MGT506 - Strategic Leadership, Mod 2 Case Assignment Essay

MGT506 - Strategic Leadership, Mod 2 Case Assignment - Essay Example The success behind such unprecedented growth of SAS is attributed to the CEO of the company, Jim Goodnight. Jim Goodnight has been with the company for more than 35 years and ensured that the company grew each year without having to face any layoffs. Jim Goodnight strived for an open system for the organization with a flat structure to ensure efficient working of the company. Jim Goodnight has been considered to be one of the greatest American business leaders of the 20th century by Harvard Business School in 2004 (Stamper, 2010). The paper attempts to shed light on the leadership qualities of Jim Goodnight as a situational leader. This paper will analyze how SAS is able to prosper and continuously show growth on account of having a leader such as Jim Goodnight. Lastly, the paper would discuss whether situational leadership style is bred or born. Situational Leadership style was another style of leadership developed by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard. As the name implies, leaders falling in this category take action according to the situation. They combine elements of both autocratic and participative styles in order to achieve the desired results. This leadership style takes into account that there is no best leadership style but the best leaders are those that understand that core of the issue and take action accordingly. Thus situational leadership relies on the external environment heavily which includes not just the people within the team but also the task they have to accomplish. Hersey and Blanchard use the four quadrant model of Situational leadership to properly explain the characteristics of such leader and the action they take given the situation. The Situational leadership model as presented by Hersey and Blanchard is: Structuring: Leaders need to adopt this approach in the bleakest situation, that is, the morale of the employees in not just low, they also do not have the ability to deal

How ratio analysis provides a meaningful comparison of a company to Essay

How ratio analysis provides a meaningful comparison of a company to its industry, chief competitors, or to any other well run firm - Essay Example These techniques help to compare a company’s performance with its chief competitors in same industry as well as monitor the company’s progress over time. Accounting ratios is an important tool for financial statement analysis. A ratio is defined as relation between two numbers expressed as fraction or as percentage. When such relationships are derived from the financial statements, they are called accounting ratios (Kim & Ayoun, 2005, p.2). Accounting ratios have immense application in interpretation of financial statements by helping perform both intra-firm and inter-firm comparison. Intra-firm comparison helps to measure the performance of the company on Y-O-Y basis while inter-firm comparison helps to evaluate Company’s performance with its competitors. Ratios can be broadly classified into income statement ratios (derived from income statement), balance sheet ratios (derived from balance sheet) and composite ratios (one item from balance sheet and another from income statement). They help to evaluate the firm’s ability to honor its short term or current obligations. It is an indicator for the measure of working capital management. The firms’ short term obligations include carrying out day to day operations, payments to creditors for purchase of raw materials, payment of daily wages of laborers, outstanding expenses and bills payables, etc. These current liabilities are financed by current assets (Bragg, 2012, p.73). It is the ratio of total long-term debt to total asset. While a low ratio provides security to creditors a high ratio helps the management to trade on equity. Hence it is also called the leverage ratio (Drake, 2008, p.9). It is the ratio of long term debt to shareholders’ fund (Equity shares, retained earnings, preference shares, and fictitious assets). Form the investors’ point of view a