Global Business Perspectives | Horizon University UAE

It is easy to become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of syllabus that we, as faculty, need to work through during the semester. Inevitably, there are sections that even we struggle to find interesting. It can become hard to motivate students when we are teaching such sections. I’ve found that learning stations work well for me in such cases. The preparation that I have to put in to design the stations and process always means that I end up finding an interesting angle from which to approach the lesson. The fact that students have to move around the classroom and complete activities with differing levels of difficulty always means that they are not distracted from the core material and engage with it in a more meaningful way.

Some of you may be familiar with the concept of a learning station and others not. Therefore, for those of you who have not used this particular tool before, I will provide a brief outline as to what it is. So what is a learning station? Rollins (23 March 2017, online) writes: ‘at their best, stations encourage student autonomy, critical thinking, collaboration, and student engagement’. Learning stations can only achieve this when they have been well designed by us, the lecturer. Picture your classroom with between four – six learning stations in the form of desks spaced about your classroom with different activities based on the material you are teaching that day. Each desk has a set of instructions and an activity. Students move around the classroom in groups and are given time at each station in order to complete the activity. The teacher keeps a strict monitor on the time and can either go from group to group offering encouragement or be stationary at one group and have a “teacher-led station”. Stations are not a way of removing any responsibility for the learning from the teacher but are a way of placing some of the responsibility of learning on the students. They are a dynamic and interactive way of bringing some fun to your classroom, without sacrificing content time.

Rollins (23 March 2017, online) provides the following tips to think about when planning learning stations so that the experience can be maximized by both you and your students.
Six tips for planning Learning Stations

1. Assign team leaders to help students navigate the stations.
2. When appropriate, place answer keys at the stations so that students can self-assess.
3. Consider incorporating an engaging anchor activity. Students carry these with them from station to station and work on these during any free time.
4. Plan furniture arrangement and travel routes to expedite stations.
5. Have materials already on tables ready to go.
6. Utilize a timer, and announce when they have about a minute left, to “Pack up the station, and get ready to move!”

There is no doubt that to start, using learning stations will be a labor intensive process for you the lecturer. Once you have your basic first lesson planned though, it is easier to plan further sessions based on this principle. I use learning stations to teach referencing systems and the dangers of plagiarism. My students appreciate the fact that they are not simply sitting and being talked at about a subject that at its very best can be described as challenging and I appreciate the fact that my students are actually engaging with the concepts and techniques and not merely playing around on their cellphones.

Reference:
Rollins, S.P. (23 March 2017). Three questions to guide teaching through learning stations. Available at: https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/3-questions-to-guide-teaching-through-learning-stations/

Article Written by Eman Ali Ahli, MBA Student

The transition from the operational level to the strategic level is an important process that every leader needs to overcome. It involves many challenges. Many leaders face difficulty to pass this step and they fail to overcome it. Due to the rapid changes in the business environment and the growing competition and changing attitudes of employees from one generation to other generation, it is necessary for organizations to develop strategic leaders who are able to formulate and implement strategies which deliver the desired results to achieve sustainability.  In contrast to operational leadership, whose role is limited to managing only the day-to-day operations, leaders who transform from operational leadership to strategic leadership need to play different types of roles to achieve long-term strategic results. This will help their organizations to grow and gain competitive advantage. It will also help them to implement the change management process easily and quickly. The importance of each role depends on the status of the business that the leader is associated with. The strategic leader generally plays nine roles in the organization while displaying his leadership style.

These nine roles of the top strategic leadership are:  

1.Navigator— In this role, the leader works quickly and clearly to deal with difficulties, solves problems and takes advantage of various opportunities to influence existing work and people. The Navigator role of the leader makes the leader to analyze a large amount of conflicting information, understand the root cause of the problems and identify the feasible and optimal solutions.

 2. Strategist— The strategist role of the leader enables the leader to develop a long-term strategy and set targets to match the vision of an organization. The strategy is focused on creation of future plans and required actions immediately. The strategist role enables the leader to provide a direction to the organization to achieve the desired vision. 

