Biotechnology Alters Foods (Obj. 3)
Web
California is home to the nation’s most diverse and valuable agricul- tural industry. Many of its crops are sold in Japanese and European markets where customers are extremely wary of genetically modi- fied foods. Despite that fact, sources in the state capital are reporting that the biotech industry is actively seeking sponsors for a bill in the state legislature that would preempt the right of counties to ban genetically engineered crops. As an intern working for the Organic Consumers Association, the nation’s largest public interest group dedicated to a healthy and sustainable food system, your supervisor, Andrea Lopez, asked you to gather data about the dangers of ge- netically engineered crops. The organization plans to write a report to the state government about this issue.
Your Task. Conduct a keyword search using three search engines on the Web. Select three articles you think would be most pertinent to the organization’s argument. Save them using the strat- egies for managing data, and create a bibliography. Conduct the same keyword search with ABI/INFORM or LexisNexis. Save the three most relevant articles, and add these items to your bibliography. In a short memo to Andrea Lopez, Director of Government Relations, summarize what you’ve found and describe its value. Attach the bibliography.
11.15 Selecting Graphics (Obj. 7)
Your Task. Identify the best graphics form to illustrate the following data.
a. Figures comparing the costs of cable, DSL, and satellite Internet service in ten major metropolitan areas of the United States for the past ten years (for a congressional investigation)
Grammar and Mechanics C.L.U.E. Review 11
Total Review
The first ten chapters reviewed specific guides from Appendix A: Grammar and Mechanics Guide (Competent Language Usage Essentials). The remaining exercises are total reviews, covering all of the grammar/mechanics guides plus confusing words and frequently misspelled words.
Each of the following sentences has a total of three errors in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, usage, or spelling. On a sepa- rate sheet, write a correct version. Avoid adding new phrases, start- ing new sentences, or rewriting in your own words. When finished, compare your responses with the key beginning on page Key-3.
Example: To succede as a knowledge worker in todays digital work- place you need highly developed communication skills.
Revision: To succeed as a knowledge worker in today’s digital workplace, you need highly developed communication skills.
1. Companys are looking for individuals with strong writing and grammer skills, because much time is spent communicating.
2. Permenant employees can expect to spend at least fifty percent of there time processing documents.
3. One organization paid three thousand dollars each for twelve employees to attend a one week workshop in communication training.
4. Although it cost four hundred dollars, my BlackBerry allow my manager and I to stay in touch through e-mail.
5. If you work in a office with open cubicles it’s rude to listen to Web radio, streaming audio, or other multimedia, without headphones.
6. Bad news is genrally disappointing, however the negative feel- ings can be reduced.
7. On June 1st our company President revealed a four million dollar drop in profits, which was bad news for everyone.
8. Most of us prefer to be let down gently, when we’re being re- fused something, that is why the reasons before refusal pattern is effective.
9. If I was you I would begin the bad-news message with a comple- ment, not a blunt rejection.
10. Because of rising health costs our Director of Human Resources announced an increase in everyones contribution.
b. Figures showing the distribution of West Nile Virus in humans by state
c. Figures showing the process of delivering electricity to a metro- politan area
d. Data showing areas in the United States most likely to have earthquakes
e. Figures showing what proportion of every state tax dollar is spent on education, social services, transportation, debt, and other expenses
f. Data showing the academic, administrative, and operation divi- sions of a college, from the president to department chairs and division managers
g. Figures comparing the sales of PDAs (personal digital assistants), cell phones, and laptop computers over the past five years h. Percentages showing the causes of forest fires (lightning,
73 percent; arson, 5 percent; campfires, 9 percent; and so on) in the Rocky Mountains
11.16 Evaluating Graphics (Obj. 7)
Your Task. Select four graphics from newspapers or magazines.
Look in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News
& World Report, Fortune, or other business news publications. In a memo to your instructor, critique each graphic based on what you have learned in this chapter. What is correctly shown? What is incor- rectly shown? How could the graphic be improved?
