Personally speaking, I’m really concerned about the decision that Google is planning to quit China and very looking forward to the results of the negotiation between Google and Chinese government.
Information given by the official Google blog says that a highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attack originated from China affected at least 20 large companies. Evidences show that the hackers’ primary goal was to access the GMail accounts of known Chinese human rights activists.
The company also complained about the filtering of information which is required by the Chinese Government. But sometimes as we often say that if a company wants to win within a market, it has to respect the culture there and I believe censoring informaton can be regarded as an example.
However, as everyone knows that China possess a very huge market and Google can gain lots of profits from it. Thus, I do appreciate the courage hidden behind this decision. It’s hard for a company to leave 1.3 billion customers behind but it also shows that Google does try their best to fulfill its responsibility to its customers. The company wants a free environment and wants to do its best to protect what it can protect.
I happened to read an article about the challenges of social media and would like to pick up this topic again.
Mentioned in the article, five challenges that social media will bring about are integration, governance, culture, human resources and measurement & ROI. I would like to relate the culture with customization which was recently introduced in class. As mentioned in this article, “all organizations should fall somewhere on a spectrum of being “open” or “closed” meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally.” In my opinion, for an organization with an open culture, it can benefit from social media if the company leverages a strategy to open up their production process in order to get more customers known more detailed about their production. Therefore, feedback will help engage their customers into their production. Furthermore, being a guide, feedback can lead the company’s production. By developing products that follow consumers’ preferences, companies will benefit from this different method of customization.
Thus I believe that taking advantages of the combination of social media and customization will somewhat benefits companies.
Article mentioned above please refer to http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/08/a_recent_survey_conducted_by.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+harvardbusiness+(HBR.org)
Considering the three components: ”efficient supply chain, consumer choice and profitable”, we may come up with three corresponding solutions: a quite short produce-sale line from companies to consumers with high qualitative products; fast shifts of companies’ production according to the changes of consumers’ tastes and good sales with reasonable prices. Among all the three components, keeping up with latest fashion is the most challenging one.
In order to shift quickly, the company will have to guarantee a comparatively fewer days of inventory to keep a relatively lower costs of unsold products. Meanwhile, they are supposed to have a comparatively shorter path of ordering raw material for their production. Furthermore, a keen observation of the change in market trend also plays a paramount role. As a result, the decision-making managers in the company should possess a high flexibility in adapting to new market environments. Also they have to be good team players and quick, accurate decision-makers. At the same time, decision makers should be diversified in order to make the new products appeal to wider range of consumers.
In a nutshell, the most necessary feature a company should posses in order to combine those three aspects well is high-level flexibility.
In 2006 and 2007, several bribery scandals were unearthed at Siemens AG(Siemens), including some of the company’s employees bribing foreign officials to gain contracts and creating slush funds for this purpose and the company bribing some of their representatives on the supervisory board in order to gain their support for its policies.
Apparently, it is unethical for the company’s employees to bribe foreign officials to gain contracts. It is unfair for its competitors and will probably and actually did force their rivals to do the same thing in order to keep up in the intense global competition. Simultaneously, it made those officials who are not supposed to gain any profits from these contracts actually gain money and increased the unnecessary cost of competition in global markets. However, those costs can be used to advance their products and technology. What they did actually decreased the overall efficiency of resources.
The second scandal is unethical because it made the decision-making process unfair and opaque, resulting in those representatives existing in name only. The company was actually cheating on their employees in the situation that their employees have rights to know what’s going on and decide whether some policies should be carried out.
More details please refer to the following link
http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800518742_499488_NT_ba36b1cc.HTM