Leadership

Having good leadership in business can make the difference between a good company and a bad company. Leadership is a must need quality for a manager to have, it allows for the manager to guide his employees through their assignments, and motivate them to work their butts off. Leaders must show dedication, if the leader shows that he/she is dedicated to the task on hand, then it will set a good example for the workers. Leaders should show openness, which basically means that they need to be willing to listen to the employees ideas without criticising them on the spot. Openness is able to build respect between the leader and his followers, would you have more respect for a person who trashes every idea that you have even before you tell him about them, or one that listens to your ideas and has a further discussion with you about your ideas?

Confidence goes hand in hand with leadership. Confidence gives people the feeling that you know what your talking about, its much easier to understand people that speak with confidence than it is to understand someone who seems like they aren't really sure how what they are talking about. People generally look up to people that have confidence, and workers are supposed to look up to their leaders, so as you can see confidence is needed by managers in order to be looked up at.

These are qualities that required in order to be a successful Leader in the business industry. Without having a good leader, employees can become misguided and lack motivation to get their work done.

The Glass Ceiling

I recently did a post in class about how the Glass Ceiling effect was present in the finance industry in the UK, and it motivated me to make a blog post about how there should be enforced laws that deal with this kind of crap. The article dealt with how women in the finance industry specifically in the UK were making 20% less in their salaries then men, even with the same qualifications. When I presented it in class, I was given some good feedback on how to get rid of the glass ceiling. The one that stuck out the most was how the only way that we can fix this, is to have people that think that it needs to be removed in charge of the companies that have these sort of things happening in them. Having a women in charge of one of these companies in my opinion would get rid of the salary differences between men and women. People shouldn't get payed more or less because of their gender, its morally wrong and we should have moved past this point a long time ago.

Another way that we could get rid of the Glass Ceiling is by introducing laws that force companies to pay fair salaries or give companies incentives to pay fair salaries like a small tax break for companies if they are able to prove that they pay all of their employees equally, and provide equal opportunity for their employees. It is hard to deal with the glass ceiling because it's hard to prove that companies are actually avoiding promoting certain employees of a different gender or race. It seems like there are always people suing because of the glass ceiling effect, so why haven't we made laws that can combat this horrific problem? I think that if we were able to get rid of this burden on people's jobs we would see many more people show their true potential, and it would allow for people to get their ideas shown.

Walmart's competetive advantage

Wal-Mart is one of the, if not most successful retail stores in the world. Wal-Mart is able to hold a competitive advantage over other retail stores because of how effective they are at managing the massive company. The company is actually so big now that they basically dictate at what price the suppliers are going to sell them products at. Wal-Mart is always looking for ways to cut costs to keep improving their advantage over their competitors, something that maybe RIM should have though of when they were leading in the Mobile industry. The strategy that Wal-Mart uses in order to keep their competitive advantage is outlined by the following:

1. Low Cost - Wal-Mart is able to sell their products for very low prices, because of how good they are at lowering their operating expenses. The major way that they cut costs is virtually because of how good their distribution capability is, which includes their store locations. Competitors can't keep up with how low Wal-Mart is able to sell their products at giving them a huge advantage on where people go to shop.

2. Service - Wal-Mart puts the customers needs first. They use the mindset that the worst thing a customer can do is spend money at another store and that customers don't need you, you need customers. As a result they will do anything in order to get more customers, this includes having great customer service to influence repeat business, allowing customers to virtually return any product that they bought (excluding food) as well as having low prices. Having a workforce culture that is very customer-oriented greatly helps increase the loyalty from customers and as I mentioned before it helps bring back customers to the store.

3. Leadership - Wal-Mart was able to create a culture within their managers to put the company first. Sam Walton was able to inspire leaders to focus on the company instead of their own egos. This is similar to how the Japanese run businesses, by creating a team atmosphere that motivates workers to do a good job so that they won't let the team down. Wal-Mart holds yearly meetings for their managers that are apparently full of spirit and from what I've heard they sound pretty awesome.

Wal-Mart is making sure that they stay on top, and they are doing it the right way. They sell basically anything but they also make sure to focus on the important things like ways that they could reduce operational costs and how they can make Wal-Mart better for the customer.

Disney's Brand loyalty

Everyone has heard of Disneyland , and knows of to be a prestigious place that is awesome to go on vacation to. the Disneyland in California is considered to be one of the best amusement parks in the world, allowing you to even stay at hotels that are located close to the park. Disney is also renowned for having great customer service, and providing great entertainment, whether its from having a guy in a Mickey Mouse costume entertain your kids, or from how they have people that go around picking up garbage all day, in order to make their parks spotless. One thing that is notably strange about Disney employees, is how they still work at Disney despite receiving a relatively low income. Employees build trust in Disney, which allows Disney to build internal Brand Loyalty, and in turn their employees work insanely hard to please their customers. Disney uses the Loyalty Profit Chain, which basically puts their workers over their profit as shown by this picture:

This way employees feel more valued and are willing to work harder for the company.


