A leader is the one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. —-John.C. Maxwell

This blog gives me inspiration and helps me gain a better understanding of human resource management and leadership with the connection of class content.

Leaders: Develop These Three Qualities for Greater Impact.

The blog indicates three qualities for leaders should be developed for greater impact. They are vulnerability, empathy, and communication.

4 ways to define leadership

• Vulnerability: We are all human:

The vulnerability we are lauding is a leadership trait that earns trust from those you lead. By showing your weakness and not hiding from the imperfect, you are signaling: I’m human. Aren’t we all?

• Empathy: Active listening:

The most successful leaders in any field are the ones who demonstrate empathy on a regular basis, and leaders who express empathy can show gratitude more swiftly.

• Communication: Your work depends on it:

Creating a productive work environment depends on high-quality communication. Team members will be willing to trust you more when you communication.

Leadership having to do with responsibility

This blog also provides what they look like in real life. Those examples give great explanations and applications.

In my mind, leader’s gene is why others would follow you. As a great leader, you should have visioning, execution, resilience and agility. To lead a team, a great leader should good at relating people, engaging people and developing people. The core of leadership and the key of leadership is value resonance.

How to create value resonance and keep employees following you? As we learned in human resource management, the company Zappos is a suitable example. The company provides 24-hour free food, staff training, insurance and vacations, and the company organizes employees to create and design memorial T-shirts for every activity and sends to employees freely. Everyone in the company use the same type office table even the CEO. In such environment, it is easier to unit in employees’ interests and ideals. Employees hold passions for the company. Those strategies help Zappos attract better talent and motivate workers. Zappos employees give the impression that they truly like their customers and their jobs.

For more information, 10 tips for developing leadership skills:

• Clarity of vision
• Recognize  and use your potentials and strengths
• Be inspirational
• Follow your values and morals
• Be a role model for others
• define your goals and make solid action plans
• positive altitude
• admit and learn from your weakness and failures
• improve yourself by continuing your education
• improve your communication skills

Stepping up to leadership

Reference Blog: Leaders: Develop These Three Qualities for Greater Impact.

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For many people, Wi-Fi is hard to leave as water and air.

But recently, Wi-Fi has been exposed to significant security vulnerabilities.

Key Reinstallation Attacks Breaking WPA2 by forcing nonce reuse

According to the researcher Mathy Vanhoef from University of Leuven, security protocols that protect wireless networks have been hacked, potentially allowing hackers to monitor any communications connected to an Internet device.

Mathy Vanhoef said the weaknesses are in the Wi-Fi standard itself, and not in individual products or implementations. During initial research, it is discovered that Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys, and others, are all affected by some variant of the attacks.

In another word, as long as your device supports WiFi, then the weakness will affect you, the attacker can easily steal users’ credit card numbers, passwords, chat messengers, photos and emails without cracking Wi-Fi password.

• All major manufactures launched patches deal with the weakness

1, Apple’s latest beta of iOS, MacOS, WatchOS and TVOS has fixed the bug.

2, Microsoft says it has already fixed the problem for customers running supported versions of Windows. Windows have released a security update to address this issue. Customers who apply the update, or have automatic updates enabled, will be protected, and the company withheld disclosure until other vendors could develop and release updates.

Microsoft has already fixed the Wi-Fi attack vulnerability 

• Authoritative department: Risk is controllable, no need to change the password

The authority of 360 total security issued that at present the risk of this vulnerability is under control. Users do not need to be panic or change the Wi-Fi password, and timely updating the firmware of the terminal, router and other devices to effectively defend against it.

• How should individual user respond?

1, Use less Wi-Fi and more 4G. Do not randomly connect to unknown Wi-Fi in public places to avoid unnecessary losses.

2, Be sure to update. Pay attention to the firmware upgrade information of the phone, computer and router, etc., and update the software version of all WPA2 wireless authentication client devices in time.

• Protect your privacy from data mining

An introduction into data mining

As we learned in Class 15, with the development of Internet and E-commerce，the data mining is an ubiquitous phenomena. When we do shopping online or using social media, we should pay attention to personal privacy.

