Pernille Fjeld-Hansen

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced that Meg Whitman would be the company’s new CEO, the fourth in only six years. This turnover has affected the company’s consistency and performance and has led to costumers, employees and investors to question Hewlett-Packard’s viability and proliferation.

William Hewlett and David Packard’s company soon became famous for their products, but also because of their extraordinary corporate culture.  Employees were empowered and allowed to work flexible hours and encouraged to share their opinion on company issues and policies. This employee-orientated leadership created trust and is what made the employees loyal to the company. William and David were respected leaders and the “HP-way” soon became a guiding principle for many entrepreneurs and managers.

The company has had to adapt to the rapid growth of technology. Mark Hurd tried to change the culture to one of execution and cost control. In addition, one of the inflection points of change was the merge with Compaq in 2002, which brought a more aggressive and competitive culture to the company. However, changing the organizational culture in respond to changes in the environment is not easy in a strong culture. In order to become a successful business again, HP is encouraged to set a stable spectrum of objectives, goals and projects established to take part in the long run in order to restore the stable leadership and culture’s organization.

In the past five years, Lululemon has tripled its annual revenue and expanded from 70 stores to 200 stores due to its popularity in North America. However, the colourful, stretchy and form-fitting pants tend to be inadvertently see-though and Lululemon has had to recall some of its products.

Who to blame?

This spring, 17 % of the black yoga pants were recalled and the company says the problem is the fabric used and blames the gaffe on its Taiwanese supplier. The shipments to Lululemon go through a certification process, which Lululemon has approved, and so the blame is thrown back and forth.

Not the first time

This is not the first product glitch made by Lululemon. New York Times investigated in 2007 the Vitasea line of seaweed fabric that claims to add marine amine acids, minerals and vitamins to the skin, and found that that the fabric did not contain any of the health claims at all. Ultimately, Lululemon is responsible for the standard of their products and with this news, they are not doing their research.

Link to article

Spotify is an award-winning digital music service, already used and loved by millions of Europeans, that is expected to compete with ITunes, offering costumers free access to approximately 15 million songs. The biggest difference is, that by using Spotify, consumers are leasing the right to listen to music, while on iTunes, consumers own the right to their downloaded music.

Anyone can use Spotify’s service for free with ads, for 5 dollars a month without ads and 10 dollars a month for mobile access. Rumors claimed apple wanted to buy the company, but instead they launched the a new music service that makes it easier for consumers to sync music and other data to different devices.

Though Spotify has taken over some of iTunes’ market share in Europe, it still is the most successful music store in history. ITunes was the first to enter this type of market, which is a significant benefit, and makes it harder for Spotify to compete.

As I read through my classmate’s blogs, I came across a blogpost Yssa Romero wrote about Coca-Cola’s new campaign, taken from this article. This really caught my eye, and I have to say I was surprised Coca-Cola, one of the world’s biggest companies, could run this kind of campaign.

As a promotional strategy, Coca-Cola released a campaign that featured a series of bottle caps that were supposed to be used to create humorous sentences. The bottles had offensive phrases on them, which also had different meaning in other languages. For example, “retard” is an offensive word in English, but translates to “shower” in French.

The marketing department in Coca-Cola did not do a very good job on this campaign. What was supposed to be funny turned out to be offensive and confusing.

People love shopping everything from clothes to groceries at the lowest price possible. Chains like Walmart and H&M are some the most successful, but what is the real price of having such low-price chains?

Allison Bullen talks about the ethical problem Walmart had where many Walmart employees in the States stepped forward saying they were being treated unethically. The employees said there were discrimination, very low pay and bad working hours in their workforce. The employees took action and the case got publicity that could damage Walmart’s reputation, pressuring Walmart to change their unethical behavior.

H&M got a lot of publicity for the circumstances their workers had to work in at their factories. This is not uncommon in the clothing industry, but both H&M and Walmart are big companies that should take more responsibility of the working environment and how their employees are treated.

According to this article people still like working for a man. A survey of 2,059 adults found that both men and women would prefer to work for a male boss. Though 41% of respondents said they had no preference, 35% said that, if given the choice, they would choose a male boss over a female boss. Twenty-three percent said they’d rather have a female boss. But what is the difference between working for a man and a woman?

