Compare And Contrast Two Successful Global Companies Commerce Essay

Compare And Contrast Two Successful Global Companies Commerce Essay In this paper we shall evaluate, compare and contrast two successful global companies: UPS and Amazon.com. UPS is the worlds largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics services (UPS, n.d.). It continues to diversify in its product offering. UPS is the third largest employer in the US and has been operating for the last 103 years. On the other hand, Amazon.com is one of the successful survivors of the internet boom in the late 90s. By 2008 Amazon had become a global brand with other 76 million active customers accounts and had earned itself the reputation of offering earths biggest selection of books. Being a company that was founded in 1995, it is not surprising that Amazon.com is still led by its visionary founder Jeffrey Bezos. Amazon.com has a small management core that co-ordinates a virtual/boundary less organisational structure that has been necessitated by the nature of its business. UPS on the other hand is run by a highly centralized management committee that is mostly organized into functions. At the global level we find business units. Both organizations though are structurally organized to enhance efficiency along their supply chains. According to Lambert and Cooper (2000): One of the most significant paradigm shifts of modern business management is that individual businesses no longer compete as solely autonomous entities, but rather as supply chains (p.65). Further, in this emerging competitive environment, the ultimate success of the single business will depend on managements ability to integrate the companys intricate network of business relationships (Lambert Cooper, 2000). The two companies differ here in that whereas UPS owns most of its supply chain operations as epitomized by its 400,000 employees, 600 plus airplanes, more than 90,000 delivery trucks and 72,000 retail outlets Amazon.com manages its supply chain through a network of partnerships with companies such as Toys R Us and Borders in the US, and Waterstones in the UK etc. Indeed, as new technologies provide opportunities to radically change business and industry economics, the need to frame strategy and its executionà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦has become increasingly importantà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦for executives and entrepreneurs who are searching for opportunities to create and exploit game-changing innovations (Applegate, 2008, p.21). Information Technology (IT) has been central to both organizations though manifested differently in their strategies. For UPS, IT has been the potential change factor for the last decade. By building up their IT network and database capacity through such innovations as eLogistics and UPS OnLine Tools the company was able to redefine its core business through what Varian (2003) refers to as new combinations of productive means. The case for Amazon.com is different because it is an e-business where IT is a fundamental component. Nevertheless, Amazon.com has been able to develop proprietary technologies with the functionality and features that simplify and improve there customer shopping experience. It is this that made the organisation to prosper while other dot-coms failed. Amazon.com has been able to achieve awareness, customer loyalty and repeat purchases, a form of customer lock-in According to Varian (2003) this tact by Amazon.com reduces dispersion of willingness to pay, which is a form of price discrimination and increases barriers to entry. When we look at the effect of Porters five forces to these two companies we are enabled to understand their strategic intents better. In the case of UPS we see a highly competitive industry with strong brands to compete against such as FedEx, DHL and US Postal Service. The few strong brand names, high fixed costs, trade tariffs and international regulations make entry into this industry difficult thus reducing threat of new entrants. Buyer power is moderate in spite of the low switching costs for customers because individually they are too small to have an impact. Threat of substitutes is low considering that few competitors can match UPSs airfreight. The biggest threat for UPS comes in the form of strong supplier power. This is manifested through labor problems, fuel costs and capacity constraints for example UPS reported a fourth-quarter 2007 net loss of $2.58 billion mainly due to a $6.1 billion pension-related charge. For Amazon.com industry rivalry is also high especially with such competitors like eBay, Barnes Noble and Wal-Mart, high threat of substitutes from specialist e-commerce sites e.g. Apple iTunes store for music downloads and low power of suppliers such as publishers who find competition with online companies so expensive and challenging that they prefer entering into partnerships. Though the capital expenditure required to enter into e-commerce is low Amazon.com has been able to reduce threat of new entrants through demand side benefits of scale, development of proprietary technologies, brand identity and effective and efficient distribution channels. According to Porter (2008): Demand side benefits of scale arise in industries where a buyers willingness to pay a companys product increases with the number of other buyers who also patronize the company (p.4) The future performance projections for UPS for at least the next five years should be high considering that the company has been able to successfully transform itself from one oriented towards becoming the leading package delivery company into an enablers of global e-commerce. In spite of this the company has also successfully maintained its strong culture that has made it have a low rate of employee turnover throughout its history. The firms commitment to continual development of game changing business models e.g. leasing its call center capacity to a customers, supporting and managing entire back-end systems for corporations like Nike etc, and its quick embracing of new technologies are bound to keep UPS very competitive for the near future. Amazon.com though is in a less predictable industry where disruptive technologies have the ability to change the entire industry overnight. Moreover, e-commerce aspiring entrants armed with new capacity and hungry for market share could easily ratchet up the investment required for Amazon.com to stay in business (Porter, 2008) which is not the case for UPSs industry. Customers in this industry are also more fickle as their online experience evolves and could easily be drawn to substitute offerings. Nevertheless, we cannot take away Amazon.coms relentlessly focus on customer experience and customer loyalty which enabled them survive the dot-com bubble burst. With the visionary founder till at the helm we should expect Amazon.com to maintain its competitive edge.

