So there isn’t a name on the blog, so I’m not too sure whose blog I’m responding to but the material is still relevant.

Anyway, while Google provides their employees with free food, I’m sure that it’s not the only incentive/reward that they offer like this blog post is suggesting with the linesL

“Reward systems are imperative for companies to motivate their employees and ultimately drive the company forward. They often focus us promising promotions, increasing salaries and recognizing their works one way or other. However, Google takes a different approach. They provide a cafeteria with free gourmet food and snacks to its employees”

I’m fairly certain that the way Google rewards employees is just in general to make them feel comfortable, wanted, important, and needed. Google offers things that are valuable to their employees. This could be in the form of benefits such as the ever talked about “if you die, your spouse will get half your salary for x amount of years (I cannot recall the amount of years)” benefit. Google just goes of its way to make its employees feel good, to have a nice environment, which is a great example of good organizational culture.

Personally, I would really love to work for google but that’s like shooting for the stars.

This is William’s blog if you want to read it. I cannot agree more with William. Even though I’ve made it into Sauder, which is a business school with a great reputation, I can’t help but think “is it enough?”. Plenty of people have bachelor’s degrees in commerce, will mine be enough to get me a good job? Will I have to go to graduate school? Do I want to go to grad school? Can I make it into grad school? These thoughts regularly come into my mind. The world has changed. Gone were the times where a degree could get you a good job. Now it’s all about being different, being unique. It’s about setting yourself apart from others and experiencing things. Sometimes I wonder if I can really do that, but honestly it makes no difference whether I can or can’t, I have to anyway, and I will make myself outstanding. Like William said, life can’t be planned. I just have to work hard and hope for the best.

Anyone who lives in Vancouver has probably heard of it. It’s iconic, it’s delicious, and if you’ve ever had a bowl of pho (vietnamese rice noodles), you’ve probably at the very least seen it; the red and green bottle of hot chili sauce with a rooster printed on it.

Sriracha has recently faced a few problems. People living near the Sriracha factories have complained about the smell coming from the hot chilis that the company uses to make their sauce. The city of Irwindale asked for a restraining order against the factory (fancy that, didn’t know a city could ask for a restraining order against a factory). While the judge ordered against it, the judge set a hearing for Nov. 22 about whether the company should shut down or not.

This obviously could hurt the company a lot, as well as its consumers a lot. Should this factory shut down, the prices for Sriracha would “jump a lot” as stated in the article. This obviously decreases demand for the product.

This also shows how much a company can be affected by “the people”. The residents complained about the smell, and these complaints could potentially ruin this company.

All I can really say though, as a consumer of this product is, please don’t go away Sriracha.

A lot of people like to accuse Yelp that they fabricate their reviews. That some companies pay them to write good reviews and give them good ratings. The Co-Founder of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman says otherwise. In his own words, “There has never been any amount of money you could pay us to manipulate reviews,” . This is refreshing to hear because it shows that not all businesses are just there to completely and totally maximize profits. Sure Yelp could increase profits if they were to accept money to manipulate reviews, however in this case, they are sticking to their value proposition which is likely something along the lines of “providing accurate and concise reviews and ratings of restaurants for hungry people looking for good food”. Another thing that Yelp does is that the company actively looks for companies that are trying to “buy reviews” from “reputation management firms” and posts an alert on the page of these companies revealing evidence of this. That is also great to hear and I’m glad that Yelp sticks to their word and their value proposition. Of course though, one does have to take this statement with a grain of salt as it is coming from a Co-Founder of Yelp.

We’ve talked about Netflix quite a bit in our COMM101 lectures. It’s gone from being the king and the first in the industry, to being dethroned and kicked while it’s down, and has climbed its way back up again. Now Netflix is proposing another huge change. It is pushing for financing to be able to stream movies 30-45 days after its release. Currently, theatres have exclusive access to movies which allows them to show movies for at least 90 days before other services can acquire them. Netflix is pushing against this. If Netflix can actually pull something like this off, its stock price will go up and please its customers too. Not only will Netflix be pleasing their customers though, it’ll also be killing off some of its competition. If Netflix is able to pull this off, I’ll be looking forward to the results. Just kidding, I won’t be, because I won’t be able to see the results, because Netflix Canada completely pales in comparison to Netflix USA. But it is always interesting to see Netflix try to innovate and get ahead of its competition.

