughes (1966:104) observes that: Celtic clerics seem to have been untroubled by the diversity of practice. Why should they be? The church had endured such problems for centuries, and the popes had no clear official pronouncement. ‘Let Gaul, I beg, contain us side by side, who the kingdom of Heaven shall contain’ writes Columbanus to the Gallican synod. To him, even in the mist of the Easter controversy, there were matters which seemed of far greater importance in the life of the church than liturgical diversity.The greatest irony of all—looking now beyond the Irish illustration to the experience of many other minorities encountered by the advancing wave of Christianity—is the fact that at about the time all of these questions seemed resolved in the Western world, the whole profusion of cultural diversity within the Christian Church has burst forth as the result of the missionary movement in the non-Western world. The angriest problems in the world today are not international imperialism but questions of conformity within national states—in a word, civil wars: Vietnam, Nigeria, Sudan, and (here we are again) Ireland.The question is how long the Amharas can dominate the Gallas in Ethiopia, whether the Kikuyus shall forever dominate the government in Kenya, whether a handful of whites shall run the country in Rhodesia, etc. The reason these problems are so nearly insoluble is the same: 700,000 Celtic people who speak Welsh do not feel that Dr. Ralph Winter is President of William Carey University located in Pasadena California. He served as a professor of missions at Fuller Theological Seminary and also was a missionary to Guatemala . Editors Note: This essay is a revised edition of Chapter 17 of God, Man, and Church Growth (Eerdmans, 1973), edited by Alan Tippett, a festschrift in honor of the late Dr. Donald McGavran’s 75th birthday. Since the writing of this essay, a number of books have appeared which confirm the remarkable contribution of the mission scholarship of the Celtic Church. Note John T. McNeil’s groundbreaking work, The Celtic Churches, 200 AD to 1200 AD, and also Light from the West, and more recently the popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. ] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FRONTIER MISSIONS How to cite Mass Media’s Effect on Indian Society, Papers

Silvio Napoli Schindler Case free essay sample

Schindler is a Switzerland based elevator manufacturing company founded by Robert Schindler in 1874. Since its inception, the company has generated billion dollar revenues and is regarded as the technology leader in elevator manufacturing. Alfred N. Schindler, who is the 4th generation of the family to lead the company, has seen growth potential for the company in India and is attracted by the growing demands for elevators in that particular part of the world. After negotiations for a joint venture with a local Indian firm BBL has failed, Schindler decides to establish its wholly owned subsidiary in India. To lead the implementation of this plan Schindler has appointed Silvio Napoli, a Harvard MBA graduate as the head of the Indian subsidiary project. With the appointment of Silvio Napoli as the Head, several issues come up as the reality of starting up a new subsidiary in a country that is culturally different proves to be more challenging than what was initially anticipated. We will write a custom essay sample on Silvio Napoli Schindler Case or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page From having to deal with the newly formed management team taking orders for customized elevators, which is not part of the business plan written out by Napoli emphasizing the sale of standardized elevators only, to not getting full support from the European plants in regards to the request for parts and design specifications for the elevators, implementation of Napoli’s business plan is proving to be more perplexing than initially planned. Such issues raise the questions of whether appointing Silvio Napoli as the Head of the project is the right decision and how Luc Bonnard, who is the vice chairman of Schindler, would evaluate Napoli’s performance on the project thus far. Was Silvio Napoli the right choice for general manager of Schindler’s India operations? Assessing whether Silvio Napoli was the right choice for general manager position will require looking at his strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments, as well as his compatibility with the new management team and the host country. In terms of professional qualifications, Napoli is no doubt the right choice. A Harvard MBA graduate with various accomplishments up his sleeve, Napoli has the necessary knowledge and experience to lead a new subsidiary. He reports directly to the CEO of Schindler and is the only â€Å"non-member to attend VRA meetings† (Fagan, Yoshino, Bartlett, 2006, p. 3), which are reserved exclusively for the corporate executive committee consisting of Alfred Schindler, Luc Bonnard, and Alfred Spoerri. In addition to this, Napoli has a proven success record with regards to the Swatch Project, which is the first major assignment that he took, in which he redesigned Schindler’s entire supply chain to bring costs down and increase profits as mentioned by Fagan et al. (2006, p. 3). In addition to this, since Napoli is the person who came up with this business plan, it may be best that he is the one who leads the realization of such plan. Moreover, although Napoli’s strict and demanding leadership style is often seen criticized for not being adaptive to the culturally different management styles of his newly formed team, it is effective in helping Napoli achieve the task at hand. As Fagan et al. (2006, p. 6) describes â€Å"Napoli expected things to be done yesterday, but in India things do not get done yesterday†. From this, Napoli’s bureaucratic leadership style is evident. According to Grayson (n. d. , Bureaucratic Leadership Style section) bureaucratic leadership style is most effective when you want things to be done precisely the way it is planned in an organized and timely manner. This means that such style of leadership is best suited for the task in hand at that time, as such tight control style of leadership has the ability to ensure efficiency in getting things done which in this case is to cut costs and increase productivity in the manufacturing of the