Data mining your personal info from the Internet

3 types of information which should not post on social media:

1, Train tickets, plane tickets, boarding check. The bar code or QR code includes the personal information of passengers.

2, Passport, house key, plate number. Those photos will tell your special location at special time and your daily life circle.

3, The photos and name of children and olds. Those information will help lawbreaker      recognize children or olds easier. It is better if you set up special groups who are able see those pictures.

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https://blogs.ubc.ca/stanleyli

The author began his blog with Toshiba Corporation, a negative reflection of multinational companies, to illustrate his understanding of business ethic. Toshiba forget its financial statement to keep its reputation favorable. From his point of view, Toshiba was fallen with decreasing sales revenue and employees followed leader’s orders absolutely. I do agree with these points since companies usually disobey regulations when their operation scales are falling and owners still want company’s account to be satisfied so that public are still willing to purchase companies’ products and services. Moreover, I think accountants in some companies are not professional enough while shareholders want to maximize their profits. So some accountants would rather take risks to evade taxes than get fired by the company.

Toshiba Corporation to showcase human smart community technologies

The author also listed and explained several business ethic aspects that Toshiba disobeyed. First, he thought “Toshiba disobeyed business ethic between one company and its competitors.” In my opinion, competition between companies is fierce but it should be healthy instead of companies disobeying regulations. Similar with the author’s opinion, I do agree that Toshiba made a negative example in dealing with its competitors. Second, he believed “Toshiba disobeyed business ethic between company and its shareholders”. Since Toshiba is still operating normally I think this point is meaningless to some extent but it does have potential possibility to go bankrupt in the future if Toshiba keep disobeying rules. Third, he pointed out that “Toshiba disobeyed business ethic between one company and its employees.” A well-developed company should provide workers with benefits and subsidies so that workers can be motivated to work harder and create more value for the company. We do not know exactly how many benefits Toshiba provides to its workers but it will definitely cause harm to all of its workers if it went bankrupt or get punished by the government. Lastly, the author thought “Toshiba disobeyed business ethic between one company and society.” From my point of view, it is the most serious aspect which is also the core value of business ethic. It is true that the main purpose of setting up a company is to make profits but it is an obligation for all companies to follow government’s regulations and business ethic. Companies should help the society by devoting money to charities, providing more jobs and also coming up with eco-friendly products. Therefore, I do agree with the author that Toshiba failed to take social responsibilities.

Business ethics and corporate social responsibilities

To sum up, the author’s content was clear and related to business ethic for most parts. I am always convinced that a successful company should try to help society get better. Only if the economy is operating healthily can those companies gain more profits and grow larger. Therefore, we can never ignore the importance of following positive business ethic.

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I believe many young people have experienced such a weekend: Woke up at 12 o’clock,  opened take-out apps, placed the order and waited for them. When the weather is bad, people even order food and lounge at home all the day.

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Online takeout orders could overtake phone orders in 5 years or less

Those food come to you through material selecting, producing, packaging and delivering, after eating, a few plastic boxes, bags, and disposable forks, straws, possibly cigarette butts are thrown in trash can with the rest of food.

You may not have a problem with this set of operations, but it does have serious problems.

According to the 2017 China’s Local Lifestyle Service O2O Industry Report, due to different scenarios where goods or services are provided, local lifestyle service O2O(Online-to-offline commerce) can be divided into 2 categories, which are to-shop O2O and to-home O2O. (Ires, 2017) Furthermore, the online take-out users with consumption frequency more than three times weekly accounted for as high as 63.3% in China. It seems like ordering food online has become the conventional lifestyle.

In other words, in this way of consumption, there are at least 400 million take-outs hustling through the streets of China every week. Of course producing at least 400 million disposable boxes, 400 million plastic bags and 400 million disposable tablewares.

However, the average using time of a plastic bag is 25 minutes. Its mission is making sure your food will not be confused with someone else during delivering.  After the plasticbag’s mission is over, it will be sent to landfills or being dumped directly into the sea.

The problem is, it takes at least 470 years for each plastic bag to degrade.

