Friday, February 28, 2020

Nucor Steel and Partner's Healthcare Term Paper

Nucor Steel and Partner's Healthcare - Term Paper Example As a function of this, the following analysis will consider and review the means by which Nucor Steel and Partner Health have attempted to leverage increasing returns within their organization as a means to make them more competitive and ultimately more profitable within the markets that they compete. Although it is oftentimes not easy to determine what aspects of a firm are primed for increasing rates of return, the instances that will be discussed in this case study and analysis have been determined from prior research which has been performed with the sole intent of labeling these increasing return mechanisms and seeking to implement them as a way to boost the profitability of the industry in question. Q1) Nucor challenge and principles of increasing returns working to help the firm achieve its strategic goals. Analyze the cases in terms of network effect, standardization, high switching cost, and learning effect. With regards to Nucor Steel, the case study in question presented a situation in which lower levels of company leadership outright refused to communicate and or learn from the experience of one another. As a function of this compartmentalized approach to management and information sharing, the firm itself was suffering from a lack of free flow of knowledge systems and intelligence transfer. As a result of this, the profitability and overall level to which the firm could hope to grow was necessarily constrained. As a means of outgrowing this constraint and leveraging increasing returns of the human capital inputs that the process entailed, the authors of the piece detail how they sought to implement a type of incentive system for information sharing within the firm and among leadership positions (Anderson 2009). Naturally, such an approach necessarily sought to change an aspect of the company’s culture. However, what was particularly intelligent about the means by which this was affected was the fact that rather than merely forcing this chang e upon the shareholders, it was presented to them by means of an incentive mechanism (Nucor 2012). In this way, the switching cost was alleviated, the network affect (by which shareholders sought to implement the change) was also assisted, and the learning effect was shortened. Such an approach was highly useful and insightful as it helped the firm to rapidly yet methodically implement the new structure and achieve the ultimate affect which was sought after without disrupting the otherwise solid performance that the firm exhibited within the market. The second article that has been analyzed dealt with the case of Partner Health and their desire to implement a type of EBM (Evidence Based Medicine) into their field of practice. Recognizing that the prime impediment to a higher quality of care and helping the firm to evolve to the next level was the fact that their current system of healthcare provision meant that there was little to no evolution and growth within the body of knowledge that medical practitioners disseminated on a daily basis, the top leadership sought to engage a system of EBM as a means of seeking to provide these affected shareholders with an ever expanding body of clinical knowledge which could help to inform them as to the decision that they should make. Likewise, with relation to the ultimate implementation of

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Is virtue ethics able to provide concrete ethical guidance to doctors Essay

Is virtue ethics able to provide concrete ethical guidance to doctors Why or why not - Essay Example This raises the question of the sort of person one should be rather than what they should do. Due to the assumption, virtue ethics is not considered as a normative rival in relation to utilitarian and deontological ethics. However, its revival serves as a reminder to moral philosophers that a full account of our moral life may not be given due to the normative theory elaboration. The grounds one might have for believing that a choice of action cannot be given by virtue ethics is based on the claim that it is concerned with character rather than action, meaning it is not able to provide concrete ethical guidance (Mukherjee, 223). The above claim highlights the contrast that is there between virtue ethics and the other two approaches. While virtue ethics is agent-centered the other two are said to be act-centered. The conflict problem comes about with supporting the general claim that virtue ethics does not give a course of action. Different virtues have different requirements and it is said that these different requirements can point us in different directions. This goes to support the idea that virtue ethics is not able to provide concrete ethical guidance to doctors (Hursthouse, 651). The Emperor of All Maladies gives a history of cancer. It is an ancient disease that was not talked about much but its effects brought about the need for it to be looked into. This was in an attempt to learn more about its personality and behavior. It traces back the origin of the disease, the triumphs and deaths encountered. It brings out the start, the progressiveness and the war waged against it by people who were determined to see that it comes to an end or find ways of preventing and curing the disease (Mukherjee, 224). A thirty year old kindergarten teacher named Carla Reed and a mother of three woke up one morning with a headache. As she later found out, it was not an ordinary headache. She was a very active