UBC’s Sauder School of Business, where I am studying, set up the Arc program to help address the social issues in developing countries, such as Rwanda, South Africa…etc. The Sauder students and alumni worked together and benefit the population of the participating countries through internship or workshops.

Hence, you may ask, why do the developing countries need Arc since the United Nations takes responsibility and capable of helping them?

Well, the answer is that the work cannot be done by the United Nations only, all the citizens ought to make efforts. The United Nation may be able to offer economic or material aid in short terms, but they are just scratching the surface but not a permanent cure. In order to make lasting impacts, the concept of social entrepreneurship is introduced. The entrepreneurs are not mainly focused on profits; they are interested in creating imaginative ways to settle the social issues from a different perspective. They are actually not businessmen. They are “social men” who work for the impoverished all over the world. Certainly, the continuous expansion of Arc cannot leave with the Government support; it demonstrates that social entrepreneurship is the combination of business, social, political and moral factors. The participants can get the practical experience and know how to manage the limited time and money while their work empowers the entrepreneurs and benefits the developing countries.

The things they have done are more than creating social responsibilities; they are building brighter future for the people in the developing countries. Therefore, we need social entrepreneurs, we need the young business generations’ power to change the world and build a brand-new image of business people.

Article Reference：http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-adds-43-000-jobs-in-october-jobless-rate-down-to-6-5-1.2827314
Picture Reference:http://www.canadianbusiness.com/economy/gallery-canada-unemployment-rates/
The jobless rate in Canada reached its lowest point in October since 2008. Except New Brunswick, the economy in other provinces added more jobs in manufacturing, self-employment and private sectors. Recall my previous blog, it’s said that Canadian young workers were jobless; but now, they seem to solve this problem by either starting their new business or being private-sector workers.

Definitely, this news is worth celebrating; however, we should think about the reason behind the phenomenon. The increasing demand of workers in manufacturing and natural resource sectors indicates that the globalization is functioning well so that the supply of imports rises (because the population in Canada does not change very much, namely, more supply is caused by the demand from worldwide places). Secondly, we can see the potential hidden behind the alternative energy development. The natural resource will someday be used up and working on the development of the alternative energy technology is crucial to dominate the future business. Thirdly, since the unemployment rate of young workers is still twice higher than the overall jobless rate, the government should further encourage the entrepreneurship. To be more specific, the government can lower the interest rate of loan to promote the young generation to start an enterprise. Besides, this policy will also help the current Canadian government to win the vote if they do so.

In general, the declining jobless rate in Canada not only is good news for all the citizens, but also benefits the Harper’s Conservative a lot.

Article Reference: http://blogs.ubc.ca/sbose/2014/10/05/wow-thats-coal/
Picture Reference:http://www.freediveuk.com/sustained-easy-co2-tolerance-training-for-freediving/
According to Samar’s blog, there is a great piece of news which is carbon dioxide can be captured from the power sector! Although the technology is “fresh off the boat”, it has the large potential to be applied worldwide. In the short term, the government may spend millions of money on developing the new-coming technology; however, in the long run, Canada will not need to buy more quotas of carbon trading and achieve their promise to reduce the Carbon Dioxide emissions.

Successive emissions of Carbon Dioxide is the major cause of the global warming and extreme climate events; almost all the countries are suffering from it. For instance, melting glaciers and the increasing sea level are not only environmental problems that long for solutions, but the economic loss as well; therefore, either from the environmental or economic perspective, the technology benefits Canada a lot.

Also, the development of technology demonstrates that the fixed cost is going to be variable in the long run because the quotas that the company had to buy in the past to get the permission of releasing Carbon Dioxide are not fixed anymore since they have the ability to store Carbon Dioxide by themselves.

Article Reference: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/mcdonald-s-sales-slide-coke-flat-as-consumer-tastes-shift-1.2807475
Picture Reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s

