The eNotes Blog Why You Should Read Stanford’s Mandatory Reading for First Years Homegoing by YaaGyasi

Why You Should Read Stanford’s Mandatory Reading for First Years Homegoing by YaaGyasi Photograph by means of Stanford News Stanford University’s â€Å"Three Books† program urges approaching first years to peruse three chose titles before starting the school year. This year, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was picked as one of them. Gyasi’s debut novel subtleties the enduring impacts of servitude, both socially and generationally. It ranges more than three centuries and seven ages starting with two relatives: Effia and Esi in Ghana. Effia weds a white man and moves to the Cape Coast Castle, infamous as a slave-exchange focus. Just a couple of floors underneath Effia, her stepsister, Esi, is kept in imprisonment in the castle’s storm cellar and in the end sold into subjection in America. This sets the remainder of the book moving, intently following the two distinct heredities. Gyasi remembers an aggregate of 14 distinct characters for the novel, with each assigned one section committed to them. A few sections center around one especially significant period in their life, while others length their entire youth and that's only the tip of the iceberg. While this uneven story is somewhat hard to stay aware of at first, its effect is significant. Through this structure, Gyasi incorporates a few significant memorable and social minutes, which would have been unthinkable if she’d picked to constrain the quantity of characters. These significant minutes incorporate the slave exchange, convict renting, the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance, to give some examples. This implies Homecoming peruses less like a novel and increasingly like interconnected short stories. Photograph by means of Paperback Paris This account structure not just permits Gyasi to investigate the various verifiable encounters of being dark in America, yet it additionally uncovers the resonating impacts of servitude on families in both the United States and Ghana. â€Å"I didn’t need my composition to be about beautiful blossoms in a field. I needed to be locked in with the world around me.† Yaa Gyasi Through mind blowing narrating, Gyasi makes encounters that transport perusers back in time. For instance, while the bondage sections are not lovely to peruse, they are written in intense detail making an amazing understanding encounter. With significant subjects that run from family to race and prejudice, Gyasi doesn't avoid the harder points yet rather handles them head-on, making a particular understanding encounter. Gyasi expressed, â€Å"I didn’t need my composition to be about lovely blossoms in a field. I needed to be locked in with the world around me.† In a period of â€Å"fake news† and â€Å"alternative facts,† it is imperative to remember who holds the force in picking which stories are told. As one character, Yaw, discloses to his understudies, â€Å"[W]hen you study history, you should consistently ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was smothered with the goal that this voice could approached? When you have made sense of that, you should find that story too.† Homegoing delivers that stifled story, expounding on the staggering impacts of subjection from 14 distinctive purpose of perspectives in various timespans of time. Gyasi features these stifled voices to show the quest for their characters, their jobs in the public eye, and for a spot they can call home. Peruse the Homegoingâ rundown and study control with characters, topics, and statements. In the event that you appreciated Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, make certain to check these extra titles: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates Melody of Solomon by Toni Morrison Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Word Nigger Essays -- Definition History Nigga Nigger Black Essays

The Word Nigger â€Å"My niggas. A few niggas that you don’t wanna attempt.  â â â â My niggas. A few niggas that’s truly sink or swim.  â â â â My niggas. Ain’t done living a falsehood.  â â â â My niggas is stong. My niggas is real.†      Does this craftsman utilize the word nigger similarly that racists have and still are? The response to this inquiry is a basic one-no. Today’s urban culture have changed, the definition, yet in addition the spelling of this word, which was once used to disparage those of African-American OK. Presently, the definition as demonstrated through today’s urban youth holds numerous significations positive and negative. Be that as it may, has the definition truly changed? Or on the other hand are today’s urban culture simply being oblivious and socially blinded by the hardships of our progenitors as they keep on utilizing a word that held such incredible racial strain when utilized in the 1800’s? Two responses for this one-yes and no. Truly the definition has changed, however not absolutely to where it’s point of reference has been overlooked. Truth be told, urban youth are so socially amazing that they can take a word and thoroughly flip it and use it inside themselves yet when one of another race utilizes it, they return it back to the old definition and the racial comments start.      The meanings of the word nigger are as per the following: 1.â â â â â a Negro 2.â â â â â loosely or erroneously applied to individuals from darker looking race 3.â â â â â a obscene hostile term of threatening vibe and disdain as utilized by Negrophobes Nigger (historical underpinnings) 1.     Latin niger gets Spanish and Portugese Negro utilized in France for â€Å"black man† particularly in Africa adjusted by the English 2.