elevators. Considering the partisan perspectives however, it also becomes clear that Napoli’s cultural and organizational background do not quite fit in with that of India’s which soon ends up leading to various cultural management issues within the newly formed subsidiary. To begin with, his Swiss-Italian background differs greatly from India from a cultural perspective. It goes without saying that the country of Switzerland, which is where the headquarter of Schindler company is located, lies on the opposite spectrum of cultural dimensions as identified by the GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness) Study when compared to India. This study was conducted with the intent of finding out the relationship between culture and leadership. And according to a review of this study by Hoppe (2007), the major premise is that â€Å"leader effectiveness is contextual, that is, it is embedded in the societal and organizational norms, values, and beliefs of the people being led. † This means for Napoli, whose leadership and cultural background being different from that of the management team he is assigned to lead, creates conflicts and undermines Napoli’s potential ability to lead effectively. This factor is reinforced when we look at the country clusters resulting from the findings of the GLOBE study (refer to Appendix A). It can be clearly seen that India belongs to the ‘Southern Asia’ cluster whereas Switzerland belongs to the ‘Latin Europe’ cluster. And these two clusters are on polar opposite ends of the ‘Humane Orientation’ dimension (Appendix A). What this means is that for someone like Napoli, who comes from an individualist society where individual achievements are regarded as high priority, it may be hard to realize the power and importance of interpersonal relationships. But for a manager in India, the role of human interactions is regarded as very important, and hence the high value on humane orientation and in-group collectivism for India. This mismatch in cultural management can hurt the team’s potential to achieve their intended objectives. This discrepancy in management style can be seen when Fagan et al. (2006, p. 6) mentions that â€Å"Napoli’s Indian staff and colleagues described him as driving very hard, impulsive, impatient, and at times over-communicative†, which contrasted sharply for his colleague and co-leader M. K. Singh, whom â€Å"one manager saw as friendly and easygoing. † In addition to this mismatch in cultural management, there is also incongruity in the kind of organizational environment that Napoli has to work in within the Indian subsidiary. As stated in the case by Fagan et al. (2006, p. 7), the employees describe the new Indian subsidiary’s company culture as â€Å"informal, open, responsive, and proactive†. And for Napoli this is not something that he is used to as back in the Swiss headquarters, the company hierarchy â€Å"was clear, politeness important, and first names rarely used† (Fagan et al. , 2006, p. 3). Lastly, the strategy to reuse the Swatch Project formula of having standardized products does not seem feasible given that the Indian market is completely different and customers demand different needs. With the intentions of segmenting the market into low-rise and mid-rise elevators and targeting to hit low-rise segment with the standardized products (refer to Appendix B for detailed Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning strategy for Indian subsidiary) Napoli has taken the approach to apply the existing values and strategies of the company into a predetermined business plan. This does not work as for the culturally different Indian managers as they prefer to incorporate the needs and demands of the general customers with focus on relationships before applying any practices All things considered, it can be said that Silvio Napoli was the right person for the job. But what the Schindler headquarters back in Switzerland should have done is before deploying Napoli to India to implement the start-up plan, he should have received some kind of cultural management training or support from the European parent company. Initial research into the workings of Indian culture should have been carried out in addition to the research on the Indian elevator market. Such training and research could have prepared him better and teach him to prioritize relationship orientation over task-orientation in a culture such that of India’s. How should Silvio Napoli have approached the nonstandard glass wall elevator situation? One of the major challenges that Napoli faces during the implementation of his business plan is the management team accepting an order for a customized nonstandard glass wall elevator. As stated by Fagan et al. (2006, p. 10) Napoli â€Å"was at first just surprised, and then pretty angry† about the situation. To Napoli, this is a violation of what is written in the business plan which all of them have agreed to commit. However, Napoli should not have reacted the way he did. The business model that he has built upon is based on the previous success and learnings of the Swatch project. The plan is to ensure short-term success for Schindler in India so that this can motivate continued operations further down the line. What Napoli fails to realize is that this approach does not fit in well with the Indian counterparts who hold more of a long-term orientation. To them meeting the needs of the domestic customers is regarded as higher than ensuring short-term success through the standardized product strategy. Therefore, instead of stubbornly continuing the standardized product approach Napoli should adopt the customization strategy as this will align with Indian culture’s orientation towards relationships which involve listening to the demands of the general public. Napoli should take note of what the customers want rather than strictly following his business plan, as the focus on standardized products does not give any flexibility, and it has been made evident through the first four orders that customers would not accept the products without customization (Fagan et al. , 2006, p. 10). It is not like Napoli does not know the need to adapt and adjust to the demands of the domestic market. He himself mentions that â€Å"to survive in India you have to be half monk and half warrior† (Fagan et al. , 2006, p. 6). What he means by that is one should learn how