The picture above is one of the pictures I took at the Southwest HQ (click to see a bigger version). EVERY hallway there is filled with pictures of their people. It’s not the pictures on the wall that make the culture strong. The culture is strong because they go to great lengths to hire people who “belong.” They go out of their way to care about their employees as human beings. The pictures on the wall are just one of the things they do to prove how much they love their people.

How to know if a company really wants to understand and satisfy what their customers want? I read a blog about a man’s recent visit to the Southwest Airline corporate headquarters in Dallas. He deeply believes that if a company cares about their employees very much, they would love their customers too. Also, he believe that a company which workers are glad and prefer to work for, would be a ideal choice to do business with too.

 In my opinion, nearly every single company on the planet will tell people how much they care about their customers, whatever they have done is for their customer. Is that really the truth? I don’t think so. I consider that what most companies care is the benefit, the business, and the money. They speak to the public about their concern for their customers, but what they think about is how much money they can make. If a company really care about people, they will treat their employees well too.

Finally, the U.S. labor market has some concrete job growth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic, there is 162,000 new jobs in American in March. However, this number is still insufficient compare with consensus expectations, which predicted about 190,000 more jobs. Even though employers added a significant amount of jobs to their payrolls last month, the growth wasn’t robust enough to lower the unemployment rate, which was unchanged at 9.7%, as economists had expected.

The fact that the unemployment rate stayed at the elevated level of 9.7% likely signals that the job growth wasn’t enough to offset a flood of unemployed workers from returning to the job market. An estimated 3 million workers quit searching for jobs altogether during the downturn. 

More robust job growth will be needed to recapture the millions of jobs that were slashed during the recession as companies cut costs to deal with falling demand. However, March’s employment figures did exceed the 120,000 jobs that must be created just to keep up with population growth. 

Reference link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36146930/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/

Following the last pot topic, what conclusions do Mr. Hunt finds in the crisis study? Their findings have relevance to current policy debates in Washington, Rogoff adds, and they have examined crises in 66 countries for their book.

Once debt becomes excessive, countries must go through time-consuming and often painful debt repayment and increased saving. They can’t merely grow out of the problem. With excessive debt, it’s not critical whether it’s owed to other nations or owed internally. Extreme debt damages not just total output, but also labor markets and prices of assets, such as financial investments.

Some countries have dealt with debt overhangs by inflating their currency. In the US, Hunt sees deflation as the greater risk currently. Employing those who are out of work and fully utilizing our resources will be a slow process. He sees stimulus plans as possibly a “transitory benefit,” but not for long. They just pile up debt.

What should we learn from the past 800 year? A recently publish book can tell us something, it suggests that the United States and other countries will emerge only slowly from what is often dubbed the“great recession.” The author of the book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Kenneth Rogoff, is a Harvard economist and author who has also published extensively on policy issues in international finance. He suggests in this book that the stock market will take two to three to get back to its peak before the crisis, and employment will need more than four years to creep back. Moreover, House prices will need seven to 10 years to return to their earlier level.

Over the past two centuries, financial crises have been followed within two or three years by a wave of sovereign debt crises, often bond defaults. Nations have piled up too much debt and have trouble paying back their bondholders.

This is the recent papers from Kenneth:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/rogoff/Recent_Papers_Rogoff

Reference link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff

What is the big matters that attract international attention recently? It’s the debt crisis in Greece which means Greece is paying the price for past fiscal irresponsibility. Anxious investors have driven interest rates on Greek government bonds extremely high as well as risen the country’s borrowing costs. This will push Greece even deeper into debt. As a matter of fact, Greece’s public debt, at 113 percent of G.D.P., is indeed high, but other countries have dealt with similar levels of debt without crisis. American had federal debt which equal to 122%of G.D.P. in 1946 cause the United States was just walk away from World War II. Debt as a percentage of G.D.P. continuously falls in the decades that followed, hitting a low of 33 percent in 1981. The rise in G.D.P. in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real G.D.P. and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956. Unfortunately, Greece can’t expect a similar performance. So the only way Greece could tame its debt problem would be with savage spending cuts and tax increases, measures that would themselves worsen the unemployment rate

Reference linl:http://www.feedcry.com/archive/aid/646236

Some credit card companies are less considerate to the public. What they care about is to earn more money, thus thousands of credit card users are paying a higher payment for credit card fee than the amount they owed which they are supposed to pay. One of the Obama’s idea would be related to the credit card interest rate, as he want to rebulid and improbve the exisiting regulation of credit card interest rates. However, new credit card proposals aim to crack down on irresponsible lending and offer consumers fairer, more transparent terms.

David Black of Defaqto, the data firm, said: “The new rules will offer a comfort blanket to consumers but if you have already had your rates increased, these measures will offer little protection. The best you can do is to switch to another card with a 0% introductory rate on balance transfers.”