Racial self loathing in The Bluest Eye Essay

In â€Å"The Bluest Eye†, author Toni Morrison builds a story around the concept of racial self-hatred and how it comes to exist in the mind of a young child. â€Å"The Bluest Eye† deals directly with the individual psychology of the main character, Pecola Breedlove. So intense are Pecola’s feelings of self-loathing and inferiority that she would do anything to soothe them. In her young mind, she needs a miracle; she needs the bluest eyes. All of the tragedies in this novel can be directed back to one main issue, whiteness as a standard of beauty. This belief that white sets the standards for beauty is a major factor to the racial self-loathing, which occurred in America in the past as well as today. The show of racism through white beauty, and the desires of the black society to acquire this beauty, led to the destruction of many characters in this book. ‘The Bluest Eye† provides a description of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards disfigure the lives of black girls and women. Obvious messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, for example the white baby doll given to Claudia, the praising of Shirley Temple, the fact that the light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, the idealization of white beauty in the movies, and Pauline Breedlove’s preference for the little white girl she works for over her daughter. Adult women, having learned to hate the blackness of their own bodies, take this hatred out on their children Mrs. Breedlove shares the conviction that Pecola is ugly. The lighter-skinned Geraldine also curses Pecola’s blackness. Claudia remains free from this worship of whiteness, but she does realize that society does, imagining Pecola’s unborn baby as beautiful in its blackness. Morrison describes Claudia’s rage against this belief, while at the same time, shows the other characters being enveloped by this nonsense. This standard of beauty can be seen throughout the novel. But the book hints that once Claudia becomes older, she too will learn to hate herself, as if racial self-loathing was a necessity to be mature. Through the dark-skinned Pecola, Morrison constructs her as hiding her true feelings form everyone in the novel. Yet although Pecola hardly meets the  physical qualifications of light skin and â€Å"good† hair, she does possess the key emotional characteristics, which is a desire for white privilege and an increasing breakup from the black community but not from her family. Ensuring that we do not miss her point Morrison introduces â€Å"a high-yellow dream child† named Maureen Peal (Morrison 52). It’s the light-skinned Maureen who reveals Pecola’s connection with the traditional self-hating black. The person who suffers most from white beauty standards is, of course, Pecola. She connects beauty with being loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life will be replaced by affection and respect. To Pecola, blue eyes symbolize the beauty and happiness that she associates with the white, middle-class world. They also come to sym bolize her own blindness, for she gains blue eyes only at the cost of her sanity. Beauty and ugliness form the basis of black self-loathing. In simplest terms, blackness is linked to ugliness and therefore inferiority, while beauty is seen as a characteristic found only in whites. Also, white beauty becomes parallel with purity, and Pecola’s father Cholly imagines God as â€Å"a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue eyes† (Morrison 134). Of the few whites that appear in The Bluest Eye, none can even approach this idealized white beauty. White beauty, therefore, exists as an ideal and not a reality, a goal to which even white people can only hope. Morrison portrays this impossibility by adding the Dick and Jane passages showing what white people as well as black people should aspire to. They should live and act how the characters of â€Å"Dick and Jane† do, but it is evidential that it is impossible. The men in the story react to the racial self-hatred in different ways. Cholly believes what all blacks think of race; the whiter you are the more beautiful you are. By all rights, we should hate him, given that he rapes his daughter. But Morrison explains in her afterword that she did not want to destroy her characters, even those who destroy one another, and she succeeds in making Cholly a sympathetic figure. He has experienced much suffering, having been abandoned as a baby and having suffered humiliation at the hands of white men. He is also capable of pleasure and even joy, in  the experience of eating a watermelon or touching a girl for the first time. He is capable of violence but is also vulnerable, as when two white men violate him by forcing him to perform sexually for their amusement and when he defecates in his pants after encountering his father. Cholly represents a negative form of freedom. He is not free to love and be loved, but he is free to have sex and fight and even kill. He falls apart when this freedom becomes a complete lack of interest in life, and he reaches for his daughter to remind himself that he is alive. Soaphead Church’s family is proud of its white heritage and light skin and thinks of itself as superior to darker skinned and less educated blacks. He is a religious hypocrite light skinned Indian who hates all kind of human touch but the one of touching little girls. Being a pedophile he gives little girls money and candy for him to touch them. He believes that he is religiously higher than everyone and compared himself to god once he helps Pecola â€Å"get her blue eyes†. He is a very malignant character that will go through anything to prove to himself and others that he is better then them because of race and because of his actions. In conclusion racial self-loathing corrodes the lives of the characters from â€Å"The Bluest Eye†. Characters such as Cholly, Maureen, and Soaphead church abused Pecola. To recognize themselves in Pecola is to show their own degradation. Desperate to avoid this painful truth, blacks put as much distance between themselves and Pecola by humiliating her. Yet in the process of victimizing Pecola, they also victimize themselves and their race by contributing to the use of racial self-hatred.

