Performance Improvement Analysis

Performance Improvement Analysis
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Performance Improvement Analysis
Article Summary
The article primarily deals with the dynamic contemporary business environment. According to the author, a crisis can occur regardless of the preventative efforts put in by a company. Hence, strategic planning is presented as a discipline that, over the last 40 years, has aided planners to forecast and cope with numerous industry forces and problems existing beyond their control (Kash & Darling, 1998). For the paper, crisis management is opined as a series of processes through which crisis issues are identified, studied, and forecasted. The strategies help organizations to put in place specific approaches through which they can cope with crises.
According to the author, there are two types of crises. The first are those that can be managed, and the second category is that of approaches that manage you. It is through proactive planning that managers are aided to control and also resolve crisis events. Whenever such possibilities are ignored, a crisis can take a life of its own (Kash & Darling, 1998). The author presents companies that had to employ strategic approaches to manage emergencies. They include the following.
Companies
The Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant had its warning signs go off in 1979, indicating that the nuclear reactors were at risk of a meltdown. The plant had close to 120 different alarms which went off at the same time. Those required to take action failed to do so because planned instructions had never been provided (Kash & Darling, 1998). The second company presented is Nike which in the year 1997 faced an event it had no plan to resolve. The article presents the different stages of a crisis and preventative efforts that possibly can work to fix them. The final organization presented is Martin Marietta. According to the author, the company recognized the need to sufficiently present information to stakeholders during periods of crisis (Kash & Darling, 1998). For this reason, it maintains communication at a level from which it can communicate immediately to all its immediate constituencies.
Measures
Nike chose to take more of an intervention measure to resolve it; the company had to do away with an entire line and recall more than 38,000 shoes (Kash & Darling, 1998). The second company, the Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant, might have had a preventative measure in place. Even so, its insufficiency meant that the crisis never was well acknowledged at the start and eventually became a chronic phenomenon (Kash & Darling, 1998). Finally, the measure employed by Marti...