Oil and Gas Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Oil and Gas Management - Essay Example Another fundamental type of eccentric strategies is the change of coal and gas utilizing engineered fuel methods and cutting edge innovation. Offbeat techniques for penetrating oil are still in their starting eliminate and have happened to the need by the propelled countries to provide food for the interest and offset it with the flexibly for constant use. Be that as it may, these strategies have had their potential risks particularly to human wellbeing and the effects on the environment.Conventional or in any case the customary techniques present colossal misfortunes and ecological effects regarding the matters. Initially, they demolish the development of the earth’s outside layer and center. The penetrating of the well to make space for applying pressure in order to extricate the oil is without anyone else commotion contamination and particularly to the individuals living around the mining locales and all the more so to those endeavor the boring works (Boesch and Rabalais, 2 000, p.117). Potential natural fiascos emerge as in there are dangers presented to the untamed life living close by that needs to escape to make space for the penetrating procedure; relocation. This, thus, compromises the endurance of natural life and particularly with the accessibility of predators therefore causing the annihilation of certain species. Penetrating requires wide land occupation and the conceivable ecological effects would be the arrival of unsafe air into the earth, sullying of groundwater from uncontrolled gas, liquids and spills and even uncontrolled waste releases and spillages.

Enterprise Target Status Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Venture Target Status - Research Paper Example The execution of inside system is additionally taken cover behind switches. All firewall's and switches have additionally been ensured with passwords just known to worker from arrange organization office (Lammle, 2007). System wanted status There is a need to guarantee that the product that is being embraced is shared among the different offices. . ERP handles all the exercises that are done in the human asset office utilizing coordinated programming. Its essential capacity is to empower the trading of data between all the areas in the office. It additionally offers a chance to the workers to check their status concerning installment, individual data, charge data and business information. All the more along these lines, the framework has an easy to use interface which empowers the client to finish the expected errand with a ton of straightforwardness. What's more, the framework can follow all the insights regarding the employee’s get-away consequently utilizing a venture organ izer (Porter, 2010). The job that is played by a decent system in the organization can't be misjudged since without it, various PCs that help the framework can't speak with one another and with the database server. There are three system segments that are utilized to mechanize a business. These are the system working framework, the physical association and the application segments (Ross, Weill, and Robertson, 2006). System working framework is the appropriate working convention that encourages correspondence. The sending and getting of data is made conceivable by the NOS. The product deals with the trading of information between the customer PC and the server. The capacity of the server to oblige huge number of customer PCs and empower them to trade information and data is because of the nearness of appropriate NOS (Saha, 2007). The system working framework that is utilized in the in the division utilizes TCP/IP (move control convention/web convention). The most well-known NOS are U NIX, Windows NT server, Linux, and OS WARP server. One issue that has been hazardous for most business associations is the creation and support of big business wide innovation engineering. This case is right now observed in many associations that have been broke down previously. When middleware alternatives started to multiply so did organizations in their utilization of web advances with incorporated frameworks. Notwithstanding, making web established e-business frameworks that react to this test are unpredictable. This implies organizations need to battle to incorporate different and one of a kind databases and applications that are created in various dialects. This implies the association needed to gain assorted middleware frameworks. This will be done to react to big business application combination as a significant test in its venture engineering process (Porter, 1985). The associations should set up and keep up an impartial ground regarding the nature if innovation design that is perfect to big business wide innovation engineering. It grasps all data innovation issues in the association, which incorporates specialized, instructive, application and infrastructural design. This is the motivation behind why the organizations should receive normal item demand representative design (CORBA) to coordinate various dialects in a delegate (Buchanan, 2002). All in all, endeavor design enables organizations or business associations to get viable with the utilization of data techn

How to Create a Strong Classroom Community

How to Create a Strong Classroom Community TeacherVision advisory board member and veteran teacher, Sara, writes about the importance of creating a strong classroom community in your classroom. She shares her favorite tips from her own teaching experience.   As we all know, or should at this point have figured out, the classroom culture that we build as practitioners is paramount to our students’ overall success and well-being in the classroom. Without culture, we cannot reach our students’ social-emotional needs or their academic needs. As a reflective professional, it is my goal to provide the safest and bravest spaces for our students to flourish and nurture their talents, abilities, and needs every single day.   Below are ways that you can build strong community within your respective learning environments without leaving the rigor and relevance of core instruction in the dust.   Provide students with an opportunity to complete a class survey This survey could be done at the beginning of the year and once again at the end of the year as a means for understanding each student’s instructional environment preferences, their interests and hobbies outside of the classroom, and their desires and goals for excelling in a specific content area throughout the year.   This is also an opportune time for students to express how they learn and why they learn the way they do. You could make this survey into a Google Form, basic printed handout, or even play up a centers-based activity that allows students to express their preferences and interests with other students, allowing for classroom community to be enriched and nourished.   Take a Stand and Stand Knowing that all students have an opinion about everything (they are teenagers, after all), this strategy can be used at the beginning of the year and throughout each unit as an instructional activity that increases students’ ability to formulate and elaborate an argument in an academic setting. Throughout instruction, statements that can be argued or researched further for qualitative and quantitative measurements are centrally used to promote whole-group engagement and experiences with students using academic language to solve problems.     Do Small Community-Building Actions For All Students   Greet students by name each day as they enter class and throughout instruction when Calling on students to answer questions or when feedback or praise is provided. Provide sincere and authentic praise to students throughout instruction and in transition to other classes: ensure that the praise you are providing to students is real and measurable by their actions and contributions to the learning environment. Show up and support your students at sporting events, club fundraisers, plays, and concerts to connect with students and their interests and hobbies - this is also a great way to engage with parents and community members. Write one letter a week to a family in your classroom, expressing gratitude and appreciation for the specific student. Praise that student qualitatively and/or quantitatively to inform the parents of how that child is growing academically or personally in the learning environment. Have monthly check-ins with students in a one-on-one setting to discuss personal and academic growth. Invite students to eat lunch with you in your classroom or in a neutral site around the school (with permission from administrators, of course).   How do you build your classroom community? Share with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Sara Willey is a seven-year veteran teacher and administrator from Clarksville, Tennessee. She has taught in Title I schools her entire tenure as a professional and she has a heart for working with disadvantaged and underserved student populations. She has experience teaching English at the high school level and before she became an administrator, being in the classroom was her ultimate passion and where she  felt the most comfortable. When she isn't teaching, she enjoys cooking and home decorating, reading, exercising, and napping.