What Teachers Should Wear in The Classroom

Teachers, like most other working professionals, dont have the luxury of dressing however they would like. Outer appearances tend to make strong impressions and teachers are not immune to being judged based on their looks. Teachers work with administrators, students, families, and other teachers on a daily basis and need to make sure to put their best foot forward for all of them. Dressing the part is a great place to start. Above all else, professionalism, practicality, and comfort should control a teachers wardrobe choices. Dress codes can vary considerably by school but there are a handful of universal rules. Dress for success by adhering to these general guidelines and suggestions. Avoid Tight, Sheer, or Revealing Clothing Avoid overly-clingy tops and slacks no matter what your body type and never show up to school wearing anything see-through or excessively low cut/short—this is basically true of all professional fields. There is no shame in wanting to look and feel your best but avoid anything objectively inappropriate or that could be construed as distracting or unduly sexy. Bear in mind that your clothes do not need to be loose-fitting or otherwise unflattering to be school appropriate. Stay Age-Appropriate Cultivate a professional persona by opting for age-appropriate clothing. It is not your job to dress for parents and families but know that you will probably be at least partially judged by your clothing. Think of how you would like to be perceived and dress accordingly—this goes for makeup too. That could mean keeping up on the latest trends, sticking with the classics, or something in between. When in doubt, go for an approximation of business casual and avoid grey areas. If youre not sure of a school rule, play it safe. As long as you present yourself as the qualified professional that you are, dont wear anything that your students arent allowed to wear, and maintain authority, your clothing can be as fashionable and contemporary as you want it to be. Stock up on Wardrobe Essentials Many teachers find that a reliable collection of clothing staples makes their life easier. You may want to simplify your daily choices by selecting a few neutral go-tos and a rotation of your favorite shades to mix and match as you please. Teacher clothes can be just as fun and colorful as any others and you shouldnt feel the need to shy away from interesting patterns or hues but a handful of basic slacks, skirts, dresses, tops, and blouses could save you time and money. Choose Shoes for Comfort Avoid any shoe that will be hard on your feet after an eight or more hour workday. Teachers spend most of their days standing, weaving between desks, and even squatting and kneeling. High stiletto heels and toe-pinching loafers are not kind to your heels and arches for long periods of time. Stay away from overly casual tennis shoes and sandals except during days where you are outside a lot such as field trips or walk-a-thons. Other than that, any comfortable shoe that is sensible and easy to walk in is perfectly fine. Layer Up A school can go from frigid to balmy in the time it takes students to line up. Be prepared for inevitable fluctuations by dressing in layers during every season. Jackets, sweaters, suit coats, and cardigans are simple to put on even in the middle of a lesson. Some teachers choose to leave a few pieces of warmer clothes at school so that they are there when unexpected temperatures strike. Leave Expensive Jewelry and Accessories at Home It probably doesnt need to be said that teaching is a hands-on job. Dont chance an accident or put meaningful, expensive jewelry or watches at risk. When working with very young students, you might also want to avoid anything that can be grabbed. Accessorize as desired without wearing anything that you would miss if damaged or lost.