CEO

Building A Record Label

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Record labels continue to consolidate and internal departments continue to merge. However, it is important for future record industry executives to have some idea of the internal mechanisms that exist within a major label. In fact, independent labels have to incorporate many of the same responsibilities within their infrastructure in order to compete in todays marketplace.

Some of the departments may seem obvious to some of the more experienced readers. However, even you can benefit from knowing what tasks need to be tackled and accomplished in order to be a fully functional recording labelindependent or major.

It is important to remember that a record company is defined by foundational concepts:
1. Equity in the copyright of the sound recording
2. An ability to promote
3. An ability to distribute

Keeping these underlying concepts in mind, a label can then be about anything the owners want it to be about. Many people hate to concede to the idea that a record label is ultimately about making money, then hopefully about making great music. Although, the latter has been falling farther and farther behind in todays marketplace.
Suffice it to say, the labels departments must also be working toward the common goal in their own ways. Below is a general list of departments within a record label and the responsibilities of each department. Remember with smaller labels, departments are smaller and therefore, many tasks are accomplished by fewer people.

CEO
1. Crafts strategy and implements agenda of corporate parent company
2. May not be involved in day-to-day operations
3. May be responsible for the business affairs of all affiliated labels under the corporate umbrella
4. Reports to executive at corporate parent company

PRESIDENT
1. Responsible for entire record label
2. Reports to CEO
3. Less removed than CEO and may be involved in day-to-day operations and high profile signings

BUSINESS AFFAIRS
Responsible for all contract negotiations and legal affairs

FINANCE/ACCOUNTING
Responsible for all financial functions, payroll, royalty accounting and financial reporting

LABEL LIAISON
1. One person or a small group of people
2. Serves as liaison between record companys distribution company and the record company
3. Helps decide when to release an album and makes sure it doesnt conflict with any other labels the record company owns

A&R
1. Finds new artists (works with a research team to uncover important market research statistics/numbers)
2. Finding artists material
3. Liaison between artist and all other departments of the record company
4. Coordinates across departments for projects
5. Product Manager (your manager within the label)

PROMOTIONS
1. Primary function is to service radio stations with product and secure airplay
2. Manages independent promoters and contractors
3. Works closely with radio stations on contests, concerts, giveaways, etc.
4. Works closely with new media and marketing

SALES
1. Primary function is to service retail with product and oversee retail initiatives
2. Services national and independent accounts
3. Instrumental in planning release schedule, initial unit volume, and solicitation strategies
4. Works closely with marketing and promotion to track radio airplay

MARKETING
1. Creates strategic marketing plan for the company as well as, specific artists and their releases
2. Instrumental in seeking strategic alliances for the label (Consumer Products, advertising, radio/tv/film)

PUBLICITY
1. Gets the word out
2. Writes press releases
3. Helps secure personal appearances radio interviews, television exposure, featured articles
4. Works with artists independent publicist if applicable

NEW MEDIA
1. Responsible for dealing with some of the newer aspects of the music business
2. Creates Online Presence social networks, online reviews and feature, blogs, website, streaming music, etc.
3. Responsible for producing and creating music videos for the artist

MANUFACTURING AND DISTRIBUTION
1. Coordinates
2. Pressing
3. Packaging
4. Shipping
5. Warehousing and Inventory Management
6. Digital Distribution
7. Rack Jobbers, One Stops, Record Clubs

The aforementioned departments and their tasks are for general reference only. Each specific label has their own way of accomplishing tasks, assigning names to departments, and ultimately selling product. However, note the information, use it to perhaps build your labels infrastructure or to possibly look for a position in the music business, and then build upon it for further success in the music business.

Translation Ethics Moral Issues In The Translation Business

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Clients rely on the translator to provide a translation that does full justice to the source text. This means that the translation should cover every aspect and connotation in the source, and should not add any material or connotations extraneous to that source, nor hints of the translators personal opinion with respect to the subject-matter. Clients that are particularly keen on ensuring that this practice is adhered to will ask for a sworn translation, but most professionals would agree that the general principles underlying sworn translations also apply to translation in general, and should be used accordingly. This is easier said than done, however. While it is true that translations should be reliable and undistorted reflections of the source in a different language, clients will also expect an attractive text that is pleasant to read and effective in achieving its purpose. It is impossible to simply convert the content of the source text into the target language: the requirements of register, stylistic authenticity and readability inevitably entail some degree of modification of the original.

Having said that, there is general consensus that clients can rightfully expect a translator to possess professional skills, which entails that the translator should not accept a translation job if he feels incapable of providing a high-quality text, for instance because the subject-matter is not within his field of expertise.

