This post caught my attention because the author likened the US government and its recent shutdown to that of a company. Actually, if you think about it governments are companies. The CEO of the company can be compared to a president or prime minister. The COO of a company is the vice president or the deputy prime minister. The various ministers, secretaries, and deputies can be likened to other top company positions like the CFO, CIO , etc. And we, the people, are the board of directors as we appoint the government CEO, we establish the constitution and the laws, and the government is accountable to us, at least in a democratic country such as Canada and the United States.

The author makes a good point when he says what is happening in the US government is a kind of management turmoil. The various managers are divided on how the “company” must proceed. Healthcare is one of the issues at the forefront. The company has also not recovered enough from its recent financial losses and its “liabilities” are also growing, its debt is now 75% of its “assets” (GDP). This “company” needs to fix its financial issues and set a clear, defined goals to aim for and policies to follow. Its brand name as the famed “Land of the free” and “Land of opportunity” may be good and attractive to skilled immigrants (consumers and company investors) who hail from not-so-free lands, but as we have seen in other major companies in the past such as Ford, Kodak, etc., a good brand name did not prevent them from bankruptcy.

Source:

Lau, Aidan. “What if U.S. government is a company?.”Aidan Lau’s Blog. UBC, 06 Oct. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2013. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/aidanlau/2013/10/06/what-if-u-s-government-is-a-company/>.

Financial statement fraud is one of the big problems facing accounting today. Many companies and organizations have given fraudulent financial reports in the past. Why? Well greed is one of the most common reasons for this. People give out false or fraudulent financial accounting reports in order to simply receive more money.

Recently in the United Kingdom, a former headteacher, Sir Alan Davies, who was head

of Copland School in north-west London, was sentenced with a 12 month sentence , suspended for two years, after admitting false accounting. According to the article, John Black QC, the prosecutor of the case, said “the six charges of false accounting that Davies admitted related to payments dating back to 2007 totalling £315,000, including several bonuses for Davies himself.”

We can see in this case that greed drove this headteacher to commit false accounting. This accounting fraud is part of a wider issue with business ethics. Our modern society can be so materialistic and greedy that ethics as a result are often ignored. People, especially leaders like him, need to be more honest and care more for things like business ethics. At the very least, our motivation to do this should be to set a good example for future generations. This is best shown in what Judge Deborah Taylor, the judge of this case, told the headteacher:

“You were in a position of trust at that school. Your dishonest behaviour represents a fall from grace. You have failed in your duty as head of the school – in failing to ensure proper, transparent management and, more importantly, you lied about it and resorted to dishonest fabrication.”

“What sort of message did that send to the children?”

Source:

Former headteacher sentenced for false accounting. (2013, Oct 03). The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/03/headteacher-sentenced-false-accounting

In my comm 101 classes, we have discussed several times about the cellular phone market. We discussed about the current of strategy of Apple, and Samsung, its main competitor in the market. These two brands currently dominate the industry. But it got me thinking, what happened to the other phone companies, especially Nokia, a brand of phones that was extremely popular in my country when I was a child.

I researched about this and found an article entitled Crash of the Mobile titans: What happened to Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, and HTC. The article says that there are many reasons for this, and they include failed leadership, stubbornness to adapt, poor marketing, and success from competitors. I was able to relate this to my class in Comm 101 about Product Positioning. In the case of Nokia, as recent as 2007, Nokia still had 63 percent of the phone market. But, like what we discussed about the Positioning of the Leader, a leader needs to be willing to embrace change. New technology continually develops and that creates new markets that render older ones obsolete. When Steve Jobs first walked out with the iPhone (and together with it a new Operating system), he created a new market that quickly made conventional phones obsolete. Nokia reacted too late to this and by the time they began making their own smartphones to compete, Apple had already captured the market.

And this in a nutshell is why the old Mobile Titans, particularly Nokia, are now basically nonexistent.

Sources:

Miller, Mathew. “Crash of the mobile titans: What happened to Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia, and HTC?”. ZDNet. N.p., 26 Sept 2013. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://www.zdnet.com/crash-of-the-mobile-titans-what-happened-to-palm-blackberry-nokia-and-htc-7000021189/>.

“Product Positioning.” QuickMBA. N.p.. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://www.quickmba.com/marketing/ries-trout/positioning/>.