Yue Huang's Blog

If  the United Nations was fully funded, why would we need the Arc or social enterprise?

The United Nations is not an organization that specificly handle economic issues. The economic development in countries of Africa and South America is only one of the many issues that the UN should care about. Not putting enough attention, time and money, the UN alone cannot make any outstanding changes. So there came Arc and social enterprises to provide specific aid on the economics development of those developing countries.

Arc Initiative, as a university program, could directly provide business knowledge and skills. Take Arielle Uwonkunda as an example, she is originally from Rwanda, so nobody knows the economics situation of Rwanda better than her. Knowing exactly what to do to help the government and local entrepreneurs, members of Arc Initiative could efficiently offer their help.

I am particularly interested in the fashion brand Osei-Duro and this kind of social entrepreneurship is what I am always pursuing. Closely communication with local people of Africa and South America allows the Arc Initiative team to help them in a more meaningful way — not just give them something, but help them earn their livings using their own hands. By doing so, not only economics stuation will be better, but the education will be improved and the cultural inheritance will be achieved. Also, compared to the United Nations, Osei-Duro as a social enterprise has more power to influence the global market by instilling fresh energy and perspectives towards fashion into the industry.

Takeaway from class15

Questions for companies before the existence of CSR:

What is the value for a company? How to define a company’s value? Is it how much money the company made last year? Is it how dedicated the employees work for the company?

Questions for companies which just began to think about CSR:

We should take some responsibilities to bring business and society together, but how to turn this mindset into reality?

Solutions:

Sharing value with others sounds incredible for business, but right now, under such a cohesive global picture, sharing value with others is creating value for ourselves.

By reconceiving products and markets, companies meet social needs while better serving the existing markets, accessing new ones or lowering costs through innovation. For example, Tesla should cooperate with universities to develop more efficient and more environmental-friendly technologies.

By building supportive industry clusters, companies build reliable local suppliers, a functioning infrustructure of roads and telecom, access to talent, and effective and predictable legal system. For example, Tesla should hold conferences to gather car manufactures like itself to discuss the way they improve.

By redefining productivity in the value chain, companies improve quality, quantity, cost and reliability of inputs and distribution while simultaneously acting as a steward for essential natural resources and driving economic and social development. For example, Tesla should develop a new way to produce batteries more efficiently.

Google creator of successful “Innovation Time Off” intrapreneurship program

“Smart companies want you to become an intrapreneur because it fuels business growth and allows them to gain a competitive advantage in their industry.”

Google is famous for its unique innovation. At the first time I saw pictures of Google’s office building, I was shocked. It is almost an amusement park for employees, full of colorful decoration and toys. Why does Google do that?

As I quoted at the beginning, smart companies do not push employees to work, but they want everyone to create. Google even specially set up a program called Google’s Intrapreneurship Program. Famous Google products and services such as  Google News, AdSense and Gmail, all came from employees’ intrapreneurial ideas. Not like traditional companies, technology-core companies apply flat operational structure — employees can pitch ideas directly to executives.  Turning employees into entrepreneurs and enforcing them to capitalize new business ideas lever up the innovation of the whole company.

In return, with their intrapreneurial ideas applied to practice, meaning their abilities are confirmed by the company, employees will have a stronger feeling of belonging to and contributing to the company. Hence, such win-win project brings Google financial success and employee loyalty.

Study after class13 Finance 1

IPO (initial public offering) is a type of public offering in which shares of stock originally traded in a private company now go into public market. Through the process of IPO, the ownership is diluted while assets and equity increase.

Recently, one of the biggest e-commerce companies (online shopping website) in China called Alibaba went public in the New York Stock Exchange. Accordineg to <the economist>, “measured by the value of goods sold on its platforms, Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined.”

Alibaba’s success largely depended on the correct analysis of Chinese market and Chinese customers’ behaviour. Marketing research has always been Alibaba’s advantage, then I will focus on that and state my point of view.

E-commerce has been develping at an alarming rate during recent years in China. The situation has been changed dramatically due to the development of Alibaba’s fierce competitors, such as JingDong. Alibaba’s position dropped from the top to maybe one of the top three. Entering the US market probabily was a market strategy of Ali’s CEO Jack Ma, to raise money for the poor financial situation in the company. To be honest, as a Chinese, I feel proud to see a Chinese company entering the US market, but this time, I feel more worried about the incentive of this raise-funds.

Comments on external blog from Business of Fashion:

How Kitsuné Cultivated a Loyal Fashion Fanbase Through Music

As discussed at the very beginning of Comm 101, a single department in a company cannot function alone without cooperating with other departments. Instead of “Marketing vs. Accounting”, it should be “Marketing & Accounting”. Likewise, as mentioned in the article, through the combination of music and fashion, the company Kitsune achieved multiple successes in the sales market. Hence, widely using the combination impact, 1+1 can be greater than 2.

Carefully analyzing the market should be the most important step of deciding what to combine and how to combine. Compared to entering fashion industry, entering music industry requires less capital investment. Based on this fact, Kitsune chose to use the music side of the business as a financial tool to provide cash flow for the fashion side of the business to produce a collection or open a store. Also, in the marketing side, music is always an effective marketing tool for promotion. Inversely, what the fashion side can do to pay back the music side is that a high-end fashion company image will be established by entering fashion shows in New York, Paris and Tokyo. It will always end up at the simplest idea — people help people, department supports department. With combination, the impact power will be greater than one man’s power.