The Social Of Social Networking Sites - 1459 Words

Social Signals On June 2014, Matt Cutts announced Facebook, Twitter Social Signals not part of Google Search Ranking Algorithms. Social networking sites can still help you to easily connect prospect and direct traffic to your website. Use it correctly, your social profile page can show up on search result as it s matched with the searcher s intent. 23. Spend time on social networking sites While creating a business page on social media sites, you must promote and share web content relentlessly. †¢ Facebook †¢ Tumblr †¢ Twitters †¢ Google+ †¢ Pinterest Pins †¢ Google+ †¢ Yelp †¢ Linkedin When someone types a brand name on Google, you will notice a page one ranking. How you accomplish this goal you ask? Say you actively share and promote content on Yelp. With solid effort, Yelp treats your social profile pages as incredible relevant to their audience. In addition, your Yelp profile page receives tons of link juice. In other word, you can experience multiple benefits: An increase in rankings in search engine results: †¢ The chance to be distinguished as an authority in your industry †¢ More targeted traffic coming to your site †¢ The potential for more customers to reach you †¢ The chance to develop new partnerships and better relationships 24. Write quality reviews Google is paying attention to the feelings, emotions and good/bad opinions of the web content from your customers. Source: Sentiment Search Signals SEO 25. Start sharing other people s content This encourages theShow MoreRelatedSocial Networking Sites1296 Words   |  6 PagesSocial Networking Site A social networking site is an online service, platform, or a site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. It allows users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. Web-based social networking sites make it possible to connect with people who share interests and activities across political andRead MoreSocial Networking Sites1614 Words   |  7 PagesSocial networking sites Online social networking site is a very common tool for communicating and socializing with each other. Nowadays, most of the adolescent like to use Facebook. There is a rapid growth of the number of user of social networking sites. According the recent research, Kreutz (2009) stated that â€Å"starting from 1997 to 2010 there are some 1.5 billion users of social networking websites† (p.222). This shows that how popular the social networking site is. Although many parents thinkRead MoreSocial Networking Sites1062 Words   |  5 Pages Social networking sites (SNSs) are defined as â€Å"tools young people use to get in touch with peers sharing the same interests while facilitating opinion exchange and information sharing† [1]. Attributed to the convenience these SNSs brought to us, they play significant roles in our daily lives. They become the major channels for people to have contact with each other [2]. Gone were the days when people made connections with others m ostly through phone calls or letters. Generally, users communicateRead MoreThe And Social Networking Sites1630 Words   |  7 PagesNext time when you are hiring, do not look at the resume, just â€Å"stalk† the candidate’s Facebook profile page. Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. are definitely corrosive especially to communities that want to socialize by meeting peers in person, but are societally forced to gain access to such social networking sites. What is the true meaning of social networking? How has it changed in this fast paced society? I am sure our grandparents will be able to give us a spot-onRead MoreSocial Networking Site14603 Words   |  59 PagessCHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction- Social Networking Sites Few years back, usage of social networking sites became popular around the world. Social networking sites are also known as social networking website. Social networking sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers’ fascinated by their affordances and reach. Social networking sites are web-base service that building an online community of people that share same interest, or activitiesRead Moresocial networking sites4491 Words   |  18 Pagesrelatives. The emergence of social networking sites (SNSs) simplify the whole process as majority of them are free to use, they are easier to use and navigate, because it does not require advanced knowledge and experience of the internet and are made up of a wide array of different formats and topics; this means that just about anyone can connect. Currently, there are hundreds of SNSs that can draw millions of people, with diverse technological affordances. Nearly all sites enable persons to a vail pre-existingRead MoreSocial Networking : A Social Network Site?765 Words   |  4 PagesQuestion 1 (a) Social Networking What is a Social Network Site? Since the advent of networking, users have been communicating in ever increasing ways. For a majority of users their first computer-mediated communication (CMC) may have been simple text message emails, while at work. Emails now have the ability to include HTML formatting and to include attachments. Messages are sent one-to-one or one-to-many, but this is not what we normally refer to as Social Networking. Social Networking as defined byRead MoreSocial Media And Social Networking Sites1074 Words   |  5 PagesIntroduction Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pinterest, and MySpace are being used among adolescent and college age individuals for several hours per day. The overwhelming use of SNS within this younger generation has been studied in numerous journals. Cyber bulling has become a serious concern that directly relates to Facebook users that make up this younger generation. Although SNS are intended to be a portal that encourages positive connections and behavior, thereRead MoreSocial Media And Social Networking Sites3053 Words   |  13 PagesINTRODUCTION The social sites these days are gaining a lot of popularity with almost all of the educated youth using one or more of the social networking sites. These have played a crucial in bridging boundaries and crossing the seas and enabling them to communicate on a common platform( Dinh ,2011).The increased use of social networking sites has become an international phenomenon in the past several years. Through these websites everyone connect with their peers , share information ,reinventRead Moreimpact of social networking sites1577 Words   |  7 Pagesï » ¿ IMPACT OF SOCIAL NETWORKING AMONG STUDENTS A STUDY OF NTHMC KRISHNA MAN SHRESTHA Symbol no. 12030706 P.U registration no: 2011-2-03-2065 Nepal Tourism and Hotel Management College (N.T.H.M.C) Business Management Center (B.M.C) Submitted for the degree of: Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A) Pokhara, Kaski, Nepal 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER- I INTRODUCTION

Luther Burbank Agricultural Inventor

American horticulturist Luther Burbank was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts on March 7, 1849. Despite receiving only an elementary education, Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, and the Freestone peach. Luther Burbank and Potato History Wanting to improve the common Irish potato, Luther Burbank grew and observed twenty-three potato seedlings from an Early Rose parent. One seedling produced two to three times more tubers of a larger size than any other. His potato was introduced in Ireland to combat the blight epidemic. Burbank cultivated the strain and marketed the Burbank (named after the inventor) potato to farmers in the U.S. in 1871. It was later nicknamed the Idaho potato. Burbank sold the rights to the potato for $150, enough to travel to Santa Rosa, California. There he established a nursery, greenhouse, and experimental farm that have become famous throughout the world. Famous Fruits and Vegetables Besides the famed Idaho potato, Luther Burbank was also behind the cultivation of: the Shasta daisy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, Royal walnuts, Rutland plumcots, Robusta strawberries, Elephant garlic, and many more delectables. Plant Patents New plants were not considered a patentable invention until 1930. Consequently, Luther Burbank received his plant patents posthumously. Luther Burbanks own book, How Plants Are Treated to Work for Man written in 1921 influenced the establishment of the Plant Patent Act of 1930. Luther Burbank was granted Plant Patents #12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 41, 65, 66, 235, 266, 267, 269, 290, 291, and 1041. Burbanks Legacy He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1986. In California, his birthday is celebrated as Arbor Day and trees are planted in his memory. Had Burbank lived fifty years earlier, there can be small doubt that he would universally be regarded as the father of American horticulture.