Thanksgiving is a national holiday where most people get a day off to rest. However, some people are still forced to work, which sucks for them. Walmart announced that they will be opening at 6:00pm on Thanksgiving. Too bad for the 1 million Walmart employees that have to work that day. But there is a silver lining. Walmart also announced that it would feed the 1 million employees a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, an extra day of pay, and 25% off a future shopping trip at Walmart.

This is a pretty nice example of Corporate Social Responsibility. Walmart is giving back to the people that have to work on Thanksgiving Day. However, just because this small thing is taking place doesn’t mean Walmart is an amazing company with amazing policies. In contrast to this, I watched a documentary in Sociology about Walmart and how its policies “force” its employees to end up buying from them with the pay that they get from Walmart and how all the money in these communities ends up going back to Walmart. So a small display of kindness from Walmart doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a benevolent company.

Although it is pretty nice that they gave these employees a turkey dinner, better that than nothing.

McDonalds has officially cut its ties with Heinz. The event itself is not too big of a deal. I just don’t get my Heinz Ketchup when I eat at McDonald’s any more. It’s not like I even eat there often. What is significant is how it happened. McDonald’s cut its ties with Heinz because of management changes for Heinz.

“A former Burger King CEO became head of Heinz in June after the company was bought by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital. 3G, a Brazilian investment firm, also controls Burger King.”

Heinz was bought out by a different company, who is also affiliated with Burger King (and by affiliated, I mean that the company owns Burger King). Obviously, McDonald’s wouldn’t want to form a partnership with a company that is so closely affiliated with it’s competitors.

The business world is constantly changing and adapting. Takeovers, buyouts, partnerships, there are many things that influence relationships with different companies. Heinz was bought out, management changed, management just so happened to be affiliated with Burger King, and now I don’t get Heinz Ketchup at McDonald’s. One thing that happens to a business has a chain reaction that ultimately ends up affecting the customer.

Good thing it’s just ketchup.

I found this article online today while browsing on Reddit. Speaking of Reddit, Brian (CEO of Kiip) said that he worked for Digg, which “imploded on itself”. Digg was pretty much killed by Reddit. Anyway, back on track. This article talks about how the presence of internet is negatively influencing Wal-Mart and surprisingly, Amazon, which is an internet based company. The article talks about how the internet has connected so many people around the world that things that people want to buy things with “meaning” more than just regular products. An example noted in the article would be if you wanted to buy a tea-cozy. Instead of just buying one from eBay or Amazon, a lot of people would rather buy (and there is a whole company based on this) a hand-knitted tea-cozy from an elderly lady in Britain, knitted with her family’s historic knitting pattern and such. The internet allows for things like this to happen and allows for more personal interactions and items to be traded. It also talks about how there is a rising demand for “trades”, which is interesting meaning that humans are slightly going back to the barter system. All this is fairly surprising because it means that what is rising in demand is going against things that are primarily more “efficient” and “cost-effective” which is what businesses usually try to strive for.

I found these two links which coincide together: 1, 2.

In summary, the first article details that the stock of Tesla, an automobile company that produces electric cars, dropped by 6.2%. While it is not entirely due to this, it is partially because of a car crash that resulted in a Tesla Model S catching on fire, which raised concerns about the safety of electric cars, as well as the lithium-ion battery inside them. It is important to note that this is the first fire to occur in a Tesla vehicle, after 83 million miles of Model S driving. As well, it was due to a collision. The vehicle also performed as designed as it protected the driver. The second article is from Tesla Motors’ own blog. It basically speaks about the incident and talks about what happened in great detail. Through full transparency and research, I believe that Tesla dealt excellently with what could have been a big blow to public relations. The blog post from Tesla Motors argues that electric vehicles are safer and that Tesla vehicles in particular have been designed to protect the driver in situations like these, and it is most definitely convincing.

We’ve discussed about this topic plenty of times in class. We’ve mentioned and discussed how Blackberry lost nearly $1 billion dollars in the last quarter with the Blackberry Z10. I cannot recall if we’ve talked about how Blackberry has announced that it will be cutting a third of its work force, about 4500 employees. However, this article puts a bit more of a positive light on this while showing how competition can take advantage of another company’s faults. Google’s Motorola will be looking to hire some of the employees that Blackberry will be cutting from its workforce. Google will be hiring “computer science and engineering talent”.  Couple with the communications patents that they received when they bought Motorola, this could possibly be the beginning to new innovations. As well, Google is taking advantage of RIM/Blackberry’s failure and capitalizing on the opportunity that its been given to get ahead through possible new innovations. Also, on the more “humanitarian” side of the issue, the people who lost their jobs due to Blackberry’s failed business ventures will be able to find new jobs at arguably a better company too.