â â â â â latin niger, for dark, happens in such stream names as the Rio Negro in South America and the Niger f Central West Africa. At the point when utilized by a white individual to depict a dark or African American individual, this can be the most contemptuous harmful, hostile term in the language today. This word in American discourse goes back to the late sixteenth century, in spite of the fact that the cutting edge spelling doesn't show up until two centuries later. The out of date spelling niger dates to 1574. It gets from the Latin niger significance dark. It imparts this normal root to negro. The primary recorded utilization of the word nigger was in 1786 out of a sonnet by Robert Burns yet minor departure from it including negar, neger, and niger are recorded two centuries before at that point. The unsavoriness of the term has expanded ov... ...ds noticeable all around and shout. In this proposal, I’ve really took in a couple of things. From looking into the word in historical background books, I presumed that the general public has come to understand that we do utilize the word among ourselves yet never to the degree to which it has been utilized hundreds of years prior towards our precursors. One book cites â€Å"†¦African Americans regularly utilize the word in various manners among themelves†¦Ã¢â‚¬  1. DMX, Interlude, (Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, 1998) 2. â€Å"Nigger.† The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ed. 1973 3. DMX, Interlude, (Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, 1998) 4. â€Å"Nigger.† The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ed. 1973 5. â€Å"Nigger† Webster’s Third New International Dictionry 6. â€Å"Nigger† A Short Etymologica Dictionary of Modern English ORIGINS ed 1966 7. â€Å"Nigga† Dictionary for American Slang ed. 1995 8. Twain, Mark Hulckeberry Finn 9. Rice Jr., Earl The O.J.Simpson Trial San Diego, CA:Lucent Books Inc, 1997 10. Peterson, Nina. Individual meeting. 2 June 2000 11. Punisher, Big. Watch Those! (Yeaah Baby!, 2000) 12. Heavy traffic (film) 13. Scoop, Fat Man, Brooklyn Clan (Hot 97’s blend tape) 14. â€Å"Nigger† Encyclopedia of Word and Phase Origins ed 1997

Highfive

Highfive INTRODUCTIONMartin: Today we are in Redwood City in the Highfive office. Hi, Shan, who are you and what do you do?Shan: Hi, Martin. Thank you very much for coming by. It is very nice to meet you. My name is Shan Sinha. I am the founder and CEO of Highfive. We build an all-in-one hardware software video and web conferencing tool for businesses of any size. We are based here in Redwood City.Martin: When did you start this company and what made you come up with this business idea?Shan: We started the company just over three years ago. Ive been in the world of communication and collaboration for a pretty long time now, going on 12, 13 years starting at Microsoft where I worked on a couple of products there. I loved Microsoft. I started a company in collaboration space backed up by Google. A Google, I was running Google enterprise apps where we were bringing cloud-based email to companies and so where the idea for Highfive was a long way of getting to, the idea of Highfive. Where the idea for Highfive came from was a bunch of things that we saw on Google. Google is a phenomenal place. They communicate differently than every other company in the world and what we ended up seeing at Google was a company that decided to use video as their primary way to talk to each other. Most companies still use conference calls and the telephone to talk to each other but at Google we use video. All of that technology that enabled that was made through a bunch of homegrown systems that we had created there. When we saw that, we were convinced that every other company in the world would communicate the way we did at Google. We decided to start Highfive based on that inside and that is what led to what we are doing now three years later.Martin: Can you walk us briefly through the beginnings of Highfive? Once you have left Google what the first two or three months look like?Shan: It is a good question. The first few months when we stumbled on to our observation that there is a big oppor tunity here there are a bunch of questions that we asked. The first question we asked was, well, what was it that made video really work in that environment in the way that we saw it at Google. The numbers were staggering. Google was 40,000 people. The question that we asked was what made video work across all those 40,000 people? Just to put it to perspective, at Google we were doing 20,000 video calls every single day. The average person was using video one to two times a day. The first couple of months were spent figuring out what that key insight was, how we were going to structure our product, what was going to be important to our product, what was not going to be important almost as critical. The first two or three months we spent time securing some initial investment. We put some definition around what product we are going to build and on recruiting an initial team. When we ultimately left Google the first two to three months was going from two people, my co-founder and me, t o around eight people. Just within the first couple of months, we secured some initial funding from some great investors here and we really just focused on product definition.The thing that is interesting and, I think, maybe for everyone who is listening to us right now, the thing that was interesting was that we had this insight for a product and we put together our initial plans within those first two to three months. Three years later, we are working on substantively the same exact problem. After three years now what was amazing to see is that those ideas that we are working on in a small room together have