3. Entrepreneur­— In this role, the leader acts an entrepreneur. He/she identifies and takes advantage of opportunities and expands business by creating innovative products, services or markets. Thinking like an entrepreneur and owner of the organization, the leader generates new ideas, takes advantage of opportunities or proposals and transforms them into a new path. The leader develops the ability to solve problems easily through his acumen and shrewdness and creates a new style of leadership.

 4. Mobilizer— Playing the role of mobilizer, the strategic leader mobilizes all kinds of resources and develops teams and partners to work with them by leveraging the synergy of wide variety of talent. Also, he / she builds a capacity that allows rapid implementation of work in order to achieve complex objectives.

 5. Talent advocate - In this role, the strategic leader identifies talented and skillful employees, internally and externally and stays in touch with them to tap their talent as and when required. He / she creates a culture of talent development by encouraging innovative ideas, by providing training, by empowering the talented employees to reach their highest possible abilities.

 6. Captivator— Playing the role of a captivator, the strategic leader continues to build confidence among employees, and creates positive feelings and a culture of belongingness. In this role, the leader converts the talent of employees into a useful outcome for the organization. Also, he convinces employees to accept his leadership style, synchronizes it with the vision of the organization and empowers them achieve the vision.

7. Global thinker— The other important role played by the strategic leader is as a global thinker. The leader understands and respects all types of diversity in the organization and designs the strategies and action keeping the diversity factor in mind. He thinks from a very high macro level perspective and keeps identifying global opportunities.

8. Change driver— Organizations need to adapt to the dynamic business environment by making changes on a continuous basis. The strategic leader plays an important role as a change driver. The leader creates and develops change management strategies and evolves techniques to make the employees accept the changes from time to time. The leader convinces the employees by projecting the fruitful outcomes of the changes.

9. Enterprise guardian - In this role, the strategic leader acts as an enterprise guardian. He / She keeps a constant check on the status of the organization by keenly observing the business environment and guards the enterprise from any disturbances. The leader refuses to negotiate over long-term gains. He / She takes bold and wise decisions with courage and risk taking attitude for a long-term benefit to the organization. The leader takes the onus of failure and shares the success with all the employees. Keeps away from emotions and personal relationships when it comes to the achievement of results. He / She becomes popular in the organization and outside by taking bold, useful but unpopular decisions.  It is essential to develop the leaders with the above abilities in every organization. Management institutions like Horizon University, an accredited university in UAE offering MBA courses, BBA courses and diploma courses in Sharjah have a key role in inculcating such leadership traits right from the college days among the management students to enable them to grow and become strategic leaders in future.  

Written by: Mohammad Ali Elabed & Abdullah Ali Elabed

Lending technologies can be distinguished based on many different dimensions such as structure of the loan contracts, screening and underwriting policies or procedures, monitoring strategies and mechanisms, and the primary source of information. These technologies are deployed to address the types of problems that can lead to either over lending or credit rationing. The changes in the economic environment in which banks and small businesses operate have heightened concern about the availability of credit to the small businesses. Part of this concern reflects the fact that the small businesses are often informationally opaque and have far fewer alternatives to external finance than large companies. Also, many small businesses are highly dependent on banks for external finance.

There are two main types of lending technologies that are distinguished by the type of information that the banks use in monstering and granting the loan. These lending technologies are used to finance small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The first type is the Transaction-based lending technologies which are primarily based on borrowers’ hard quantitative information, like the strength of the financial statement or the value of their assets, which are relatively easily available at the time of loan origination, easily to document them, and transfer. It may come in a different forms, including financial statement lending, small business credit scoring, factoring, asset-based lending, equipment lending, real estate-based lending, and leasing. It is better suited for relatively transparent small businesses and it focuses on one transaction with a customer, or many repetitive and standardized transactions with various customers.  Lending decisions are made after borrowers go through a formally structured application process where they are required to meet certain requirements like providing specific financial information in order to qualify for a loan. The transaction-based lending or arms-length lending can be more cost-effective and also allows larger and non-local banks to lend to SMEs.