The struggle to track ocean plastics

According to the World Bank sees global garbage crisis, China, which eclipsed the United States as the world’s largest waste maker in 2004, generates 70 percent of the trash in the East Asia-Pacific region. (France-Presse, 2017)

There are many news about  cross- regional dumping trash secretly, and the main reason is that some of the city’s garbage capacity is saturated, so they can only transfer to other cities. When the land cannot bear the trash, then the human took aim at the sea. About 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year, and China took about 30%.

The world’s deepest Mariana Trench, with a maximum depth of 10911 meters which is more then 2000 meters higher than the highest peak Mountain Everest. It is too far away for, the world where we live, and thus has long been considered the most mysterious ‘pure land’ on earth. However, according to the latest research, a chemical raw material, PCBs, which is already banned, has found in organisms deep in the Mariana Trench.

‘Extraordinary’ levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench 

Definitely, due to the consumers’ diversified demand of life, the local life service O2O covers many fields. On the one hand, with more convenient consumption methods, O2O changed people’s consumption habit. On the other hand, O2O platforms help merchants to attract customers and to improve efficiency. The great potential attracts companies in various industries to try O2O. O2O can take advantage of the internet information platform and improve the efficiency of information spreading. It changed the traditional way of point-to-point offline information circulation and product consumption to point-to-surface. ( Ires, 2017)

However, while the online-to-offline commerce is bringing social and economic development, it also is ruining the environment.

It’s all very sensational, and are there any strategies can help? Yes. The way is reducing the use of disposable plastic products.

Learn more: 9 tips for living with less plastics

Billions of planets, but only one Earth

The ones you thrown away, the nature will give it back somedays…

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“This seems to be all profit-driven for somebody, and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”             –Dr. Aberg

I believe many of you have seen the news which was all the rage in December 2016. This story is not complex, and it matches Hollywood’s narrative logic perfectly.

1. An evil dragon appeared and broke the silence. There is a drug called “Daraprim” used by malaria and Aids patients, and its price doubled 55 times overnight. That was Martin Shkreli’s “masterpiece”, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.
2. The super heroes emerged blinking. A group of Sydney school students did not  wanna stand idly and they decided to solve it out.
3. Super heroes slaughter dragon, saved princess and the world. Boys recreated the drug’s key ingredient for only 20 dollars.

As most readers , it made my blood boil. However, I thought the thing was not that simple.

The video: Active Ingredient from $110000 Drug Recreated for $20 by High Schoolers.

The main character Daraprim, who owns the patent actually? 

I searched in the WIPO patent collections and found Daraprim is an old drug. It was invented by Gertrude Elion in 1952.



WIPO – Search International and National Patent Collections

However, the patent belongs to Martin Shkeli now, who was mentioned by every media. Such as BBC and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Martin Shkreli: Australian boys recreate life-saving drug

Martin Shkreli: ‘The most hated man in America’

As you know, the patent protection duration of medicine is only 20 years. As a judge fund manager, Martin Shkreli discovered Daraprim have those characteristics: expiring patent, the exclusive specific drug for a disease, few factories have production permit. Then increasing price sharply, attracting broad attention, triggering pharmaceuticals Industry stock market crash, short selling then making exorbitant profits.

That is why the price of Daraprim increased sharply. It was totally a financial game as ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’.

Actually , more and more drug companies aimed at the expiring patent drugs, always specific drugs to some diseases. Such as Cycloserine which is an anti-TB drug and an antibiotic called Doxycycline.

Here’s what happened to AIDS drug that spiked 5,000%

Let’s do some connections to the business ethics. There are two different theories of social responsibility and ethics in business, and due to the analysis I have done, I think business ethics should be the responsibility to the whole society, the employers in your company, the environment, and yourself. By the way, Martin Shkreli was sued and imprisoned by the US Attorney’s Office.

What conclusions can we make?

1. Respecting intellectual property rights is the basis to ensure industry innovation capability.

2. Focusing on the expired patent

3. Innovating in synthetic process. It is like getting goal in roundabout way for small industries.

The Sydney boys undoubtedly deserve admiration, but the world is never that pure.

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