I was deeply moved by the persistence that First Nation people show on protecting their territory and the natural environment from being damaged. With the advent of cutting-edge technologies, the society keeps satisfying unlimited human desires for natural resources by mining, cutting down trees et cetera. Companies that intend to build more plants by occupying more aboriginal areas may use money to bribe First Nation people. Also, governments try to make more profits and higher GDP, not appreciating the tremendous good that the healthy natural environment will bring to human beings in the future. However, First Nation should never give in and never avoid the responsibilities, for their next generations and also for the whole world. Speaking of keyohs (one of the first nation areas), people are so proud that they call it “home”. Never should a people abandon their home for creating more so-called social value.

On the other hand, the government has put on lots of efforts on solving the dispute problem with the natives, promoting more cooperation but not litigation. Also, the development of modern industry such as mining will not be totally harmful for the first nation people. To convince first nation, more environmental-friendly methods should be discovered.

Comments on Danny Jung’s blog: Apple Pay

It is true that Apple has a chance to be successful in the field of mobile phone transaction, for 330 million of Apple users all around the world have already become the potential users of Apple Pay. Also, the convenience can be another advantage of using Apple Pay because with the Touch ID of Iphone5s or the NFC chip of Iphone6, users do not need to register for another account like what Paypal askes them to do. In addition, as mentioned in his blog that many big companies are starting to sign deals to accept the form of mobile payment,  Apple also reached out for the cooperation with banks such as Visa and Master cards, making Apple Pay more competitive.

However, I hold a negative point of view that Apple Pay is going to survive the market of China. The market shares have already been divided by the two biggest mobile payment systems — Alipay(Zhifubao) and Wechat payment. Comparing to the two local payment systems, Apple Pay has no competitive advantages at all, for the services are the same and Chinese people are used to paying bills with Alipay or Wechat. There still is a long way to go for Apple’s expantion in China.

Comments on Andrew Choi’s blog: Retail Tea Tales

I personally love small companies. Like what Professor Tamar said, not like big companies which are usually employee-saturated, you could actually handle something when you work for a small company.

Also, I found Andrew’s point of view towards retails and wholesales  is very dialectical. In general, retailers serve individual customers and wholesales serve customers or companies which are in need of a large number of the product. A company chooses their sales strategy according to what product they want to sale and what their target market is.

Tea, in traditional Chinese culture, always functions as gifts for family members and friends, so it is normally sold by retailers. Many tea suppliers in China are trying to booth their sales by cooperating with tourism industry, attracting travelers to visit the tea houses and buy their tea products as gifts for family and friends back home. The example of Tealeaves provides a fresh perspective of selling tea. Targeting at wholesales market can be another effective way to keep those tea suppliers’ plantations running. Like Tealeaves’ market — renowned restaurants and hotels which are in need of high-quality tea to cater their customers’ luxury needs, will be perfect choices for local tea suppliers to cooperate with.

As I was doing the preparation for class 6 : operations, the interview with the founder of Dell — Michael Dell in 1998 grabbed my attention. Dell was known as a successful example of outsourcing. The company tried to apply a special business model which is a combination of “verticle” and “virtual” integration. By doing this, Dell does not have to produce every single component of the computer, instead of which, can put more focus on catering for customers’ needs. The difference between pure outsourcing and Dell’s business model is that Dell is not just seeking for facturies to do the manufacturing work, but also work with them as partners by, for example, let engineers from partner companies work with engineers from Dell’s team when lauching a new product. The key point is, we have to make sure what the company’s value is if we want it to stand out among competitors.

However, why Dell has no longer been one of the strongest companies in the industry? Why Dell fails competing with Apple?

Innovation. No matter the innovation of technology or of customer-friendliness, Dell was not marching as fast as Apple. Apple developed a brand new system IOS by itself while Dell still chose to work with Microsoft without awareness of investing on this development.

I assume there are many other reasons explaing Dell failing Apple. Welcome to leave comments!

First I tried to figure out what business ethic means. According to Wiki, “business ethics” is a philosophy of business, one of whose aims is to determine the fundamental purposes of a company. After finishing the preparation for Class 3, I also reconciled Friedman’s and Freeman’s opinions: the purposes of a company should be maximizing profits for all the shareholders while taking certain social responsibilities.

However, what I disagree with Friedman is that social responsibilities should not only be taken by individuals, ironically, companies should take the most because I believe the existence of CSR(corporate social responsibility).

Take an example of Microsoft and Bill Gates: according to Microsoft website, the company runs 50000+ nonprofit programs globally per year and Bill Gates himself has also donated $28million+ to charity and funds. As one of the biggest enterprises of the world creating $25million+ per quarter, Microsoft set a positive example of corporate social responsibility. The reason I think companies should shoulder more social responsibilities it that businesses always have a stronger and faster impact on influencing people’s lives by producing goods and services, creating job offers, paying taxes, etc. Also, stakeholders of the company have the right to expect a business to be ethical.