In this proposal, credit card users not only have the right to pay off the most expensive debt first when there has been a balance transfer but also enjoy more time to reject increased rates, and better access to information.Currently, customers often find their payments applied to balances that are not incurring interest (such as 0pc balance transfers) while parts of their balance on which interest is charged are not being reduced. If the credit card issuer applied the payment to the interest-bearing balance first, the customer would pay less interest overall. Although the new rules would not be enshrined in law, the effect would be the same. This could become a binding code of conduct between card companies and the Government.

Undoubutly, We know China might be the world’s largest Internet market, due to its large number of population and nearly at least 400 million Web users as well as the relative vital, mobile phone business. These potential profit have attracted Google which enjoy the largest protion of the world’s internet market. However, the company’s problems about trying to bypass the censorship of China’s international security have arouse a certain number of arguments. Government reacted angrily to Google’s attempt to bypass government censors. As a matter of fact, by directing search users in China to its uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong, Google may have jeopardized it long-range plans.

 As the pressure from the public have cumulated, other business of Google also faces with barrier now. Some companies are planning to consider more about whether they should keep working with Google or not. For instance, China Mobile is one of the biggest cellular communications company in China as well as Google’s earliest partners in its foray into smartphones has decided to cancel a deal that had placed Google’s searching engine on its mobile Web home page. Similarly, China Unicom, was said by analysts and others to have delayed or scrapped the imminent introduction of a cell phone based on Google’s Android platform.

 When I get the information that Google have been considered and announced several times that they are broking the international security regulation cause they cannot well control the information limits, I know this is going to be a great conflict to Google. According to my experience, Chinese government is always focusing a lot on Information Censorship. The government could shut down the company’s Chinese search service entirely by blocking access to Google’s mainland address, google.cn, or to its Hong Kong Web site. Google might also face problems in keeping its advertising sales force, which is crucial to the success of its Chinese language service on PCs and mobile phones.

Relative Reference:

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-google-in-china-more-fallout/

I agree that online publishing poses a great threat to newspapers which is lethal because a newspaper is a bundled good; I don’t think people will read all the content of a newspaper because no one is interested in all the different parts. In addition, many information of newspapers is ephemeral, everyone wants to get the most accurate news.  Online publication offers both unbundling and immediacy, therefore it’s more attractive to readers. Moreover, the online resources can cover a huge amount of information which would take the place of the demand for reference books. One of the most famous information resource is Wikipedia.

 The reason that Rupert Murdoch have said that the Kindle will kill the book industry is that Amazon  is charging a very low price for many of the books that it sells for downloading to the Kindle.

However, the printed book also has some significant advantages over the online book. For example, it is easier to read, underline, and to go back and forth in. We have get used to the traditional way of reading, this is hard to replace. Readers enjoy the feeling of reading a real book, and sometimes read online materials is painful. In short, I don’t think e-books can take the place of traditional books in a short time. But in the future, who knows?

Relative reference:
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/02/will-printed-books-soon-be-obsolete-posner.html

If the same thing happen to Honda, Kia, Nissan, such a recall might get only a few paragraphs in the business pages. But  when the Big Cheese catches a cold, the media crow.  As a matter of fact, never mind the media exaggerations and safety frenzy, Toyota has grown too big and too fast, and  its quality has slipped. Of course it is not easy to cut costs while maintaining standards. However, people buy a Toyota for its quality. There is no other reason. Toyotas are not fun to drive. They do not give you that warm glow of ownership satisfaction. You buy it because it works, and works very well. And it keeps working. So a recall for a Ford or a Renault, while a pain, is like taking Buster to the vet. Shit happens. But when your fridge breaks, that’s bad. Toyota will lose some of the faithful motoring illiterates who constitute most of their customer base.

To conclude, Toyota’s quality and production processes are still the most envied in the industry, and it remains the world’s wealthiest car maker. Although they are facing a difficulty now, this hardship will pass and they will power to even greater domination of the world motor industry.

America Online（AOL）used be one of the nation’s most popular and famous brands and workplaces, just like the Google or the Facebook of its time. Then things changed overtime, the company was no longer the leader of the USA internet technology. As a matter of fact, having an @aol.com e-mail address, something that used to mean you were on the cutting edge, now just suggests you are old.

Incredibly, the story of AOL is not the only one who first rise and reach a great success then fall. Many companies achieve success, moreover, a few achieve great success. But none seem to be able to stay on top of their game for a long period of time, particularly after a charismatic leader sells out, steps down or moves on. The reason that many new companies fail in just a few years is that to bring a vision to life, a company needs structure. For those few founders who know how to build structure, their companies will not only survive; they will grow. But for a structure to continue to grow, that passionate crusade is still needed… and that is what leaves a company after its founder moves on.