11.17 Drawing a Bar Chart (Obj. 7)
Your Task. Prepare a bar chart comparing the tax rates of eight industrial countries in the world: Canada, 34 percent; France, 42 percent; Germany, 39 percent; Japan, 26 percent; Netherlands, 48 percent; Sweden, 49 percent; United Kingdom, 37 percent; United States, 28 percent. These figures represent a percentage of the gross domestic product for each country. The sources of the figures are the International Monetary Fund and the Japanese Ministry of Finance.
Arrange the entries logically. Write two titles: a talking title and a descriptive title. What should be emphasized in the chart and title?
11.18 Drawing a Line Chart (Obj. 7)
Your Task. Prepare a line chart showing the sales of Sidekick Athletic Shoes, Inc., for these years: 2008, $6.7 million; 2007, $5.4 mil- lion; 2006, $3.2 million; 2005, $2.1 million; 2004, $2.6 million; 2003,
$3.6 million. In the chart title, highlight the trend you see in the data.
11.19 Studying Graphics in Annual Reports (Obj. 7) Your Task. In a memo to your instructor, evaluate the use and effectiveness of graphics in three to five corporation annual reports.
Critique their readability, clarity, and effectiveness in visualizing data.
How were they introduced in the text? What suggestions would you make to improve them?
11.20 Avoiding Huge Credit Card Debt for College Students (Objs. 3, 5, and 6)
Consumer Web
College students represent a new push for credit card companies.
An amazing 56 percent of students carried a credit card in the most recent study of undergraduate card use,27 and the number undoubt- edly continues to skyrocket. Credit cards are a contributing factor when students graduate with an average of $20,000 debt. Because they can’t buy cars, rent homes, or purchase insurance, graduates with big credit debt see a bleak future for themselves.
A local newspaper plans to run a self-help story about college credit cards. The editor asks you, a young part-time reporter, to pre- pare a memo with information that could be turned into an article.
The article would be targeted to parents of students who are about to leave for college. What can parents do to help students avoid sinking deeply into credit card debt?
Your Task. Using ABI/INFORM, Factiva, or LexisNexis and the Web, locate basic information about student credit card options. In a memo discuss shared credit cards and other options. Your goal is to be informative, not to reach conclusions or make recommendations.
Use one or more of the techniques discussed in this chapter to track your sources. Address your memo to Barbara Hagler, editor.
© Photodisc / Getty Images
Chapter 12
Informal Business Reports
OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, you should be able to
1 Show skill and accuracy in tabulating information, using statistical techniques, and creating decision matrices to sort and interpret business report data.
2 Draw meaningful conclusions and make practical report recommendations based on prior logical analysis.
3 Organize report data logically and provide cues to aid readers’
comprehension.
4 Prepare short informational reports.
5 Prepare short analytical reports that solve business problems.
Interpreting Data
Starbucks and all other organizations need information to stay abreast of what is happen- ing inside and outside of their firms. Much of that information will be presented to decision makers in the form of reports. This chapter will focus on interpreting and organizing data, drawing conclusions, providing reader cues, and writing informal business reports.
Assume you have collected a mass of information for a report. You may feel over- whelmed as you look at a jumble of printouts, note cards, copies of articles, interview notes, questionnaire results, and statistics. It is a little like being a contractor who allowed suppliers to dump all the building materials for a new house in a monstrous pile. Like the contractor you must sort the jumble of raw material into meaningful, usable groups. Unprocessed data become meaningful information through skillful and accurate sorting, analysis, combina- tion, and recombination. You will be examining each item to see what it means by itself and what it means when connected with other data. You are looking for meanings, relationships, and answers to the research questions posed in your work plan.
Tabulating and Analyzing Responses
If you have collected considerable numerical and other information, you must tabulate and analyze it. Fortunately, several tabulating and statistical techniques can help you create order from the chaos. These techniques simplify, summarize, and classify large amounts of data into meaningful terms. From the condensed data you are more likely to LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1
Show skill and accuracy in tabulating information, using statistical techniques, and creating decision matrices to sort and interpret business report data.
LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1 Show skill and accuracy in tabulating information, using statistical techniques, and creating decision matrices to sort and interpret business report data.
Interpreting data means sorting, analyzing, combining, and recombining to yield meaningful information.
Interpreting data means sorting, analyzing, combining, and recombining to yield meaningful information.
Numerical data must be tabulated and analyzed statistically to bring order out of chaos.
Numerical data must be tabulated and analyzed statistically to bring order out of chaos.
Howard Schultz returned to Seattle from Italy in 1984 impressed by the espresso bars he had visited in Milan. In no time Schultz set up the first U.S. espresso bar in a downtown Seattle Starbucks store, one of only five Starbucks in existence at the time. Until then, Starbucks had sold only coffee beans, not drinks. Today, Starbucks is the world’s largest coffee shop chain, with more than 13,000 retail locations North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim—37 countries in all. The company serves more than 40 million customers weekly and generates more than $7.8 billion in annual sales.
Starbucks’ customers love such exotic drinks as its Iced Caramel Macchiato and its Espresso Frappuccino blended coffee. What’s more, employees love working there. Who wouldn’t, with perks such as health coverage for those who put in 20 or more hours a week and stock options, called “Bean Stock,” after one year. Adding to its accolades, Starbucks ranks among the top five in the Fortune maga- zine list of “America’s Most Admired Companies” and repeatedly was named among Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For. ”
Starbucks is probably best known for bucking traditional retail wisdom. It regularly breaks the retail rule about locating stores so closely that they cannibalize each other’s sales. Take Chicago, for ex- ample. Starbucks has over 100 shops, and many of them are on the same street. Marshall Fields even has two shops in the same store, one on its lower level and another on its first floor. In metropolitan areas such as London and New York City, you may find over 150 Starbucks outlets within a five-mile radius.
This “being everywhere” approach creates several distinct advantages. Clustered storefronts act as billboards, thus allowing Starbucks to keep its advertising budget to a minimum. Its numer- ous locations mean that Starbucks intercepts consumers on their way to work, home, or anywhere in between. Moreover, ubiquity builds brand awareness.1 However, explosive growth and the push
Starbucks: More Than Just Beans
Communicating at Work Part 1
for efficiency may have led to a “watering down of the Starbucks experience,” in the words of Chairman Schultz. Specifically, he wor- ries about the use of automatic espresso machines and flavor-locked packaging. Schultz fears that Starbucks stores “no longer have the soul of the past, and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store.”2 You will learn more about this case on page 372.
Critical Thinking
● What kind of information should Starbucks gather to help it decide how closely to locate its stores?
● How could Howard Schultz test his impression that the intimate communal coffee-drinking experience is fading at Starbucks?
● How can collected information be transmitted to Starbucks’ deci- sion makers?
http://www.starbucks.com © Pascal Le Segretain / Staff / Getty Images
Good Corporate Citizens Like many innovative companies, Starbucks wants to be seen as a responsible corporate citizen. On its Web site Starbucks posts its annual corporate social responsibility report. The company also has an “Environmental Mission Statement” and holds suppliers to a “Supplier Code of Conduct.” Do ethical considerations affect your opinions of companies or sway your buying decisions?
Ethics Check be able to draw valid conclusions and make reasoned recommendations. The most helpful
summarizing techniques include tables, statistical concepts (mean, median, and mode), correlations, grids, and decision matrices.
Tables. Numerical data from questionnaires or interviews are usually summarized and simplified in tables. Using systematic columns and rows, tables make quantitative informa- tion easier to comprehend. After assembling your data, you will want to prepare preliminary tables to enable you to see what the information means. Here is a table summarizing the response to one question from a campus survey about student parking:
Question: Should student fees be increased to build parking lots?
Number Percent
Strongly agree 76 11.5
} To simplify the table, combine these items.
Agree 255 38.5
No opinion 22 3.3
Disagree 107 16.1
} To simplify the table, combine these items.
