All Quiet On The Western Front - 1069 Words

All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of the young Paul Bà ¤umer, a man of 19 years who enlisted with his classmates: Kropp, Mà ¼ller, and Leer. Together with a few others, these men formed the Second Company of the German Army. The story of these young men is a tragic one, full of few laughs and many sorrows. Throughout the story, the author demonstrates the undying loyalty that grows between the protagonist and his friends, specifically Kat, another member of the Second Company. Also, the author gives readers a glimpse into the inner workings of a soldier’s mind, invoking a strong feeling of sympathy as Paul questions who he really is. The protagonist feels as though he will never fit back into peacetime society, for he does not really have a life established in his hometown. Paul is not the only soldier with emotional instability, Kropp showed signs of PTSD early in the story (18.) Finally, the theme of loss is introduced early in the book, with the death of Kem merich, and is continued throughout the book. There were many main aspects throughout the story. One of these aspects was the friendship of Kat and Paul. Even though, they were not classmates they quickly became the closest of friends. For example, after Kropp and Tjaden were put into open confinement, Kat asks Paul if he wants to roast a goose. Kat meticulously marked the point on the map: a shack owned by the regimental headquarters, and after a bribe of 2 cigarettes to a munition-wagon driver, they wereShow MoreRelatedAll Quiet of the Western Front756 Words   |  3 PagesPlot Summary: All Quiet on the Western Front Written by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front is the tale of a young man by the name of Paul. Paul who is nineteen years old gathers several of his friends from school and together they voluntarily join the army fighting for the Axis alliance. Before they are sent off into actual battle, they are faced with the brutal training camp. Along with this they face the cruelty of the life of a soldier. This made them question the reason forRead MoreAll Quiet on the Western Front700 Words   |  3 PagesThe greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is a novel that depicted the hardships of a group of teenagers who enlisted in the German Army during World War 1. Enlisting right out of high school forced the teens to experience things they had never thought of. From the life of a soilder on the front line to troubles with home life, war had managed to once again destroy a group of teenagers. Throughout the novel, we saw the men of the Second CompanyRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front1797 Words   |  8 PagesTitle: All Quiet on the Western Front Creator: Erich Maria Remarque Date of Publication: 1929 Class: War Novel Anecdotal Information about Author: -Erich Maria Remarque was conceived on 22 June 1898 into a working people family in the German city of Osnabrà ¼ck to Peter Franz Remark (b. 14 June 1867, Kaiserswerth) and Anna Maria (nà ©e Stallknecht; conceived 21 November 1871, Katernberg). -During World War I, Remarque was recruited into the armed force at 18 years old. On 12 June 1917, heRead MoreAll Quiet on the Western Front943 Words   |  4 Pages The book All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is about a group of 19 year old young men who are changed by the ways of war. There is paul: the main character; Tjaden: a tall, skinny locksmith, also the biggest eater; Albert Kropp: a lance-corporal and the clearest thinker; Muller: studious, intelligent, and likes school; Leer: has a preference for the girls from the prostitution houses and has a beard; Haie Westhus: a peat-digger, and big in size; Deterring: a peasant, he alwaysRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front2393 Words   |  10 PagesAll Quiet on the Western Front: Book Review Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, actually fought in WWI (Remarque 297). Because of this, he was able to write this book with accurate depictions of the war. He writes how being in combat can really take a toll on a person and affect them in a negative way. He also writes of the pain and suffering that the soldiers must cope with that comes along with living in constant fear and danger. When looking at the title of theRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front2085 Words   |  9 PagesThis essay will consider the different effects created by Erich Maria Remarque in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. As a writer, Remarque unknowingly left his novel open to readers with completely different perspectives, and to various forms of criticism. This undoubtedly meant that every single reader had been affected by the novel in many different ways which unfortunately for Remarque may have been an effect that he never intended. This essay is divided into 5 main sections. Firstly itRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front1089 Words   |  5 Pages In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, human nature is the only abstract periphery between belligerent barbarism and justifiable violence. Through the insipid bombardments that rained shells over the Germans’ heads and noxious implementation of mustard gas, Remarque dexterously misleads the reader into believing that he fights in an apathetic war where all remnants of human nature and identity have been destroyed with the introduction of trench warfare. Through Paul Baumer’sRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front1509 Words   |  7 Pagesâ€Å"He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to a single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front† (Remarque 296). Paul Baumer, the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, enlisted into the German army at a young age of nineteen with a group of friends from school. Kantorek, Paul’s teacher, â€Å"gave us long lectures until the whole of our class went, under his shepherding, to the District Commandant and volunteered† (RemarqueRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front1129 Words   |  5 PagesIn Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, soldiers at the front have a better idea than civilians of the true n ature of war because they have experienced the war while civilians have only read about it or listened to government propaganda. Remarque is trying to tell us that only those who experience the war can understand how awful war truly is. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the main character Paul goes back to his home, the people he meets still think that the Germans are winningRead MoreAll Quiet On The Western Front1790 Words   |  8 Pagessmell of cigar smoke, gunpowder, and dirt that filled the air. There was no nationalism; all Paul wanted was survival. World War I was supposed to be about nationalism and the propaganda forced upon the soldiers to feel superiority over other countries, but Paul helps to prove otherwise, as his story tells what is was like to be at the front, and how tough it was to be a soldier. â€Å"All Quiet on the Western Front† portrays war as it was actually experienced, replacing the romantic picture of glory and

Investment And Conflict Of Romantic Relationships

Investment and Conflict in Romantic Relationships Com 620 Mark Pace and Bo Zhang Investment Model The theory of relationship investment is an effort to understand maintenance of ongoing relationships. This model is an expansion of Kelly and Thirbaut’s (1978) interdependence theory, which specifies that satisfaction is a function of the reward value of a relationship, relative to expectations, and that commitment stems from the superiority of a relationship, compared with viable alternatives. Interdependence assumes that we evaluate the rewards and costs of our own and our partner’s various behaviors in a relationship, and that both partner’s actions and preferences impact the nature of the relationship. Rusbult (1980) expanded interdependence theory to include that commitment was determined by satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and investments with subcategories of intrinsic, and extrinsic. Intrinsic includes example ideas like emotion and time while extrinsic includes ideas like mutual friends and shared activities. Rustbult’ s ex pansion included the value of resources gained through involvement in a relationship and also resources devoted to developing the association. This model views the ending of a relationship as a loss of resources. Further research such as longitudinal studies on the topic of investment have only strengthened the theory (Bui, Peplau, Hill 1996). The investment model predicts that commitment should increase as the relationshipShow MoreRelatedThe Brain Is Wider Than The Sky1416 Words   |  6 Pagesfathom today. This mental state, depression has affected countless people throughout time. To get to our central point, depression causes deterioration in relationships, especially romantic ones. To understand how to mend relationships and build ourselves up as a community, we need to begin a discussion about depression within romantic relationships. It’s time to offer solutions and open communications with one another to help each other in this very human struggle. Depression affects 350 millionRead MoreRelationship Between Long Distance Relationships1588 Words   |  7 PagesDespite the fact that relationships can be troubling, stressful, and even deadly, most of us are aware that we need relationships with others and that the quality of our lives depends on those relationships whether it is from friends or romantic partners. With the development of technology the evolution of long distance dating relationships are transforming. Long distance relationships used to primarily consist of handwritten letters with the occasional phone call in between. However, progressionRead MoreAttachment Types Of The Bond Formed Between Females And Their Primary Caregiver Essay1109 Words   |  5 Pagesbeen found to influence romantic relationships which can affect depressive symptoms (Broderick Korteland, 2002). Attachment in association with depression and romantic experiences was investigated by Steinberg and Davila (2008). A sample of 83 early adolescent females and their primary caregivers were given questionnaires regarding romantic competence, parent-adolescent security, stress and psychopathology. The results showed that when participant’s had frequent romantic experiences and parent’sRead MoreRelationship Between A Parent And Child1653 Words   |  7 Pagessignificant other. For many, a romantic relationship is the most important element in their lives. A good relationship can improve all characteristics of your life, such as strengthening health, mind and connections with others. The ability to have a healthy loving relationship is a lot of work, give and take, and comprising of one’s individual wants and needs. Whatever you put in, the more you can get back; relationships are investments. However if the relationship is not working, it can be an astronomicalRead MoreThe Effects Of Parental Divorce On Children1604 Words   |  7 Pages and more positive attitudes towards divorce. Hence, this negative att itude about marriage leads to decreased commitment in romantic relationships, which causes relationship quality to deteriorate. Divorce can also influence children s sexual behavior, which can put their emotional and relational stability at risk. One effect of divorce on children’s future relationships is cohabitation. Children of divorced parents run the risk of having a positive attitude towards cohabitation and a cynical attitudeRead MoreA Relationship With My Friend And His Girlfriend970 Words   |  4 Pagesthis relationship interview was to determine if the answers given by my friend and his girlfriend, in regards to how they have felt about their relationship after moving in together, matches with information given in our textbook on the topic of cohabitation. The questions that I gave the couple centered around their happiness in the relationship now, compared with how they felt about one another before cohabitation began. The questions also helped to gain insight on the types of conflict thatRead MoreThe Tongue Lies1560 Words   |  7 Pageswith her, and she with me, And in our faults by lyes we flattered be - Shakespeare Introduction and Definition Before surveys, studies and prying psychologists Shakespeare was poetically exploring, with a clever pun, the complexities of romantic relationships. His bawdy yet poignant couplet hints that lies are a social lubricant. However, it is the submission of this essay that Shakespeare is only representing one side of a complex dichotomy. Perhaps lies might facilitate a measure of closenessRead MoreNarcissism And Its Effects On Adolescent Relationships3175 Words   |  13 Pagesnarcissistic. Narcissism has been studied in communication research, especially regarding narcissism and relationships. Although narcissism tends to be looked down upon, studies have shown that there are positives associated with people who possess this trait, both in their personal lives and in romantic relationships. The purpose of this literature review is to study what is known about narcissism in relationships, the bright side of narcissists and how they can contribute to society, and topics for futureRead MoreThe Development Of The Pair Bond1513 Words   |  7 Pagesculture the relationship most often discussed when describing human interaction and that which is considered the most â€Å"ideal† or â€Å"normal† relationship (demonstrated by cultural morality and various forms of media) is that of the male-female couple. This pair-bonding is a phenomenon that exists to some degree in the natural world, but occurs most prominently in humans. The development of the pair-bond is one of the single most important aspects of human evolution, culture, and relationships as we understandRead MoreDivorce Essay1166 Words   |  5 Pagesmarriage, and more positive attitudes towards divorce. Hence, this negative attitude about marriage leads to decreased commitment in romantic relationships , which causes relationship quality to deteriorate. Divorce can also influence childrens sexual behavior, which can put their emotional and relational stability at risk. One effect of divorce on children’s future relationships is cohabitation. Children of divorced parents run the risk of having a positive attitude towards cohabitation and a cynical attitude

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte Free Essays

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 Georges Seurat A Sunday on La Grande Jatte medium’s is an oil on canvas artwork painted by Georges Seurat for two years. His technique is basically painterly. It depicts realistic experiences of people at that time while having a relaxing Sunday in a suburban park in an island in Seine River. We will write a custom essay sample on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte or any similar topic only for you Order Now For some, it is as if Seurat wanted the ‘characters’ in his work to parade in nature. The elements that are highlighted in the painting are texture, value, and color. Georges Seurat used the form of painting called divisionism or most commonly known as pointilism. He was the first to use such form. This form projects a certain kind of rough texture for the artwork. The importance of value is given significance in portraying the feeling of the painting, giving it a certain feel of tranquility. Color is largely seen on how a serene Sunday should feel, happy and full of positive emotions. The painting’s subject matter conveys the peacefulness the people at that time felt, how the people just slowly walk or sit around inhaling the beauty of their surroundings. It is basically a 2D painting in form. The painting literally communicates the calmness of that particular day. Looking at it makes you calm and reminiscing. Seurat’s work of art portrays a serene, calming moment where different kinds of people gather in the shoreline of an island in Seine River, taking pleasure in a Sunday afternoon. The artist’s seeming ‘cast’ composed of soldiers, boaters, the fashionably and casually dressed, the old and the young, families, couples, and single man and women. It appears to be that he is trying to assemble a certain kind of community consisting of different class of people. What is notable in this canvas is the characters’ explicit lack of interaction suggesting that it is because of their diverse class order. Seurat suggests starting a revolution in Impressionism, making his subjects like those in ancient Greeks live and move in a modern setting. The artist used oil paint in order to finish his work. His reverence for the material is evident on how he used it in a unique manner thus creating a certain kind of style called pointillism. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte serves as the start of Neo-Impressionism at the 19th century where Impressionism is widely popular. While both of them values the depiction of realism in painting and canvas, Neo-Impressionism differs because it is more defined and more conservative. As a whole, the painting exudes such immense harmony to people which particularly why I become fond of it. It also gives you an expression of anonymity, making you feel like you also want to have a piece of what the characters or the people in the painting are experiencing. In all fairness, the artwork gives calmness to people and serene to troubled heart. Sources: The Art Institute of Chicago http://www. artic. edu/aic/exhibitions/seurat/seurat_themes. html Artble http://www. artble. com/artists/georges_seurat/paintings/a_sunday_afternoon_on_the_island_of_la_grande_jatte How to cite A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Essay examples