The second type is the relationship lending which is extended primarily based on borrowers’ soft qualitative information, such as the entrepreneurs’ characteristics that include skill and integrity, which are not easy to verify. As the soft information is accumulated through close bank-borrower relationships, broad and long banking relationships should accompany the relationship lending so they need to be located close to their borrowers which enables the loan officers to personally contact their borrowers at a lower cost.

The relationship lending was better suited for more opaque small businesses. Traditional literature emphasizes that the use of the relationship lending methodology when dealing with SMEs because these firms are considered informational opaque and lack collateral.

Relationship lending is one of the most important technologies that employed by banks in extending credit to informationally opaque small businesses. The process of relationship lending is not well understood. However, a clear understanding of how the relationship lending technology work, and how the organizational structure of the bank affects their ability to deliver this service that are needed to assess how recent changes in the economic environment are likely to affect the availability of the credit to the small businesses.

Key Words: Lending technologies, SMEs, Small Businesses, Relationship lending, Transaction based lending

It is the responsibility of the teacher to actively involve his or her students in the learning process.  The most important thing he or she should do is to avoid giving clear, concise, organized lectures. If the presentation of a lesson is too easy to follow, most of the class will not need to learn the new material on their own. 

To grow is a basic human instinct. Civilizations across the globe and across the time have celebrated growth and people responsible for growth have always been admired and respected and others have been advised to get inspired by these examples. Nations from every corner of the world have made policies, provided incentives and have taken steps to facilitate growth and development in economic terms. In the past environmental issues were not crucial as number of people on the planet and the amount of natural resources used by them were comparatively. The accelerated development of technology, growing human population, and exponentially growing usage of resources and consequent wastage have brought the environmental concern on the forfront.The inventions of non-biodegradable materials,deforestation,pollution of various kinds created by machines and automobiles have made the sustenance of this growth pattern questionable. The use of a new pesticide can have harmful impact on food products and soil, and the long run damage caused by it can be much more than short term benefits. Various new drugs and medicines can cause severe damage to human organs in the long run. The growing industrialization and usage of automobiles may pollute the environment ultimately resulting into a series of diseases and untimely deaths of human beings. Various industrial accidents like Bhopal Gas tragedy are hard to forget for any civilized human being. The fear of rising temperature and meltdown of glaciers, damages to ozone layer, depleting drinking water, vanishing animal and plant species can put the entire civilization’s existence at risk. Hence, there is a need of tackling these issues with conviction. The real concerns for environmental hazards started getting voiced at national and international forums in the second half of the twentieth century. Various protocols and summits like Kyoto, Montreal and the latest Copenhagen summit etc. are evidences of growing concern across the globe regarding environmental issues. People from every country have started thinking and working for sustainable development. A real development is the development which can be sustained for a long term. We can’t afford to ignore the issues related to environment, if we want to hand over a beautiful earth and prosperous future potential to future generations. We must look at the both sides of effects related to usage of new inventions and adoption of new processes. Our experiences with legislations and summits have taught us the hard way that a lot more needs to be done. The issue of sustainable development or growth with environmental protection may be ensured with following for steps: 1) Creating awareness through media and education-No universal problem can be solved without creating awareness about it to all. For this, environmental study should be made the compulsory part of education at all levels in all streams. It should be given the same importance what we give to the education of languages, technology, mathematics and general awareness. Secondly, the power of all types of media including print, electronic, internet, campaigns should be harnessed to the maximum to make people know about the environmental impact of their consumption or activities, and their probable consequences. 2) Making uncompromisable legislations- Although we have various legislations related to protection of wildlife, forest etc. and there are government institutions and ministries to look after environment, but it’s obviously not sufficient. There is a need to enact legislations which make intentional damages caused to environment as serious as causing damages to human lives or sovereign nations. We must realize that if environment does not sustain then nothing will. People with power and contacts should not be allowed to remain unpunished if they have committed crimes against environment. 3) Emphasizing research on environmental protection-In order to ensure growth without environmental hazards, researches related to it must be given due priority. We spend billions of rupees on researches related to industries, defense, health etc., but environmental researches still do not attract best talents or substantial resources. There is a need to promote environmental researches with the cooperation of both governments and private sector at every possible level.Universities, institutes and research agencies must work in this direction in every related discipline area. There is also a need to facilitate environmental researches at local levels to find alternative ways of production and consumption which are environment friendly. 4) Balancing the distribution of Income-One of the major causes of environmental hazards is the fact of people in large number struggling for survival every day in the different parts of the world. An individual, who is not sure of his next meal, can’t be sensitive to possible problems in future years or hardships to next generation. For him survival at any cost is the fact of life. No campaign or legislation can stop a starving individual to cause environmental damage. This is evident in damages caused to forest in areas full of poor people and a large number pf poverty stricken employees working for dangerous and environment damaging occupations. Hence, enough honest efforts must be made to create a reasonable balance in the distribution of income. The poverty of masses also makes the economic growth unsustainable in many ways including sustainability in environmental terms. In order to ensure the growth with safe environment these points should be considered by policymakers and general public at large. Human beings survive on hope of better future, and without protecting environment we lose the hope of bright future. It’s the case of saving our hope and our environment. Horizon University College is among the top educational institutes in Sharjah and it continues working for sustainability and environmental protection through the community service activities and training to students. HUC is among the best options for BBA in Sharjah. It has also started BBA in public administration to prepare a students for administrative responsibilities.

