Sustainable Businesses enterprise tries to have a minimal negative impact on the global, local or communal environment. Such organizations participate in environmental friendly activities ad make sure that their processes, products, manufacturing and other operations are not causing any negative effect on the environment.

Companies can also promote and maintain sustainability by changing or encouraging a certain type of employee behavior through rewards possibly. This article in the guardian talks more about this method and gives examples of Sony which has launched a new scheme to promote green behaviour. This encourages employees to take steps ranging from eliminating their in-office trashcan to turning on the energy-saving settings on their computer and based on their actions they receive ” Sony bucks”.Eric Johnson, who runs the program for Sony Electronics, stated: “small behavior changes add up to big savings, especially when multiplied across a large organization..(The guardian, Stevens)

Also, another way to do this is by Employee transportation. Google’s employee shuttles are an effective way of promoting sustainability. This reduces the number of roads on the car by a huge number, thus reducing pollution and traffic. Other large tech companies in
the San Francisco area, including Yahoo!, eBay, and Apple, have also started shuttle programs in response to Google’s success.

(Image from google employee Kaushik  http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/10-insights-from-11-months-of-working-at-google/)

Therefore, taking these small business decisions can really help society as a whole and also make businesses more sustainable.

This video talks about promoting sustainability through employee engagement

How Should Organizations Promote Sustainably Employee Engagement?

Cited :

Susan Hunt Stevens: ://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/employee-engagement-sustainability-strategy

http://mobile.mit.edu/connected-urban-development/files/cisco/google_employee.pdf

Thinking of a original creative idea is the first step towards any successful business. this article in the business insider shares with us 40 most interesting entrepreneurs that are under 40 and in this post i will talk about some of the ones i found most original and interesting and motivating. These businesses also use internet and latest information technology to run their business.

Nasty girl, a website owned by a 29 year old started in 2006, is a vintage women’s clothing retailer and was named he fastest growing retailer by Inc. magazine last year. This is run by a girl who has a tremendous fashion sense and made use of it to benefit herself and run a business.

Another very interesting idea is the Birchbox,owned by Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barnait is said to be the Netflix of beauty. This unique business send customers a small box by mail filled with high end beauty products for a monthly cost of 10$ based on each customers personal beauty profile.

Learnvest.com is a website that helps people, especially women control and manage their financial spending. This is run by Alexa Von Tobel, a 30 year old entrepreneur motivating young women too think about and implement their ideas.

Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed also made the list. His unique and innovative way of list based journalism approach attracts almost 85 million monthly visitors.

Customer feedback as i learnt in my Comm 101 Performance management class is a Customer metric to measure how well the business is doing in terms of happiness of customers.

An article in the business insider how customer metrics like satisfaction surveys and other feedback can help companies grow.In the IT systems class we talked about how using information technology like social media, websites and online surveys companies can gather customer feedbacks and take actions and decisions based on this.

The article mentions that customer feedback is very important for businesses to build good customer relationships, thus a positive review from people.This also helps companies understand what customers like and what they don’t so they can take decisions based on that for example if a wedding business asks for customer feedback and get to know that most customers like light coloured decor they would make use of that information and make customers happier in future. This further gives companies a constant opportunity and ideas to improve and therefore progress and beat competition.

Gathering customer feedback can help companies improves in branding, marketing and strategic decisions and with the help of information technology these days this is not very expensive to cater to either, keeping the accounting department happy too.

Walmart: The High Cost Of Low Prices FULL MOVIE

The link above is a documentary of one of the world’s biggest retail store, Walmart which offers the lowest prices for its customers on a variety of products. According to Porter’s Generic Strategy grid, this company falls under the broad cost leadership box as discussed in class. This documentary however makes people aware of how the businesses manages to do so and what the consequences are.

The following article talks about how the film accuses Walmart of keeping its workers in poverty by paying low wages and charges high health benefits costs,causing small businesses to become bankrupt, and being unconcerned about the environment in the process of making high profits. Walmart’s strategy is based on faithlessly cutting costs, allowing it to mark down its competitors, being the reason for its tremendous profits.

Labour experts and former employees were interviewed to figure out all these internal detail. This leads to great various ethical issues and links to the argument discussed in class about integrity of business, social corporate responsibility and how companies should realize whether it is okay to make enormous profits at the cost of sacrificing ethics.

Also, it leads us into the thinking about the fact that how businesses with low cost strategies are able to pull them of and what the real hidden cost behind their strategies are.

Young college student and people from low income families on a low budget are inclined towards Fast fashion clothes from companies like Forever21 and H&M who offer great up-to-date new designs and variety of clothes for low costs. But is there an unseen cost behind that?

These companies are found to be violating the employee rights and ethics. Workers are not paid adequate wages on an hourly basis but are oused to hard to make as many clothes in a shorter time-span and are paid for the number of clothes they make in terrible working conditions. My fellow class fellow Vivian Jung in his blog post also highlights this issue linking it to lack of social responsibility.

This emerging and rapidly growing trend of Fast fashion seems to neglect the corporate social responsibility businesses have and violates labour standards and intellectual properties rights as companies like forever21 have been sued various times for copying designs of other companies. The following blog also analysis the company Forever21’s unjust treatment to their employees in order to produce cheaper clothes at a faster pace.