Categorization and Identification E-Commerce and Marketing

Question: Describe about the Categorization and Identification for E-Commerce and Marketing. Answer: Introduction E-commerce platform is continuously expanding in the UK as it has provided the most convenient mode of virtual shopping experience for its consumers (Haucap and Heimeshoff 2014). Top e-commerce giants in the UK are Amazon and eBay, which has provided the most important and daily usable products at affordable price for each of the consumer segment. This report will discuss about the seven unique features of eBay ecommerce website in UK and evaluate the features in terms of their effectiveness. Company Background EBay is the American multinational ecommerce company that provides B2C and B2B sales via internet (Ebay.co.uk. 2016). One of the most effective marketing strategies of this website is online auction, which generates the highest profit for both vendors and the organization. EBay has earned revenue of US$ 8.59 billion in the year 2015 and has 34,600 employees worldwide (Neto, Bloemhof and Corbett 2016). This organization provides wide range of categorical products such as electronics, furniture, books, entertainment products, medicines and lots more, which has resulted in the highest profit in the year 2013. Seven Unique features Ubiquity According to Wang, Ren and Meng (2012), eBay has extended its marketing capabilities beyond traditional boundaries and has created the largest virtual marketplace in the UK. Geographic location has become boundless, through which the organization is able to engage lot of consumers from varying segments. Garratt, Walker and Wooders (2012) pointed out that by Smartphone and data connection, people can match their preference with the product existence and finally initiate sales in eBay. Shopping costs are reduced and customer convenience is enhanced. Global Reach Van Der Heide, Johnson and Vang (2013) opined that the e-commerce platform eBay, has reached cross-boundaries, which has been possible due to strategic account management and flawless shopping experience. On the other hand, Wang et al. (2012) pointed out that eBay has able to reach globally just because of the involvement of real vendors, who can be testified through the contact available the virtual store against any product. Therefore, reliability and transparency has enabled the formation of largest consumer base in ecommerce platform. Universal Standards According to Curchod, Patriotta and Neysen (2014), eBay kept the same technical media standards across nations. In the UK, eBay has set different price of same product that is sold in the India as well. Therefore, shopping standards are different among nations so that price does not prevent sales. On the other hand, von Brzeski, Taddy and Draper (2015) pointed out that eBay has set extra shipping cost for some of its products among different nations and regions. Therefore, it has able to keep the same revenue and at the same time ensure client satisfaction. Richness Audio, video and text messages of eBay are interrelated and integrated into same marketing channel and therefore clients are not misleaded with different information (Ferguson 2013). The clients are able to get same information about the website and its products even if they are not present in their respective location. Thus, rich information is accessed by the clients, which has enhanced the shopping experience and the clients are able to purchase products, which are not under their vicinity. Interactivity According to Xie and Lui (2015), eBay has enhanced its communication engine, where authentic buyers are able to communicate with potential buyers. Authentic buyers provide feedback and answers to queries raised by potential buyers, which indicates virtual mode of interactive communication. Walia and Zahedi (2013) pointed out that communication style of eBay is justified by 24x7 customer service as well, which mitigates the query of buyers and thus it results in eliminating the gap between the management and consumers. Information Density Saeedi (2014) pointed out that consumers are able to get adequate information of their preferable products if the buyers access the specifications and features. EBay lists out the products specifications and categorical features in the most vivid way and therefore consumers can get the physical evidence of the product. On the other hand, Lendle and Vezina (2015) pointed out that technology reduces informational cost and increases quality. Adequate information triggers the sense of purchasing a product in eBay. Personalization EBay has created the virtual personalized marketplace, where based on account creation, clients can save their preferences in wishlist, which they buy at their convenience. On the other hand, Ye, Gao and Viswanathan (2014) pointed out that personalized marketing messages such as discounts and coupons related emails and promotional messages enhances the amount of sales in eBay. Figure 1: Seven Unique Features of eBay (Source: Ye, Gao and Viswanathan 2014) Evaluation of Features From the above features, it has been found that information density and interactivity are not effectively carried out by eBay. Einav et al. (2014) pointed out that eBay does not provide real information as most of the tech-gadgets are found to have different specifications if those are compared with official product information. On the other hand, Turban et al. (2015) pointed out that interactivity of the website is poor if compared with Amazon as the latter provides a separate query related reply section for the popular products from authentic buyers, which lacks in eBay. Einav et al. (2014) argued that eBay has the best personalization as online auction of products and instant sales are directly mailed to the frequent buyers, which lack in other ecommerce platforms. Moreover, Huang and Benyoucef (2013) opined that universal standards of eBay are more flexible and attractive in UK in terms of both delivery and shipping cost based on regions. Therefore, it can be said that best featu res of eBay are Ubiquity, global reach, universal standard, richness and personalization, whereas its information density and interactivity features are poor. Findings and Suggestions Findings From the above discussion, it is evident that eBay does not have the most concrete information density for its products. Products specifications do not match with the actual features and therefore, certain percentage of frequent buyers is misleaded, which is hampering the sales. It has even been found that interactivity between buyers and potential buyers are not up to the standard that is practiced in Amazon. Therefore, eBay needs to increase the communication platform and information sharing among its clients. The finding even gave the fact that universal richness and ubiquity are strong factors of eBay, which it needs to sustain in future while expanding its business in different locations other than UK. Suggestions for Improvement Update Information It is suggested that eBay needs to update its information regarding the product at the time of inventory replenishment. Most of the products when launched, have distinctive features, which are recorded by eBay, but as time passes, some additional features are included in the products by the manufacturers so that life cycle of the products are increased. Such information needs to be updated when store is replenished so that information is not differentiated. Communication It has been found that interactive communication is poor in eBay and therefore, it needs to update the User Interface and customize the section in such a way so that query and answers are raised and replied conveniently among buyers. Through this system, buyers will get the physical evidence of the product and sort out their suspects and if they are satisfied sales will be initiated. This can be a strategy of the organization to raise the consumer satisfaction through interactive communication. Action Plan Objectives Tasks Success Criteria Time Frame Resources Enhance information depth of products List out new product replenishments Ensure product information update Reduction in consumer query regarding product validity 50 60 days Supplier Human resource Cost Enhance interactive communication Change UI (in-app) Create new query section Increase in consumer query and number of comments 30-40 days Web designer Time Cost Table 1: Action Plan (Source: Created by Author) The above action plan gives the suggestions in the form of objectives and the tasks that it needs to accomplish against each objective. Interactive communication in ecommerce can be ensured if user interface is upgraded. Therefore, within next two months, eBay needs to create the communication section and information base of new products. The resources that will be required are time, cost, web designer, and human resource. Conclusion While concluding, it can be said that eBay can continue to expand if it innovates new strategies within the unique features discussed in the report. Out of the seven unique features, it has been found that eBay poorly practices communication and information, which needs to be upgraded in future through the action plan projected in the report. On the other hand, eBay needs to expand in the global market with more number of products and intuitive search engine so that none of the consumers are left dissatisfied. EBay needs to create the most advanced intuitive search engine and communication hub among its clients so that consumers are able to get the best taste of products as per their preference in UK market. Reference List Curchod, C., Patriotta, G. and Neysen, N., 2014. Categorization and identification: The identity work of business sellers on eBay.human relations,67(11), pp.1293-1320. Ebay.co.uk. 2016. Electronics, Cars, Fashion, Collectibles, Coupons and More | eBay. [online] Available at: https://www.ebay.co.uk/ [Accessed 29 Mar. 2016]. Einav, L., Levin, J., Popov, I. and Sundaresan, N., 2014. Growth, adoption, and use of mobile e-commerce.The American economic review,104(5), pp.489-494. Einav, L., Levin, J., Popov, I. and Sundaresan, N., 2014. Growth, adoption, and use of mobile e-commerce.The American economic review,104(5), pp.489-494. Ferguson, R.B., 2013. How eBay uses data and analytics to get closer to its (massive) customer base.MIT Sloan management review,55(1), pp.2-3. Garratt, R.J., Walker, M. and Wooders, J., 2012. Behavior in second-price auctions by highly experienced eBay buyers and sellers.Experimental Economics,15(1), pp.44-57. Haucap, J. and Heimeshoff, U., 2014. Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet driving competition or market monopolization?International Economics and Economic Policy,11(1-2), pp.49-61. Huang, Z. and Benyoucef, M., 2013. From e-commerce to social commerce: A close look at design features.Electronic Commerce Research and Applications,12(4), pp.246-259. Lendle, A. and Vzina, P.L., 2015. Internet Technology and the Extensive Margin of Trade: Evidence from eBay in Emerging Economies.Review of Development Economics,19(2), pp.375-386. Neto, J.Q.F., Bloemhof, J. and Corbett, C., 2016. Market prices of remanufactured, used and new items: Evidence from eBay.International Journal of Production Economics,171, pp.371-380. Saeedi, M., 2014. Reputation and Adverse Selection, Theory and Evidence from eBay.Theory and Evidence from eBay. Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J.K., Liang, T.P. and Turban, D.C., 2015. E-Commerce: Regulatory, Ethical, and Social Environments. InElectronic Commerce(pp. 689-730). Springer International Publishing. Van Der Heide, B., Johnson, B.K. and Vang, M.H., 2013. The effects of product photographs and reputation systems on consumer behavior and product cost on eBay.Computers in Human Behavior,29(3), pp.570-576. von Brzeski, V., Taddy, M. and Draper, D., 2015. Causal Inference in Repeated Observational Studies: A Case Study of eBay Product Releases.arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.03940. Walia, N. and Zahedi, F.M., 2013. success strategies and web elements in online marketplaces: A moderated-mediation analysis of seller types on ebay.Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on,60(4), pp.763-776. Wang, Q., Ren, K. and Meng, X., 2012, March. When cloud meets ebay: Towards effective pricing for cloud computing. InINFOCOM, 2012 Proceedings IEEE(pp. 936-944). IEEE. Wang, S., Jank, W., Shmueli, G. and Smith, P., 2012. Modeling price dynamics in eBay auctions using differential equations.Journal of the American Statistical Association. Xie, H. and Lui, J.C., 2015. Modeling eBay-like reputation systems: Analysis, characterization and insurance mechanism design.Performance Evaluation,91, pp.132-149. Ye, S., Gao, G.G. and Viswanathan, S., 2014. The good, the bad, or the ugly? An empirical investigation of revoking behavior on eBay.An updated version of this paper has been published in MIS Quarterly: Shun Ye, Guodong Gao, and Siva Viswanathan, pp.1033-1056.