Refer to the article I read, it is said that the sales of McDonald’s dipped 3.3 percent, largely because of the expired meat scandal in China and the U.S. customers’ taste shift.
Business ethics are notably important for any company if they want to succeed. Therefore, the scandal exposed last month hurt McDonald’s really hard; a previous reputation for safe and quality food has been blemished. Although they apologized and changed the supply chain of beef and chicken in China, it takes a long time to get Chinese customers’ trust back because the negative side of word-of-mouth marketing is shown; the scandal drove customers to other brands. In addition, since more people are being health-conscious, the sales of Coca-Cola have shown one percent drop worldwide, especially in U.S.
In order to push up the sales of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, generally speaking, the only way is to make the product healthier. In the short run, the demand of McDonald’s was inelastic past decades; however, more substitutes came out nowadays and people had realized that fast food was not healthy. Thus, in order to adapt to the changes of people’s tastes, McDonald’s had better to produce late-model food with low calories and fat (because American worried about obesity! Big health problem in North America) and be patient to win the fame back. As for Coca-Cola, they need to find a way to produce Cokes with less sugar while the sweetness keeps as the same as possible. It is hard to achieve but if they are not able to overcome the combination of health and taste, they cannot earn more.
The key to keeping pace with or even surpass other competitors is to meet customers’ needs, and at present, we need a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Article Reference://blogs.ubc.ca/stellacho/2014/10/20/58/
Picture Reference:http://freshome.com/2010/02/07/beautiful-efficient-design-in-a-one-room-apartment/
I am impressed with the blog written by Stella Cho, which briefly analyzes the current housing market in Vancouver. I share the same opinion with her because the price of renting an apartment in Vancouver is prohibitive; setting up such a high price system is not smart because the majority of the tenants are full-time students or graduates who just start to work. The current price is not reasonable and affordable, and as she states, the housing market may even crash someday in the future.

Besides the reasons that she provided that why the price is unexpectedly high, I think the government must play a role in the market as well. Because Canada has a mixed economy, the government has the right to intervene once the market tends to fail. They set up a price floor for rental, and have not displayed any willingness to lower the price compulsively. It indicates that, the government still thinks the current housing market makes the society better off, namely, the gain is greater than the loss with respect to economic surplus.

Stella Cho connects the case of her family with her statement, which makes her words more convincible. The current housing prices not only make the community of young adults stress out, but also burdens the old generation by having negative impacts on their retirement plan. The housing market shares some similar symptoms with bubble economy, and I predict that either the housing market are going to crash or the price is going to nosedive in decade, as expected.

Article:http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/Unilateral+park+declared+Tsilhqot+includes+Prosperity+mine/10192766/story.html
Picture Reference:http://quesnelcariboosentinel.com/tsilhqot%E2%80%99-nation-consultation-prosperity-mine-proposal
The first nation has fought against the government for centuries to get back their deserved land and rights. According to what the article said, the industry was not allowed to mine or log NEAR their land by the Tsilhqot’in nation recently.
From the perspective of the industry, their development plan has been hindered because the first nation asserted mining/logging would result in impairments of their land and environment.
The first nation, as an external factor, actually is one of the major resistance on the growth of mining or industry. For an industry, they have to obey many a law and take responsibility of the society as the premises of making profit.
Firstly, Mining by force is not feasible; it will violate the law and the vulnerable-enough relations between two sides may deteriorate even further. On the basis of the PESTLE analysis, factors like social cultural, legal, environment and technology cannot be neglected. Because of the environmental issue, they may focus on the improvement of technology to make mining/logging more ecofriendly or at least less damageable in order to make the agreement with the first nation. To do so, their cost structure is going to shift in technology projects (perhaps they can get subsidized by government); in short term, it may cost a lot, but it is long-term prospective world trend if we think deeper. Besides, because the first nation thinks highly of the environment, the company ought to understand their culture or they can break down their programs into small pieces, trying to minimize the influence; meanwhile, they can hire the first nations to work for them, which partially solves the unemployment problem and gets a step move on building a more positive relationship with the first nations.

Blog://linkis.com/disq.us/NvyMi

Picture Reference: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2012/10/24/entertainment/men-not-women-are-better-multitaskers-swedish-study/
This blogger, Tony Robinson, brings an interesting and absorbing topic to us; he thinks choosing a woman as his business partner is much better because men are more likely to have corruptions and failures in business.

The conclusion is based on his 30-year business running experience and I totally agree with him.

There are two main reasons. First of all, I am a girl, and certainly I stand by the women side. On the other hand, although nowadays a majority of successful business is set up by men, that is partially because in the old times, women served as housewives or did other jobs rather than starting a business. Women just began to explore the business world in the recent centuries. With respect to the relative rate of successes in business, women actually did a better job than men. Tony Robinson’s women partners, in common, have confidence, energy and requisite knowledge to work with him while the men partners always show their “unwillingness to really get their hands dirty” (Robinson). It is easy to understand because it is the nature of men. Their nature also applies in the everyday life; I saw many boys talking condescendingly to others without anything they could really show off.