Women are often accused of being more personal and relationship-orientated, but there is no evidence that men are more task-oriented then women. However, the most obvious difference is the leadership style. There are small, but noticeable differences between male and female managers, but the similarities between female and male managers are much greater than the inequalities. I believe that it is better to focus on leaders and their skills, regardless of gender.

Link to article: AT&T, it’s too soon for a 9/11- themed ad

In memory of 9/11, AT&T posted an ad on the 12th anniversary of the attack. Even though the purpose of the as was to pay respect to the ones affected by the tragedy, the ad shows a smartphone held against the New York skyline, taking a photo of the memorial at ground zero, where the twin towers used to stand.

Both twitter users and Facebook users immediately responded to the ad and called the inappropriate product placement “tacky,” “terrible,” and “gross” among other criticisms. AT&T took down the ad and apologized on twitter. People have expressed that it is still too soon for a 9/11-themed ad. This as shows a lack of corporate social responsibility, by comparison, may damage a firm’s reputation and make it less appealing to stakeholders. AT&T is such a big company and should know better.

Link to article: Dreamliner

Today, Japan Airlines signed a historic contract with Airbus, the rival of their current aircraft manufacture Boeing.

The order is for the purchase of 31 aircrafts of type A350 at a price of $ 9,5 billion dollars including 25 long-distance aircrafts to replace its aging Boeing 777 from 2020.

This is the first contract Japan Airlines has made with the  European aircraft manufacturer, and it is considered a breakthrough for Airbus, in a markets dominated by the American rival,  the Seattle -based Boeing .

” This is a significant blow for Boeing and 787, and reinforces our view that the A350 will be a” game changer . ” I expect the ANA will be tempted to choose the A350 aircraft and maybe some A380 aircraft ,” said analyst Shukor Yusof.

Dreamliner trouble
The agreement with Airbus comes after Boeing’s Dreamliner , where a third of the aircraft built in Japan , was delayed by more than three years and initially were grounded after problems with the aircraft’s battery system. Japan Airlines already operates nine Dreamliner in a fleet of 214 aircraft. In January this year , a Dreamliner associated with ANA was forced to make an emergency landing in Japan because of smoke in the cockpit.

The delays and the technical trouble has definitely harmed Boeing’s reputation and many airline companies has been effected by this in the stock market.

Link to article: Blackberry

A BlackBerry shareholder has filed a lawsuit against the struggling handset maker and two of its executives.

The company is accused of releasing misleading information about the financial health and sales-prospects of the BlackBerry 10. According to the plaintiff , BlackBerry told  the investors that the smartphone BlackBerry 10 had been well-received in the market, something they apparently have all wrong.

During the past year , the company lost money, and several analysts have predicted that the company only has, in best case, eighteen months to go, until they will be bank-ruped, writes Phone Arena who is in great company. The Technology newspaper writes that analysts expect BlackBerry to lose around 7 million consumers over the next year.

Potential buyers have recently expressed interest in the company , including Fairfax Financial’s and Cerberus Capital , have announced that they will bid .
” The company was not on the road to recovery, or trying to win more market share. In reality, BlackBerry 10 well received by the market and the company has to make a depreciation of nearly $ 1 billion. The company was also forced to get go of 4 500 employees, which is about 40 percent of the workforce , ” said the lawsuit according to Cnet .

BlackBerry has not  respond to inquiries from the American media today. (oct 7th 2013)

Link to article

Comfort Care Services thought it had made great technological strides by issuing laptops to about 200 of its mobile workers last year. The firm which provides housing and rehabilitation services for adults with mental illness and other special needs, thought it would improve the efficiency of their employees.

Some employees didn’t want to go through the multi-step logon process. Others worried that pulling out a big, black piece of hardware would upset their more anxious patients. Therefore, about 30% of the laptops deployed were barely touched.What the administration thought would be convenient for the employees, turned out to be a hassle when it came to patient visits, and was not beneficial for the patients.

Technological devices are to be found everywhere inn our society. Most businesses find the technology helpful to keep up with the rest of the world. But technology also means that a lot of sensitive information is out on the world wide web. In cases like this, where the company deals with adult and people with mental illness, it is important to protect the information and help protect their personal data. To combat such issues, some companies try to ban all on-the-job use of personal devices. But given their pervasiveness, that’s not always realistic.