EXPRESSION OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND BENEFITS FOR CREATING AN EFFECTIVE MENTORING ENVIRONMENT. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CASE OF LITHUANIA AND LATVIA

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the survey results on communication competencies in mentoring in Lithuania and Latvia. In mentoring, it is imperative to examine barriers to communication competencies between business consultants (from now on referred to as "mentors") and start-up entrepreneurs or those intending to start a business (from now on referred to as "mentees") and propose solutions on how to enhance and maintain the business mentor network by utilizing communication technologies.

E-perceptions and Business ‘Mating’: The Communication Effects of the Relative Width of Males’ Faces in Business Portraits

This study investigates the relative impacts of the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) on the first impressions business professionals form of business consultants when seeing their photographs on a corporate website or LinkedIn page. By applying conjoint analysis on field experiment data (n = 381), we find that in a zero-acquaintance situation business professionals prefer low-fWHR business consultants. This implies that they prefer a face that communicates trustworthiness to one that communicates success. Further, we have investigated the words that business professionals use to describe their preferred consultant. These approach motivations help practitioners to improve the picture-text alignment. The results underline the necessity to critically assess the pictures and text used on websites and media platforms such as LinkedIn for business purposes, and to see them as a key element of business and self-communication that can be altered in order to improve business ‘mating.’

On Identifying Customer Needs when Selecting Service Enterprise Optimisation Techniques

The article covers the controversial issue on embracing the client-focused approach with regards to implementing optimisation procedures. The stages highlighted by business consultants are demonstrated and attention is drawn to the lack of a stage for identifying client attitudes towards optimisation measures. The opinion of business consultants is presented: upon the fulfillment of non-standard orders, the profitability of the business decreases. There is a contradiction between the need to optimise business operations to increase profits and the mission of the service enterprise; to satisfy the needs of the target customer group. In order to resolve the contradiction, it is proposed to introduce a customer needs identification phase into the optimisation process to inform the choice of optimisation techniques. The example of a catering company in Ekaterinburg shows the feasibility of selecting optimisation techniques based on an analysis of the reasons why customers refuse services. The following optimisation techniques were chosen: service format modification (the study was run prior to the pandemic outbreak), the optimisation of service assortment and personnel activities. As a result, new varieties of the catering service for the company were selected; menu options for different price ranges and target purposes were proposed; the introduction of additional services was justified. In optimising staff activities, it was decided to abandon hourly pay by linking it to the number of customers served, the complexity of the menu items, master classes, work at an offsite/stationary event, and the number of staff per shift. A new position has been added to the staffing table, allowing the company’s core staff to focus on the quality of their duties. The example illustrates the resolution of the contradiction between the optimisation goal of increasing profits and the principle of customer focus.

Conclusion

The Conclusion sums up the key issues of the book. It characterizes media and business consulting as a historically emergent relation between loose and solid coupling. It shows how business consultants strategically use “new media” to create new services or rebrand existing offers. In the context of business consulting and management, media techniques and apparatuses function as discursive channels for factors that were until then incapable of being articulated or represented. The graphic media network translated the heterogeneous fields of management and consulting into a loose visual coupling: the basic prerequisite for the definition of generally valid concepts, and the formation of an accepted canon of managerial methods. This leads to a politics of consulting that shifts the power structures in society.

Krisen im Aufschwung

The figures for company insolvencies continue to decline: 9,900 cases in the first half of 2018 compared to 10,250 cases in the same period the previous year. However, the relative significance of insolvencies is increasing. The number of employees affected by them is around 20 per cent, while the commercial losses of 17 million euros caused by them in 2015 rose to 30 million in 2017. This is because middle-sized and large firms are increasingly among the companies going bankrupt, which is resulting in growing legal complexities. At a symposium entitled ‘Krisen im Aufschwung’ (An Upswing in Crises), speakers and participants discussed company insolvency law, insolvency employment law, mass generation and compliance especially, along with industrial constitution law and the right of appeal. This anthology offers in-depth access to these and other important issues relating to insolvency law and employment law in practice, and will not only appeal to academics but also to lawyers, business consultants, insolvency administrators and judges in particular.

Organizational elites and the discourse of flexibility: Will be the consultants in the future managers?

The purpose of this article is to investigate how the discourse of flexibility could be used instrumentally by organizational elites in their disputes for power within the firms and how this phenomenon can affect some aspects of organizational behavior. The careers of business consultants who worked in a consulting firm operating in Brazil have been searched. Resumes of 239 individuals were analysed and the empirical evidence found allowed to advance in the understanding of the issue under study. The data obtained were analysed from the perspective of institutional logic and power structures established by organizational elites. The results showed that the passage by a renowned consulting firm represents a very effective shortcut to executive positions in organizations of various sectors of activity, especially when associated with a MBA for some prominent international business school, highlighting the use and alignment of the discourse of the interests of the elites to legitimize their organizational claims to rise to positions of power in organizations without having to go through the time-consuming path required for the assimilation of specific knowledge of each type of activity or business.