I do not mean to make a generalization to all the men, but I still persist that Tony Robinson is right; women are better than men in many cases in the field of business.

Article:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/business/media/music-sales-drop-5-as-habits-shift-online.html?ref=business

Picture Reference:http://musicworkshopcompany.wordpress.com
The article above states that more customers prefer to listen to music online rather than download it or buy the CDs nowadays. Although the customers’ habits shifting online could be accepted and reasonable, the question is, in the music industry, “can [this] growth be enough to offset the dropping sales of CDs and downloads” (Sisario).

So far, the answer is no.

Music companies, though, are mostly worried about the dropping sales of downloads right now, they were supposed to make some preventions in advance. For instance, decrease the price of downloads in order to be more competitive with streaming. These days, more places are covered by WI-FI network, especially in the universities, WI-FI is even available while walking on the street. When people can listen to music online with less payments, why do they bother to spend more money on downloading? In my consideration, the music company should alter their focus from “old-fashioned” CDs (like producing smaller amount of CDs according to the decreasing needs) and downloads to streaming. Based on the previous-year data, the company (suppliers) can charge a little bit more for listening online and provide a wider range of music simultaneously.

Anyhow, the winner in business will always be the one who can amend the strategy flexibly as the customers’ tastes change.

Article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/younger-workers-poorer-than-parents-generation-research-says-1.2775231

Picture Reference:http://rhetoriccamel.blogspot.ca/2010/09/no-money.html

According to a recent research, it indicates that the younger workers in Canada have really low salaries compared to their parents. This is a strange phenomenion because most of them are more well-educated and theoretically they should get a good job much easilier.

However, that is not the reality. So, why?

In my opinion, the first reason is the globalization. More elites from other countries come to Canada and get good education; this group of people generates or even increases the employment pressure faced by the Canadian young generation. Therefore, globalization partially causes the current undesirable situation.

Secondly, even though the younger workers are well-educated, most of them do not have practical skills to compete with the ones who are sophisticated and familiar with the rules of society with decades of experiences. The older you are, the more you learn and understand. This is a thing that you cannot learn from school, you should learn it by yourself starting at the moment you step into the society.

However, this is a serious problem for both governments and younger workers. As long as the older generations retire, less taxes will be received and it is hard to support the welfare system such as health care. The government has to rely on a small proportion of the population to pay more tax (because younger workers are poor!).

I think, the Canadian government should limit the immigration population and create more opportunities for the local people. Besides, the companies should not only focus on their profit, trying to believe the young generation is crucial.

Article: http://time.com/3402723/iphone6-line-apple-release/

Picture Reference:http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/18/iphone6-renders-design-changes/
With the new products launching and the iso upgrading, Apple company, again, attracts an ocean of fans to buy iPhone6/6plus; even I, myself, was surprisingly happy and felt lucky to buy the last iPhone 6 in the apple store (which is true! The last one!). Therefore, I am wondering why Apple company is so successful compared to their competitors.
Firstly, the Apple products are easy to use and the engineers stand on the customers’ viewpoint while inventing new products (Bajamin). The concept of the company is quality over quantity; if you think about the number of their products, you will find they do not have many stuff actually. However, the every single product can be considered as a limestone to some extent and shows its personalization. I think this is the most important reason why it is so popular around the world. In general, it is because they meet the customers’ needs.
Secondly, they are targeting at Chinese market right now which is a really smart marketing plan. This can be seen in the recent Apple press conference; there is even a interpreter who translated the English to Chinese on the conference. They have realized that a large proportion of customers is Chinese and tried to expand the market further. ( I am Chinese, and I know how crazy the Chinese loves IPhone)
Thirdly, they have really good promotions. For example, if a customer wants to buy a IPhone, he can sell his previous iPhone to Apple store and offset some money on the price of the new phone. This service promotes the customers to stick on purchasing their products.
Last but not least, they persist in hunger marketing so as to create a seller’s market. There is no doubt that this strategy is extremely successful otherwise how come almost all the iPhone 6/6 plus has been sold out in a week. In China, the price of iPhone 6 goes up to 12,000RMB if you buy one from the black market.
Undeniably, the Apple company perfectly understand the consumer psychology and win the audience.