Blog assignment 3: What makes people successful in career?

Have you ever heard of Jack Welch? Daily Mail remarked Jack “He has bestridden American-and world-industry like a colossus for the past 40 years”. Jack joined in GE right after he graduated from his doctor degree in chemical engineering. He worked as the CEO of General Electric (GE) for around 20 years from 80s to 2001. His greatest achievement accounted for turning GE into the most valuable company in the world, led GE become one of the world pioneer companies that succeed in intense global competition and set up a company culture with fast respond to market changing, value people than strategy and creating a boundless work environment.

I was always wondering what makes Jack so successful in his career? He is smart, quick, with an incisive mind, tough and absolute candor. Also he is a workaholic. Other than that, I personally more appreciate his integrity, self-confident and dare to try new things.

Integrity to me is the fundamental element among them three. Any people who are at work, in a friendship or a relationship, integrity is the most important thing. It can either help people create a strong positive image or destroy their own images in front of others. Integrity is in favor of trust which is a premier factor to be considered when building a relationship. Based on trust, people can develop further relationship in every business. A person considered with low integrity might have the trouble of being trusted consequently have little possibility to be successful in every aspect.

I believe self-confident is as important as integrity in one’s success. I think it might be formed along the years people grow up or through their career experiences. It is concerned what you have achieved that enhance someone’s self-confident, what you have done wrong may decrease someone’s self-confident. Luckily in GE, Jack encouraged people to do things in the way they feel comfortable and gave people enough space to demonstrate their abilities. When people succeed in doing something that might beyond their own expectation, this must extremely help people build their self-confidents. Besides, Jack as the top manager was always trying to celebrate people’s good work which also helps. A question arises, what if people make mistakes? At this moment, self-confident recovery is essential. Learn from mistakes, develop self- confident and always believe yourself, you can do it.

The last thing I was inspired by the story is everyone should dare to try new things. The biggest concern of not trying new things must be scared of failure. Especially in a big company with huge fund investment, try new things is taking a big risk, lose money or lose career in worst case. At this moment, it is very much depending on people’s judgment on future demands. Therefore it is more important for people to update themselves with latest information from market and continuously learn new things as well to be able to have a high capability to make a “risky” decision of trying new things. In short, the more you catch up with the new things, the less risk you are taking and the more benefit you can gain from it.     

Probably not everyone can be as successful as people wishes, but the more you try the more you get. I believe it.

Material Economy

The presentation given by Annie Leonard's conveyed us a lot of valuable information with its focusing on material economy. It has been presented that a process which starts from Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Trashing. Basically it is a process of making goods, consume goods and dispose goods that is involved in the world we live on.

In the first step, extraction, it revealed the fact that we are running out of resources by over exploration of nature resources in the process of supplying raw material to make goods, because of the huge demand of consumption by us.

The second step is manufacturing, the process of producing goods by using energy. The problem is the take in toxins and toxins generation from the production.

Distribution is especially important in today’s intense competition market. As Annnie demonstrated in the presentation, she can buy a pair of shoes with a so low price which is not even enough for paying the rent of shelf in US. The question rise up is who is paying the cost?

Consumption is considered as the driven factor in the whole process. It is because of people’s high demands for new stuffs, desire of catching up with the newest technology and countless advertisements exposed in our daily life which has a dramatic impact on our purchase decision. Unfortunately 99% goods are in trash within 6 months according to Annie. It indicates a huge waste of resources we consumed that in many cases we may not need to do so. However it seems is the rulers plan to stimulate material consumption to make the world running. Is it a right strategy? I doubt it.

Disposal is the last step in this process. Even though two ways of disposal has been used but the problem is neither way is environmental friendly.

Based on the above process and problem description, it emphasized the crisis we are facing that is the deterioration of our environment, global warming, polluted air, water, natural disaster…And the concerns of public health, diseases… We have many examples in our life that the environment is getting worse. It is time for us to take serious measures to save our planet. A series of proposals are brought up by Annie, sustainability, equity, green chemistry, zero waste, renewable energy and so on. I understand to do all of these really requires governments from all over the world pay attention to and take effective measures seriously. As an individual we should not think it is only government’s responsibility to do this, even though we may not affect government decision but we can contribute ourselves by reducing waste, reusing whatever it is possible, consume what we really need, resources sharing. There are a lot of things we can do as individual to contribute to environment protection. And surely it is not a short period of actions we are talking about, it takes time and generations efforts, furthermore, it is a no ending efforts.  

This presentation also let me think of the relationship of economy development and environment. Like now in some countries because of over exploration or heavy industry productions in order to speed up economy development, but on the other side, it has resulted in very bad environment problems. The question is: is it worthy to over seek economy development by sacrificing human beings’ health or even lives? If the countries nature resources are running out, public healthy are reaching the limit, how long time the economy development will stay? I think it is more important to secure people live in a safe environment, to build a society which people are satisfied with the life they are having, this is element factor which will lead to social sustainable development.

Thought on "Snooping Bosses"

"Privacy" is a sensitive topic to most of us in life. We always want to keep something secreat for ourselves no matter what the causes are, no matter how close our relationship is to our family mumbers,friends,or collagues. Some privacies are "easily" protected such as our feelings, thoughts and ideas because they are something in our mind, it is not visible. No one can see it unless we want to share it with people. Whereas some privacies are difficult to hide,like visible things. Although sometimes our thoughts can be reflected by visible behaviours, talking and actions etc.

At work, the desire of protecting privacy is especially strong. There must be a number of reasons why people dont want to share things. I personally believe everything has a reason behind it. For example, the employee called for sickleave in Monument Security company, maybe he just wanted to take an advantage of company's sickleave welfare instead of really being sick, for the CEO found out he was not in bed resting.  From the employee perspective, he did not share the real reason with his boss, that's his right of protecting privacy.He might very appreciate his boss rather trust him but not investigate what he said is true or not. When people found out he is not trustful by other people, what they are supposed to do? If it was me, I will lose trust as well to the people who don't trust me.

From  company perspective, it is not wrong that they should make sure their employees spend the time for company at work, not for individual staffs. Company would like employees spend 100% work time at work hours. In theory it is understandable that CEO did things like that. However, company is doing business with their employees as well besides outside customers. Benefits company is aiming for should be mutual to both company and employees. If employees think their benefits are not protected, they may tend to work for other companies. On the other hand, company also has right to hire new people.

What I want to address here is the relationship between employers and employees should be mutual trustful. A friendly working environment can be helpful for mutual benefits.