Month: October 2010

Patagonia Getting Citizens Involved

Post author By liannemcradu
Post date October 23, 2010
No Comments on Patagonia Getting Citizens Involved

After our class on ‘Seeking Eco-Advantage,” I thought it would be interesting to do some more research on what kinds of steps companies are taking towards being more sustainable. After re-reading my blog posting on ‘What will it be.. Tree-hugger and Tree-cutter,’ it made me think back and re-ask, how are companies showing concern for the environment? I looked into the company Patagonia, that has high exposure, and am seeing how they are trying to get support from their clientele for some of the latest environmental issues. Patagonia donates money and responds to some of the top environmental emergencies. They have recently been funding and raising awareness about the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Crisis. I recognize how Patagonia caters to a clientele that are: willing to spend more for Patagonia’s environmentally friendly products, and relate to their naturalist values. They connect the use the web (and social media) for product marketing as well as services showing concern for the environment. While customers can go online and purchase their products, the company uses this as an opportunity to educate and get communities involved in projects company is working on. They post additional information and links about the crisis’, have links to influential people they want you to write letters to, as well as volunteer sign-ups, which makes them differentiable from others companies.

http://www.patagonia.com/us/contribution/patagonia.go?assetid=54730

Insight

Your Name Goes Here: _______

Post author By liannemcradu
Post date October 2, 2010
No Comments on Your Name Goes Here: _______

After reading the required material for class 6, a piece of information in one of the articles definitely caught my eye. It was in the article about Product Positioning. In the article, a study was done which showed on average that school teachers graded essays with more common names a full grade higher than uncommon names like Hubert and Elmer. They also exclaim that “Even a person’s name impacts his or her success in life.” I found this interesting, and a little worry some.It mad me think about my past. I sure hope that my teacher was not give me lower grades because of my name! A name like Lianne McRadu is not very common. In fact, I am pretty sure I am the only person in the world with this name… well at least on Facebook! This article on product positioning uses this example of student names to portray how important and powerful a name can be!

Insight

Team Skills

I thoroughly enjoyed class 6, where we talked about team skills that we will be applying to our group projects throughout the rest of this coarse. The team skills we will be developing throughout our next four years at Sauder are going to be extremely important to practice. We are being given the chance to start practicing them now in a fun, learning, and cooperative environment. In this class, we discuss how effective teams work together, how team engagement is important, how we need to brainstorm content together, and how to clean, edit, and bring the group project together. So far, I found our project team to be pretty efficient. We organized a dinner to get to know each other and figure out everyone’s role in the project. Everyone was cooperative and allowed each member to voice their opinions to the group. We set goals to have things done by a certain date, learned about everyone’s skills, and chose an editor that would pull everything together.

This class also made me think about the connections to the content we learn in OB. It has also made me think about my past experiences in my job, and how team skills could be better applied.