Another interesting issue is that of errors in the source text. The requirement of faithfulness dictates that any errors found should simply be copied into the translation, but this obviously clashes with every serious translators common sense and desire to produce a text that is free from error and, if at all possible, even better than the original. Sometimes a translator might even feel the urge to protect the authors reputation if he suspects that the content or tone of voice of the source text would open its author to ridicule. One example is that of a CEO whose deputy speechwriter had come up with a New Years speech in a raving populist style. The translator in this case had decided to somewhat neutralise the invective, while of course pointing out to the client that he had taken liberties with the text in order to adapt it to the tastes of the target audience.
The obvious strategy in these cases is to highlight errors or problems and ask the client to reconsider his text, and while many clients will indeed appreciate such perspicacity, others will condemn the translator for being pedantic. Clearly there is no ideal remedy.

These, however, are all technical issues. The real dilemmas are found at a different level, for example when a professional is asked to do a translation of a text whose contents clash with his or her personal moral beliefs. One example from professional practice is that of a website for a womens rights organisation, which several Arab translators refused to translate because one section concerned womens sexual freedom and the rights of lesbians. While the obvious an only acceptable response to such refusal is to respect it, this issue does raise interesting questions about the translators relation to the text he translates and the extent of his responsibility for its contents, or his complicity with its objective. The latter would apply, for example, to a person agreeing to translate the election manifesto of a political party whose views he does not subscribe to. In some jurisdictions, a translator working on the translation of a hate speech might even be committing a criminal offence. Generally speaking, however, decisions in this category very much depend on the translators personal orthodoxy. People who depend on translation for their livelihood can be expected to be slightly more liberal-minded than those who can afford to refuse unsavoury orders thanks to alternative sources of income.

There is also a category of texts which, at first sight, appear to be positively illegal. If a translator agreed to translate bomb-making instructions, would he be responsible for attacks committed with the bombs produced with the help of such instructions? He certainly would, in our view, if he did not take the trouble of finding out who needed the translation, and for what purpose it was required. If the nature of the client were sufficiently obscure to raise even the slightest concern, no translator in his right mind would accept such an order. However, if the translation was commissioned by a government authority as part of efforts to study terrorists practices, the translator might actually contribute to a good cause by translating even the most reprehensible texts.

To sum up, it is clear that translators in addition to grappling with the technical content of source texts may be up to some morally challenging tasks as well. While guidelines and codes of conduct exist to help translators formulate their stance in general ethical issues, in many cases the approach to practical moral dilemmas in translation will be a matter of personal consideration and assessment, aided by the translators knowledge of the client.

About translation agency beedigdevertaling.eu
Beedigdevertaling.eu, established in the Netherlands, is a professional translation agency with a primary focus on the Dutch and international business community, and on public and semi-public institutions. Our principal strengths lie in the financial, legal and medical sectors, as well as in commerce, advertising and media. Our client base includes some of the largest corporate enterprises in Europe.

Key Areas To Aligning Performance To Corporate Strategy And Goals

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It used to be that performance management was managed in one department. Today, performance management has spread throughout the entire organization, where almost every division must focus on performance management to some degree in order to be successful. Despite this wider range of performance management, enterprise-wide performance initiatives are not widely practiced. And without an enterprise approach, it is extremely difficult to align your performance to organizational goals and objectives.

According to software vendor SAS, a recent survey of 1100 businesses revealed that performance alignment was the PRIMARY benefit companies hoped to receive from their performance management efforts. Aligning performance to your organization’s goals and objectives is critical to your organization’s success. On the other side, lack of alignment increases inefficiencies and risks and prevents optimal execution of the organizational strategy.

Think of this scenario as a model for linking corporate strategy to business objectives:

The executive board collaborates high-level strategic planning and identifies goals for the CEO and organization. The CEO then meets with his/her senior executives who in turn develop objectives derived from the CEOs goals and integrates those goals into the strategic plan. In turn, those executives meet with their managers who develop objectives derived from the strategic plan, and so on. Then, each subordinate goal is tied to one or more goals of their manager. Ideally, the final result is that every tracked goal in the entire company can map back to a corporate objective developed by the board.

Chances of organizational success are greatly increased by translating each high-level objective into a cascading series of focused performance measures. Using our previous example, the CEO may focus on net cash flow while the CFO looks at debt-to-equity ratio. The controller may focus on liquidity ratio, while the accounts receivable manager looks at days sales outstanding, and the accounts receivable clerk worries about percent of collections over 30/60/90 days.

This article discusses aligning corporate strategy to four key areas: departments/ divisions, workforce, finance, and systems.