now led to a company that is now 70 people. We have got over a thousand customers now and we are essentially working on the same idea that was a genesis for the company so that we have not had any major pivots or anything like that. The first few months were critical for laying the foundation for what we were ultimately going to create.Martin: Shan, how hard was to raise the m oney?Shan: It is a good question. I was fortunate where a couple of prior successes and being associated with Microsoft and Google ended up being a significant asset in raising capital. For us, raising some of that initial capital was not terribly challenging. A lot of that was our history and the work that we have done in the past. The second part of it was this was a big market. Business communication, as one of these 8 billion dollar markets now, and many of the products are very, very old, outdated, and antiquated. I think there was a lot of interest in bringing your products to life, creating new companies in that category. It ended up not being too much of a chance to raise some initial capital. What I would say is as you continue to need more capital down the line, raising money was always challenging. We ended up having our share of learning as we were going through that process as well.BUSINESS MODEL OF HIGHFIVEMartin: Good. Let’s talk about business model of Highfive. Sh an, what are the typical customer segments that you are targeting?Shan: Highfives business model is very simple. We build an all-in-one video conferencing and web conferencing device for businesses that they can use to deploy video all across their company. We are all familiar with the types of problems we deal with the work. You walk into a room trying to get together with a group of people trying to get work done and inevitably, in every single company someone says why are we burning the first 15 minutes just trying to get people connected? People are trying to plug cables, they are trying to get their screen on the TV, and they are trying to get somebody dialed in. It turns out the first 15 minutes of every meeting generally end up in a mess. The reason why we are increasingly distributed is people are remote, we have multiple offices and everybody is just trying to get work done. The tools that we have available to do is that we are all designed for a very different world. Highf ive simplifies all that.Highfive gives companies a way to bring easy, simple and affordable video to everyone in their organization, conference rooms, mobile devices, laptops and other desktop computers. The way Highfive works is very simple. We have a very simple hardware device. This is it right here that we built. You attach it to a TV. It is like plugging an Apple TV. It is like a device that you might use at home. We have a cloud service that people sign up for it. Ultimately, it takes just a couple of minutes to set up. We target today small to mid-market businesses so companies between 50 and 1000 people. We make it very easy to try, buy and use. We sell the device for an initial one-time upfront fee. We have a service plan available for companies to subscribe to it. We have a couple of different service plan packages that companies can use depending on what features that they need.Martin: And how are you different from other web conferencing companies like skype or other sol utions to solve this problem of having like remote communication by a video?Shan: It is a good question. There are many options that people have. The interesting thing that we have observed is that, regardless of all the options that people have, inevitably the thing that people keep coming back to is that the beginning of every meaning still tends to take fifteen minutes to get going for some reason because not all of it works. The big differentiator that we have stems from an observation that we made back at Google that led to the formation of Highfive. Most of the tools out there like the ones you are referring to, Skype and Google Hangouts and all of that, were designed to support people working at their laptops or at their desktops. Skype specifically was designed for grandparents to talk to their grandchildren in our personal lives but they were not really designed for the needs of us at work. At work, our requirements are unique. When you think about people at work, what ends up happening is you have groups of people that are in the office and you have groups of people that are remote. Those groups of people in the office tend to go into a conference room to work together. The people that are remote, they might be working from home or in a different geography and they need to connect to those groups of people in the conference room. The thing that makes Highfive unique is that we bring together in conference room experience with a user experience for people that are outside of that conference room so that everybody can very easily get connect together. The big difference is that we bring together the physical in-room experience with the people that are mobile or working from remote locations. No other product does that effectively, affordably or as easily as we do. We put everything together in a great user experience to make it easily used. That is ultimately, what makes us different.At the large end, there are many traditional incumbent companies like Cisco and Polycom working here. All their products are antiquated, they are outdated, they are massively expensive and they are just unapproachable for most companies that are just trying to get work done.Martin: How does it work normally for a small company that is buying your products? Are they only buying for one office or are they buying for the whole company for connecting international office?Shan: The pattern