Strongly disagree 203 30.6
Total 663 100.0
Notice that this preliminary table includes a total number of responses and a percent- age for each response. (To calculate a percentage, divide the figure for each response by the total number of responses times 100.) To simplify the data and provide a broad overview, you can join categories. For example, combining “strongly agree” (11.5 percent) and “agree”
(38.5 percent) reveals that 50 percent of the respondents supported the proposal to finance new parking lots with increased student fees.
Sometimes data become more meaningful when cross-tabulated. This process allows analysis of two or more variables together. By breaking down our student survey data into male and female responses, shown in the following table, we make an interesting discovery.
Question: Should student fees be increased to build parking lots?
Total Male Female
Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent
Strongly agree 76 11.5 8 2.2 68 22.0
Agree 255 38.5 54 15.3 201 65.0
No opinion 22 3.3 12 3.4 10 3.2
Disagree 107 16.1 89 25.1 18 5.8
Strongly disagree 203 30.6 191 54.4 12 4.0
Total 663 100.0 354 100.0 309 100.0
Although 50 percent of all student respondents supported the proposal, among females the approval rating was much stronger. Notice that 87 percent of female respondents (combin- ing 22 percent “strongly agree” and 65 percent “agree”) endorsed the proposal to increase fees for new parking lots. But among male students, only 17 percent agreed with the pro- posal. You naturally wonder why such a disparity exists. Are female students more unhappy than male students with the current parking situation? If so, why? Is safety a reason? Are male students more concerned with increased fees than female students are?
By cross-tabulating the findings, you sometimes uncover data that may help answer your problem question or that may prompt you to explore other possibilities. Do not, how- ever, undertake cross-tabulation unless it serves more than mere curiosity. Tables also help you compare multiple data collected from questionnaires and surveys. Figure 12.1 shows, in raw form, responses to several survey items. To convert these data into a more usable form, you need to calculate percentages for each item. Then you can arrange the responses in some rational sequence, such as largest percentage to smallest.
Once the data are displayed in a table, you can more easily draw conclusions. As Figure 12.1 shows, South Bay College students apparently are not interested in pub- lic transportation or shuttle buses from satellite lots. They want to park on campus, with restricted visitor parking; and only half are willing to pay for new parking lots.
The Three Ms: Mean, Median, Mode. Tables help you organize data, and the three Ms help you describe it. These statistical terms—mean, median, and mode—are all occasionally used loosely to mean “average.” To be safe, though, you should learn to apply these statistical terms precisely. When people say average, they usually intend to indicate the mean, or arithmetic average. Let’s say that you are studying the estimated starting sala- ries of graduates from various disciplines, ranging from education to medicine:
Three statistical concepts—mean, median, and mode—help you describe data.
Three statistical concepts—mean, median, and mode—help you describe data.
Restrict visitor parking
Increase student fees to build parking lots Offer incentives to use public transportation Limit student parking to satellite lots, providing shuttle buses to campus ____________
*Figures may not equal 100 percent because of rounding.
Reactions of South Bay College Students to Four Proposed Solutions to Campus Parking Problem*
Spring 2006 N = 663 students
Agree 92.3%
49.9 16.7 7.8
No opinion 2.3%
3.3 4.4 4.7
Disagree 5.4%
46.8 78.9 87.5
Finished Table
1. Increase student fees to build parking lots 2. Limit student parking to satellite lots, providing shuttle buses to campus 3. Offer incentives to use public transportation 4. Restrict visitor parking
Indicate Your Feelings Toward the Following Proposed Solutions to the Student Parking Problem on Campus.
Agree ______
______
______
______
Disagree ______
______
______
______
No opinion ______
______
______
______
Orders items from highest to lowest “Agree”
percentages
Shows raw figures from which percentages are calculated
Uses percent sign only at beginning of column
Tips for Converting Raw Data
• Tabulate the responses on a copy of the survey form.