Quarry Hill Essays - English-language Films, Films,

Quarry Hill "What are you doing tomorrow?" It seemed I had asked this question 100 times already during the summer. "Nothing, hey lets figure something out now, so we don't sit around doing nothing tomorrow morning!" Was the reply I got from my friend Rudy. My other friend, Tom, jumped up onto the hood of his 1979 Camero Z-28. This was the unspoken signal that we would all stay under the stars and contemplate for a while. I decided to take a seat on top of the back of my mother's car. "Well, what are we going to do, guys?" Rudy must constantly be thinking of new things because he didn't even appreciate the moment of almost absolute silence. Tom gave a half laugh which said either "I've got no ideas" or "Rudy is a funny guy". "I don't know, what do you want to do?" I offered to both Tom and Rudy. "I don't know, what can we do?" Asked a frustrated Rudy. I looked up to the stars and tried to think. Finally an idea excited me enough to actually say something. "I know! Lets go to the Quarries in Uxbridge and go swimming! I've never been and I hear it's a cool place!" "Yeah!" It was clear to me that Rudy is a quick thinker -- I barely finished my idea before he was in agreement. "Come on Tom, lets go to the Quarries!" Rudy said to get a response out of him. Tom -- still in his "quiet mode" -- looked Rudy right in the eye, blinked, gave a half laugh, and smiled. "Well, all right. It's 1:00am, I think I'm going to go to bed now." I was getting bored with the silence, and Tom wasn't going to move into his hilarious mood, so I figured that I'd get some rest for once. Tom and Rudy got in their respective cars, said some final words to each other, and then the silence was killed by the roar of the '79 Camero's big block 350 engine. I casually walked into the house, shut and locked the door, turned off the lights, and went to bed. The next day I was awakened by the telephone. I rolled over, sat up, and answered. "Hey, Tom and I are coming down now." It was Rudy, his voice was lower than normal, so I could tell that he just woke up as well most likely by Tom knocking on his door. "Aight, I've just gotta take a shower, get dressed, then we can go." "Aight, see yah in a bit." "Later, man." "Later!" I fell out of bed, took a quick shower and then got dressed. As soon as I flipped on my hat, I went to the front door. I jumped down the stairs and whipped the door open, only to see Tom and Rudy standing there with a shocked look on their face. Tom pressed the doorbell, and yelled "Hello Anybody home?!" "Heh.. Wuzzup?" My timing couldn't have been more perfect. The guys stepped back and allowed me to exit. I took one step outside before I remembered. "Oh yeah, I forgot my bathing suit." I ran back up and grabbed a towel and my bathing suit, then flew back outside. "All right Matt, how do we get there?" asked Rudy. "Just follow me to Quarry Hill, I know somebody who lives at the bottom, we'll park there." Tom and Rudy hopped into Rudy's 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix (It was Rudy's turn to drive), as I stepped into my mothers 1992 Buick LeSabre Custom. I started up the big boat of a car, turned on the radio, and then we were on our way. Quarry Hill is only about 10 minutes away from where I live, and nothing happened that was out of the ordinary while driving to the next town over, Uxbridge. We arrived at the top of the hill, drove down, and parked on a little dirt road. I put the car in park, rolled up the windows, got out, and locked the doors. I realized that I was carrying my bathing suit and towel, and asked Rudy where his were. "In my backpack, I've got enough room if you want to put yours in as well." "Yeah, that'd be cool, I don't want to carry it." Rudy opened his green backpack and I stuffed my stuff into it. "Hey, Tom, you're not gonna swim?" Tom shook his head and said "No." I started to walk across the street. "Where

Worst Ways to Remove a Tick

Worst Ways to Remove a Tick Is there anything worse than finding a tick embedded in your skin? Besides the ick factor, tick bites are a definite cause for concern, because many ticks transmit disease-causing pathogens. In general, the faster you remove the tick, the less your chance of getting Lyme disease or other tick-borne illnesses. Unfortunately, theres a lot of bad information being shared about how to remove ticks from your skin. Some people swear that these methods work, but scientific studies have proven them wrong. If you have a tick embedded in your skin, please read carefully. These are the 5 worst ways to remove a tick. Burn It With a Hot Match Why people think it works: The working theory here is that if you hold something hot against the ticks body, it will become so uncomfortable it will let go and flee. Dr. Glen Needham of Ohio State University found that holding a hot match against an embedded tick did nothing to convince the tick to let go. Needham also noted that this tick removal strategy actually increases your risk of pathogen exposure. Heating the tick can cause it to rupture, increasing your exposure to any diseases it may carry. Also, heat makes the tick salivate, and sometimes even regurgitate, again increasing your exposure to pathogens in the ticks body. And do I need to mention that you can burn yourself trying to hold a hot match against a tiny tick on your skin? Smother It With Petroleum Jelly Why people think it works: If you completely cover the tick with something thick and gooey like petroleum jelly, it wont be able to breathe and will have to back out to keep from suffocating. This is an interesting idea that has some basis in reality, since ticks breathe via spiracles and not their mouths. But whoever hatched this theory didnt have a complete understanding of tick physiology. Ticks, according to Needham, have extremely slow respiration rates. When a tick is moving about, it may only breathe 15 times in an hour; while resting comfortably on a host, doing nothing more than feeding, it breathes as little as 4 times per hour. So smothering it with petroleum jelly could take a very long time. Its a lot quicker to simply pluck the tick off with tweezers. Coat It With Nail Polish Why people think it works: This folklore method follows the same reasoning as the petroleum jelly technique. If you completely cover the tick in nail polish, it will start to suffocate and give up its grip. Smothering a tick with nail polish is just as ineffective, if not more so. Needham determined  that once the nail polish hardened, the tick became immobilized and was therefore unable to retreat from the host. If you coat a tick with nail polish, you are simply securing it in place. Pour Rubbing Alcohol on It Why people think it works: Maybe because they read it in Readers Digest? Were not sure of their source for this tidbit, but Readers Digest has claimed ticks hate the taste of rubbing alcohol. Perhaps they think a tick doused in rubbing alcohol will loosen its grip in order to spit and cough in disgust? However, rubbing alcohol isnt without merit when it comes to removing ticks. It is good practice to clean the affected area with rubbing alcohol to prevent infection of the tick bite wound. But that, according to Dr. Needham, is the sole benefit of putting rubbing alcohol on a tick. It does nothing to convince the tick to go. Unscrew It Why people think it works: The theory here is that by grabbing and twisting the tick, it will somehow be forced to lose its grip and pop free of your skin. Dr. Elisa McNeill of Texas AM University has an amusing retort for this tick removal method – tick mouthparts are not threaded (like screws)! You cannot unscrew a tick. The reason a tick can maintain such a good hold on your skin is because it has lateral barbs extending from its mouthparts to anchor it in place. Hard ticks also produce a cement of sorts to fasten themselves down. So all that twisting isnt going to get you anywhere. If you twist an embedded tick, you will most likely succeed in separating its body from its head, and the head will remain stuck in your skin where it can become infected. Now that you know the wrong ways to remove ticks, learn how to remove a tick safely and effectively (from the Centers for Disease Control). Or better yet, follow these  tips for avoiding ticks so you never have to remove one from your skin. Sources Evaluation of Five Popular Methods of Tick Removal, Glen R. Needham, Ph.D., Ohio State University. Journal of Pediatrics, Vol. 75, No. 6, June 1985.Physicians Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance, 6th edition, by Jerome Goddard.Tick Removal, Centers for Disease Control website. Accessed online May 27, 2014.Ticks and Tick Bites, Dr. Elisa McNeill, Texas AM University. Accessed online May 27, 2014.Tick Bits, Kansas State University. Accessed online May 27, 2014.

TBA Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

TBA - Essay Example I had trouble listening to the speaker that day. As such, I had to identify the barrier that influenced my lack of listening during the presentation. Misinterpretation and attachment to personal beliefs and values were the two significant barriers to effective listening that day. Misinterpretation is a primary cause of listening barrier during communication. In most cases, our thought force us to interpret messages in a manner that was intended by the speaker (McPheat, 2011). Misinterpretation often leads to misunderstanding the speaker’s message and may directly lead to a lack of listening to the speaker. When we add an interpretation to the speaker’s word, we introduce sources of error in the communication. Misinterpretation may have contributed to my inability to listen to the speaker on the preventive measure of HIV/AIDS. According to my interpretation, I thought that the speaker meant that abstinence is the only way to prevent the spread of the diseases. Personally, I knew that there were other possible measures as well. The fact that I interrupted the speaker wrongly led to my lack of listening. I found myself doing other stuff, browsing my phone instead of listening to the speaker. There particular facts about the speaker’s message that I misinterpreted. Firstly, the speaker meant that among the many possible preventive strategies, abstinence was the best. This does not mean that there are no other measures. Secondly, abstinence should the first step in ensuring we stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It was clear that the misinterpretation contributed significantly to my inability to listen to the speaker. However, there are particular approaches that can help overcome misinterpretation as a barrier to effective listening. If I could have used these strategies, then I would have successful overcome the problem of lack of listening. Developing the habit of asking for

Economic, Health, and Demographic data of United States and China Research Paper

Economic, Health, and Demographic data of United States and China - Research Paper Example These include pollution, particularly in some of the most densely populated areas, particularly as a reliance on automobiles (as seen in the Western world) and other technologies continues to grow alongside the economy (Yueh, 2010). Additionally, there is a high level of income poverty in China, which could pose a challenge as nationals may not have the spending power to continue to increase the strength of the internal markets (Yueh, 2010). It has also been noted that recent years have seen a decrease in the speed of Chinese economic growth, which may make it difficult to overtake the U.S. in terms of GDP (Yueh, 2010), which may be linked to the global economic downturn or one of the factors outlined above. United States Currently, the U.S. has the world’s largest economy for a nation. There are several reasons for the strength of the U.S. economy. One of these is that it has a high level of natural resources, which can therefore be exported for profit (Wallace, 2010). Additi onally, there is a strong infrastructure in place which allows high productivity, good services and general well-being (Wallace, 2010). The U.S. is also highly involved in international trading, particularly with the EU, China and Japan (Wallace, 2010). There are weaknesses, however, which may continue to cause problems for the U.S. economy. One of these is the current unemployment rate, which is far exceeding historic rates and may continue to grow (Wallace, 2010). Additionally, as the largest economic force, the U.S. was hit particularly hard by the 2007-2008 economic downturn, causing a drop in GDP and having an additional effect on productivity and employment within the country (Wallace, 2010). Additionally, a high reliance on natural resources like oil and gas may cause problems in the future, as these are evidently limited in their capacity to provide financial stability due to their finiteness (Wallace, 2010). Health China China has a fairly strong health profile, with an ave rage age at mortality at 74 years old, and infant mortality at an all-time low. There are still a number of health problems in mainland China, however. One of these is smoking-related illnesses, with about 350 million people currently smoking and no major government interest in preventing smoking uptake (WHO, 2010). Additionally, there are a number of women’s health and sexual health problems which are associated with a lower level of acceptance of sex education and contraception advice in China (WHO, 2010). Additionally, there is a high level of malnutrition still present in China, mostly affecting those who live in rural areas (WHO, 2010). This brings the mortality rate up, and can lead to further health problems. However, this issue of malnutrition is being tackled by the Chinese government and aims to be eradicated at some point in the near future (Bloom et al, 2004), which may improve the overall health profile of the People’s Democratic Republic of China further and bring it more in line with that of Western countries. Additionally, China has an extremely affordable healthcare system, whereby the annual cost is around $7 and only a small proportion of this is paid by the patient, which means that there may be significant increases in China’s health after the system has been in place a few years longer (Bloom et al, 2004). United States The average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78.5, which is higher than China but is much lower than that of other industrialized