that we have seen over the course of the last year is that we started shipping our product in January (2015) so we have only been in market for 9 months now. One of the interesting things for us was that we spent two and a half years really building a product that made sense for businesses. The pattern that we have seen is typically a company will say, Let me bring Highfive in for a team of people and what we will do we will outfit a couple of offices where that team is distributed. As that tends to work, what would end up happening is that they will tend to roll out Hi ghfive more broadly across their organization. The thing that we have been excited about is that companies have been responding very, very favorably to the overall user experience. They are giving us high marks for the ease of use and simplicity. People are able to join calls without having to go through all of the complexities that people run into. We have got over a thousand customers now. We are processing only a million minutes a weak of calls. Our largest customers are deploying hundreds and even thousands of users now within their organizations.Martin: What have been the major challenges for you? Was it really understanding the problem or finding a good user experience or was it more technology point of view?Shan: There has been a bunch of challenges that we had to solve along the way. I think we are probably still at the earlier phases of working throughout those challenges. We are just starting to go through our growth and scale phase right now but the biggest challenges tha t we have had to solve a kind of stem from a few things:One is that we have had to solve the problem of bringing something that is hard to build, hard technology and to bring that into an end user experience that is easy to use. The thing that is unique about our particular product is that the category feels like something that should just be easy. I want to do a call with a group of people. I just wanted to work. It turns out that just in that call what you are actually trying to do is maybe fifteen different things and all of those different use cases have to be woven together into an easy to use experience. That has been one big problem that we had to solve.The second big problem is that the technology infrastructure has to It has to be reliable. It has to be something that is rock solid and in order to do that there is a lot of engineering required to make all this work well over the public internet.The third problem is more of a user behavior problem that we have to solve. Wha t is unique about Highfive is that we are asking people to work in a different way and figuring out how you evangelize that new way of working. You should use video when you have typically been used to using conference calls. How do you encourage and drive that user behavior change is a whole set of problems that we have begun to get good at but continued to have more work to do there. When we think about what makes Highfive a hard business to build it boils down to hard technology that has to be easy to use and you have to drive user behavior change. The good news is that when you get all that right you actually enable a brand new change inside companies. You enable that new change in the way that people work. That part is most exciting whenever you see that business is fundamentally working differently than they did before.Martin: Shan, when you look at the communication network once you built a small company, is it only closed so that means from office A of the same company I can only call office B if it has the same hardware from you installed? Or is it also that I can combine with my Skype account and some other people that are using your hardware and software?Shan: It is a good question. We are built on open standard. We built our product on top of the standard called WebRTC. The great news about the WebRTC is that it is a new standard that is being built into platforms all around the world into all different products. The way that we approach the ability for people to talk to each other regardless of whether they have our system is to take advantage of that standard.The way that Highfive works is if I happen to have Highfive in my conference room and I wanted to talk to you, Martin, in Germany, what I could do is I could send you a link and even if you dont have Highfive hardware you could just join from your laptop or mobile device by opening up that link. Click on that link and you will be in a video call with us.The user experience is one that can su pport all of those types of scenarios becauseIt is cloud-based;It is built on open standards.You will be able to join calls directly from a set of web applications that we built that you will be able to access wherever you are.Martin: Imagine, I am buying your hardware and install it in my company and after maybe twelve months or so there is some kind of issue with your hardware are you then responsible for the maintenance or are you sending somebody to solve the problem or is it me who should fix it or buy a new one?Shan: No. We have warranties and guarantees for customers so that they can buy Highfive and if anything goes wrong with the devices that you have in your offices weve got a support team that can take care of all issues. The interesting thing about Highfive is that unlike previous generations of hardware companies when you buy a piece of hardware it does not really change after a couple of years.One of the interesting things about Highfive is that we are primarily a soft ware company but we are building a piece of hardware. In addition, the nice thing about being a software company is that we have adopted all the best practices of how software companies work. We have automatic updates. Every