Nowadays, food has become easier to prepare. Has this changed or Essay

Nowadays, food has become easier to prepare. Has this changed or improved the way people live Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer - Essay Example Because of the need for greater efficiency without sacrificing quality in meal preparation, enterprising business has turned towards the processing and packaging of meals and food ingredients, and the development of kitchen appliances that speed up the cooking process. These products have come to be a permanent feature of modern living, which begs the question: do easy-to-prepare meals impact life positively or negatively? The position of this writer is that it does, and does so positively. Let us first describe what â€Å"easy-to-prepare meals† include – or rather, what they do not include. They do not include fast foods and junk foods, since these type of foods do not require any preparation at all on the part of the consumer, and often are not even considered nutrition. Empty calories are decidedly not under consideration when one speaks of easy-to-prepare meals, which essentially are meals that are nutritious and substantial as much as they are simple and quick. First and most apparent benefit that comes from quicker meal preparation is the savings in time and effort for the cook. Few families could afford the services of a permanent cook to prepare family meals, which means that usually it’s mom, dad, or an older sibling who does the cooking. Expectedly, family members have things to do and places to go, and it is not uncommon for both parents to hold jobs. The demographics gathered by government agencies show the unmistakable increasing trend in the number of women leaving home to work: "In 1950 about one in three women participated in the labor force. By 1998, nearly three of every five women of working age were in the labor force. Among women age 16 and over, the labor force participation rate was 33.9 percent in 1950, compared with 59.8 percent in 1998. "As more women are added to the labor

WilaSeldons Leadership at Tides Centre Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

WilaSeldons Leadership at Tides Centre - Essay Example One of the critical aspects of organizational excellence involves effective leadership in an organization. This assumes critical significance considering the fact that leadership provides the long term vision to the organization and also helps formulate a roadmap to success (Yukl, 2007, p.445). In real life there is considerable number of examples of the manner in which effective leadership has been able to generate competitive edge. This includes the likes of individuals like Steve Jobs (founder of Apple), William and Sergy Page (Google), NR Narayana Murthy (Infosys) who have shown how an effective leadership can help bring about a growth momentum for any organization (Maak & Pless, 2006, p.5-8). The aspect of leadership has been a subject matter of great academic research in various areas. There have been many leadership theories including behavioral theories, contingency theories trait as well as power and influence theories that define and classify various kinds of leaders with t heir style of leadership in an organization (Kinicki & Kreitner, 2009, p.348). The case analysis of Tides center reveals a democratic style of leadership of Wila Seldon at Tides center. A democratic leadership style involves a leader making decisions on the basis of consultations with other team members. These types of leaders seek inputs from various quarters of the organization before making a crucial decision. In other words a democratic leader takes into account the views and sentiments of the entire organization while undertaking a major decision in the organization. A democratic leader tries to ensure encourage the entire organization in the decision making process (Daft & Lane, 2007, p.44). The analysis of the leadership qualities of Wila Seldon reveals a significant correlation with the traits of the democratic leader mentioned above. In the case it was quite evident that in all her stints as a leader, where she always tried to involve the entire organization with regards to crucial decision making for the organization. The case study shows that while assuming charge at Tides center Wila Seldon instead of making decisions like an autocratic leader chose to take the employees views into account. The initiation of teams like M team, strategic management team also shows that the CEO tried to ensure that decision making and learning has a bottom up approach. This is quite contra from the perspective of an autocratic or a Laissez faire type of leaders who normally take up decisions without consulting others and do not take an active role in the decision making and leave it to the responsibility of others (Wood, 2011, p.255). Wila Seldon also displays democratic leadership straits even in cases like the introduction of the 360 degree appraisal system for measuring employee performance at the organization as well as to the decision of referring projects as customers. Unlike an autocratic leader who imposes his/her decisions on their subordinates, Wila Seldon acted as a true democratic leader when she even took views of the employees who were opposing the decision. The CEO did not act in a haste and imposed decisions but tried to indulge into a democratic decision making process. This has helped in employees getting greater responsibilities and also to the fact that employees started to think out of the box solutions. This type of leadership skill was extremely important for an organization like Tide that was in the midst of a severe crisis in business whose revamp required comprehensive and extra efforts apart from an inner drive to propel the organization towards growth. The democratic lead