Departmental Performance Alignment

Departmental performance alignment can be difficult when business processes within an organization span across multiple business units and functional support groups. To avoid bottlenecks, finger-pointing, and redundancy of work, shared performance measures that align people across organizational boundaries must be identified and responsibilities accounted for. For instance, a performance measure that includes percent of collections over 30/60/90 days might be applied both to accounts receivables clerks and sales representatives, thus sharing and integrating performance measures, encouraging collaboration and boosting overall performance.

Workforce Performance Alignment

When workforce performance is aligned with corporate objectives individuals in an organization develop a stake in that organization’s performance. Employees at every level are measured by something they understand and control, and that same measure is clearly linked to the goals of their direct supervisor and the organization as a whole.

Financial Performance Alignment

In an economy where results need to be achieved fast and investor confidence is low, CFOs and finance organizations are implementing integrated performance management to improve information quality and visibility. One challenge organizations face aligning performance is finding financial measures that are meaningful to those responsible for carrying out the work. Using the previous example net cash flow is a critical performance measure for executives, but it probably means very little to the accounts receivable clerk who has no idea of how their contribution improves net cash flow performance. Stick with simple financial metrics that employees can understand and control.

System Performance Alignment

The IT/IS department’s role is to provide technical support for the entire organization. While we know that this alone is a complex task, today’s business model requires systems to not only support users, but to align technology to meet the business needs of the organization. Understanding business unit objectives and translating them quickly and accurately into IT priorities is essential today. So how does an organization measure how well their systems are aligned to organizational objectives? By implementing vehicles for aligning and measuring IT performance, such as service level agreements, performance-based contracts, and products and services catalogs to generate reports that illustrate how well they are measuring up to business objectives.

If you can move closer to aligning performance in these areas your organization will be well on it’s way to surpassing all of it’s goals and objectives. While the goal of a performance initiative is to align performance to organizational strategy, it is most important to maintain flexibility and adapt to organizational changes quickly.

About Victor Holman

Victor Holman is a business performance and growth strategy coach, consultant, international speaker, entrepreneur and creator of the Business Performance Portal. He has provided his expertise to over 50 government agencies worldwide and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. His goal is to help small businesses outperform their competition by applying business growth strategies and assessment tools that work for large, successful businesses.

He provides business consulting for small and large size organizations, business coaching, team performance workshops, and in-depth on-site business assessments for business owners trying to take their business to the next level. His highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club delivers fast, simple, easy to implement strategies for growing your business fast!

You can access his FREE business assessment tools, business management kits, business training programs, videos, templates, and more at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com

The Academy Of Business Strategy – The Closely Guarded Recruitment Secret

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The recruitment industry has always been reactive by nature. This is not intended to be a criticism in any way, it is just considered to be convention within the industry. An employer advertises a vacancy, a candidate advertises their CV. Prospective candidates are forwarded onto the employer and prospective vacancies are similarly forwarded onto the candidate. This will invariably result in thousands of candidates applying for each individual vacancy and success is ultimately determined by the efficiency of each individual employer’s recruitment procedure. Candidates are always powerless throughout this process. The introduction of online job boards through the internet has only served to exasperate this problem. They tend to identify success in terms of quantity rather than quality. They will proudly advertise that they have thousands or even millions of candidates registered with them. They will also have hundreds or thousands of vacancies listed too. The implication being of course that if they serve this many customers then they must be good. Having said this, online job boards do provide an important service now within the recruitment industry. They provide portals where both candidates and employers can be introduced to each-other and the service which they provide is far more cost-effective than traditional offline advertising and in most cases they provide a more efficient service too. Unfortunately it does not really do very much to help candidates gain better employment and it is still rather like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is because the service which they provide merely ensures that more and more applicants apply to each individual vacancy. It is also widely accepted within the recruitment industry that any vacancy which we may see advertised is always a peripheral vacancy. What is meant by this is that they tend to be general vacancies which arise from prescriptive change such as expansion, or a merger or acquisition. The very fact that the organization does not have anyone in mind for this vacancy who could be promoted from within tells you that the vacancy is probably a peripheral one. Core vacancies are never advertised. The organization will already have internal candidates in mind for these positions and they are too important to risk employing a candidate who is considered to be an unknown quantity. Consequently core vacancies are always the ones we should be targeting. They are the vacancies which constitute power, influence and life-changing personal benefits. A senior manager or partner at a major financial institution, retail organization or manufacturing company will earn an annual salary amounting to several hundred thousand dollars for their services. A senior Director or Executive Officer at the same company will earn an annual salary amounting to several million dollars for their services. How many jobs do you actually see advertised with annual salaries that exceed 250,000.00 USD? There are traditional recruitment companies who practise what is commonly known as head-hunting, but these still tend to be for peripheral positions. The reality is that anyone who achieves a core vacancy within a major global organization will have developed and implemented a successful career management strategy over a sustainable period of time. It is quite literally the difference between success and failure. Recruitment companies and online job boards alike are already thinking of innovative ways in which they can provide better services. Improving online technology is to some extent gradually enabling them to do this. There are growing improvements in terms of the search engines that are used to pre-qualify candidates for employers and conversely to pre-qualify employers for candidates. However the more recruitment companies or online job boards which choose to move in this direction the more they will have to charge candidates and employers for the services they provide, whereas registration, particularly for candidates has been largely free of charge and candidates have grown accustomed to this of course. It is already clear that those recruitment companies who are starting to charge candidates for the service that they provide, tend to provide much better services. The old adage that “you always get for what you pay” tends to apply here. Ultimately these changes while providing some improvement in the professionalism of recruitment companies and online job boards over time will not change anything at all concerning the type of vacancies advertised. Advertised vacancies will always be peripheral. Candidates who have the most successful careers are always those who are proficient at managing their own career management strategy. It is true that we cannot all aspire to be the CEO of Microsoft, General Motors, HSBC Bank, or Mittal. But we can still ensure that we at least have the opportunity to achieve as much as we can with our careers and we will not achieve this if we are reactive by nature and if we do not take personal responsibility at some point for our own career development. After all an individual’s career development surely constitutes a core activity, not a peripheral one!

