Even though the leaders contended that conflicts between its auditing and consulting missions had no impact on the quality of its work but actually they do. The two roles rarely mix well--a fact Arthur Andersen himself warned about as far back as the Great Depression. The culture changed where the auditor was no longer the guy people respected in the '80s and '90s. Even as many of its partners and staff continued to uphold a high standard, others compromised in the interest of generating fees. Andersen's remaining leadership disputed that the firm emphasized the selling of services over audit quality, replacing partners who were strong auditors but didn't generate enough revenue.
With the economy in recession, high unemployment rates, and high interest rates proved very challenging for Welch to run GE. The challenges faced from inside the company were massive information and inefficient macro-business models. Amidst all the challenges, Welch took them on with a motto, which was to be “Better than the Best” (Bartlett & Wonzy, 2005). Welch took a stand to restructure the company and identified managers who would fit in areas that could assist to restructure the company, while other managers who did not bring value to the company were let go. By eliminating the sector level, about 123,450 jobs, and also eliminating addition of new jobs, Welch implemented lean and agile methodologies, as well as real-time-planning strategy.
The case of Enron is said to be a “smoke and mirrors” act dictated by top executives presenting the positive financial wealth of the company. Shareholders, lower executives, employees, and most American’s were not aware of the grieve financial trouble the company was enduring. Company Culture Enron’s motto was “respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence” and along with that its Vision was “Treat other as we would like to be treated ourselves…” Both the motto and vision were inconsistent with the actual company procedures. Enron had a much different approach to the company culture and reward system they actually used. Competition was the main concept; which led to numerous financial mistakes in future years.
This created a complex environment in where the organization had a necessity to Attract, Retain, and Reward and motivate a special group of people with compensation given. The major thing to be mentioned when it comes to Microsoft Reward strategy and Management system is, “One Microsoft” Strategy. Knowing the fact that the company is worldwide known and accommodated employees from all over the globe company would face high risk. The risk is that applying performance and reward solution might be different depending on country which creates a complexity. The company gives more importance to Distinctiveness, differentiation, market competitiveness and accountability when it comes to reward strategy.
There were other factors that Germany thought that were very unfair such as their tiny army and the amount of land that was taken from them. Their army had to be reduced to 100,000 men and also they could not have any military aircraft, submarines or armored cars. This made them very vulnerable to other countries and other countries took valuable resources from Germany making their future seem even worse. All the countries who had been involved in the war had different aims in the treaty these included France who at the time president was Clemenceau who was seen as the harshest of the big three. France in the war had suffered the most so it was only right that they wanted Germany to be crippled and Clemenceau with the support of France had the aim of crushing them.
In the Treaty, Germany was forced to accept all the blame for war, and was also forced to pay reparations amounting to about 6.6 billion dollars, which was finally all paid off in 1989. The absence of money from the German economy caused extreme hyper-inflation, which in turn caused many Germans to lose their jobs. In the infamous Great Depression of the 1920s, the US was not the only hard-hit country but Germany too and even more severely so. This was because Germany had lost over 2 million men in the war, and many of those who did come back were crippled and could not work. Germany had also lost trust with many countries who were their trading partners, causing them to lose even more money as they could not export their goods.
And to top it all off both of these empires fail for similar reasons. The Han Empire collapsed for reasons such as: undetermined emperors could no longer control powerful warlords, weak emperors let canals and roads fall into disrepair, because of the weak government people started to turn on each other and lose control. But the most important reason for the empire collapsing was because of the economic inequality. Burdened by heavy taxes and crushing debt many peasants revolted destroying the civilization. While this collapse took very little time to happen, the Roman Empire’s decline took about a century to occur.
By the end of the war Vietnam was incredibly unpopular in the US and had cost the lives of 70,000 men. Vietnamese losses were far higher and spread to the civilian population, but they perceived the losses to be a necessary evil - they were fighting for freedom and independence. The US wasn't. 3. The US failed to understand that they were fighting a guerrilla war.
Brief overview of WorldCom’s case and general discussion of its fraud nature: Beresford, Katzenbach and Jr (2003) stated that, from 1999 until 2002, a few executives at WorldCom perpetrated accounting fraud that led to the largest bankruptcy in history. The principle business strategy of its CEO – aggressive growth through acquisitions underlined its collapse and eventually imposed pressure to management to commit fraud. In fact, WorldCom’s fraud was a consequence of a set of complex factors, including the existence of dominant senior management, structurally weak internal controls, inadequate audits by Arthur Andersen, the poor oversight of the Board, and pressure from Wall Street’s expectation, etc. The large scale collapses of WorldCom and Enron triggered immediate remedies of corporate governance, essentially the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which aimed to solve the issue of “lack of confidence” in the reported financials. WorldCom’s fraud was an intentional misconduct of the perpetrated senior management that results in an $11 billion material misstatement in the financial statements via two principle forms: reduction of the reported line costs and exaggeration of reported revenues, in order to create an image of increased earnings and revenue and hold the line costs lower than the industry average rather than indicate the truth and fairness of WorldCom’s wealth and progress (Beresford et al, 2003).
Company faced an immediate pressure from external environment because of lawsuits filed by its large customers like Cherry Communications, this damaged company’s reputation. Also, two to three of World-Com’s commercial customers filed for bankruptcy in any given quarter, this created a long term pressure on growth of WorldCom. Investigation from SEC mounted a big external pressure on WorldCom following which revealed multiple accounting frauds