time we push out a new release, every single person who has Highfive or who has Highfive installed in their offices will get all of that new functionality. We push our releases very frequently, generally anywhere from every two to six weeks. We have designed our hardware in a way that it can automatically be updated and take advantage of all the new functionality that we are releasing. Your product will always get better. It will automatically be improving over time but if you do run into issues, you just work with us and we will take care of it all.Martin: How hard was it to design the hardware and find a supplier?Shan: This was my first company where we built a piece of hardware. This is my fourth startup company now. I did three other startup companies, they were all building software. But this is the first time that I got involved in building a piece of hardware. For anybody who is contemplating building hardware, internet of things is a common theme these days, what I will share with the folks based on our learning is that while it is easier than it has ever been to build a hardware-based product its still hard. Moreover, it took us nearly two years to go from concept when we had even a napkin sketch idea of what we were trying to build to something that was fully production grade and ready to be manufactured. It turns out that all of the problems you have to solve along the way, they just take time. Anytime you are discovering an issue, it is a six-week turnaround before you can build a new version of it. As a result any mistake you make along the way will get fell down the line because of the time required to iterate. Theres a lot of learning that we had around being able to pull together and build the device particularly those ones connected to the internet and particularly one that needed to be affordable, easy to be used and reflect the margins that we need to be able to operate a business. We have been successful. I think it creates significant differentiator for us. Ultimately, it was the user experience that customers needed.Martin: Where do you perceive the market will go in terms of conferencing systems?Shan: I think what you are seeing is that there is a general transition away from the way that conferencing systems worked before. Conferencing systems tended to be special purpose, big iron types of products that customers had to customize and deploy. These are products from companies like Cisco, from companies like Polycom. When it comes to business communications these are the companies that were building products. For todays world, they just require too much customization, too much deployment costs, too much complexity to manage and as a result, they have not been able to be deployed very broadly.I will give you a statistic that we like to think about. There are over 50 million conference rooms in the world today and only one million of them have been wired with video. Most of them have nothing but a TV screen and a speakerphone in them. Our bet is that every single one of those rooms will be wired with video. Cisco and Polycom just do not have products that you can deploy at that kind of scale because they are either too expensive or too hard to manage. Software tools are not going to enable you to put video and all those conference rooms either. What we have found is that the market size is enormous for a new generation of products. I think customers are creating tools to work better. People are frustrated and not happy with tools like WebEx and GoToMeeting. They are looking for a new generation of tools to do better. I think we are in that category.Where we see the world going is that our bet is that video and conferencing is going to continue to be a significantly growing market. People are more distributed. People are looking for new ways to connect. They have mobile phones and devices that they need to connect with their co-workers from wherever they are. They have broadband connections everywhere. The tools that exist today that people are using were all invented in a time before all those things were realities. I think what youre going to see over the next several years is a set of tools that emerged that are designed for todays world where we are connected from everywhere. They assume that we have high band connections; they assume we have smart phones in our pockets. They are easy to use and they are lightweight. You can just walk into a room, click a button and be connected to the group of people that want to talk to you.Martin: Shan, it seems that currently you are only building intra-companies communication networks. Are you also planning to do inter-company networks? Either imagine you are going on Linkedin searching for some people that y ou thought would be worth that you thought you can sell or buy something from them. You both check: Am I in the Highfive communication network. Yes. We are. Let us have a video check and make a transaction virtual.Shan: What we tend to find is that most people are looking for more ways to communicate, not less, because oftentimes what you really want to find is the right form of communication for the situation. Sometimes an email might make sense, sometimes an instant message might make sense, sometimes a text message might make sense and sometimes a phone call might make sense. What we find is that the way that we have developed Highfive is that people can talk to whomever they want. For example, one of our customers, Cloudera, is using Highfive for recruiting conversations. We want to recruit somebody into the company and it is a way better to do a video call than it is a phone screen. The way that Highfive works is that a recruiter can send the customized link for their candidate and a candidate can join the