Project Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Project Management - Essay Example Henry Fayol significantly contributed to the development of strategic management techniques in the construction industry through establishing five functions of management. Planning was the first function of management which up to date is fundamental to the success of an organization. Cole observes that all the aspects of manufacturing depend on the initial plan to a large extent. It involves conducting an analysis of the present situation of an organization, as well as its future. After this analysis, the managers set the strategies for accomplishment of the organizational goals that are based on where the management would like the organization to be in future. Planning continues through out the life of the organization especially due to the fact that changes may be necessary so that an organization can cope with the dynamics of the operating environment. In other words, planning helps the managers to strategize to come up with solutions to emerging issues. It is important for the ma nagers to deal with challenges facing the business as well as the utilization of opportunities for the success of the organization. Bradford observes that strategic planning is the practice whereby an organization develops its course of action to accomplish upcoming objectives. The managers are in charge of evaluating the operating environment and the internal factors that affect business through strategic planning to ensure that the organizational goals are accomplished. This involves conducting a SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis to ensure that the business remains on track. ... Planning continues through out the life of the organization especially due to the fact that changes may be necessary so that an organization can cope with the dynamics of the operating environment. In other words, planning helps the managers to strategize to come up with solutions to emerging issues. It is important for the managers to deal with challenges facing the business as well as the utilization of opportunities for the success of the organization. Bradford (2000) observes that strategic planning is the practice whereby an organization develops its course of action to accomplish upcoming objectives. The managers are in charge of evaluating the operating environment and the internal factors that affect business through strategic planning to ensure that the organizational goals are accomplished. This involves conducting a SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis to ensure that the business remains on track (Cole, 2003). Managers in the construction and manu facturing industries have a role to play in ensuring that just in time deliveries are accomplished. Modern production is demand driven and therefore planning is necessary to ensure customer satisfaction. Egan emphasized on customer focus as an important aspect in regard to the success of the construction industry. Adoption of Egan’s theory of customer focus has significantly contributed to the emergence of just in time deliveries in the construction industry whereby contractors deliver the product before customers get anxious about their needs. Organizing is the second among Fayol’s functions of management in which the managers prepare for implementation of the plan. This is accomplished through evaluating and allocating the available resources to aid in the

