Jessica Li's Blog

According to Mawer Investment Management Ltd., corporate culture is crucial for a company to succeed, it is important for a team’s cohesiveness and communication among members.

Successful example: （attracting the right people and getting them doing the right things）

• “WestJet sees happy employees as the key to making the travel experience more enjoyable for its passengers, ultimately leading them to choose WestJet over other travel options“
• Google’s strong, innovative culture creating an environment in which innovation flourishes, by attracting talented people, and by giving them the freedom to develop new technologies, Google has created a circle of success that reinforces its culture.
• Saputo: not innovative and attractive enough, but Saputo’s clear sense of identity allows it to attract detail-oriented people and retain them for the long-term.

Failed examples:

• Enron encouraged excessive business risk and sanctioned cover ups as a standard way of doing business, creating an environment in which it was acceptable to ignore integrity and Enron’s other state values.

—This study highlights a high level of trust and candour as necessary ingredients for sharing ideas, open debate and effective decision-making that turns a groups of individuals into a high-performing investment team.

Source:  Mawer Investment’s webpage

Many donations and non-profit committees are going on right now in India. This article gives brief view of how different companies react to it and how they donate.

“large corporations can do well and do good by aiming at people at the so-called bottom of the pyramid.” I suppose this is because larger corporations have a  much more broader view of seeing people and understanding consumers’ and employees’ performance. That is why they can aim at a very specific point of people and really get to know what they want. That should be the most important thing for a business.

Many small businesses give only a little donation and contribution. I suppose there’re two main reasons. One is that their financial structures are not as fully developed as the larger businesses. So that they can not get that much flow-income into donations. Secondly, as opposed to the description of larger businesses, small entrepreneurs don’t hold that much communication of within the business so that there is a lack of information management which leads to that they are not capable to manage their time and finance as well for donations.

MIS is Management Information System which is necessary for businesses in terms of to give people feedbacks from consumers, to be able to transfer information within the businesses and to go online and promote customers with other ways.

MIS works to the largest limit to use computer and internet to improve businesses’ information management. They could use it to go online to promote customers. For example, MIS can be used to make researches online to customers to let businesses know about customers’ deep thoughts so that they could efficiently fit customers’ needs and wants at the right time and at the right price. Moreover, MIS could be used to promote customers by giving them free trials and other marketing strategies online since of the importance of computer in nowadays people’s life.

Thereafter, strategic MIS can really bring businesses huge financial benefits, let businesses to be very efficient indeed and improve businesses’ management level. So businesses should really train employees to know the way to use MIS and this would also empower employees by giving them such an important responsibility in hand and get them involved in the determination of businesses’ performances.

I always hear a saying that “consumers are god”, this is always true, and there’s another  thing that is also important is employees.

This article mainly talks about consumers, but then it also includes how employees in the workforce can affect their performances.

“Great recession will change consumer buying habits”, this is basically an economic theory but this of course applies everywhere in businesses. Consumers’ buying habit are affected by general economic and social situations. And that is based on how businesses perform and how they compete with other. There is no point of saying a consumer’s buying habits in company A if he or she actually has a high level of brand loyalty in company B.

According to Times’ research, 64% of Americans want to do more things and make more things themselves. There’s a huge opportunity in providing the tools, materials, and skills to do that. I suppose this is because businesses have not yet reached their goal of satisfying consumers yet in terms of both the quality, innovation and the price of the product.

Businesses should focus more on consumers’ real wants! Market research is important and they should give employees more power to do so.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100901/understanding-the-consumer-of-the-future.html

During 2009, there was a great recession all over the world, especially in Europe. This video interviewed some of the entrepreneurs of small businesses in Europe.

Generally, people felt scared and starts to feel pessimistic about their future. They all try to cut costs and urge to have a recovery due to the financial strain that they are experiencing. One of them closed their store that his father has opened it 40 years ago, and another female entrepreneur said that her business’s profit dropped by 9-10% which she thought was pretty lucky.

Besides pessimistic, another issue was that people felt uncertain about their future. One of the chief who opened a small restaurant said if he could find a smaller place, he would go. He’s already nearly 56 years old, and he could not afford to pay for his insurance for which he had to keep working. His daughter was graduated from a master degree but still couldn’t find a job. At that time, having a job is a dream!

To conclude, this economic recession in a large prospective helped economic to grow slower, but for stable economics’ countries like Europe. They really get affected and urge for recovery.

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/video-series-small-business-and-the-recession/?ref=smallbusiness

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june03/donaldson_4-29.html

This article is about companies cheating on investors by giving overly optimistic advice! By which it means they promised more than they can actually do. This action of course is against business ethics. They have got a strict and most ever they had for there business, the penalty of $1.4 billion to the government. This had a great impact on the whole Wall Street and the main part on the other half of the news talks about the reform of these businesses in the future.

Cheating is a broad type of immoral behavior, in the terms of business immorality, promising more than they could do especially to investors who’s the big group of social income will really harm them as in financial term and also harm their reputation if they are actually investing for others (their customer if it’s an investment bank of a firm).