What makes companies top? Well, there are several factors; however, one of the most important factors is the leadership.
Leaders are those people who inspire us, organize us, and lead us to an ambitious goal. A good leader is brave to admit his or her faults.

Glenn Kelman who is the leader of Redfin, which is an online real estate brokerage firm, is very humble. The firm gives 2/3 of the commissions, which are charged by traditional agents; while, real estate agents disliked it, and blacklisted the firm. Kelman then set up a blog talking about the bad aspects of real estate as well as his self-criticism and company’s internal suffering. Customers loved the behavior and the company’s blog. More and more customers started believing in Redfin, and the business grew significantly. Thanks to Kelman’s modest attitude, the company gains more success and reputation.

According to Macleans’ blog, there is a patent fight between Apple and Samsung, which are two largest smart phone companies. These two companies all argued that opponent made infringement.

      
From my perspective, it is inevitable for smart phone companies to have overlap. For example, the recent ios.7 system is quite similar with android system. The new system does not like Apple’s style at all.
The lawsuits of patent fight costs two companies a lot and I think they should not pay attention to the patent competition but should focus on new technology research. Besides, each companies should find their uniqueness and make innovations from the old and unique products.

After reading Jiaqi Zhai’s blog, I got interested form Snapchat and looked for the background and news about it. Snapchat is an app, which can be used to message and photo-sharing. The Snapchat Company just declined $3 billion offer provided by Facebook. $3 billion is a considerably large number; however, it is quite interesting that this small company, which has just started approximately 2 years, unexpectedly not get appealed by the intriguing amount of money. Therefore, I downloaded the Snapchat app, and I started to recognize its uniqueness.

Snapchat is an app, which include photos and videos. But the difference from other photo-sharing app, people can set up a time, and after the timing ends, the photo will disappear. It indeed protects users’ privacy.

However, I think Snapchat won’t increase its users rapidly as it does presently. Recently, it is labeled as sexting app. Since the photo can be disappeared in a second, people who send pornography won’t worry about being caught. Besides, students may use this as a cheating tool when having exam. Consequently, I think Snapchat should adjust and modify its previous strategy, or it will not have long term success.

When Black Friday comes, every shopping mall in the USA provides extremely attractive deals. In order to retain customers, many Canadian shopping malls, for example, Metrotown, decide to offer great deals to Canadian customers.

The sales will remain 3 days from November 29^th to December 1^st. The malls will open earlier than normal times on November 29^th at 7am. Shops will also give appealing coupons to customers who arrive earlier

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I think the decision is right. First, during Black Friday, although the prices of the products are pretty low, the sales will increase considerably because of increasing customers’ demand. Besides, shops can use the special day to reduce the plentiful inventories.

Weili Dai is a co-founder of Marvell, which is one of the top 5 silicon chip makers in the world. Weili launched the company in the year of 1995, and she found that it was not easy to start a new company. She had to think about how they convinced the customers to deal with a startup company and the fund. Ms. Dai and her co founder made every decision cautiously, and the behavior indeed paid off.

Ms. Dai treats her employee very well. She always believes that her success, the company’s success and the team’s success are everybody’s efforts. So, because of having a kind boss and royal and hard working employees, Marvell runs very well.

The company has met many challenges; however, Ms.Dai remains being positive, and she focuses on the long term success.

The U.S Justice Department has approved the 11-billion merger of American Airlines and US Airways, and the merger makes create the largest airline around the world.

The U.S Justice Department refused to allow American Airlines and US Airways. It concerned that the merger would dominate the flights and lead to an increase of fares. But the Department dropped its opposition of the merger after the agreement: The two airlines would reduce the slots for low-cost carriers.

For American Airlines and US Airways, the merger gives more strength in the marketplace. Although two airlines accept the scaling deal, they still possess 57 percent of national flights in the airports; thus, unfortunately, it will reduce the airlines’ competition and lead to the increase of price of flight ticket. The consequence is absolutely disadvantageous for consumers, while it will create huge benefits for two airlines.

As China is a country with huge population, Wal-Mart is willing to win more profits. Actually, as a Chinese, I think it does succeed. There are several reasons I can think of that leads Wal-Mart to success.

First, the target market is clear and the price is relatively low. Wal-Mart focuses on consumers in middle class and lower, which takes up a great percentage of total Chinese. Because of relatively low prices of goods, people can afford them.

Also, the locations of Wal-Mart in China are mostly distributed near neighborhood units. Therefore, people can get the goods they want conveniently.

Apart from that, since Chinese cook almost every day thus the food resources require being fresh. Wal-Mart provides fresh food materials and it wins the fond of Chinese.

In China, Haagen-Dazs is treated as a luxury brand that it costs people approximately $14 (84RMB) for 500ml in China, while, in Canada, it only costs $4.99, which is 35RMB after tax. Why is that happened?

I notice that, Haagen-Dazs, in China, mostly is sold in storefronts. However, in Canada, I just found out that it is sold in convenience store. Therefore, the business models of Haagen-Dazs in China and Canada are different that it is serves as high-end products in China and fast products in Canada.

Haagen-Dazs are located in prosperous area in China and it pricing highly so that it makes consumers feel that eating Haagen-Dazs can show their social status. Therefore, vanity from people helps it to promote sales of Haagen-Dazs in China.

From the analysis, I figure out that firm using different models in different countries can lead to  great sales as well.

Before the year of 2007, BlackBerry was hot in the area of technology. CrackBerry used blackberry to check emails, send messages, surf the Internet constantly. However, things have changed after Apple published iPhone. People are addicted to iPhone for its brand new system and Apps. Since the year of 2012, Apple has become the dominator in the market of smart phone. People, who were once consumers of BlackBerry, are no longer attracted by Blackberry, which leads to a considerable decline of sales of Blackberry.                                                     

In order to retrieve the situation and appeal to more investors and consumers, BlackBerry optimized its new operation system, changed the company name from RIM into BlackBerry and published Q10 and Z10 on January 2013, while, BlackBerry delayed the publish and missed the best time, the sales were significantly low, which made the shares dropped sharply.

I think the major problem of BlackBerry is that it does not have a prompt reaction to the market. When it publishes its newest product, people have already been fascinated by products from other phone company.

The future of BlackBerry is vague. The leaders of the firm must modify its plan as soon as possible or the situation will be worse.

All companies want to maximize their profits, while they have to obey business ethics, which is  study of proper business policies and practices regarding potentially controversial issues, such as corporate governance, insider trading, bribery, discrimination, corporate social responsibility and fiduciary responsibilities( Business ethics)

Business ethics help a firm facilitate its accountability, reliability and honesty to its customers, cooperative partner and the government. Many enterprises are urgently eager to win as much profits as possible, so they use illegal means to achieve their wants. But actually, this kind of behavior can ruin their reputation significantly and they can not run anymore.

So, company is better do legal things and listen to the law. In order to build a strong reputation, company should promote and integrate its value, culture, leadership&enforcement.

Reference:

Business ethics, investopedia, link: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/business-ethics.asp