Book Vs Film: The Clockwork Orange

Book Vs Film: The Clockwork Orange Glenn DW will tell us something about the book then we will give you a short summary of the book, then I will give you some information about the author. After that glenn VH show us some differences between the book and the movie. And for ending we will show you a fragment. We are going to discuss the book and the movie A Clockwork Orange. The first thing we want to say, is that the book is very hard to read. There are a lot of hard words in it and Alex and his three friends speak a dialect, called nadsat. Its the teenage vocabulary of the future. Glenn Vanhaeren also read the book in Dutch and it was also very difficult to read according to him, even in Dutch. because they use a lot of words that nobody understands. In the Dutch version of the book is a list with all the explanations of these words, in the English version there isnt. A few examples: To viddy is to see A droog is a friend Short summary A clockwork orange is a story about a young teenager named Alex living in near-future England. Alex leads a small gang of teenage criminals, Dim, Pete, and Georgie are the other members. They do things like robbing and beating men and raping women. Alex and his friends spend a lot of their time at the Korova Milkbar, thats an establishment that serves milk laced with drugs, such milk is called Milk-plus. Alex begins his narrative from the Milk bar, where the boys sit around drinking. When Alex and his gang leave the bar, they go on a crime. Their last crime was when they broke into an old womans house. She calls the police, and before Alex can get away, Dim hits him in the eye with a chain and runs away with the others. The police found Alex on the ground and take him to their office, where he later heard that the woman he beat and raped during the earlier robbery has died. Now hes become a murderer. Alex is sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He befriends the prison chaplain, who notices Alexs interest in the Bible. The chaplain lets Alex read in the chapel while listening to classical music, because Alex likes classical music. On one day Alex is selected as the first candidate for an experimental treatment called Ludovicos Technique, a form of brainwashing that incorporates associative learning. After being injected with a substance that makes him dreadfully sick, the doctors force Alex to watch exceedingly violent movies. In this way, Alex comes to associate violence with the nausea and headaches he experiences from the shot. The process takes two weeks to complete. After this process Alex can no longer enjoy classical music, which he has always associated with violence. After two years in prison, Alex is released, a harmless human being incapable of vicious acts. Soon, however, Alex finds hes not only harmless but also defenceless, as his earlier victims begin to take revenge on him. His old friend Dim and an old enemy named Billyboy are both police officers now, and they take the opportunity to settle old scores. They drive him to a field in the country, beat him, and leave him in the rain. When they leave him Alex goes to a nearby cottage and knocks on the door, begging for help. The man living there lets him in and gives him food and a room for the night. Alex recognizes him from two years ago as the man whose wife he raped, but the man does not recognize Alex. This man, F. Alexander, is a political dissident. When he hears Alexs story, he thinks he can use Alex to incite public outrage against the State. He and three of his colleagues develop a plan for Alex to make several public appearances. When they are speaking to each other He berates the men in  nadsat, which arouses the suspicion of F. Alexander, who still remembers the strange language spoken by the teenagers who raped his wife. Based on F. Alexanders suspicion, the men change their plans. They lock Alex in an apartment and blast classical music through the wall, hoping to drive Alex to suicide so they can blame the government. Alex does, in fact, hurl himself out of an attic window, but the fall doesnt kill him. While he lies in the hospital, unconscious, a political struggle ensues, but the current administration survives. State doctors undo Ludovicos Technique and restore Alexs old vicious self in exchange for Alexs endorsement. The author Life Anthony Burgess was an English author; he was borne in Manchester in 1917 and died in London in 1993. His sister Muriel died in 1918 Four days later his mother Elizabeth died at the age of 30 on November 1918, Burgess was one year old. After the death of his mother, Burgess was raised by his aunt, because his dad was unable to raise him. You could say that Burgess hasnt had a normal youth. Burgess did military service during WW II. He left the army in 1946, and became teacher. In 1954, Burgess joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher. But most of his time, he wrote and worked at his novels. At his death he was a multi-millionaire, leaving a Europe-wide property portfolio of houses and apartments. Work His real name is John Burgess Wilson, but he published under the pen name Anthony Burgess. In total, Burgess wrote more than ten novels. He wasnt only a novel writer, he also wrote screenplays (eg. The Spy Who Loved Me, a James Bond movie). Except from being active in the world of literacy, Burgess was also musician and composed regularly. Several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio. He wrote The Clockwork orange in 1962. This is Burgess most famous novel. The film version of A Clockwork orange was released in 1971. 2) The novel Main Theme Burgess believed that the freedom to choose is the big human attribute, This belief provides the central argument of A Clockwork Orange, where Alex must follow the Ludovico treatment. When the State removes Alexs power to choose his own moral course of action, Alex becomes nothing more than a thing. The chaplain, the novels clearest advocate for Christian morals, addresses the dangers of Alexs Reclamation Treatment when he tells Alex that goodness is something chosen. Characters The main character of The Clockwork Orange is Alex. He is the anti-hero of the novel. Alex likes to name himself Alexander the Large; this was later the basis for Alexs claimed surname De Large in the 1971 film. Alex is the leader of a gang, the tree other member of his gang are George, Pete and Dim. The rival of Alex (and his gang) is Billyboy. Billyboy also haves a gang, these two gangs often fight with each other. Dr. Brodsky is a doctor who is the founder of the Ludovico technique. There is also another doctor, Dr. Branom. This is Brodskys colleague and co-founder of the Ludovico technique. He appears friendly towards Alex at first, before forcing him into the theatre to be psychologically tortured. Another important character in the novel is the prison chaplain. This is the only character who is truly concerned about Alexs welfare There are many other, rather small characters. E.g. The people who are terrorized by Alex and his gang. 3) Book vs Film Differences Age There are plenty differences between the book and the film. One of the big differences is the age of the characters. In the book the characters are younger as the characters in the film. I will give you two specific examples of these differences. The girl that is about to be raped by Billy Boys gang is ten years old in the book while looking at the film it is a young woman which is about to be raped by Billy Boys. After meeting two ten-year-old girls named Marty and Sonietta in a record shop, Alex takes home these girls and rapes them. This happens in the Book but in the film, the girls are about 14 years old. Although these differences dont change the story or the meaning of the story, they do change the way you look at the story. If you would see a ten-year-old girl which is being raped by a 15 year old young man, who looks like a man of at least 18 years old in my opinion, it is not realistic enough. Unlike a film, a book it is not being visualised for you and so you dont see it. Then its shocking to read that this girl is so young. Ending The ending of the story is also different between the book and the film because the last chapter, which is chapter 21, of the book was not filmed. In this chapter, Alex meets Pete. That was the third member of the original gang. Alex realises that he wishes to do the same, but his violence was an unavoidable product of his youth. The film is ending with a scene where you see a naked girl that is being raped and Alex saying I was cured, all right. Overall there are some differences but they have almost no influence on the story. Most of the differences are just some small details. The differences in age are only improving the story and the differences in the music cant even have any influence because you cant hear music when you are reading a book. Although both endings are different the almost say the same and that is that Alex wants to change but because of his violent childhood he will never be completely cured. Crucial Scene The scene takes place just before Alex is released. The Ludovico threatment has ended and it has worked. In a short presentation the doctors want to show what they archieved. (show part of movie from minute 81 -> 86) (read book pg. 93 95; all of us) Conclusion The book is hard to read, as mentioned before. The movie of the book is excellent, each chapter in the book is a scene in the movie. Although, there is a lot of explicit content in the movie, the story is good and there is a message in it. Thank you for your attention Euthanasia in Australia: Arguments For and Against Euthanasia in Australia: Arguments For and Against McKenzie Maviso â€Å"Research arguments for and against Euthanasia in Australia. Is it likely to be decriminalised in the future or not? By what rationale?† Innovations and technologies in medical sciences throughout the history have focused primarily on disease preventions to achieve better health outcomes. However, physicians are often confronted with extreme challenges in life-and-death circumstances, particularly with patients who are suffering from prolonged and debilitating illnesses. To alleviate such suffering, euthanasia or physician-assisted death is sometimes considered upon request from patients. While it remains a globally controversial issue in medical practice, it is performed legally in some countries as an optional medical intervention. This essay will examine the main arguments for and against the practice of euthanasia in Australia. It will then argue that euthanasia is not likely be legalised because of strong oppositions relating to medical code of ethics, political objections and legal justice system perspectives. Therapeutic interventions for patients suffering from chronic and prolonged debilitating illnesses can be challenging in medical practice. With the focus to provide best possible intervention, physicians often consider various interventions for patients to put an end to pain and suffering. In some cases, patients who are diagnosed with incurable illnesses, such as cancer, which often continues to its devastating state can be unbearable for them and their family members (Frost, Sinha, Gilbert, 2014). Similarly, in such difficult situations, euthanasia is often considered upon the request of the patients to end life intentionally from their poor health conditions. Euthanasia, a Greek word meaning a â€Å"good† or â€Å"gentle death† whereby a patient has control over death and is often viewed as a medical intervention performed by physicians to end life (Boudreau Somerville, 2014; Devakirubai Gnanadurai, 2014; Starr, 2014). Furthermore, Levy, et al., (2013) explain tha t it can be â€Å"active† in order to actively end a life, while â€Å"passive† is based on the deliberate suspension of medical treatments to hasten death. Euthanasia can also be performed as â€Å"voluntary† upon patients’ request, or â€Å"involuntary† without the permission of the patient (Adan, 2013). It is often considered upon the perception that the debilitating condition is certain to suffer extremely, and that this suffering can only be resolved by euthanasia upon the patient’s consent. For instance, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Oregon in the United States (US) have legitimate control measures for physician-assisted death, especially by considering patients’ conditions and choices of care (Levett, 2011; Pereira, 2011). Thus, euthanasia is often conducted under specific situations when the devastating illness prevails over the health of patients that causes unbearable discomforts and sufferings. There are two primary reasons that qualify physicians to perform euthanasia in relation to patient’s poor health status. Firstly, autonomy in patients are perceived as important and need to be recognized in any health care practice. Autonomy is described as an individual with full self-control over mind, body and capable of making critical decisions and choices (Frost, et al., 2014). Obviously, patients are primary decision-makers that have the rights to access health care services where appropriate. Respect for autonomy thus, is considered as a main reason in health care to allow patients to have complete control when making decisions for euthanasia (Sjostrand, Helgesson, Eriksson, Juth, 2013). Furthermore, Ebrahimi, (2012) claims that arguments supporting euthanasia are based on the concept of autonomy and self-determination enabling patients to make critical decisions without impacting others. Conversely, physicians are to respect the rights of patient should a choice is m ade regarding medical care. For instance, in devastating medical situations when suffering becomes intolerable, autonomy must be acknowledged for patients requesting euthanasia intervention (Onwuteaka-Philipsen, et al., 2010; Trankle, 2014). As a result, recognizing the autonomy that lead to make critical choices and decisions relating to poor illnesses are often crucial during the course of care for both physicians and the patients. Secondly, constant pain and suffering experienced by patients with particular debilitating illness is another primary reason supporting the argument for euthanasia or physician-assisted death. Prolonged discomforts and sufferings have always been the basis for advocates in favour for legalization. Any therapeutic measures administered to patients must not be focused only on recovery processes, but also to enhance reliefs and comforts that are revealed in the sufferings (Lavoie, et al., 2014; Kucharska, 2013). In the same way, Frost, et al., (2014) maintain that to avoid terrible pain and suffering is an obvious indication why euthanasia may be justified. Although, suffering is a main reason used to explain euthanasia, Karlsson, Milberg and Strang (2012) further claim that patients with anticipatory fears, sufferings, and uncertainty in relation to the continuity of treatments often contemplate on this intervention. Providing therapeutic care to patients who are struggling amidst thei r illnesses can be challenging, but for some patients, physician-assisted death is a merciful and honourable act that relieves intense suffering (Boudreau Somerville, 2014). Nevertheless, Devakirubai and Gnanadurai (2014) argue that pain is not the only reason for some patients with poor prognosis requesting death, but often symptoms that may facilitate unbearable experiences such as: persistent vomiting, incontinence, fatigue, discomfort and paralysis may also influence request for euthanasia. Therefore, patients who are undergoing extreme sufferings to the extent of desiring for euthanasia deserve consented death, and it is physicians’ legal obligation to fulfil a desired intervention within their scope of practice. Although euthanasia is regarded as an alternative treatment in certain prolonged illnesses, there are several main arguments that oppose this medical intervention. These arguments against euthanasia are established due to the following reasons; medical code of ethics, political objections, and legal justice system. First of all, medical ethics often enable medical professionals to provide care within the scope of their practice without causing harm to patients, instead assist them to achieve optimal health benefits. Myers (2014) claims that medical ethics are often determined by how physicians assist patients to cope with preventive and curative treatments during the practice. In every aspect of health care, physicians’ are to protect their patients and provide care that is based on mutual trust and confidence that do not interfere with their code of ethics. In addition, physician-patient relationship is built on common trust, in which physicians’ expertise and knowledg e are fully exercised to improve patients’ wellbeing without prejudice and negligence (Myers, 2014; Malpas, et al., 2014). However, purposeful termination of life for patients suffering from terminal illnesses, may undermine trust and confidence of physicians, and eventually may limit the protection offered to patients during the care (MacLeod, et al., 2012; Doyal Doyal, 2001). Despite devastating health conditions, medical ethics should not be neglected during medical interventions, and focused on achieving satisfactory health outcomes for patients. Therefore, medical practices that undermines the value of patients’ health rights and wishes can be regarded as unethical within medical context. Another argument focuses on political objections in relation to euthanasia. Although, in some countries, legislative reforms have been passed by the government to permit euthanasia, its intervention is associated with a strong political agenda opposing its practice within the medical landscape, such as in Australia. For example, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly approved the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act in 1995, was aimed to assist terminally ill patients the right to request voluntary euthanasia (Nicol, Tiedemann, Valiquet, 2013). Unfortunately, the bill has triggered intense criticism and was condemned by the federal parliament for several reasons. One of the reason as being â€Å"culturally† unacceptable, particularly for elderly indigenous seeking medical assistance (Kerridge Mitchell, 1996). This means that such law will prevent indigenous elderly population to seek appropriate care, and would eventually deny them from accessing basic health services. Anot her main reason that opposes the bill to legalise euthanasia was the firm opposition from ‘conservative’ liberals and key members of Labor’s right-faction in federal parliament, and that politicians need to have adequate information and knowledge in order to make good public policy (Plumb, 2014). A well-informed and collective decisions are of high importance to provide practical legislative policies for euthanasia. Regardless of overwhelming public support to permit euthanasia, Trankle (2014) affirms that it has remained illegal in Australia since the bill was dismissed. Furthermore, Plumb, (2014) argues that medical and legal experts are against its legitimacy, and although, attempts to legalise the practice in South Australia and Tasmania are apparent, the law on voluntary euthanasia is limited for changes in the future. Besides, professional organizations such as the Australian Medical Association (AMA) does not have a strong position regarding bills on eutha nasia consequently of different views and opinions shown from medical practitioners. This has also made the federal parliament to provide rationales that rejected the likelihood to legalise euthanasia in Australia (Plumb, 2014; Nicol, et al., 2013). Legalising euthanasia would likely to result in serious effects by changing medical practice, and that would affect physicians’ clinical roles. The law against euthanasia still remains and thus, it is unlikely to be decriminalised in the future. The other argument is that the deliberate termination of life due to prolonged medical condition may be unethical and against criminal laws. Most importantly, life must be valued and assisting death for terminally ill patients would require legal justice systems to be effected. According to Norwood, Kimsma and Battin (2009), physicians who conduct euthanasia would eventually lead to patients being killed against their will. In addition, active intervention which has a primary intention of killing, despite the patient’s consent is a criminal offence and is a homicide (McLellan, 2013; Ebrahimi, 2012). Similarly, MacLeod, Wilson, and Malpas (2012) claim that assisting in death with or without consent and regardless of the medical situation is a crime. , because of the integral value of human life. Furthermore, Plumb (2014) claims that euthanasia is not likely to be legalised, it is against criminal law and physicians must argue in the court that their conduct was â€Å"reasonabl e†. Often killing an innocent human life is ethically wrong in itself thereby respect awarded to human lives would be undermined (Kucharska, 2013; Varelius, 2013). Therefore, debilitating illnesses leading to death should be accepted as a natural event, rather than prematurely instigated by any medical interventions. Furthermore, arguments for and against euthanasia have continued to persist controversially in public, medical and justice sectors. These arguments have led to slippery slope issues, especially in relation to patients who are suffering from devastating health conditions. It has been argued that assisting death to patients with undergoing sufferings would mean setting precedence and increasing the rate for unnecessary death (Shah Mushtaq, 2014). Despite these arguments, some countries have certain laws that permit euthanasia, particularly for patients with terminal health status. For instance, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have guidelines and procedures established that specifically allow euthanasia with respect to their legal system (Pereira, 2011). In addition, the State of Oregon in the United States (US) has passed â€Å"Death with Dignity Act† to conduct euthanasia under strict criteria, considering patients’ consent (Blakely Carson, 2013). This law has enab led Oregon the legal responsibilities for physician-assisted death. However, legalising euthanasia in Australia will not likely to benefit all patients, but would continue to spark relevant arguments from some medical professionals, the federal parliament, and legal justice systems. According to Plumb (2014) there are controversies challenging the proposed legislation for euthanasia, and sufficient evidence is needed to make reasonable decisions. Therefore, the possibility of legalising physician-assisted death is seemed limited in the future as a result of differing views shown in parliamentary debates. To conclude, euthanasia still remains as a debatable issue around the world. It has generated serious discussions within the public, medical practice, politics and legal justice system. Although, it was considered an alternative medical intervention, general arguments against its legality seem to focus on undermining the patient-physician trust and confidence, thereby altering the integrity of medical ethics. Moreover, medical practice that have been motivated by empathetic care, reluctance to amend and legislate bills with respect for human dignity, and considering euthanasia as a criminal offense have limited the probability of decriminalisation in Australia. In spite of strong opposition on euthanasia, a collaborative and practical policy frameworks on palliative and end-of-life care are therefore, necessarily required from the health care system, the federal government, and the legal justice system to strengthen and safeguard medical practice. Word Counts: 2025 References Adan, M. (2013). Euthanasia: Whose Right is it Anyway? Ohio State Undergraduate Review, 1-9. Retrieved from http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001context=muna_adan Blakely, B., Carson, L. (2013). What Can Oregon Teach Australia about Dying? Journal of Politics and Law, 6(2), 30-47. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/jpl.v6n2p30 Boudreau, D. J., Somerville, M. A. (2014). Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: A Phycicians Ethicists Perspectives. Medicolegal Bioethics, 4, 1-12. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/MB.S59303 Devakirubai, E., Gnanadurai, A. (2014). Euthanasia An Overview with Indian Nursing Perspective. Asian J. Nursing Education Research, 4(1), 56-60. Retrieved from http://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?target=ijor:ajnervolume=4issue=1article=012 Doyal, L., Doyal, L. (2001). Why Active Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide Should be Legalised. BMJ, 323, 1079-1080. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1121585/pdf/1079.pdf Ebrahimi, N. (2012). The Ethics of Euthanasia. Australian Medical Student Journal, 3(1), 73-75. Retrieved from http://www.amsj.org/archives/2066 Frost, T. D., Sinha, D., Gilbert, J. B. (2014). Should Assisted Dying be Legalised? Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 9, 1-6. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1747-5341-9-3 Karlsson, M., Milberg, A., Strang, P. (2012). Suffering and Euthanasia: A Qualitative Study of Dying Cancer Patients Perspectives. Supportive Care in Cancer, 20(5), 1065-1071. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00520-011-1156-9 Kerridge, I. H., Mitchell, K. R. (1996). The Legislation of Active Voluntary Euthanasia in Australia: Will the Slippery Slope Prove Fatal? Journal of Medical Ethics, 22, 273-278. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jme.22.5.273 Kucharska, E. (2013). Euthanasia Is it a Murder or Charity? Clinical Perspective. E-Theologos, 4(1), 97-108. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/etheo-2013-0009 Lavoie, M., Godin, G., Vezina-Im, L.-A., Blondeau, D., Martineau, I., Roy, L. (2014). Effect of Knowing Patients Wishes and Health Profession on Euthanasia. Palliative Care Medicine, 4(1), 1-6. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2165-7386.1000169 Levett, C. (2011). Dying with Dignity The Case for End of Life Choices. Australian Nursing Journal, 11(8), 48. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/855629200?accountid=10382 Levy, T. B., Azar, S., Huberfeld, R., Siegel, A. M., Strous, R. D. (2013). Attitudes towards Euthanasia Assisted Suicide: A Compasrison between Psychiatrists other Psycicians. Bioethics, 27(7), 402-408. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2012.01968.x MacLeod, R. D., Wilson, D. M., Malpas, P. (2012). Assisted or Hastened Death: The Healthcare Practitioners Dilemma. Global Journal of Health Science, 4(6), 87-98. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1081341961?accountid=10382 Malpas, J. P., Wilson, M. K., Rae, N., Johnson, M. (2014). Why do older people oppose physician-assisted dying? A Qualitative Study. Palliative Medicine, 28(4), 352-359. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0269216313511284 McLellan, I. (2013). The End of Life Issues Part 2. Indian Journal of Respiratory Care, 2(2), 258-261. Myers, J. (2014). Medical Ethics: Context is the Key Word. International Journal of Clinical Medicine, 5, 1030-1045. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijcm.2014.516134 Nicol, J., Tiedemann, M., Valiquet, D. (2013). Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: International Experiences. Library of Parliament, 14-15. Retrieved from http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/2011-67-e.pdf Norwood, F., Kimsma, G., Battin, M. P. (2009). Vulnerability and the Slipery Slope at the End-of-Life: A Qualitative Study of Euthanasia, General Practice and Home Death in The Netherlands. Oxford Journals, 472-480. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fampra/cmp065 Onwuteaka-Philipsen, B. D., Rurup, M. L., Pasman, H., Roseline, W., van der, A. H. (2010, July). The Last Phase of Life: Who Requests and Who Recieves Euthanasia or Physician-assisted Suicide? Medical Care, 48(7), 596-603. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0b013e3181dbea75 Pereira, J. (2011). Legalizing Euthanasia or Assisted Suicide: The Illusion of Safeguards and Controls. Current Oncology, 18(2), 38-45. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070710/ Plumb, A. (2014). The Future of Euthanasia Politics in the Australian State Parliaments. Australian Parliamentary Review, 29(1), 67-86. Retrieved from http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=513534504481857;res=IELHSS Shah, A., Mushtaq, A. (2014). The Right to Live or Die? A Perspective on Voluntary Euthanasia. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, 30(5), 1159-1160. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.12669/pjms.305.5777 Sjostrand, M., Helgesson, G., Eriksson, S., Juth, N. (2013). Autonomy-based Arguments Against Physician-assisted Suicide Euthanasia: A Critique. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 16(2), 225-230. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-9365-5 Trankle, S. A. (2014). Decisions that Hasten Death: Double Effect and the Experiences of Physicians in Australia. BMC Medical Ethics, 15(26), 1-15. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-15-26 Varelius, J. (2013). Voluntary Euthanasia, Physician-assisted Suicide, and the Right to Do Wrong. HEC Forum, 25(3), 229-243. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10730-013-9208-2 1