Any country, big or small has to provide a favorable business environment for its economy not only to grow but also to prosper.  Needless to say provision of a number of factors are indispensable for a healthy and competitive economy. The captains of the industry in the private sector look to the policies in place for making their business decisions.

 

Student’s Name: Shaikha Majid Alshamsi           

Student’s ID No.: 12437

Every leader performs two roles in the organization, one is macro leadership role and the second one is micro leadership role. This article focuses on understanding the functions of a leader at macro and micro level and attempts to compare these two types of leaderships. Building a right environment and culture in the organization is an essential ingredient of macro leadership and analyzing and implementing the strategies on a day-to-day basis by monitoring every activity by doing an in-depth management is micro level leadership.

 Macro is generally considered to be the ‘Big Picture’ of the leader and micro is considered to be the ‘task’ accomplishment of the leader.

 At the macro level, the leader is more focused on bringing a transformational change in the organization by carefully monitoring the external and internal environment of it. The leader develops a long-term strategy by visualizing and anticipating the changes in the external environment and makes the structural changes required in the internal environment of the organization to synchronize the external changes.

 Macro Leadership:

 This leadership level or role is a strategic one. The leader thinks from a very broader perspective by scanning the business environment and suitably adapting the organization to the dynamics this external environment, keeping the vision, mission and objectives of the organization in mind.
The leader makes plans to expand the business by looking at various opportunities of investments. Keeps trying to innovate by launching new products, entering into new markets, making modifications to the existing products and services, and modifying the organizational strategies to deal with all the external stakeholders of the organization. Depending on the need, the leader also modifies the vision, mission and objectives of the organization from time to time. All the actions of the leader at this strategic level of leadership are oriented towards achieving sustainability of the organization. Therefore, at the macro leadership level, the leader plays a ‘transformational’ leader role.

Micro Leadership:

At this level of leadership, the leader tries to build the capacities of the organization in terms of manpower, finances, and other resources like machinery, equipment, and facilities. The leader also develops relationships with employee teams, lays out plans to complete the tasks, provides all the necessary support and motivation. The leader brings clarity to all the departments and functions by assigning them their roles and responsibilities in accomplishing the given tasks. All these actions match with the information gathered from the external environment at the macro leadership level.

The leader displays the necessary attitude by encouraging the employees to put their efforts to reach the goals for completing the tasks. The leader provides the required support to achieve the objectives of the organization.

Finally, for any leader to be a successful leader it is essential to display the leadership qualities at both the levels i.e., Macro and Micro.