Many customers will refuse to buy specific businesses goods or their services because they feel like the company doesn't care about them as a consumer, but Disney is able to do just the opposite of that. Disney makes Consumers feel cared about and is able to make them feel special, this helps because it lets people have a great time at their parks and hotels, and increases the chance for them to return one day. This is exactly what happened to my Sister, when she came back from Disneyland, all she would talk about was how everyone there treated her so well, and how she wanted to go back again sometime soon. Disney's strategy for repeat business is actually very well done, they are for the most part easily ahead of their competition in regards of customer service, and in my experience from when I went when I was younger, it makes other amusement parks seem much lesser, and it makes you feel like they just don't seem to be nearly as good as Disney land is.

Hard work pays off

Today in class we watched a documentary on the fast food chain restaurant Mcdonalds, and we learned how the food giant is able to gain a competitive advantage over its competition. The documentary started off by showing us two employees, one who owned 6 Mcdonalds restaurants, and his partner who looked over all 6 of the restaurants. What surprised me the most was that the guy who owned the 6 Mcdonalds actually puts in 14 hour days at work, even doing things like serving customers and cleaning the windows. You would think that once you own 6 Mcdonalds that you would never have to go to work again as you would have people doing all the dirty work, but it wasn't the case for the Mexican American guy. His partner had been working at Mcdonalds for 18 years, and was actually promoted into a relatively high up position which allows him to make over one hundred thousand dollars a year. The partner was projected to own his own Mcdonalds at some point, which would make him very wealthy, even when the interviewer asked him if he would be surprised if he would become a millionaire, he firmly stated that he would not be surprised.

The documentary had recorded footage of both men at work, and the second guy was shown encouraging workers and telling them that they were doing a great job, even while he was checking up to make sure that everything was okay. When asked about what the most important thing about Mcdonalds that would appeal to the customers, he stated that the biggest factor was that the wash rooms always had to look and be clean. The reason being is because who would ever want to go to a restaurant that had a disgusting wash room? People don't like dirty things, and having a dirty wash room is memorable for customers. It makes them think that its a dirty restaurant, and they won't go back there to eat. Both men showed that hard work pays off, as they are both making boatloads of money, and even setting themselves up for the future. I guarantee that if that guy didn't work hard for 18 years then he definitely wouldn't have gotten an opportunity like this.

Lobbying...

It doesn't really make sense to me how Lobbying is still allowed, its basically open bribery and causes basically what I would call corruption. It seems like large corporations can basically run our governments and make laws that favour their cause. Look at what the Entertainment industry tried to do with laws such as S.O.P.A and P.I.P.A, its almost as if the Entertainment industry was controlling the government to make such stupid laws that seemed as if they were hardly even thought out. Lobbying is driven by greed from big corporations, they seem to somehow pay their way into having things go the way that they want them to. Lobbyists are honestly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit in Washington to become friendly with policy makers and insure that the best interests of their clients are looked after. It crazy to think about how much money Lobbyists make considering what they do should be a federal offence. Lobbying makes sense for some things, but its not like citizens have enough money to ensure that bills are being passed in favour of citizens. Its disgusting to see how many of the people who pass laws end up working for the companies they passed the laws for, its completely corrupt and yet it seems like there is nothing that we can do about it. None of this stuff is fair, but if your on the right side of it, you will gain massive benefits. You can't fight the system because you'll never win, but if you go with the system you'll be extremely well off.

We pretty much saw how corrupt the government is when we watched both Food Inc and when we watched the Documentary on the housing market crash. The government personnel that passed the patenting laws for Monsanto either worked at Monsanto or has a guaranteed high paying job at Monsanto. Its like they don't even care how badly the laws the approve of affect normal citizens, its all about money and its brutal how they get away with this crap. The only way that I think we can stop things like this from happening is by launching complete FBI investigations against these people to show how badly they screwed others just to get their own benefits. They are completely taking advantage of people without repercussions, it goes to show how if you have money you can basically do anything you want.

Motivation

Motivation is key to success in the business world, if a company is able to motivate their workers to work hard they will obviously produce great results. It turns out that workers actually become more motivated when they find their work interesting, are faced with increased challenge and when they have an increased amount of responsibility. With the way things are looking at school right now, I could see a big change in how people are motivated to do good work, because it seems like whenever we are faced with an increase in challenge we still don't do much about it, it doesn't seem to motivate us it rather irritates us. Young people now a days seem to complain much more than the generation before us, or so I'm told. This small seeming dilemma could actually be a big obstacle in the future workforce. I also think that school/work motivation comes as you grow up, because I noticed that I didn't have the most motivation to try as hard as I could when I was younger playing sports, but ever since I realised that I didn't have many years left of competitive sports at the rep level, I started to try a lot harder, and grew out of the mindset that not trying was cool.

A big problem that many managers face, is how do you get your employee to become interested in his work? Many times the way to increase motivation is by offering them a salary raise, sometimes a promotion and giving them a new title will actually have relatively the same effect. People like having things to show off, so if you give them a prestigious sounding title, it will make people proud of themselves and they will make sure to work harder to keep the title. People have needs for personal achievement and growth, and most of the time motivation comes from the persons own free will. Stories that are passed down through companies are often motivational, for example take the guys who started Google out of a garage, sharing their story with Google employees shows them that anything is possible if they put their mind to it which will help motivate them to be like the founders. Sometimes you just need to ask employees what they want, you have to get to know what motivates them and then use it to your advantage to maximize their motivation. The last thing that I'm going to touch about is how reward systems can help boost motivation in the workforce also. When  employees work their butts off, they can become motivated when receiving rewards to show that their efforts are appreciated.