Online Gaming in South Korea Essay examples -- Asia Technology Essays

Online Gaming in South Korea The rise of online gaming in South Korea has brought improved economic prospects and notoriety, but at what price? Beginning in the late 1990’s South Korea has quickly become the undisputed king of the online gaming world. Gaming and the culture that has grown up around it are now the defining aspects of the lives of many South Korea youths. While this eruption of online gaming has created revenue for the country and made South Korea a global hotspot for international gamers it has also been a cause of concern in much the same way excessive television viewing and game playing has in the U.S. A number of factors contribute to the huge percentage of online-gamers in South Korea. A fast internet connection is a necessity and South Korea is, per capita, the most wired country in the world. Over 60% of households have broadband – compared to 20% in the United States (Kim 2). South Korea’s small geographical size and high population density make running the required cabling an easier task than it would be in the U.S. Broadband access in South Korea is, furthermore, the cheapest in the world at $25 per month (Kim 2). Additionally, in South Korea console gaming isn’t nearly as popular as it is in the U.S. and elsewhere. Console systems – Playstation, Nintendo, Sega – are by and large of Japanese origin. Due to past discord between the two countries – Korean being a colony under the rather, at the time, iron-fisted Japanese – Japanese imports have been both officially and culturally unpopular (Herz 3). Without consoles to take away from the base of game players, in South Korea unlike the U.S., online computer gaming is the dominant form of electronic gaming. Though more than half the homes in South Korea a... ...bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2499957.stm) Fulford, Benjamin. â€Å"Korea’s Weird Wired World† Forbes Online 21 July 2003. October 28, 2003. (http://www.forbes.com/technology/free_forbes/2003/0721/092.html?partner=newscom) Kim, Jin David. â€Å"Lucrative Lessons from Online Game Players† International Herald Tribune 12 March 2002. October 28, 2003. (http://www.iht.com/articles/89432.html) Ihlwan, Moon. â€Å"The Champs in Online Games† Business Week Online 23 July 2001. October 28, 2003. (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_30/b3742142.htm) Electro Lobby. â€Å"E-Sport: Gaming Goes Pro – Interview.† Unknown. October 28, 2003 (http://www.tnc.net/el/el01/progaming.html) Related Links: http://www.worldcybergames.com/ - home site of the World Cyber Games http://www.ncsoft.net/ - NCsoft, makers of Lineage http://www.blizzard.com/ - Blizzard Inc., makers of Starcraft

