Monthly Archives: September 2014

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/09/how-space-x-learned-to-make-faster-decisions/

SpaceX is a space transportation company. The company adopted faster decision making to make the whole company operated more efficiently. With this company as an example, the author came up with three ideas regarding how to make faster decisions: Offer a shared vision, Encourage more problem solving and Make decisions in parallel. I will give my comments focusing on the second point: Encourage more problem solving.

Ecourage problem solving, according to the author, means that the employees should seek problems to solve rather than wait for tasks. In my point of view, this method is useful to some extent, but there are still some specific problem about it. At first, to achieve this, the employees must be fully motivated and passionate about their work. Nevertheless, in workplaces, not all employees are as motivated as the employers expect to be. So the efficiency is relatively not that high. Secondly, staff initiatively seeking tasks has the tendency of chaos. Some work will be left undone and other work will be done repeatedly. That leads to disorder and inefficiency. So besides the employees seeking problems, the leader are supposed to assign tasks rationally to avoid confusion.

To conclude, ecouraging problem solving is indeed an efficient way. If the employers motivate the employees and assign tasks to them properly, this method would be better.

© Zhenting Du All Rights Reserved

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/09/why-the-apple-watch-is-a-gift-to-the-swiss-watch-industry/

Three weeks ago, Apple Inc. released its first smart watch, the Apple Watch®. And it has been said that the Swiss Watch may get affected. But in this article, Mr. Ryan Raffaelli holds the belief that Apple Watch doesn’t pose any threat to the Swiss Watch, and gives three reasons:

First, the Apple Watch makes wearing a watch relevant to a new generation of future watch collectors.

Second, the Apple Watch is likely to be a complement rather than a competitor to the Swiss watch.

Third, Apple and Swiss watchmakers have this in common: they are deeply committed to connecting their product with the consumer on a personal level.

I  agree with the reasons above to some extent. Nevertheless, in my opinion, I got a reason why Apple Watch does challenge the Swiss Watch: the practical value of Apple Watch weighs much more than the collection value of Swiss Watch. The current society is a place where practice is paid more attention to. To Apple Watch, it can be used to answer and make phone calls, send messages, find locations, stay healthy etc.  On the contrary, Swiss Watch is only one of the collections in th shelf of an old collector. The value of the Swiss Watch is only embodied in its ancient requtation and its symbol of status. The only use of a Swiss Watch is a timekeeper.

Swiss watch is indeed a classic watch brand, but nowadays, it is practical utility that counts.

© Zhenting Du All Rights Reserved

http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-business-ethics.htm

I’m really agree with the idea in this passage. Business ethic is really important to a company, even to a country. To a company, if it does something unethical, it would be fined or face the problem of bankrupting. To a country, if it does something unethical, it would be repelled by the globle trade system and may ended up disrupting.

In my opinion, the unethical behavior is always driven by self-interest. The word “ethic”, I think, is behavior that benefits other people else besides the one who conduct the behavior. In the light of this statement, unethical business always sacrifices other public’s interest to satisfy itself’s. And the common ending is that the business is stifled by what it did unethically.

So what to do to accord the definition of  “ethic”, or “business ethics“? (mentioned in the article. “Business ethics is the behavior that a business adheres to in its daily dealings with the world.”)  For example, an automobile manufacture should do its best to make their cars safe so that the consumers won’t get badly hurt due to the quality problems. The child labor should not exist so that children will not be under heavy labor or get hurt. We can see that companies ought to run their business and profit in the premise of not violating others’ legal rights and most of their interest. (In some cases, part of their interest should be sacrificed to achieve  higher goals that benefit them more.)

In conclusion, business ethics are of great significance to maximise everyone’s benefit and to make a harmonious business environment.

© Zhenting Du All Rights Reserved

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