Bag of Bones CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Free Essays

string(75) " first one way and then dipping the other in the opposing currents of air\." At first the door wouldn’t open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn’t locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood . . We will write a custom essay sample on Bag of Bones CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN or any similar topic only for you Order Now . or had something been shoved up against it? I drew back, crouched a little, and hit the door with my shoulder. This time there was some slight give. It was her. Sara. Standing on the other side of the door and trying to hold it shut against me. How could she do that? How, in God’s name? She was a fucking ghost! I thought of the BAMM CONSTRUCTION pickup . . . and as if thought were conjuration I could almost see it out there at the end of Lane Forty-two, parked by the highway. The old ladies’ sedan was behind it, and three or four other cars were now behind them. All of them with their windshield wipers flopping back and forth, their headlights cutting feeble cones through the downpour. They were lined up on the shoulder like cars at a yard sale. There was no yard sale here, only the old-timers sitting silently in their cars. Old-timers who were in the zone just like I was. Old-timers sending in the vibe. She was drawing on them. Stealing from them. She’d done the same with Devore and me too, of course. Many of the manifestations I’d experienced since coming back had likely been created from my own psychic energy. It was amusing when you thought of it. Or maybe ‘terrifying’ was the word I was actually looking for. ‘Jo, help me,’ I said in the pouring rain. Lightning flashed, turning the torrents a bright brief silver. ‘If you ever loved me, help me now.’ I drew back and hit the door again. This time there was no resistance at all and I went hurtling in, catching my shin on the jamb and falling to my knees. I held onto the lantern, though. There was a moment of silence. In it I felt forces and presences gathering themselves. In that moment nothing seemed to move, although behind me, in the woods Jo had loved to ramble with me or without me the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to howl, a merciless gardener pruning its way through the trees that were dead and almost dead, doing the work of ten gentler years in one turbulent hour. Then the door slammed shut and it began. I saw everything in the glow of the flashlight, which I had turned on without even realizing it, but at first I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, other than the destruction by poltergeist of my wife’s beloved crafts and treasures. The framed afghan square tore itself off the wall and flew from one side of the studio to the other, the black oak frame breaking apart. The heads popped off the dolls poking out of the baby collages like champagne corks at a party. The hanging light-globe shattered, showering me with fragments of glass. A wind began to blow a cold one and was quickly joined and whirled into a cyclone by one which was warmer, almost hot. They rolled past me as if in imitation of the larger storm outside. The Sara Laughs head on the bookcase, the one which appeared to be constructed of toothpicks and lollipop sticks, exploded in a cloud of wood-splinters. The kayak paddle leaning against the wall rose into the air, rowed furiously at nothing, then launched itself at me like a spear. I threw myself flat on the green rag rug to avoid it, and felt bits of broken glass from the shattered light-globe cut into the palm of my hand as I came down. I felt something else, as well a ridge of something beneath the rug. The paddle hit the far wall hard enough to split into two pieces. Now the banjo my wife had never been able to master rose in the air, revolved twice, and played a bright rattle of notes that were out of tune but nonetheless unmistakable wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten. The phrase ended with a vicious BLUNK! that broke all five strings. The banjo whirled itself a third time, its bright steel fittings reflecting fishscale runs of light on the study walls, and then beat itself to death against the floor, the drum shattering and the tuning pegs snapping off like teeth. The sound of moving air began to how do I express this? to focus somehow, until it wasn’t the sound of air but the sound of voices panting, unearthly voices full of fury. They would have screamed if they’d had vocal cords to scream with. Dusty air swirled up in the beam of my flashlight, making helix shapes that danced together, then reeled apart again. For just a moment I heard Sara’s snarling, smoke-broken voice: ‘Git out, bitch! You git on out! This ain’t none of yours ‘ And then a curious insubstantial thud, as if air had collided with air. This was followed by a rushing wind-tunnel shriek that I recognized: I’d heard it in the middle of the night. Jo was screaming. Sara was hurting her, Sara was punishing her for presuming to interfere, and Jo was screaming. ‘No!’ I shouted, getting to my feet. ‘Leave her alone! Leave her be!’ I advanced into the room, swinging the lantern in front of my face as if I could beat her away with it. Stoppered bottles stormed past me some contained dried flowers, some carefully sectioned mushrooms, some woods-herbs. They shattered against the far wall with a brittle xylophone sound. None of them struck me; it was as if an unseen hand guided them away. Then Jo’s rolltop desk rose into the air. It must have weighed at least four hundred pounds with its drawers loaded as they were, but it floated like a feather, nodding first one way and then dipping the other in the opposing currents of air. You read "Bag of Bones CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN" in category "Essay examples" Jo screamed again, this time in anger rather than pain, and I staggered backward against the closed door with a feeling that I had been scooped hollow. Sara wasn’t the only one who could steal the energy of the living, it appeared. White semeny stuff ectoplasm, I guess spilled from the desk’s pigeonholes in a dozen little streams, and the desk suddenly launched itself across the room. It flew almost too fast to follow with the eye. Anyone standing in front of it would have been smashed flat There was a head-splitting shriek of protest and agony Sara this time, I knew it was and then the desk struck the wall, breaking through it and letting in the rain and the wind. The rolltop snapped loose of its slot and hung like a jointed tongue. All the drawers shot out. Spools of thread, skeins of yarn, little flora/fauna identification books and woods guides, thimbles, notebooks, knitting needles, dried-up Magic Markers Jo’s early remains, Ki might have called them. T hey flew everywhere like bones and bits of hair cruelly scattered from a disinterred coffin. ‘Stop it,’ I croaked. ‘Stop it, both of you. That’s enough.’ But there was no need to tell them. Except for the furious beat of the storm, I was alone in the ruins of my wife’s studio. The battle was over. At least for the time being. I knelt and doubled up the green rag rug, carefully folding into it as much of the shattered glass from the light as I could. Beneath it was a trapdoor giving on a triangular storage area created by the slope of the land as it dropped toward the lake. The ridge I’d felt was one of the trap’s hinges. I had known about this area and had meant to check it for the owls. Then things began to happen and I’d forgotten. There was a recessed ring in the trapdoor. I grabbed it, ready for more resistance, but it swung up easily. The smell that wafted up froze me in my tracks. Not damp decay, at least not at first, but Red Jo’s favorite perfume. It hung around me for a moment and then it was gone. What replaced it was the smell of rain, roots, and wet earth. Not pleasant, but I had smelled far worse down by the lake near that damned birch tree. I shone my light down three steep steps. I could see a squat shape that turned out to be an old toilet I could vaguely remember Bill and Kenny Auster putting it under here back in 1990 or ’91. There were steel boxes filing cabinet drawers, actually wrapped in plastic and stacked up on pallets. Old records and papers. An eight-track tape player wrapped in a plastic bag. An old VCR next to it, in another one. And over in the corner I sat down, hung my legs over, and felt something touch the ankle I had turned in the lake. I shone my light between my knees and for one moment saw a young black kid. Not the one drowned in the lake, though this one was older and quite a lot bigger. Twelve, maybe fourteen. The drowned boy had been no more than eight. This one bared his teeth at me and hissed like a cat. There were no pupils in his eyes; like those of the boy in the lake, his eyes were entirely white, like the eyes of a statue. And he was shaking his head. Don’t come down here, white man. Let the dead rest in peace. ‘But you’re not at peace,’ I said, and shone the light full on him. I had a momentary glimpse of a truly hideous thing. I could see through him, but I could also see into him: the rotting remains of his tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skull. Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes. I went down, holding the lantern raised. Below it, nests of shadows rocked and seemed to reach upward. The storage area (it was really no more than a glorified crawlspace) had been floored with wooden pallets, just to keep stuff off the ground. Now water ran beneath these in a steady river, and enough of the earth had eroded to make even crawling unsteady work. The smell of perfume was entirely gone. What had replaced it was a nasty riverbottom smell and unlikely given the conditions, I know, but it was there the faint, sullen smell of ash and fire. I saw what I’d come for almost at once. Jo’s mail-order owls, the ones she had taken delivery of herself in November of 1993, were in the northeast corner, where there were only about two feet between the sloped pallet flooring and the underside of the studio. Gorry, but they looked real, Bill had said, and Gorry if he wasn’t right: in the bright glow of the lantern they looked like birds first swaddled, then suffocated in clear plastic. Their eyes were bright wedding rings circling wide black pupils. Their plastic feathers were painted the dark green of pine nee-dies, their bellies a shade of dirty orange-white. I crawled toward them over the squelching, shifting pallets, the glow of the lantern bobbing back and forth between them, trying not to wonder if that boy was behind me, creeping in pursuit. When I got to the owls, I raised my head without thinking and thudded it against the insulation which ran beneath the studio floor. Thump once for yes, twice for no, asshole, I thought. I hooked my fingers into the plastic which wrapped the owls and pulled them toward me. I wanted to be out of here. The sensation of water running just beneath me was strange and unpleasant. So was the smell of fire, which seemed stronger now in spite of the damp. Suppose the studio was burning? Suppose Sara had somehow set it alight? I’d roast down here even while the storm’s muddy runoff was soaking my legs and belly. One of the owls stood on a plastic base, I saw the better to set him on your deck or stoop to scare the crows, my dear but the base the other should have been attached to was missing. I backed toward the trapdoor, holding the lantern in one hand and dragging the plastic sack of owls in the other, wincing each time thunder cannonaded over my head. I’d only gotten a little way when the damp tape holding the plastic gave way. The owl missing its base tilted slowly toward me, its black-gold eyes staring raptly into my own. A swirl of air. A faint, comforting whiff of Red perfume. I pulled the owl out by the hornlike tufts growing from its forehead and turned it upside down. Where it had once been attached to its plastic base there were now only two pegs with a hollow space between them. Inside the hole was a small tin box that I recognized even before I reached into the owl’s belly and chivvied it out. I shone the lantern on its front, knowing what I’d see: JO’S NOTIONS, written in old-fashioned gilt script. She had found the box in an antiques barn somewhere. I looked at it, my heart beating hard. Thunder boomed overhead. The trapdoor stood open, but I had forgotten about going up. I had forgotten about everything but the tin box I held in my hand, a box roughly the size of a cigar box but not quite as deep. I spread my hand over the cover and pulled it off. There was a strew of folded papers lying on top of a pair of steno books, the wirebound ones I keep around for notes and character lists. These had been rubber-banded together. On top of everything else was a shiny black square. Until I picked it up and held it close to the side of the lantern, I didn’t realize it was a photo negative. Ghostly, reversed and faintly orange, I saw Jo in her gray two-piece bathing suit. She was standing on the swimming float with her hands behind her head. ‘Jo,’ I said, and then couldn’t say anything else. My throat had closed up with tears. I held the negative for a moment, not wanting to lose contact with it, then put it back in the box with the papers and steno books. This stuff was why she had come to Sara in July of 1994; to gather it up and hide it as well as she could. She had taken the owls off the deck (Frank had heard the door out there bang) and had carried them out here. I could almost see her prying the base off one owl and stuffing the tin box up its plastic wazoo, wrapping both of them in plastic, then dragging them down here, all while her brother sat smoking Marlboros and feeling the vibrations. The bad vibrations. I doubted if I would ever know all the reasons why she’d done it, or what her frame of mind had been . . . but she had almost certainly believed I’d find my own way down here eventually. Why else had she left the negative? The loose papers were mostly photocopied press clippings from the Castle Rock Call and from the Weekly News, the paper which had apparently preceded the Call. The dates were marked on each in my wife’s neat, firm hand. The oldest clipping was from 1865, and was headed ANOTHER HOME SAFE. The returnee was one Jared Devore, age thirty-two. Suddenly I understood one of the things that had puzzled me: the generations which didn’t seem to match up. A Sara Tidwell song came to mind as I crouched there on the pallets with my lantern shining down on that old-timey type. It was the ditty that went The old folks do it and the young folks, too / And the old folks show the young folks just what to do . . . By the time Sara and the Red-Tops showed up in Castle County and settled on what became known as Tidwell’s Meadow, Jared Devore would have been sixty-seven or -eight. Old but still hale. A veteran of the Civil War. The sort of older man younger men might look up to. And Sara’s song was right the old folks show the young folks just what to do. What exactly had they done? The clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops didn’t tell. I only skimmed them, anyway, but the overall tone shook me, just the same. I’d describe it as unfailing genial contempt. The Red-Tops were ‘our Southern blackbirds’ and ‘our rhythmic darkies.’ They were ‘full of dusky good-nature.’ Sara herself was ‘a marvelous figure of a Negro woman with broad nose, full lips, and noble brow’ who ‘fascinated men-folk and women-folk alike with her animal high spirits, flashing smile, and raucous laugh.’ They were, God keep us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn’t mind being called full of dusky good-nature. I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which ‘our Southern blackbirds’ had left. I found nothing. What I found instead was a clipping from the Call marked July 19th (go down nineteen, I thought), 1933. The headline read VETERAN GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER. According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe. At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself). The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay. Fred’s wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke. A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well. The fires had come fast when the wind changed, the paper said ‘like marching explosions.’ They jumped the only firebreak the men had left in that direction and headed for the far end of the lake. At Halo Bay there were no men to take charge, and apparently no women able or willing to do so. They panicked instead, racing to load their cars with children and camp possessions, clogging the one road out with their vehicles. Eventually one of the old cars or trucks broke down and as the fires roared closer, running through woods that hadn’t seen rain since late April, the women who’d waited found their way out blocked. The volunteer firefighters came to the rescue in time, but when Fred Dean got to his wife, one of a party of women trying to push a balky stalled Ford coupe out of the road, he made a terrible discovery. Billy lay on the floor in the back of the car, fast asleep, but Carla was missing. Hilda had gotten them both in, all right they had been on the back seat, holding hands just as they always did. But at some point, after her brother had crawled onto the floor and dozed off and while Hilda was stuffing a few last items into the trunk, Carla must have remembered a toy or a doll and returned to the cottage to get it. While she was doing that, her mother had gotten into their old Desoto and driven away without rechecking the babies. Carla Dean was either still in the cottage at Halo Bay or making her way up the road on foot. Either way the fires would run her down. The road was too narrow to get a vehicle turned around and too blocked to get one of those pointed in the right direction through the crush. So Fred Dean, hero that he was, set off on the run toward the smoke-blackened horizon, where bright ribbons of orange had already begun to shine through. The wind-driven fire had crowned and raced to meet him like a lover. I knelt on the pallets, reading this by the glow of my lantern, and all at once the smell of fire and burning intensified. I coughed . . . and then the cough was choked off by the iron taste of water in my mouth and throat. Once again, this time kneeling in the storage area beneath my wife’s studio, I felt as if I were drowning. Once again I leaned forward and retched up nothing but a little spit. I turned and saw the lake. The loons were screaming on its hazy surface, making their way toward me in a line, beating their wings against the water as they came. The blue of the sky had been blotted out. The air smelled of charcoal and gunpowder. Ash had begun to sift down from the sky. The eastern verge of Dark Score was in flames, and I could hear occasional muffled reports as hollow trees exploded. They sounded like depth charges. I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn’t be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair. Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright blue ones. She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying. I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved. I saw she was about Kyra’s age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde. Her hair is the shade her brother’s will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell. She wears a white dress and red knee-stockings and she holds her arms out to me, calling Daddy, Daddy. I start toward her and then there is a blast of organized heat that tears me apart for a moment I am the ghost here, I realize, and Fred Dean has just run right through me. Daddy, she cries, but to him, not me. Daddy! and she hugs him, unmindful of the soot smearing her white silk dress and her chubby face as he kisses her and more soot begins to fall and the loons beat their way in toward shore, seeming to weep in shrill lamentation. Daddy the fire is coming! she cries as he scoops her into his arms. I know, be brave, he says. We’re gonna be all right, sugarplum, but you have to be brave. The fire isn’t just coming,’ it has come. The entire east end of Halo Bay is inflames and now they’re moving this way, eating one by one the little cabins where the men like to lay up drunk in hunting season and ice-fishing season. Behind Al LeRoux’s, the washing Marguerite hung out that morning is in flames, pants and dresses and underwear burning on lines which are themselves strings of fire. Leaves and bark shower down,’ a burning ember touches Carla’s neck and she shrieks with pain. Fred slaps it away as he carries her down the slope of land to the water. Don’t do it! I scream. I know all this is beyond my power to change, but I scream at him anyway, try to change it anyway. Fight it! For Christ’s sake, fight it! Daddy, who is that man? Carla asks, and points at me as the green-shingled roof of the Dean place catches fire. Fred glances toward where she is pointing, and in his face I see a spasm of guilt. He knows what he’s doing, that’s the terrible thing way down deep he knows exactly what he is doing here at Halo Bay where The Street ends. He knows and he’s afraid that someone will witness his work. But he sees nothing. Or does he? There is a momentary doubtful widening of the eyes as if he does spy something a dancing helix of air, perhaps. Or does feel me? Is that it? Does he feel a momentary cold draft in all this heat? One that feels like protesting hands, hands that would restrain if they only had substance? Then he looks away,’ then he is wading into the water beside the Deans’ stub of a dock. Fred! I scream. For God’s sake, man, look at her! Do you think your wife put her in a white silk dress by accident? Is that anyone’s idea of a play-dress? Daddy, why are we going in the water? she asks. To get away from the fire, sugarplum. Daddy, I can’t swim! You won’t have to, he replies, and what a chill I feel at that! Because it’s no lie she won’t have to swim, not now, not ever. And at least Fred’s way will be more merciful than Normal Auster’s when Normal’s turn comes more merciful than the squalling handpump, the gallons of freezing water. Her white dress floats around her like a lily. Her red stockings shimmer in the water. She hugs his neck tightly and now they are among the fleeing loons,’ the loons spank the water with their powerful wings, churning up curds of jam and staring at the man and the girl with their distraught red eyes. The air is heavy with smoke and the sky is gone. I stagger after them, wading I can feel the cold of the water, although I don’t splash and leave no wake. The eastern and northern edges of the lake are both on fire now there is a burning crescent around us as Fred Dean wades deeper with his daughter, carrying her as if to some baptismal rite. And still he tells himself he is trying to save her, only to save her, just as all her life Hilda will tell herself that the child just wandered back to the cottage to look for a toy, that she was not left behind on purpose, left in her white dress and red stockings to be found by her father, who once did something unspeakable. This i s the past, this is the Land of Ago, and here the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even unto the seventh generation, which