Following the first ever online only live streaming of the England football team’s 1-0 defeat to Ukraine, Blue Coat’s EMEA Marketing VP Nigel Hawthorn, looks into the implications that live online video streaming events could have on an organisation’s network infrastructure ahead of next summer’s World Cup.

We stand today in a very different business landscape than even 10 years ago. New global dynamics have shifted the ground beneath our feet. New technologies and a hugely expanded global workforce – and the rising skills and aspirations of the major countries – are driving a global economy.

In today’s global investment environment, it is easy to feel overwhelmed with the ever-expanding universe of investment choices. Often, investors will follow market trends as an alternative. But trying to achieve financial goals by pouring all of one’s assets into emerging markets today, telecommunications tomorrow, and Japanese small-cap stocks next week is not a guarantee for achieving a sound financial plan.

The light dawned. I was in a meeting with my colleagues reviewing the rapid changes in our training and consulting business and sorting through our priorities for the coming quarter. We had doubled our already substantial business over the past 18 months. While the growth was exciting, it was also exhausting. We were piling on new programs, services and organisational changes.

The domestic and Gulf financial communities heaved a collective sigh of relief when the UAE Central Bank announced in December that it would provide additional liquidity to locally operating domestic and foreign banks. This eased tensions over Dubai’s request to delay its debt payments, which most industry observers agree was overplayed by the markets and was not as bad as perceived. Overall, the domestic investment market fared well in 2009 and can look forward to even better days in 2010.

Dr. Jihad Azour, a former Minister of Finance for Lebanon, is a luminary in the world of economics in the Middle East. He is an economist with a focus on economic policymaking, banking and financial sector issues, as well as corporate governance and development. He has held senior positions in government, international organisations and the private sector. Currently, he is a Senior Executive Advisor at Booz & Company.

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are the backbone of any economy. MSMEs form the majority of enterprises in any country and contribute to value addition, employment generation and innovation. Many of the largest and most successful enterprises in the last two decades have started as MSME ventures.

Credit risk, interest rate risk, foreign exchange risk − these are all risks that are familiar to managers. Most organisations have sophisticated mechanisms for measuring and managing such risks. Of course, sometimes these procedures break down, as was spectacularly demonstrated by the absence of effective credit risk assessment in the US mortgage market between 2003 and 2007. However, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected and communications are near instantaneous, a whole new class of risk has emerged that requires close attention by managers: the risk of irrelevance.

Riad Salameh, Central Bank of Lebanon Governor for the past 16 years, has been widely praised inside and out of Lebanon for his careful guidance of the country’s monetary system through difficult times of war and social upheaval. His strict regulation has paid dividends: Lebanon’s banking system is an example of stability in the midst of international economic crisis.

We've been writing quite a bit about the onrushing wave of fundamental change that is sweeping over the old industrial order of our world. We believe that what is occurring − what has everyone's thoughts and fears all twisted up − is more than a routine swing in the "business cycle." No less an expert than Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, has said it: "Someone hit the reset button." We've expanded on that by suggesting that a "restructuring" of many industries is coming.

Imagine you had sat down at your desk in October 2007 to develop a forecast for the price of oil as an input to your 2008 planning process. After a few iterations, you draw a graph that shows a steep climb from $45 a barrel to $145 by the middle of 2008, followed by an even steeper decline to $35 by the end of the year. What do you think the reaction of your boss would have been if you had presented him with such a scenario as a basis for building your 2008 plan? Today the reality of business is stranger than fiction and it is causing many managers to question traditional planning and forecasting techniques.

With the global markets in a tailspin, investment appetite has vanished. The impact is much more profound for the supposed culprit – real estate. The "real" in real estate is up for debate. But despite everything, real estate is still a viable investment.

Jack Yan looks at using Twitter, and whether companies should hop on to the web’s latest fad. Twitter, to put it in a basic form, is a service that allows its users (Tweeters) to broadcast a 140-character message to their followers.

Mass layoffs, or “redundancies,” as they are often called in the United Kingdom where I am based, have been an option for owners and business managers since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and a common phenomenon during the last 30 years. A new economic downturn sees it once again becoming widespread, and it is clearly one of management's primary counterrecessionary tools. Why?

Scared? Facing the uncertain economic future, you should be. And it is in these tough economic times that your brand is most at risk and will require extra vigilance, investment, support and creativity to maintain or grow. 

It is generally accepted that industry definition is a starting point in strategic analysis and is usually based on some combination of competitor and customer analysis. The main reason to define your industry is to put a boundary around whom you include or don’t include as a competitor. Defining your industry too narrowly may result in missing a potential competitive threat. Defining your industry too broadly is time consuming and may not provide meaningful and actionable information. 

The popularity of an approach to performance measurement known as the balanced scorecard suggests a continuing interest in measuring and improving organizational performance. This interest is coupled with a concern that financial performance not receive undue emphasis. As its name implies, the balanced scorecard is a device for balancing concern about the financial performance of an organization with concern for other aspects of performance (such as customer satisfaction, employee learning and growth and internal processes).

Before you embark on any kind of team development, it is critical that you understand the implications of the differences between teams and work groups.

Why Customers Shouldn't Be YourFirstPriority

Let's be frank: if you work for a company, then your primary goal is to make money. Period. You may have secondary goals to serve the interests of your customers and employees and be a good corporate citizen, but your No. 1 priority is strictly return on investment. Profit.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Strategic Management

We define strategic management as the formulation, deployment, evaluation, ongoing
maintenance and adjustment of the organization's strategy as an integral component of the management of the business.