• Calculate percentages (divide the score for an item by the total for all responses to that item; for example, for item 1, divide 331 by 663 times 100).
• Round off figures to one decimal point or to whole numbers.
• Arrange items in a logical order, such as largest to smallest percentage.
• Prepare a table with a title that tells such things as who, what, when, where, and why.
• Include the total number of respondents.
Avoids cluttering the table with total figures Raw Data From Survey Item
N
FIGURE 12.1 Converting Survey Data Into Finished Tables
Education $31,000 Mode (figure occurring most frequently)
Sociology 31,000
Humanities 31,000
Biology 35,000
Health sciences 40,000 Median (middle point in continuum) Business 46,000 Mean (arithmetic average)
Engineering 50,000
Law 55,000
Medicine 95,000
To find the mean, you simply add up all the salaries and divide by the total number of items ($414,000 ÷ 9 = $46,000). Therefore, the mean salary is $46,000. Means are very useful to indicate central tendencies of figures, but they have one major flaw: extremes at either end cause distortion. Notice that the $95,000 figure makes the mean salary of $46,000 decep- tively high. It does not represent a valid average for the group. Because means can be mis- leading, you should use them only when extreme figures do not distort the result.
The median represents the midpoint in a group of figures arranged from lowest to high- est (or vice versa). In our list of salaries, the median is $40,000 (health sciences). In other words, half the salaries are above this point and half are below it. The median is useful when extreme figures may warp the mean. Although salaries for medicine distort the mean, the median, at $40,000, is still a representative figure.
The mode is simply the value that occurs most frequently. In our list $31,000 (for edu- cation, sociology, and the humanities) represents the mode because it occurs three times.
The mode has the advantage of being easily determined—just a quick glance at a list of arranged values reveals it. Although mode is infrequently used by researchers, knowing the mode is useful in some situations. Assume that 7-Eleven sampled its customers to de- termine what drink size they preferred: 12-ounce, 16-ounce, or Big-Gulp 24-ounce. Find- ing the mode—the most frequently named figure—makes more sense than calculating the median, which might yield a size that 7-Eleven does not even offer. (To remember the meaning of mode, think about fashion; the most frequent response, the mode, is the most fashionable.)
Mean, median, and mode figures are especially helpful when the range of values is also known. Range represents the span between the highest and lowest values. To calculate the range, you simply subtract the lowest figure from the highest. In starting salaries for graduates, the range is $64,000 (95,000 − 31,000). Knowing the range enables readers to put mean and median figures into perspective. This knowledge also prompts researchers to wonder why such a range exists, thus stimulating hunches and further investigation to solve problems.
Correlations. In tabulating and analyzing data, you may see relationships among two or more variables that help explain the findings. If your data for graduates’ starting salaries also included years of education, you would doubtless notice that graduates with more years of education received higher salaries. For example, beginning teachers, with four years of education, earn less than beginning physicians, who have completed nine or more years of education. Thus, a correlation may exist between years of education and starting salary.
Intuition suggests correlations that may or may not prove to be accurate. Is there a rela- tionship between studying and good grades? Between new office computers and increased productivity? Between the rise and fall of hemlines and the rise and fall of the stock market (as some newspaper writers have suggested)? If a correlation seems to exist, can we say that one event caused the other? Does studying cause good grades? Does more schooling guar- antee increased salary? Although one event may not be said to cause another, the business researcher who sees a correlation begins to ask why and how the two variables are related.
In this way, apparent correlations stimulate investigation and present possible solutions to be explored.
A range of starting salaries becomes more meaningful when one can see a mode, median, and mean.
A range of starting salaries becomes more meaningful when one can see a mode, median, and mean.
The mean is the arithmetic average; the median is the midpoint in a group of fi gures;
the mode is the most frequently occurring fi gure.
The mean is the arithmetic average; the median is the midpoint in a group of fi gures;
the mode is the most frequently occurring fi gure.
Correlations between variables suggest possible relationships that will explain research fi ndings.
Correlations between variables suggest possible relationships that will explain research fi ndings.