is not yet. He takes her deeper and she begins to scream. Her screams mingle with the screams of the loons until he stops the sound with a kiss upon her terrified mouth. ‘Love you, Daddy loves his sugarplum,’ he says, and then lowers her. It is to be a full-immersion baptism, then, except there is no shorebank choir singing ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ and no one shouting Hallelujah! and he is not letting her come back up. She struggles furiously in the white bloom of her sacrificial dress, and after a moment he cannot bear to watch her,’ he looks across the lake instead, to the west where the fire hasn’t yet touched (and never will), to the west where skies are still blue. Ash sifts around him like black rain and the tears pour out of his eyes and as she struggles furiously beneath his hands, trying to free herself from his drowning grip, he tells himself It was an accident, just a terrible accident, I took her out in the lake because it was the only pl ace I could take her, the only place left, and she panicked, she started to struggle, she was all wet and all slippery and I lost my good hold on her and then I lost any hold on her and then I forget I’m a ghost. I scream ‘Kia! Hold on, Ki!’ and dive. I reach her, I see her terrified face, her bulging blue eyes, her rosebud of a mouth which is trailing a silver line of bubbles toward the surface where Fred stands in water up to his neck, holding her down while he tells himself over and over that he was trying to save her, it was the only way, he was trying to save her, it was the only way. I reach for her, again and again I reach for her, my child, my daughter, my Kia (they are all Kia, the boys as well as the girls, all my daughter), and each time my arms go through her. Worse oh, far worse is that now she is reaching for ‘me’, her dappled arms floating out, begging for rescue. Her groping hands melt through mine. I cannot touch, because now I am the ghost. I am the ghost and as her struggles weaken I realize that I can’t I can’t oh I couldn’t breathe I was drowning. I doubled over, opened my mouth, and this time a great spew of lake-water came out, soaking the plastic owl which lay on the pallet by my knees. I hugged the JO’S NOTIONS box to my chest, not wanting the contents to get wet, and the movement triggered another retch. This time cold water poured from my nose as well as my mouth. I dragged in a deep breath, then coughed it out. ‘This has got to end,’ I said, but of course this was the end, one way or the other. Because Kyra was last. I climbed up the steps to the studio and sat on the littered floor to get my breath. Outside, the thunder boomed and the rain fell, but I thought the storm had passed its peak of fury. Or maybe I only hoped. I rested with my legs hanging down through the trap there were no more ghosts here to touch my ankles, I don’t know how I knew that but I did and stripped off the rubber bands holding the steno notebooks together. I opened the first one, paged through it, and saw it was almost filled with Jo’s handwriting and a number of folded typed sheets (Courier type, of course), single-spaced: the fruit of all those clandestine trips down to the TR during 1993 and 1994. Fragmentary notes, for the most part, and transcriptions of tapes which might still be down below me in the storage space somewhere. Tucked away with the VCR or the eight-track player, perhaps. But I didn’t need them. When the time came if the time came I was sure I’d find most of the story here. What had happened, who had done it, how it was covered up. Right now I didn’t care. Right now I only wanted to make sure that Kyra was safe and stayed safe. There was only one way to do that. Lye stille. I attempted to slip the rubber bands around the steno books again, and the one I hadn’t looked at slipped out of my wet hand and fell to the floor. A torn slip of green paper fell out. I picked it up and saw this: For a moment I came out of that strange and heightened awareness I’d been living in; the world fell back into its accustomed dimensions. But the colors were all too strong, somehow, objects too emphatically present. I felt like a battlefield soldier suddenly illuminated by a ghastly white flare, one that shows everything. My father’s people had come from The Neck, I had been right about that much; my great-grandfather according to this was James Noonan, and he had never shit in the same pit as Jared Devore. Max Devore had either been lying when he said that to Mattie . . . or misinformed . . . or simply confused, the way folks often get confused when they reach their eighties. Even a fellow like Devore, who had stayed mostly sharp, wouldn’t have been exempt from the occasional nick in his edge. And he hadn’t been that far off at that. Because, according to this little scratch of a chart, my great-grandfather had had an older sister, Bridget. And Bridget had married Benton Auster. My finger dropped down a line, to Harry Auster. Born of Benton and Bridget Noonan Auster in the year 1885. ‘Christ Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Kenny Auster’s grandfather was my granduncle. And he was one of them. Whatever they did, Harry Auster was one of them. That’s the connection.’ I thought of Kyra with sudden sharp terror. She had been up at the house by herself for nearly an hour. How could I have been so stupid? Anyone could have come in while I was under the studio. Sara could have used anyone to I realized that wasn’t true. The murderers and the child victims had all been linked by blood, and now that blood had thinned, that river had almost reached the sea. There was Bill Dean, but he was staying well away from Sara Laughs. There was Kenny Auster, but Kenny had taken himself and his family off to Taxachusetts. And Ki’s closest blood relations mother, father, grandfather were all dead. Only I was left. Only I was blood. Only I could do it. Unless I bolted back up to the house as fast as I could, slipping and sliding my way along the soaked path, desperate to make sure she was all right. I didn’t think Sara could hurt Kyra herself, no matter how much of that old-timer vibe she had to draw on . . . but what if I was wrong? What if I was wrong? How to cite Bag of Bones CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN, Essay examples

Four Steps to Forecast Total Market Demand Essay Example For Students

Four Steps to Forecast Total Market Demand Essay Four Steps to Forecast Total Market Demand F. William Barnett Harvard Business Review No. 88401 HBR JULY–AUGUST 1988 Four Steps to Forecast Total Market Demand F. William Barnett Recent history is filled with stories of companies and sometimes even entire industries that have made grave strategic errors because of inaccurate industrywide demand forecasts. For example: ? In 1974, U. S. electric utilities made plans to double generating capacity by the mid-1980s based on forecasts of a 7% annual growth in demand. Such forecasts are crucial since companies must begin building new generating plants five to ten years before they are to come on line. But during the 1975–1985 period, load actually grew at only a 2% rate. Despite the postponement or cancellation of many projects, the excess generating capacity has hurt the industry financial situation and led to higher customer rates. ? The petroleum industry invested $500 billion worldwide in 1980 and 1981 because it expected oil prices to rise 50% by 1985. The estimate was based on forecasts that the market would grow from 52 million barrels of oil a day in 1979 to 60 million barrels in 1985. Instead, demand had fallen to 46 million barrels by 1985. Prices collapsed, creating huge losses in drilling, production, refining, and shipping investments. Bill Barnett is a principal in the Atlanta office of McKinsey Company. He is a leader of the