Entrepreneurial Skills

Lately in class we have been talking about how to use entrepreneurial skills in most areas of business. While I think this could be beneficial, I believe that entrepreneurial spirit is not only developing new ideas for individual business, but also already developed businesses. Our class was talking about taking ideas from an already developed business and making a new company. I think that this would be completely pointless, in the aspect that new businesses rarely make it in the long term of the market. However, if one would take entrepreneurial skills and implement them into an existing business, they could make that company better, instead of forming business after business on small ideas. Whenever I think of entrepreneurs, I tend to think of restless people who can't sit in an office, so they choose to make their own businesses, which usually fail. But if one took that spirit and injected that into a current business, I feel like that would be much more beneficial to the economy as a whole.

Hannah Heninger

What Truly Motivates Us?

This is probably the most interesting youtube video I have ever seen. It explains that for any type of straight forward task, the "If you do this, then you get that." type of motivators are oustanding. BUT! When a task gets more complicated and involves creative thinking, these kinds of motivators DON'T WORK! In other words, employees WILL NOT be motivated to do anything "OUTSTANDING" in their jobs with a simple raise in salary. If you want employees to be "engaged" in their work, then self direction, or "autonomy" is a much better motivator. "One day of autonomy produces things that never emerge!" People want to do things that are productive and praisworthy, but they want to do this of their own accord, not because someone said they'd "give them a raise." They are motivated to do these things when they feel they have reached autonomy.

To me this seems to be the perfect "win-win" situation for any company. If employers can trust in their employees' ability to do great things purely on their own, (without any ridiculous external motivators), then chances are they will independently do amazing things simply because they have that self-driven autonomy they strive for. The necessary work will get done, the creative ideas will flow, and the company will flourish.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to stand aside and allow people to do incredible things on their own.

Cason Wortley

I thought it was interesting how globalization of capitalism was distributed throughout the world. Globalization describes the process in which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a global network of political ideas through communication, transportation, and trade. I thought that the trade part of globalization was relevant to what we had talked about April 8 in class. I think it is very important to have Global trade flowing throughout the world so richer nations can help out developing countries. Employees in the richer nations suffer as their jobs are outsourced to low wage economies. Capitalist corporations increase exploitation by paying less to workers in developing countries for the same work that was done by workers at home. From that discussion and other research I have don’t, I have now realized why Global Vision is a pillar of the Huntsman Business School.

THE GLOBAL MARKET

How Will the Japan Earthquake Affect the U.S. Economy?

"It's still too early to measure the entire effect of Japan's earthquake on the U.S. economy. A few things, however, are all but certain."

See full article from DailyFinance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/japan-earthquake-u-s-economy/19878316/?icid=sphere_copyright

I found this article on the daily finance website. We have been talking about having a world vision in our class the past week and and was interested what the media was saying about how the destruction in Japan will effect on our economy and its effect on me personally. Talking about this subject in class and reading articles myself has really opened my eyes to really how connected the world has become. Even though I was not there in Japan when the earthquake happened and didn't suffer any personal losses the destruction the Japan faced will have an effect on me through the global economy. In the article is discussed the U.S. imported from a total of $96 billion in goods from Japan in 2009. There will be at least a short term slow of these imports from Japan. American stocks could also actually rise for a time because the article suggests "there will be a migration from Japanese equities and bonds" and "some of this capital may seek the safe haven of the U.S. equity markets and treasuries." Lastly in the article it discuesses one effect that I can see effecting me and and college students alike personally is the increase in prices for consumer electronics and disruptions in the supply of parts for devices like the Apple iPhone and iPad in which is in great demand and use around every college campus. These are just a couple of ways that we can see just how connected our world has become. Our economy has become and is even increasingly becoming a global market in which just one catastrophe in a single country can have a large effects on the rest of the world.

Looks like 2008

This past week the national average gas price has hit $3.79 per gallon. California and Hawaii crossed the $4 mark weeks ago. All this is reminiscent of early 2008 as the coming election loomed and rising gas prices led to an influx of stolen gas and growing concern. Luckily, with the election of 2008, gas prices plummeted to under $2, a welcome ease to American wallets. What has caused this recent spike? According to an article by CNN reporter Ben Rooney, a major factor is the price of oil in general, which tends to rise around this time of year anyway, in correspondence with peak driving seasons. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicted in their April short-term energy outlook that the national average gas price would reach $3.86 this summer. Though that sounds better than the looming $4 average being discussed, it's still a 40% increase from last summer. At this point, Utah comes in around the national average. Hopefully with the next election coming next year, we will see another drop in price. These recent developments raise the question of whether we should drill in Alaska. I say: yes. Let's cut our dependence on foreign oil and use our natural resources to boost our economy. Until then, Americans will have to rework their budget to fit in their rising expenses.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/12/news/economy/gas_prices/index.htm

by Marcus Lancaster

Mistakes

As I was going through an old note book I came across something I had written down at a leadership conference for Operation Smile. I don’t remember who was talking, but some of the things that they said I still remember. The point that resonated in me the most was that you can break down things that happen in your life into two groups. Good experiences or good lessons. Its ok to make mistakes, what important is learning from them. I'm not big on regret. I know I make mistakes, but there's nothing you can do about the past. I find it better to own that mistake and learn from it. This principle can be applied to not only your personal life, but work as well. If you take your life lessons and apply them in your future you will become more valuable as an employee. As I was writing this, this song came to mind. I thought it applied well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3oOGHwEQT4&feature=related

Inside Job True or False (GROUP 7)

Group 7 The movie Inside Job was certainly an interesting one and we would have to say that we really enjoyed it. We found the movie to portray many interesting facts about the government and the banking crisis. We know that everyone has there own personal opinions about the crisis and why it happened. We want to know what all of you thought about the movie. Here are some questions that might just stimulate the mind and make you even think twice about the movie or what side your on. For us the movie seemed to be very one sided and it seemed to only attack the banks and government. Now here is the first question was it only the banks fault that we fell into crisis? Why or why not? Usually documentaries try and investigate both sides of the argument but this argument was very one sided. In the movie/documentary it talked a lot about the CEO's of these big companies making millions of dollars. Now we believe that these CEO's made lots of money but is that selfish of them? You know that most of those CEO's made salaries which weren't extremely high. However they usually made their good money off of the bonuses they received from investing, financing, etc. So if you were getting paid according to your bonuses wouldn't you want to lend more. The banks were doing more investing, financing, etc. and that's why the CEO's wanted to do more and more. Making money is a business so were the banks CEO's wrong in trying to make money for themselves or their companies? Some of the things in this movie were true and really interesting, but I'm also afraid to inform you that not all of it was all the truth or the truth they had was blown out of proportion at times. If the crisis would have been completely avoidable we would have avoided it. The movie was great and gave lots of truthful insights to the economic crisis that happened, but we have to look at all the facts before we decide what really happened. This Blog post was to just get all of you thinking that there might be more about this crisis than what the movie really portrayed.