conversation. You get a much richer initial conversation when you are able to see them and so. What we have created allows people to communicate with people both inside their company and outside the company but the thing that is most important about the way we think about the world of Highfive is that we want to give people the option to use video, all those situations where email or a phone call does not quite make sense and it does not quite make sense to go travel and meet somebody at person. Recruiting and initial screens are a great example of that. Another great example of that is that I might be working with a partner, I might be working with a design agency, I might be working with a marketing vendor, and I might be working with the supplier. We talk to each other every day and we would be much more effective if we could just see each other. Highfive enables that because of the way that we have architected our system. We have maintained the secu rity that you need for people inside your company as well as giving you the ability to talk very easily to people outside your company.Martin: Shan, how did you acquire the customers and how hard was it especially with the first 10 or 15 customers?Shan: That is an interesting story actually. Before we had any product we knew that it was going to take us a while to build our new technology. What we did was we decided to go and start talking to customers right away. The reason we did that was to go learn about how big our market was and what value proposition we needed to be selling to our customers. The thing that we found was that the response was overwhelming. Everybody was looking for a solution. The way we found our customers ironically was before we had any product. The first version of our product, without exaggeration, was a PowerPoint slide or PowerPoint Tech that had a set of mock-ups of the product that we were intending to build. What we would do is we would go and reach o ut to customers directly, oftentimes just knocking on their doors and asking them if they are interested in our product. It turns out that customers ended up being very, very interested. Our first 15 customers essentially came from that effort. They just waited for us to build our product because they knew that what we were building was what they wanted. The way we found our first 15-50 customers, in fact, was through this effort of reaching out and trying to look for customers before we actually had any product. The first version of our product was a pure mock-up of a set of capabilities that we were only imagining being built. A couple of years later we finally have all that built. I think that was a good indication of how much interest we were getting from the market.Martin: Are you currently only having a direct sales force or are you using also distribution patterns?Shan: It is a very good question. It is a very hot topic for us right now internally. Today we have largely been selling purely direct. We have a sales team that is handling all of our business today but most of the interest that we are getting from customers is largely inbound and it comes over the website. We are exploring a number of different options for how we continue to distribute and certainly, distribution partners are one of the things that is potentially part of that equation.Martin: And the direct sales are they currently only focused on the U.S., or is it really like international?Shan: Today we are primarily signed to the U.S. but most of the companies that we sell to have offices overseas and so what they are doing is they are buying Highfive and setting Highfive up across their offices around the world. We have been deployed in over 55 countries now. People are regularly doing calls from all around the world.SHAN’S ADVICE TO ENTERPRENEURS In Redwood City (CA), we meet CEO and Founder of Highfive, Shan Sinha. Shan talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded Highfive, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Today we are in Redwood City in the Highfive office. Hi, Shan, who are you and what do you do?Shan: Hi, Martin. Thank you very much for coming by. It is very nice to meet you. My name is Shan Sinha. I am the founder and CEO of Highfive. We build an all-in-one hardware software video and web conferencing tool for businesses of any size. We are based here in Redwood City.Martin: When did you start this company and what made you come up with this business idea?Shan: We started the company just over three years ago. Ive been in the world of communication and collaboration for a pretty long time now, going on 12, 13 years starting at Microsoft where I worked on a couple of products there. I loved Microsoft. I started a company in collaboration space backed up by Google. A Google, I was running Google enterprise apps where we were bringing cloud-based email to companies and so where the idea for Highfive was a long way of getting to, the idea of Highfive. Where the idea for Highfive came from was a bunch of things that we saw on Google. Google is a phenomenal place. They communicate differently than every other company in the world and what we ended up seeing at Google was a company that decided to use video as their primary way to talk to each other. Most companies still use conference calls and the telephone to talk to each other but at Google we use video. All of that technology that enabled that was made through a bunch of homegrown systems that we had created there. When we saw that, we were convinced that every other company in the world would communicate the way we did at Google. We decided to start Highfive based on that inside and that is what led to what we are doing now three years later.Martin: Can you walk us briefly through the beginnings