firm’s Microeconomics Center, and his client work has focused on business unit and corporate strategy. ? In 1983 and 1984, 67 new types of business personal computers were introduced to the U. S. market, and most companies were expecting explosive growth. One industry forecasting service projected an installed base of 27 million units by 1988; another predicted 28 million units by 1987. In fact, only 15 million units had been shipped by 1986. By then, many manufacturers had abandoned the PC market or gone out of business altogether. The inaccurate suppositions did not stem from a lack of forecasting techniques; regression analysis, historical trend smoothing, and others were available to all the players. Instead, they shared a mistaken fundamental assumption: that relationships driving demand in the past would continue unaltered. The companies didn’t foresee changes in end-user behavior or understand their market’s saturation point. None realized that history can be an unreliable guide as domestic economies become more international, new technologies emerge, and industries evolve. As a result of changes like these, many managers have come to distrust traditional techniques. Some even throw up their hands and assume that business planning must proceed without good demand forecasts. I disagree. It is possible to develop valuable insights into future market conditions and demand levels based on a deep understanding of the forces behind total-market demand. These insights can Copyright 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. sometimes make the difference between a winning strategy and one that flounders. A forecast of total-market demand won’t guarantee a successful strategy. But without it, decisions on investment, marketing support, and other resource allocations will be based on hidden, unconscious assumptions about industrywide requirements, and they’ll often be wrong. By gauging total-market demand explicitly, you have a better chance of controlling your company’s destiny. Merely going through the process has merit for a management team. Instead of just coming out with pat answers, numbers, and targets, the team is forced to rethink the competitive environment. Total-market forecasting is only the first stage in creating a strategy. When you’ve finished your forecast, you’re not done with the planning process by any means. There are four steps in any total-market forecast: 1. Define the market. 2. Divide total industry demand into its main components. 3. Forecast the drivers of demand in each segment and project how they are likely to change. . Conduct sensitivity analyses to understand the most critical assumptions and to gauge risks to the baseline forecast. Defining the Market At the outset, it’s best to be overly inclusive in defining the total market. Define it broadly enough to include all potential end users so that you can both identify the appropriate drivers of demand and reduce the risk of surprise product substitutions. The factors that drive forecasts of total-market size differ markedly from those that determine a particular product’s market share or product-category share. For example, total-market demand for office telecommunications products nationally depends in part on the number of people in offices and their needs and habits, while total demand for PBX systems depends on how they compare on price and benefits with substitute products like the local telephone company’s central office switching service. Beyond this, demand for a particular PBX is a function of price and benefit comparisons with other PBXs. In defining the market, an understanding of product substitution is critical. Customers might behave differently if the price or performance of potential substitute products changes. One company studying total demand for industrial paper tubes had to consider closely related uses of metal and plastic tubes 4 to prevent customer switching among tubes from biasing the results. Understand, too, that a completely new product could displace one that hitherto had comprised the entire market—like the electronic calculator, which eliminated the slide rule. For a while after ATT’s divestiture, the Bell telephone companies continued to forecast volume of long-distance calls by using historical trend lines of their revenues—as if they were still part of a monopoly. Naturally, these forecasts grew more inaccurate with time as end users were presented with new choices. The companies are now broadening their market definitions to take account of heightened competition from other longdistance carriers. There are several ways you can make sure you include all important substitute products (both current and potential). From interviews with industrial customers you can learn about substitutes they are studying or about product usage patterns that imply future switching opportunities. Moreover, market research can lead to insights about consumer products. Speaking with experts in the relevant technologies or reviewing technological literature can help you identify potential developments that could threaten your industry. Finally, careful quantification of the economic value of alternative products to different customers can yield deep insights into potential switching behavior—for example, how oil price movements would affect plastics prices, which in turn would affect plastic products’ ability to substitute for metal or paper. Analyses like these can lead to the construction of industry demand curves—graphs representing the relationship between price and volume. With an appropriate definition, the total-industry demand curves will often be steeper than demand curves for individual products in the industry. Consumers, for example, are far more likely to switch from Maxwell House to Folgers coffee if Maxwell House’s prices increase than they are to stop buying coffee if all coffee prices rise. In some cases, managers can make quick judgments about market definition. In other cases, they’ll have to give their market considerable thought and analysis. A total-market forecast may not be critical to business strategy if market definition is very difficult or the products under study have small market shares. Instead, your principal challenge may be to understand product substitution and competitiveness. One company analyzed the potential market for new consumer food cans, and it concluded that growth trends in food product markets were not critical to the strategy question. What was critical was knowing the value positions of the new packages HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW July–August 1988 elative to metal cans, glass jars, and composite cans. So the company spent time on that subject. Dividing Demand into Component Parts The second step in forecasting is to divide total demand into its main components for separate analysis. There are two criteria to keep in mind when choosing segments: make each category small and homogeneous enough so that the drivers of demand will apply consistently across its various elements; make each large enough so that the analysis will be worth the effort. Of course, this is a matter of judgment. You may find it useful in aking this judgment to imagine alternative segmentations (based on enduse customer groups, for example, or type of purchase). Then hypothesize their key drivers of demand (discussed later) and decide how much detail is required to capture the true situation. As the assessment continues, managers can return to this stage and reexamine whether the initial decisions still stand up. Managers may wish to use a ‘‘tree’’ diagram like the accompanying one constructed by a management team in 1985 to study demand for paper. In this disguised example, industry data permitted the division of demand into 12 end-use categories. Cause for