Hong Kong Style

HONG KONG STYLE An Interview with Victor Fung BY JOAN MAGRETTA UPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT is Working its Way onto the strategic agendas of CEOs in an expanding list of industries, from autos to personal computers to fashion retailing. Propelling that change is the restructuring of global competition. As companies focus on their core activities and outsource the rest, their success increasingly depends on their ability to control what happens in the value chain outside their own boundaries. In the 1980s, the focus was on supplier partnerships to improve cost and quality.In today's faster-paced markets, the focus has shifted to innovation, flexibility, and speed. Enter Li et) Fung, Hong Kong's largest export trading company and an innovator in the development of supply chain management. On behalf of its customers, primarily American and European retailers, Li et) Fung works with an ever expanding network PORTRAIT BY LANCE HIDY 103 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE of thousands of su ppliers around the globe, sourcing clothing and other consumer goods ranging from toys to fashion accessories to luggage.Chairman Victor Fung sees the company as part of a new breed of professionally managed, focused enterprises that draw on Hong Kong's expertise in distribution-process technology-a host of informationintensive service functions including product development, sourcing, financing, shipping, handling, and logistics. Founded in 1906 in southern China by Victor Fung's grandfather, Li &) Fung was the first Chinese-owned export company at a time when tbe China trade was controlled by foreign commercial houses. In the early 1970s, Victor was teaching at the Harvard Business School, and his younger brother, William, was a newly minted HarvardM. B. A. The two young men were called home from the United States by their father to breathe new life into the company. Since then, the brothers have led Li et? Fung through a series of transformations. In this interview with HBR edito r-at-large foan Magretta, Victor Fung describes how Li &) Fung has made the transition from buying agent to supply chain manager, from the old economy to the new, from traditional Chinese family conglomerate to innovative public company. Victor and William Fung are creating a new kind of multinational, one that remains entrepreneurial despite its growing size and scope.Victor Fung is also chairman of a privately held retailing arm of the company, which focuses on joint ventures with Toys R Us and the Circle K convenience-store chain in Hong Kong. He is also chairman of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and of Prudential Asia. How do you define the diHerence between what Li & Fung does today-supply chain managementand the trading business founded by your grandfather in 1906? ing which quotas have been used up in Hong Kong, for example, tells you when you have to start buying from Taiwan. Understanding products was also more complex. We knew that in Taiwan the synthetics were be tter, ut that Hong Kong was the place to go for cottons. We could provide a package from the whole region rather than a single product from Hong Kong. By working with a larger number of countries, we were able to assemble components; we call this â€Å"assortment packing. † Say I sell a tool kit to a major discount chain. I could buy the spanners from one country and the screwdrivers from another and put together a product package. That has som. e value in it-not great value, but some. In the second stage, we took the company's sourcing-agent strategy one step further and became a manager and deliverer of manufacturing programs.In the old model, the customer would say, â€Å"This is the item I want. Please go out and find the best place to buy it for me. † The new model works this way. The Limited, one of our big customers, comes to us and says, â€Å"For next season, this is what we're thinking about-this type of look, these colors, these quantities. Can you come up with a production program? † Starting with their designers' sketches, we research the market to find the right type of yarn and dye swatches to match the colors. We take product concepts and realize them in prototypes. Buyers can then look at the samples and say, â€Å"No, I don't eally like that, I like this. Can you do more of this? † We then create an entire program for the season, specifying the product mix and the schedule. We contract for all the resources. We work with facto- When my grandfather started the company in Canton, 90 years ago during the Ching dynasty, his â€Å"value added† was that he spoke EngUsh. In those days, it took three months to get to China hy hoat from the West; a letter would take a month. No one at the Chinese factories spoke English, and the American merchants spoke no Chinese. As an interpreter, my grandfather's commission was 15%. Continuing through my father's generation, Li &Fung was basically a broker, charging a fee to put buyers and sellers together. But as an intermediary, the company was squeezed between the growing power of the buyers and the factories. Our margins slipped to 10%, then 5%, then 3%. When I returned to Hong Kong in 1976 after teaching at Harvard Business School, my friends warned me that in ten years buying agents like Li & Fung would he extinct. â€Å"Trading is a sunset industry,† they all said. My brother and I felt we could turn the business into something different, and so we took it through several stages of development. In the first stage, we cted as w^hat I would call a regional sourcing agent and extended our geographic reach by establishing offices in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. Our knowledge of the region had value for customers. Most hig buyers could manage their own sourcing if they needed to deal only with Hong Kong-they'd know which ten factories to deal with and wouldn't need any help. But dealing with the whole region was more complex. In textiles, quotas g overn world trade. Know104 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE ries to plan and monitor production so we can ensure quality and on-time delivery.This strategy of delivering manufacturing programs carried us through the 1980s, but that decade brought us a new challenge – and led to our third stage. As the Asian tigers emerged. Hong Kong became an increasingly expensive and uncompetitive place to manufacture. For example, we completely lost the low-end transistor-radio business to Taiwan and Korea. What saved us was that China began to open up to trade, allowing Hong Kong to fix its cost problem by moving the labor « intensive portion of production across the border into southern China. So for transistor radios we created little its-plastic bags filled with all the components needed to build a radio. Then we shipped the kits to China for assembly. After the labor-intensive work was completed, the finished goods came back to Hong Kong for final testing and inspection. If you missed a screw you were in trouble: the whole line stopped cold. Breaking up the value chain as we did was a novel concept at the time. We call it â€Å"dispersed manufacturing. † This method of manufacturing soon spread to other industries, giving Hong Kong a new lease on life and also transforming our economy. Between 1979 and 1997, Hong Kong's position as a trading ntity moved from number 21 in the world to number 8. All our manufacturing moved into China, and Hong Kong became a huge service economy with 84% of its gross domestic product coming from services. So dispersed manufacturing means breaking up the value chain and rationalizing where you do things? That's right. Managing dispersed production was a real breakthrough. It forced us to get smart not only about logistics and transportation but also about dissecting the value chain. Consider a popular children's doll-one similar to the Barbie doll. In the early 1980s, w e designed the dolls in Hong Kong, and we also produced the olds because sophisticated machinery was needed to make them. We then shipped the molds to China, where they would shoot the plastic, assemble the doll, paint the figures, make the doll's clothing-all the labor-intensive work. But the doll had to come back to Hong Kong, not just for final testing and inspection but also for packaging. China at that time couldn't deliver the quality we needed for the printing on the boxes. Then we used Hong Kong's welldeveloped banking and transportation infrastructure to distribute the products around the world. You can sec the model clearly: the labor-intensiveHARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 middle portion of the value chain is still done in southern China, and Hong Kong does the front and back ends. Managing dispersed manufacturing, where not everything is done under one roof, t akes a real change of mind-set. But once we figured out how to do it, it became clear that our r each should extend heyond southern China. Our thinking was, for example, if wages arc lower farther inland, let's go there. And so we began what has turned into a con- forced us to get smart about dissecting the value chain. † stant search for new and better sources of supply.Li& Fung made a quantum leap in 1995, nearly doubling our size and extending our geographic scope hy acquiring Inchcape Buying Services. IBS was a large British hong w ith an estahlished network of offices in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The acquisition also brought with it a European customer base that complemented Li &. Fung's predominantly American base. This Hong Kong model of borderless manufacturing has become a new paradigm for the region. Today Asia consists of multiple networks of dispersed manufacturing-high-cost hubs that do the sophisticated planning for regional manufacturing.Bangkok works with the Indochinese peninsula, Taiwan with the Philippines, Seoul with northern China. D ispersed manufacturing is what's behind the boom in Asia's trade and investment statistics in the i99os-companies moving raw materials and semifinished parts around Asia. But the region is still very dependent on the ultimate sources of demand, which are in North America and Western Europe. They start the whole cycle going. What happens when you get a typical order? Say we get an order from a European retailer to produce 10,000 garments. It's not a simple matter of our Korean office sourcing Korean products or ur Indonesian office sourcing Indonesian products. For this customer we might decide to buy yarn from a Korean producer but have it woven and dyed in Taiwan. So we pick the yarn and ship it to Taiwan. The Japanese have the best zippers and buttons, but they manufacture them mostly in China. Okay, so we go to YKK, a big Japanese zipper manufacturer, and we order the right zippers from their Chinese SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE LI & FUNG'S GLOBAL REACH Li & Fung prod uces a truly global product by pulling apart the manufacturing value chain and optimizing each step.Today it has 3 5 offices in 20 countries, but its global reach is expanding rapidly. In 1997, it had revenue of approximately $1. 7 billion. San Francisco Paris Oporto, Portugal San Pedro Sula, Honduras †¢ Brussels †¢ Istanbul †¢ Cairo Mauritius plants. Then we determine that, because of quotas and labor conditions, the best place to make the garments is Thailand. So we ship everything there. And because the customer needs quick delivery, we may divide the order across five factories in Thailand. Effectively, we are customizing the value chain to hest meet the customer's needs. Five weeks after we have received the order, 0,000 garments arrive on the shelves in Europe, all looking like they came from one factory, with colors, for example, perfectly matched. Just think about the logistics and the coordination. This is a nev*? type of value added, a truly global product that has never heen seen hefore. The label may say â€Å"made in Thailand,† but it's not a Thai product. We dissect the manufacturing process and look for the best solution at each step. We're not asking which country can do the best joh overall. Instead, we're pulling apart the value chain and optimizing each step – and we're doing it globally. 106Not only do the benefits outweigh the costs of logistics and transportation, but the higher value added also lets us charge more for our services. We deliver a sophisticated product and we deliver it fast. If you talk to the big global consumer-products companies, they are all moving in this directiontoward heing best on a glohal scale. So the multinational is essentially its own supplychain manager? Yes, exactly. Large manufacturing companies are increasingly doing global supply-chain management, just as Li & Fung does for its retailing customers. That's certainly the case in the auto industry.Today assemhly is the easy par t. The hard part is managing your suppliers and the flow of parts. In retailing, these changes are producing a revolution. For the first time, retailers are really creating produets, not just sitting in their offices with salesman after salesman showing them samples: â€Å"Do you HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE Beijing Dalian Qingdau Shanghai Liuyang New Delhi Karachi Guangzhou . Shantou Dhaka Hanoi f† Bombay Bangalore †¢ Taipei Zhanjiang Bangkok Manila Saipan Colombo JohorBaharu . . Singapore Jakarta want to buy this?Do you want to buy that? † Instead, retailers are participating in the design process. They're now managing suppliers through us and are even reaching down to their suppliers' suppliers. Eventually that translates into much better management of inventories and lower markdowns in the stores. Explain why that translates into lower markdowns for retailers? Companies in consumer-driven, fast-moving m arkets face the prohlem of obsolete inventory with a vengeance. That means there is enormous value in heing able to huy â€Å"closer to the market. † If you can shorten your buying cycle from three onths to five weeks, for example, what you are gaining is eight weeks to develop a better sense of where the market is heading. And so you will end up with substantial savings in inventory markdowns at the end of the selling season. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 Good supply-chain management strips away time and cost from product delivery cycles. Our customers have hecome more fashion driven, working with six or seven seasons a year instead of just two or three. Once you move to shorter product cycles, the prohiem of obsolete inventory increases dramatically.Other businesses are facing the same kind of pressure. With customer tastes changing rapidly and markets segmenting into narrower niches, it's not just fashion products that are becoming increasingly time sensit ive. Several years ago, I had a conversation about ladies fashion garments with Stan Shih, CEO of Acer, the large Taiwan-hased PC manufacturer. I jokingly said, â€Å"Stan, are you going to encroach on our territory? † He said, â€Å"No, no, hut the PC business has the same basic problems you face. Things are changing so fast you don't want to wind up with inventory. You want to plan close to the market. He runs his husiness to cut down the delivery cycle SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE and minimize inventory exposure by assembling PCs in local markets. So what I have to say about supply chain management for fashion products really applies to any product that's time sensitive. Supply chain management is about buying the right things and shortening the delivery cycles. It requires â€Å"reaching into the suppliers† to ensure that certain things happen on time and at the right quality level. Fundamentally, you're not taking the suppliers as a given. The classic supply-chain manager in retailing isMarks ik Spencer. They don't own any factories, but they have a huge team that goes into the factories and works with the management. The Gap also is known for stretching into its suppliers. Can you give me an example of how you reach into the supply chain to shorten the buying cycle? Think about what happens when you outsource manufacturing. The easy approach is to place an order for finished goods and let the supplier worry ahout contracting for the raw materials like fabric and yarn. But a single factory is relatively small and doesn't have much buying power; that is, it is too mall to demand faster deliveries from its suppliers. We come in and look at the whole supply chain. We know the Limited is going to order 100,000 garments, but we don't know the style or the colors yet. The buyer will tell us that five weeks before delivery. The trust between us and our supply network means that we can reserve undycd yarn from the yarn supplier. I can l ock up capacity at the mills for the weaving and dying with the promise that they'll get an order of a specified sizc; five weeks before delivery, we will let them know what colors we want. Then I say the same thing to the factories, â€Å"I on't know the product specs yet, but I have orga- the retailer hold off before having to commit to a fashion trend. It's all about flexibility, response time, small production runs, small minimum-order quantities, and the ability to shift direction as the trends move. Is it also about cost? Yes. At Li & Fung we think about supply chain management as â€Å"tackling the soft $3† in the cost structure. What do we mean hy that? If a typical consumer product leaves the factory at a price of $1, it will invariably end up on retail shelves at $4. Now you can try to squeeze the cost of production own 10 cents or 20 cents per product, hut today you have to be a genius to do that because everybody has been working on that for years and there's not a lot of fat left. It's better to look at the cost that is spread throughout the distribution channels-the soft $3. It offers a bigger target, and if you take 50 cents out, nobody will even know you are doing it. So it's a much easier place to effect savings for our customers. Can you give me an example? Sure. Shippers always want to fill a container to capacity. If you tell a manufacturer, â€Å"Don't fill up the container,† he'll think you're crazy.And if all you care about is the cost of shipping, there's no question you should fill the containers. But if you think instead of the whole value chain as a system, and you're trying to lower the total cost and not just one piece of it, then it may he sm^arter not to fill the containers. Let's say you want to distribute an assortment of ten products, each manufactured hy a different factory, to ten distribution centers. The standard practice would be for each factory to ship full containers of its product. And so those ten cont ainers would then have to go to a consolidator, who would unpack and epack all ten containers before shipping the assortment to the distribution centers. Now suppose instead that you move one container from factory to factory and get each factory to fill just onetenth of the container. Then you ship it with the assortment the customer needs directly to the distribution center. The shipping cost will be greater, and you will have to be careful about stacking the goods properly. But the total systems cost could be lower because you've eliminated the consolidator altogether. When someone is actively managing and organizing the whole supply chain, you can save costs like that. We think about supply chain management as ‘tackling the soft ‘ in the cost structure. † nized the colors and the fabric and the trim for you, and they'll be delivered to you on this date and you'll have three weeks to produce so many garments. † I've certainly made life harder for myself no w. It would be easier to let the factories worry about securing their own fabric and trim. But then the order would take three months, not five weeks. So to shrink the delivery cycle, I go upstream to organize production. And the shorter production time lets 108 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE So when you talk about organizing the value chain, what you do goes well beyond simply contracting for other people's services ot inspecting their work. It sounds like the value you add extends almost to the point where you're providing management expertise to your supply network. In a sense, we are a smokeless factory. We do design. We huy and inspect the raw materials. We have factory managers, people who set up and plan production and balance the lines. We inspect production. But we don't manage the workers, and we don't own the factories. Think ahout the scope of what we do.We work with about 7,500 suppliers in more than 26 countries. If the average factory has 200 workers – that's probahly a low estimate – then in effect there are more than a million workers engaged on behalf of our customers. That's why our policy is not to own any portion of the value chain that deals with running factories. Managing a million workers would he a colossal undertaking. We'd lose all flexihility; we'd lose our ability to fine-tune and coordinate. So we deliherately leave that management challenge to the individual entrepreneurs we contract with. Our target in working with factories is to take nywhere from 30% to 70% of their production. We want to he important to them, and at 30% we're most likely their largest customer. On the other hand, we need flexibility-so we don't want the responsibility of having them completely dependent on us. And we also benefit from their exposure to their other customers. If we don't own factories, can we say we are in manufacturing? Absolutely. Because, of the 15 steps in the manufactu ring value chain, we prohably do 10. Our basic operating unit is the division. Whenever possible, we will focus an entire division on serving one customer. We may serve smaller customers hrough a division structured around a group of customers with similar needs. We have, for example, a theme-store division serving a handful of customers such as the Warner Brothers stores and Rainforest Cafe. This structuring of the organization around customers is very important – remember that what we do is close to creating a customized value chain for every customer order. So customer-focused divisions are the building hlocks of our organization, and we keep them small and entrepreneurial. They do anywhere from $20 million to $50 million of business. Each is run hy a â€Å"What we do is close to creating customized value chain for every customer order. † / The way Li & Fung is organized is unusual in the industry. Can you describe the link between your organization and your strateg y? Just about every company I know says that they are customer focused. What, in fact, does that mean? Usually it means they design key systems that fit most of their customers, they hope, most of the time. Here we say-and do-something different: We organize for the customer. Almost all the large trading companies with extensive networks of suppliers are organized geographically, with the country units as their profit centers.As a result, it is hard for them to optimize the value chain. Their country units are competing against one another for husiness. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 lead entrepreneur-we sometimes call them â€Å"little John Waynes† because the image of a guy standing in the middle of the wagon train, shooting at all the had guys, seems to fit. Consider our Gymhoree division, one of our largest. The division manager, Ada Liu, and her headquarters team have their own separate office space within the Li & Fung building in Hong Kong. When you wal k through their door, every one of the 0 or so people you see is focused solely on meeting Gymhoree's needs. On every desk is a computer with direct software links to Gymhoree. The staff is organized into specialized teams in such areas as technical support, merchandising, raw material purchasing, quality assurance, and shipping. And Ada has dedicated sourcing teams in our branch offices in China, the Philippines, and Indonesia because Gymboree buys in volume from all those countries. In maybe 5 of our 26 countries, she has her own team, people she hired herself. When she wants to source from, say, India, the branch office helps her get the joh done.In most multinational companies, fights hetween the geographic side of the organization and the product or customer side are legendary – and predictable. From the product side, it's â€Å"How can I get hetter service for my customer? It may be small for you in Bangladesh, hut it's important for my product line globally. † A nd from the country side, it's â€Å"Look, I can't let this product group take unfair advantage of this particular factory, hecause it pro109 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE duces for three other product groups and I'm responsible for our relationships in this country overall. Here's our solution to this classic prohlem: Our primary alignment is around customers and their needs. But to balance the matrix, every productgroup executive also has responsibility for one country. It makes them more sensitive to the prohlems facing a country director and less likely to make unreasonahle demands. Can you tell us more about the role of the little John Waynes? The idea is to create small units dedicated to taking care of one customer, and to have one person running a unit like she would her own company. In fact, we hire people whose main alternative would be to run their own business.We provide them with the financial resources and the administrative support of a hig organization, h ut we give them a great deal of autonomy. All the merchandising decisions that go into coordinating a production program for the customer-which factories to use, whether to stop a shipment or let it go forward-are made at the division-head level. For the creative parts of the business, we want entrepreneurial behavior, so we give people considerable operating freedom. To motivate the division leaders, we rely on substantial financial incentives by tying their compensation directly to the unit's bottom line.There's no cap on bonuses: we want entrepreneurs who are motivated to move heaven and earth for the customer. Trading companies can be run effectively only when they are small. By making small units the â€Å"We think of our divisions as a portfolio we can create and collapse, almost at will. † heart of our company, we have been able to grow rapidly without becoming bureaucratic. Today we have about 60 divisions. We think of them as a portfolio we can create and collapse, a lmost at will. As the market changes, our organization can adjust immediately. What role, then, does the corporate center play?When it comes to financial controls and operating procedures, we don't want creativity or entrepreneurial behavior. In these areas, we centralize and manage tightly. Li &. Fung has a standardized, fully computerized operating system for executing 110 and tracking orders, and everyone in the company uses the system. We also keep very tight control of working capital. As far as I'm concerned, inventory is the root of all evil. At a minimum, it increases the complexity of managing any business. So it's a word we don't tolerate around here. All cash flow is managed centrally through Hong Kong.All letters of credit, for example, come to Hong Kong for approval and are then reissued by the central office. That means we are guaranteed payment before we execute an order. I could expand the company by another 10% to 20% hy giving customers credit. But while we are ver y aggressive in merchandising – in finding new sources, for example-when it comes to financial management, we are very conservative. I understand^ though, that Li & Fung is involved in venture capital. Can you explain how t hat fits in? We've set up a small venture-capital arm, with offices in San Francisco, London, and Brussels, hose primary purpose is corporate development. If you look at a product market grid, Li &. Fung has expertise in sourcing many types of products for many types of retailers, but there are also holes in our coverage. A big piece of our corporate development is plugging those holes-the phrase we use is â€Å"filling in the mosaic† – and we use venture capital to do it. Let's say Li &. Fung is not strong in ladies fashion shoes. We'll have our venture group look for opportunities to buy into relatively young entrepreneurial companies with people who can create designs and sell them but who do not have the ability to source or to finance.Th at's what we bring to the deal. More important, doing the sourcing for the company lets us build presence and know-how in the segment. At the same time, we think it's a good way to enhance our returns. All venture capitalists will tell you that they bring more than money to their investments. In our case, we are ahle to back the companies with our sourcing network. One of our biggest successes is a company called Cyrk. We wanted to fill a hole in our mosaic in the promotional premiums business-clothing or gift items with company logos, for example. We bought a 30% stake in Cyrk for $200,000 in 1990. We ended p doing all the M&M gum hall dispensers with them, but the real coup was a full line of promotional clothing for Philip Morris. After five years, we sold our investment for about $65 million. We're more than happy with our investment results, but our real interest is in corporate developHARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE SUPPL Y CHAIN MANAGEMENT: HOW LI & FUNG ADDS VALUE LI & Fung does the high-value-added front- and back-end tasks in Hong Kong front end design engineering production planning back end quality control testing logistics It organizes the ower-value-added middle stages through its network of 7,500 suppliers, 2,500 of which are active at any one time. raw material and component sourcing ment, in filling in the mosaic. We're not looking to grow by taking over whole companies. We know we can't manage a U. S. domestic company very well because we're so far away, and the culture is different. By hacking people on a minority basis, however, we improve our sourcing strength and enhance our ability to grow existing client relationships or to win new ones. That's real synergy. You've grown substantially both in size and in geographic scope in the last five years.Does becoming more multinational bring any fundamental changes to the company? Since 1993, we've changed from a Hong Kongbased Chinese compan y that was 99. 5% Chinese and probably 80% Hong Kong Chinese into a truly regional multinational with a workforce from at least 30 countries. We used to call ourselves a Chinese trading company. (The Japanese trading companies are very hig, and we wanted to he a big fish in a small pond, so we defined the pond as consisting of Chinese trading companies. ) As we grow, and as our workforce hecomes more nationally diverse, we wonder how Koreans or Indians or Turks will feel bout working for a Chinese multinational. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW Septtmber-October 1998 managing production We're torn. We know that if we call ourselves a multinational, we're very small compared to a Nestle or a Unilever. And we don't want to he faceless. We are proud of our cultural heritage. But we don't want it to be an impediment to growth, and we want to make people comfortable that culturally we have a very open architecture. We position ourselves today as a Hong Kong-based multinational trading company. Ho ng Kong itself is hoth Chinese and very cosmopolitan. In five years, we've come a ong way in rethinking our identity. As we grow and become more multinational, the last thing we want to do is to run the company like the big multinationals. You know – where you have a corporate policy on medical leave or housing allowances or you name it. How do you avoid setting policies, a path that would seem inevitable lor most companies? We stick to a simple entrepreneurial principle. For the senior ranks of the company, the mobile executives, we â€Å"encash†-that is, we translate the value of benefits into dollar figures-as much as we can. Cash gives individuals the most fiexihiiity. I annot design a policy to fit 1,000 people, so when UI SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE in doubt we give people money instead. You want a car? You think you deserve a car? We'd rather give you the cash and let you manage the car. You buy it, you service it. The usual multinational solution i s to hire experts to do a study. Then they write a manual on car ownership and hire ten people to administer the manual. If you ask yourself whether you would rather have a package of benefits or its equivalent in cash, m. ayhe you'll say, I don't want such a nice car, hut I'd prefer to spend more money on my home leave.Cash gives individuals a lot more freedom. That's our simplifying principle. month is still doing so this month. The committee of 30 not only shapes our policies hut also translates them into operating procedures we think will he effective in thefield. And then they hecome a vehicle for implementing what we've agreed on when they return to their divisions. There are few businesses as old as trading. Yet the essence of what you do at Li & Fung-managing information and relationships-sounds like a good description of tbe information economy. How do you reconcile the new economy with the old?At one level, Li &. Fung is an information node, fiipping information hetween ou r 350 customers Since you operate in so many countries, do you and our 7,500 suppliers. We manage all that today have to index cash equivalents to local economies? with a lot of phone calls and faxes and on-site visits. That's the guts of the company. Soon we will need Wherever we operate, we follow local rules and hest practices. We do not want uniformity for lower- a sophisticated information system with very open architecture to accommodate different protocols level managers. If they say in Korea, â€Å"We don't rom suppliers and from customers, one rohust want bonuses hut everyhody gets i 6 m onths enough to work in Hong Kong and New York-as salary,† that's the market. What we do would probwell as in places like Bangladesh, where you can't ahly drive the HR department in a multinational crazy. But it works for us: for the top people, we fig- always count on a good phone line. ure out a cash equivalent for henefits, and for the loI have a picture in my mind of the ideal tr ader for cal staff, we follow local hest practices. It's fine if today's world. The trader is an executive wearing e do things differently from country to country. a pith helmet and a safari jacket. But in one hand is a And rememher, we are an incentive-driven commachete and in the other a very high-tech personalpany. We try to make the variable component of computer and communication device. From one compensation as hig as possible and to extend that side, you're getting reports from suppliers in newly principle as far down into the organization as possi- emerging countries, where the quality of the inforhle. That's the entrepreneurial approach. mation may he poor. From the other side, you ight have highly accurate point-of-sale information from the United States that allows you to reAs you spread out geographically, how do you hold plenish automatically. In other words, you're mathe organization together? The company is managed on a day-to-day hasis by neuvering between areas that have a lot of catching the product group managers. Along with the top up to do-you're fighting through the underbrush, so to speak-and areas that are already clearly fomanagement, they form what we call the policy committee, which consists of about 30 people. We cused on the twenty-first century. meet once every five to six weeks.People fly in As the sources of supply explode, managing inforfrom around the region to discuss and agree on polimation becomes increasingly complex. Of course, cies. Consider, for example, the topic of compliwe have a lot of hard data about performance and ance, or ethical sourcing. How do we make sure our ahout the work we do with each factory. But what suppliers are doing the right thing-by our cuswe really want is difficult to pin down; a lot of the tomers' standards and our own-when it comes to most valuable information resides in people's issues such as child lahor, environmental protecheads.What kind of attitude does the owner have? tion, and countr y-of-origin regulations? Do we work well together? How good is their interCompliance is a very hot topic today-as well it nal management? That kind of organizational memory is a lot harder to retain and to share. We should be. Because our inspectors are in and out of see the capturing of such information as the next the factories all the time, we probably have a hetter frontier. You could look at us as a very sophisticated window on the prohlem than most companies. If IT system. So that's the modern side of who we are. we find factories that don't comply, we won't work ith them. However, because there is so much subcontracting, you can't assume that everyone is doWbat about the more traditional side? ing the right thing. That is, you have to make sure In the information age, there is an impersonality that a supplier that was operating properly last that seems to say that all the old-world thoughts 112 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE about relationships don't matter anymore. We're all taken with the notion that a bright young guy ean bring his great idea to the Internet, and it's okay if no one knows him from Adam. Right?Maybe. But at the same time, the old relationships, the old values, still matter. I think they matter in our dealings with suppliers, with eustomers, and with our own staff. Right now we're so big, three of our divisions could be seheduling work with the same factory. We could be fighting ourselves for factory capacity. So I'm in the process of creating a database to track systematically all our supplier relationships. We need something that everyone in the company ean use to review the performance history of all our suppliers. One of my colleagues said, â€Å"We'd better guard that with our lives, because if somebody ever ot into our system, they could steal one of the company's greatest assets. † I'm not so worried. Someone might steal our database, but when they call up a supplie r, they don't have the long relationship with the supplier that Li & Fung has. It makes a difference to suppliers when they know that you are dedicated to the business, that you've been honoring your commitments for 90 years. I think there is a similar traditional dimension to our customer relationships. In the old days, my father used to read every telex from eustomers. That made a huge difference in a business where a detail s small as the wrong zipper color could lead to disastrous delays for customers. Today William and I continue to read faxes from customers-certainly not every one, but enough to keep us in personal toucb with our customers and our operations on a daily basis. Through close attention to detail, we try to maintain our heritage of customer service. As we have transformed a family business into a modern one, we have tried to preserve the best of what my father and grandfather created. There is a family feeling in the company that's difficult to describe. We don't care much for titles and hierarchy.Family life and the company's business spill over into each other. When staff members are in Hong Kong to do business, my mother might have tea with their families. Of eourse, as we have grown we have had to change. My mother can't know everyone as she once did. But we hold on to our wish to preserve the intimacies that have been at the heart of our most successful relationships. If I had to capture it in one phrase, it would be this: Think like a big company, act like a small one. A TRADITION OF INNOVATION In the company's early years, Li & Fung dealt in porcelain and other trnditidnal Chinese products, inclLidinK bamboo nd rattan ware, jade and ivory handicrafts-and fireworks. Li ik Funj;'s invention of paper-sealed fireerackers in 1907 to replaee the traditional mudsealed firecracker was a major breakthrough. At that time, the U. S. import duty on firecrackers was hased on weight. The paper-sealed fireeraekers not only ineurred lower unport duti es by being lighter but also eliminated the problem of excessive dust produced by the discharge of the mud-sealed variety. Li &. Fung's paper-sealed manufaeturing process has become the industry's standard. i Is the growing importance of information technology good or bad for your bnsiness?Frankly, I am not unhappy that the business will HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1998 113 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, HONG KONG STYLE be more dependent on information technology. The growing value of dispersed manufaeturing makes us reach even further around the globe, and IT helps us accomplish that stretching of the company. As Western companies work to remain competitive, supply chain management will become more important. Their need to serve smaller niche markets with more frequent changes in products is pushing us to establish new sources in less developed countries.We're forging into newly emerging centers of production, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka to Madagascar. We're now landing in northern Africa – in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco. We're starting down in South Africa and moving up to some of the equatorial countries. As the global supply network becomes larger and more far-flung, managing it will require scale. As a pure intermediary, our margins were squeezed. But as the number of supply chain options expands, we add value for our customers by using information and relationships to manage the network. We help companies navigate through a orld of expanded choice. And the expanding power of IT helps us do that. So the middle where we operate is broadening, making what we do more valuable and allowing us to deliver a better product, which translates into better prices and better margins for our customers. In fact, we think export trading is not a sunset industry but a growth business. Was the professional management training you and William brought with you from the United States helpful in running an Asian family business? It's an interesting question. For m y first 20 years with the company, I had to put aside-unlearn, in act-a lot of what I had learned in the West about management. It just wasn't relevant. The Li & Fung my grandfather founded was a typical patriarchal Chinese family conglomerate. Even today, most companies in Asia are built on that model. But a lot has changed in the last five years, and the current Asian financial crisis is going to transform the region even more. Now, instead of managing a few relationshipsthe essence of the old model-we're managing large, complex systems. It used to be that one or two big decisions a year would determine your success.In the 1980s, for example, many of the Asian tycoons were in asset-intensive businesses like real estate and shipping. You would make a very small number of very big decisions-you would acquire a piece of land or decide to build a supertanker-and you were done. And access to the deals depended on your connections. 114 The Li & Fung of today is quite different from the company my grandfather founded in 1906. As it was in a lot of family companies, people had a sense over the years that the company's purpose was to serve as the family's livelihood. One of the first things William and I did was to persuade my father o separate ownership and management by taking the company puhlic in 197 3. When our margins were squeezed during the 1980s, we felt we needed to make dramatic changes that could best be done if we went back to being a private company. So in 1988, we undertook Hong Kong's first management buyout, sold off assets, and refocused the company on its core trading business. Later we took our export trading business public again. I'm sure some of our thinking ahout governance structure and focus was influenced by our Western training. But I'm more struck by the changes In the company's decision making.Right now in this building, we probably have 50 buyers making hundreds of individual transactions. We're making a large number of small decisions instead of a small number of big ones. I can't be involved in all of tbem. So today I depend on structure, on guiding principles, on managing a system. Of course, I think relationships are still important, but I'm not managing a single key relationship and using it to leverage my entire enterprise. Instead, I'm running a very focused business using a systems approach. That's why I say that in the last five years, everything I learned in business school has come to matter. Li &