Accounting Enron Scandal

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The company had to come up with a new business strategies to generate profits and cash flow in order to survive. Kenneth Lay, CEO, hired McKinsey & Co. to help in developing Enrons survival business strategy. A gas pipeline company climbed it’s way into the worlds largest energy-trader by scamming investors, the accounting Enron scandal was a real systematic manipulation of fiduciary rules to create an illusion of a very successful company. Enron accounting scandal was discovered and proved that they made deliberate attempts to alter its financial statements to make them look more attractive to investors and lenders. Following these manipulations many parties have been affected and will continue to be affected in the future, more specifically, many years. The accounting Enron scandal that lead to the Enron collapse was due in great part in the activities of their C.E.O., Jeffrey Skilling. Not only was he in charge of controlling one of the largest energy companies in the world, he was also in charge of many other side undertakings that may have been in a conflict of interest with his main job as Chief Executive Officer of Enron. The baffling part of this situation was that the other members of the Board of Directors for Enron all voted on this and passed it. There are three specific ways in which the accounting Enron scandal occured by misrepresented figures on its financial statements.

The accounting Enron scandal case was broadcast on television news for months in 2002. The accounting Enron scandal story was around the news for a period before and after the downfall of the company. Now days, however, one seldom hears about Enron or its top executives ? and the reason is not because they are all lodged safely in a federal prison. Rather, it because (a) the president and the congress gain no longer gain points by grandstanding on the issue, (b) the Department of Justice finds its difficult to put the top brass in the docket, although the Department has pressured some lower-level Enron executives into confessions, and (c) the public appears to be beyond caring. The accounging Enron scandal, however, was and is an important development for American society. The scandal demonstrated just how easily ethical standards can be discarded at the highest corporate levels when the price is right. This paper examines the accounting Enron scandal from a perspective of ethics in management. The phrase ethics in management in management is an unfortunate one.It implies that the set of ethical principles applicable in corporate management may be somewhat different from the application of ethical principles in other societal endeavors. Perceptions of that sort by top managers at Enron may have made it easier for them to pursue the courses of action that landed themselves and the company in the troubles that eventually emerged. . . . es in the trading of energy market was the manipulation of prices to created inflated and unwarranted profits for Enron at the expense of utility companies and utility consumers. Ultimately, however, the inflated profits contributed to the creation of a false representation of Enron’s performance that created financial benefits Enron selected executives at the expense of investors and the public. Similarly, the immediate intent of deceptive accounting practices involving Enron and fictitious business entities was to shield from investor and governmental regulators the fact that Enron was not a profitable company as was being reported publicly. Additionally, however, the deals between the company and fictitious entities diverted large amounts of money from the company to selected high-level executives at Enron. These behaviors were injurious to Enron employees, investors, and consumers (Axtman & Scherer, 2002). One may attempt to assess the behaviors of the offending Enron executives (all at senior levels of the organization) within a framework of business ethics. The term “business ethics” appears to imply that behaviors that are ethically unacceptable in other facets of society may be acceptable in the business realm. The accounting Enron scandal will go down in history as one of the most notorious case for American society.