to embrace the monk part and learn to accept things that cannot be changed (Silvio Napoli Interview Video shown in class). Now if he embraces what he has said, and accepts the customization strategy there may be potential for increase in sales and positive turnaround past this particular obstacle. How would Luc Bonnard evaluate Silvio Napoli’s first seven month as the general manager of the India operations? What advice/feedback should he offer? Silvio Napoli’s first seven months have seen ups and downs. And in order for Luc Bonnard to evaluate and advise on the progress that Napoli has made several factors will need to be considered. Bonnard will need to assess the progress as per the business plan, the challenges that Napoli is facing and how he has planned to deal with them, as well as the performance and effectiveness of the new management team that Napoli has put in place. To begin with, Napoli has done a good job of putting together a cohesive and experienced pool of individuals for his management team. It is wise of Napoli to pick a group of experienced individuals who have the local knowledge and the know-how in their respective fields. On top of that, all of the 4 recruits for the management team are under the age of 55 (Fagan et al. , 2006, Exhibit 3), which is one of the favorable factors mentioned by Bonnard in his explanation for choosing Napoli to be the head of the India project. As mentioned by Bonnard, he needs individuals who are â€Å"young and flexible† (Fagan et al. , 2006, p. 4), and because the entire management team including Napoli is under 55 years old it is easier for them to be cohesive and work together on the same page. Hence Napoli has done a job well done on selection of his key managers for the India subsidiary as they are all compatible to one another. Furthermore, the fact that Napoli organizes meetings between his management team members help him run the company better as such meetings strengthen the communication within the team and make the new managers feel inclusive. However, these positive achievements are not without the accompanying negatives. For instance, as far as the progress as per the business plan is concerned, Napoli has not been able to achieve his targeted sales nor meet the initially targeted level of cost allocations. Now although some of the contributing factors are out of his hands, such as the price of elevator parts going up, Napoli could have had some kind of contingency plan set up in the business plan. His original business plan is also seen flawed as he fails to prioritize the need to meet the demands of the domestic market, and instead models his plan to aggressively pursue success through the low cost strategy. Rather than relying on engineering-based manufacturing Napoli should adopt a more customer oriented approach in dealing with the obstacle of customers wanting to have customized elevators as opposed to the standardized units that Napoli has proposed in his business plan. Moreover, it hasn’t been wise for Napoli to have to deal with both family and business matters. Napoli should have taken the initiative to establish the company first in India before bringing his family to relocate in Mumbai. The decision to bring the family during the early stages of company development is not an ideal one and is a mistake on Napoli’s part. In terms of advice, it should be suggested that Napoli review his original business plan and make necessary amendments to better fit the needs of the local market. He should stop relying on the practices adopted in the Swatch Project and instead do a thorough background research into India’s culture and amend his business plan. His new business plan should try to meet more realistic goals and adopt a customization strategy as this will satisfy the demands for customized products and have more flexibility on sales (refer to Appendix C for how Customers influence Schindler through Porter’s 5 forces analysis). According to a research paper on â€Å"A competitive model of customization with lead-time effects† by Xia N and Rajogopalan S custom firms are more likely to survive and succeed in markets with large potential, such as India. It is stated that â€Å"profit margin and price of the custom product are likely to be higher than that of standard products in equilibrium under certain conditions† (Xia, N. Rajogopalan, S. , 2009). Hence by learning how to adjust his behavior according to the customization needs instead of continuing his aggressive pursuit of success through low-cost strategy, Napoli will be able to generate more sales and establish a more relationship oriented supply of products. It is prominent that Napoli aims to meet customer expectations as this is the key to success. Instead of relying solely on standardized products to achieve break-even at the committed time, maybe Napoli should consider other methods to cut costs such as reducing the day to day operation costs. Last but not least it should also be advised that Napoli communicate the inefficiency in support from the European plants to the headquarters back in Switzerland as it is one of the influential factors (suppliers) affecting the success of Schindler’s operations in India (refer to Appendix C for 5 Forces analysis). As described by Fagan et al. (2006, p. 10) in the case Napoli feels the burden of being the middle manager as he faces the multiple demands form the Switzerland headquarters as well as from the newly formed Indian subsidiary. It is essential that Napoli gets the necessary support and cooperation he needs from his European counterparts to be able to effectively lead and run the India subsidiary. Conclusion In conclusion, although Silvio Napoli is the right person for this job certain cultural preparations should have taken place prior to his deployment in India by Schindler to avoid unnecessary difficulties. In addition to this, although the initially proposed business plan is partly successful Napoli will need to amend his plan including changes in the approach towards dealing with the customer demands, inclusion of contingency plans for unforeseen circumstances that are out of his control and flexibility in the sales approach. If these measures are to be taken it is no doubt that Silvio Napoli will be able to overcome any challenges, cultural or organizational, and institute a successful subsidiary for Schindler in India.