Vegetarianism EssayPlain Paper Copier Use/Level of Economic Performance (tons per trillions of dollars) 1978 1982 1986 Nonimpact Page-Printer Use (millions of tons) CAGR 30% CAGR 3% 1978 1982 1986 1978 1982 1986 CAGR = Compound Annual Growth Rate 1978 1982 1986 Knowing the drivers of demand is crucial to the success of any total-market demand forecast. In 1974, as I mentioned earlier, most electric utilities used an incomplete total-demand forecast to predict robust demand growth. In the early 1980s, one company’s management team, however, decided to study potential changes in end-user demand as well. The team divided electricity demand into the three traditional categories: residential, commercial, and industrial. It then profiled differences in residential demand because of more efficiency in home appliances and changes in home size and the ratio of multi-unit to single-family dwellings. Industrial demand was analyzed by evaluating the future of several key consuming industries, paying special attention to changes in their total production and electricity use. This end-use approach sharply reduced the utility’s initial forecasts and led to cancellation of two $700 million generating plants then in the planning stage. In 1983, forecasters in the U. S. personal computer HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW July–August 1988 industry were saying that demand would continue to rise at a rapid rate because there were 50 million white-collar workers and only 8 million installed PCs. One company, however, did a more detailed demand forecast that showed that growth would soon flatten out. It found that more than twothirds of white-collar workers either did not require PCs in their jobs—actors and elevator operators, for instance—or were supported mostly by inexpensive terminals linked to large computers, as in the case of many clerical workers. The potential market was not big enough to support the growth rate. Indeed, the market began to flatten the next year. Forecasting total demand became crucial for another company that was thinking about acquiring a maker of video games. Many thought that low overall market penetration (10% of U. S. households) signified a lot of room for growth before the market became saturated, when about 50% of the households would have games. Using available data, however, the management team created categories 7 Understanding Copy Paper Demand Drivers Copy Cost Comparison: 1972 Dollars 0 10 9 8 Cents per Copy Copy Paper Demand 10 Reduced Paper Cost Savings in Clerical Time Reduced Consumables Cost (e. g. , Toner) 9 8 Cents per Copy 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1975 Total Cost 1 Cost of Paper 7 6 5 4 3 2 Savings in Equipment Depreciation 2 1 1 0 Tons per Billions of Dollars Real GNP 1985 Total Cost based on family income and children’s ages. The analysis made clear that the main target market, upper-in come families with children, was already well penetrated. Families with incomes exceeding $50,000 and children between the ages of 6 and 15 already were 75% penetrated. This finding convinced management that demand would fall and that the proposed acquisition did not make sense. The dramatic decline in video game sales shortly thereafter confirmed the wisdom of this judgment. Conducting Sensitivity Analyses Managers who rely on single-point demand forecasts run dangerous risks. Some of the macroeconomic variables behind the forecasts could be wrong. Despite the best analysis, moreover, the assumptions behind the other demand drivers could also be wrong, especially if discontinuities loom on the horizon. Imaginative marketers who ask questions like ‘‘What things could cause this forecast to change dramatically? ’’ produce the best estimates. They are more likely to identify potential risks and discontinuities—developments in competing technologies, in customer industry competitiveness, in supplier cost structures—than those who do not. So once a baseline forecast is complete, the challenge is to determine how far it could be off target. At one level, such a sensitivity analysis can be 8 done by simply varying assumptions and quantifying their impact on demand. But a more targeted approach usually provides better insight. Begin such an analysis by thinking through and quantifying the areas of greatest strategic risk. One company’s strategy decision may be affected only if demand is well below the baseline forecast; in another case, big risks may result from small forecasting errors. Next, gauge the likelihood of such a development. In the white paper example, the baseline forecast called for continued market growth, though below historical levels. In any particular year, demand could fluctuate with the economy, but the critical question was whether demand would at some point begin a long decline. If so, the companion supplycurve analysis indicated that prices would probably fall dramatically. The team created two scenarios of a gradual decline, one based largely on changes in the economy and the other on changes in assumed end-use trends. These scenarios showed what would make demand fall (e. g. , different rates of decline in copier prices) and thereby provided a basis for evaluating the likelihood of a downturn. Determining an Appropriate Effort The forecasting framework outlined above can work for both comprehensive and simple assessHARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW July–August 1988 ents, but there are different ways to carry out these analyses. A big challenge in demand forecasting (just as with other types of market analysis) is to gauge the appropriate effort for the project’s purpose. It’s useful to ask: ‘‘How much do I need to know to make the decision at hand? ’’ Managers can invest a lot of time in such analyses—the paper example took about 8 man-weeks and the large-scale electricity forecast about 14 manweeks. Some companies have forecasting departments who work year-round on these subjects. The more thorough, though time-consuming, approach generates greater confidence, and the effort will be appropriate where the demand projection can significantly influence corporate strategy (whether to make a several hundred million dollar capital investment, for example), or where there is great uncertainty about total demand. Often, however, the issues are not complicated, time is limited, or the total demand forecast is not important enough to merit that commitment (for example, the company is looking to add a couple of points to its small market share). In such cases, managers should proceed quickly and inexpensively. They can, for example, rely on experts’ judgment or unsophisticated regressions to forecast drivers of demand. Even the limited approaches can yield insights. Furthermore, beginning the demand analysis process can help managers determine whether important demand issues exist that should be analyzed in greater depth. Total-demand forecasting can be important to strategy decisions. Developing independent forecasts through the four-step framework I’ve outlined will not only lead to better recommendations but also help build conviction and consensus for action by creating understanding of the drivers of demand and the risks in forecasts. Even when the work is sound, though, uncertainties will remain: discontinuities will still be difficult to predict, especially if they are rooted in momentous political, macroeconomic, or technological changes. But managers who push their thinking through the steps in this framework will have a better chance of finding these discontinuities than those who do not. And those who base their business strategies on a solid knowledge of demand will stand a much greater chance of making wise investments and competing effectively. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW July–August 1988 9