On November 10, Obama announced a new plan in the APEC which is held in China this year. The plan extends Chinese student visas to five years and business and tourist visas to 10 years. Although it seems to be a benefit to Chinese population, it does mean more than that.

Approximately, there were 1.8 million Chinese population visiting America last year, bring America a considerable amount of income. A lot of job opportunities were also created in the process. What’s more, longer travel visas make it possible for Chinese parents to go overseas with their children. Therefore, age range of population who study overseas is widened because small kids can also live well in a foreign country with accompanies of their parents. Besides, more Chinese old generation will go aboard to spend their late life due to the good living conditions and longer visas. As the result, the people who really immigrate to America will decrease and the housing market will be increasingly popular in America as well as a huge amount of job opportunities are created.

So, by extending Chinese visas, America is able to build more connection with China, gaining more benefit to the nation but without obtaining more population. America has successfully facilitates their economy.

Resource:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392456/obama-starts-taking-executive-action-immigration-joel-gehrke

United Nations was established on 24 October 1945 and devotes its efforts to maintaining international peace and security. Assuming that United Nations is fully funded, they will be able to donate a sufficient amount of money to third world countries and enhance their living conditions in short term. However, no matter how much funds United Nations has, it is never enough to help the whole world. They must run out of funds in the future and the countries they are supporting will suffer poverty again. That why organizations like ARC or social enterprises are significant.

Instead of simply donating basic necessities or money, social enterprises provide the people in developing countries with skills, techniques and finance they need to start up a business and improve the business that they have. Therefore, people suffering poverty will not be the side that only accepts others kindness, they can be productive, showing their values as well.

United Nations solves the short term emergency of poor countries, while social enterprises support underdeveloped countries with long term benefit. Both forces are essential to the globe. With the help of United Nations and social enterprises, actions to help the third world would be more effective.

Resources:

http://skollworldforum.org/about/what-is-social-entrepreneurship/

http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/Global_Reach/ARC_Initiative

http://news.ubc.ca/2014/06/30/upward-arc/

Organizational culture is a sustainable advantage that helps a company to be more efficient. Mostly, every successful company has a unique organizational culture, so as Google. It has a very impressive organizational culture where freedom is underlined. In the office area, workers are free to chat and play games at wills and they also can name their own office. It is even hard to tell where the different between office and recreation area. Moreover, Google provides perfect welfare services to its employees, including free meals, medical care, laundry and even traveling. Most importantly, every employee can use 20% of their work time to do the subjects that they like. By creating such organizational culture, ideas are easy to pop up, thoughts of all employees are taken equally. I think it is really hard to tell whether the cost of doing that is worthwhile or not. For example, for the 20% of work time Google compromises, although workers would use that period of time on things other than the work they are assigned, there is a small probability that something revolutionary would show up like Gmail and Google News. So, we cannot simply measure the return according to numbers, instead, the return is the important creativity that comes with the freedom.

Resource:

http://www.google.com/about/company

Having read though a blog wrote by Damsel, I feel something different. He mentioned that there are a lot of students whose educational expense are paid by parents meanwhile complain about they do not have enough money to buy what they want. Also, it is our parents fault to pay our fees we have to go to part time job to understand the price of the education and we should participate in part time job to earn money, reducing the burden of our parents.

I do agree about some part of his argument that it is necessary that we repay our parents but definitely not now. During our time in the University, so many valuable opportunities have emerged. If we waste our time on part time jobs that give us limited return and experiences and can be done by anyone who has not attended a university, the benefit of going to universities will be reduced. Also, to understand the price of our education, we do not have to really take the job and see how it feels to earn our tuitions. Because people earn money at different rates, higher rates are the consequences of high education and experience which will be obtained through school life and activities.

So, the best we can do to show our appreciation to our parents is to finish what we are expected to do in universities.

Resource:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/cdamsel/2014/11/10/pay-for-it-yourself/

An effective marketing strategy is significant to a company to publicize their point of difference. No matter the scale of the company is large or small they can always win more market shares due to the successful marketing. However, simply market the products for the purpose of increase the profit may not have a huge impact to the market. Once the purpose of marketing is linked with intentions that could benefit the society, a lot more responses can be seen. Having read though a blog written by Raza, I was shown a good example.

In his blog, he talks about ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Before the challenge appears, there are only a small number of people who know the disease. But after the Challenge has been launched, not only the awareness of ALS is improved but also $100 million dollars fund are donated. The purpose of this Challenge is let more people be aware of ALS which is a terrible disease that mostly result in death, which has positive meaning to the society. The consequence is successful.

From the example, we can clearly see that relating the marketing strategy to social benefit will make it more effective. Along this path, companies can increase the profit and contribute to the society at the same time.

Resource:

https://blogs.ubc.ca/razarazi/2014/11/01/marketing-how-effective-can-an-idea-be/