The consumers enjoy low priced clothes with great designs and are blinded by the effects and consequences of producing those clothes for workers.

Barilla,the famous pasta company faces great backlash due to its Chairman Guido Barilla’s unacceptable comment about feeling the need only advertise for the classical family and not caring about the homosexual community consumers. The LGBT community have the purchasing power of about $800 billion annually and their boycott could result in great fall of sales for the company. The CEO of the company quickly apologized to resolve the matter, but this is a sensitive issue and people will not take it lightly and it cannot easily be put behind.

This picture explains the italian LGBT boycott situation.

This act is completely against a company’s fundamental responsibility of taking good care of a business’s ethical guidelines. This, as seen from the SWOT analysis point of view is a huge internal weakness of the company which could result in a threat as competitors might take this opportunity to advertise for the LGBT community which might shift sales and consumer preferences towards another pasta or food company.

The chairman did say that if the gay community does not like their marketing based on a classical family they may shift to another company, which is why the boycott took place.However, this will have a huge negative impact on the company’s reputation as well as sales by not only the homosexual community but also by people who give importance to human freedom and rights.

Obamacare is causing many companies to cut down the number of employees they hire due to rising health insurance costs and for medical companies payment of the new medical-device tax.

The following YOUTUBE video of FOX news talk about how Obamacare is effecting Jobs.

watch?v=b1csxSkmPk8

Many top US companies have Layoff employees in large numbers, and many businesses like UPS the University of Virginia have eliminated spouse health care coverage all together as reported by Forbes and Bloomberg.Also, Walgreen recently told about 160,000 workers that they will have to buy isurance through a private exhange . Is Obamacare really helping families in this case or becoming a problem for them? Spouses of workers who first earned health care benefits,now aren’t as a result of this reform. Obamacare might have become a huge problem for employers as they need to cut costs in the business to earn greater profits and employees aren’t getting a good family coverage and this reform could be a threat to their job security and is increasing healthcare spending for an average family.

Obamacare could gradually result in a rise in unemployment as companies are laying off employees in large numbers and some employees might be unwilling to work with such increase health insurance costs. This could also result in fall in growth of companies as increased health care costs would result in decreases profits and thus, decreased reinvestment and development. The question rises that is this reform actually benefiting the country and its citizens?

Facebook, a social media website that has almost 1.5 billion active users(Dan Noyes), is used for multiple purposes, some beneficial like socializing between friends and families far apart, to create internal school/university groups and as an information provider etc. However, people have made this more like a competition as Ken talks about this in his blog. People want and also ask for more likes and comments on their posts and that makes them feel proud, which could result in a superiority complex due to popularity or in some cases an inferiority complex or irrational beliefs one could have about not having enough friends or people, who like them. This could have a major negative social and psychological effect on children, teenagers and even adults.

The trend of having a greater number of friends on Facebook beats the purpose of communicating with people you know and compromises privacy, and probably safety.

One of my classmates, in her blog also talks about how a family used Facebook to gather money over their child’s death through a Facebook page, which is tragic, as the page is being used for means that it was never meant for and can be considered highly immoral. Similarly, there are many pages and posts on the site posted just to gain sympathy or money by undermining certain people and most also make fun of races, and types of people.

Generally, reading the news i found this article and it made me wonder if this was right to do, or was it ethically wrong towards employees.

The articles talk about how companies use incentives to achieve desired employee behavior, and also penalize them, in this case by taxing smokers, usually because their health insurance is more expensive. Different companies like PepsiCo,Macy’s and Gannet charge an annual or month fee whereas some companies just refuse to hire smokers.

I believe this is ethically wrong, as smoking is a personal choice one makes, usually being aware of its medical consequences but this should not have effect on their careers or working conditions. A company could ban smoking in the office building or during office hours but should not penalize people for just being smokers.

However, this action could be of benefit too, smokers might begin trying to quit smoking so their job opportunities are not effected and money isn’t wasted on paying the surcharges. Also, this would decrease the medical expenditure companies have to annually pay for and could spent that money on growth of the company and possible other benefits they could give to their employees to cover up for this.

Tyson Foods, one of the world’s international leader in the food industry for especially chicken, beef and pork faced some serious concerns by media, customers and general public regarding the animal abuse that had been seen at one of their farms where they physically,rashly mistreated piglets.The company also deceived the media by changing statements about having any connections with that particular farms, but later accepted buying from them.

The main reason behind this act as understood was that many companies like Tyson have a wide range of competitors which could at times make the profit margin fall very low if costs were rising, and treating animals well, and taking good care of them does increase costs, therefore, the higher profits they achieve are at the cost of tortured animals.

This is highly immoral, and not only will this effect consumers of pork, but will effect all their consumers and other stake holders world-wide keeping in mind how terribly the animals whose meat is sold and consumed, are treated.

A Youtube video on the treatment of animals is linked below.

Abuse of Piglets at Tyson Food’s Farm

ARTICLE SOURCE: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/05/11/tyson-foods-and-piglet-abuse-is-ethical-behavior-profitable/