of Highfive? Once you have left Google what the first two or three months look like?Shan: It is a good question. The first few months when we stumbled on to our observation that there is a big opportunity here there are a bunch of questions that we asked. The first question we asked was, well, what was it that made video really work in that environment in the way that we saw it at Google. The numbers were staggering. Google was 40,000 people. The question that we asked was what made video work across all those 40,000 people? Just to put it to perspective, at Google we were doing 20,000 video calls every single day. The average person was using video one to two times a day. The first couple of months were spent figuring out what that key insight was, how we were going to structure our product, what was going to be important to our product, what was not going to be important almost as critical. The first two or three months we spent time securing some initial investment. We put some definition around what product we are going to build and on recruiting an initial team. When we ultimately left Google the first two to three months was going from two people, my co-founder and me, to around eight people. Just within the first couple of months, we secured some initial funding from some great investors here and we really just focused on product definition.The thing that is interesting and, I think, maybe for everyone who is listening to us right now, the thing that was interesting was that we had this insight for a product and we put together our initial plans within those first two to three months. Three years later, we are working on substantively the same exact problem. After three years now what was amazing to see is that those ideas that we are working on in a small room together have now led to a company that is now 70 people. We have got over a thousand customers now and we are essentially working on the same idea that was a genesis for the company so that we have not had any major pivots or anything like that. The first few months were critical for laying the foundation for what we were ultimately going to create.Martin: Shan, how hard was to raise the money?Shan: It is a good question. I was fortunate where a couple of prior successes and being associated with Microsoft and Google ended up being a significant asset in raising capital. For us, raising some of that initial capital was not terribly challenging. A lot of that was our history and the work that we have done in the past. The second part of it was this was a big market. Business communication, as one of these 8 billion dollar markets now, and many of the products are very, very old, outdated, and antiquated. I think there was a lot of interest in bringing your products to life, creating new companies in that category. It ended up not being too much of a chance to raise some initial capital. What I would say is as you continue to n eed more capital down the line, raising money was always challenging. We ended up having our share of learning as we were going through that process as well.BUSINESS MODEL OF HIGHFIVEMartin: Good. Let’s talk about business model of Highfive. Shan, what are the typical customer segments that you are targeting?Shan: Highfives business model is very simple. We build an all-in-one video conferencing and web conferencing device for businesses that they can use to deploy video all across their company. We are all familiar with the types of problems we deal with the work. You walk into a room trying to get together with a group of people trying to get work done and inevitably, in every single company someone says why are we burning the first 15 minutes just trying to get people connected? People are trying to plug cables, they are trying to get their screen on the TV, and they are trying to get somebody dialed in. It turns out the first 15 minutes of every meeting generally end up in a m ess. The reason why we are increasingly distributed is people are remote, we have multiple offices and everybody is just trying to get work done. The tools that we have available to do is that we are all designed for a very different world. Highfive simplifies all that.Highfive gives companies a way to bring easy, simple and affordable video to everyone in their organization, conference rooms, mobile devices, laptops and other desktop computers. The way Highfive works is very simple. We have a very simple hardware device. This is it right here that we built. You attach it to a TV. It is like plugging an Apple TV. It is like a device that you might use at home. We have a cloud service that people sign up for it. Ultimately, it takes just a couple of minutes to set up. We target today small to mid-market businesses so companies between 50 and 1000 people. We make it very easy to try, buy and use. We sell the device for an initial one-time upfront fee. We have a service plan available for companies to subscribe to it. We have a couple of different service plan packages that companies can use depending on what features that they need.Martin: And how are you different from other web conferencing companies like skype or other solutions to solve this problem of having like remote communication by a video?Shan: It is a good question. There are many options that people have. The interesting thing that we have observed is that, regardless of all the options that people have, inevitably the thing that people keep coming back to is that the beginning of every meaning still tends to take fifteen minutes to get going for some reason because not all of it works. The big differentiator that we have stems from an observation that we made back at Google that led to the formation of Highfive. Most of the tools out there like the ones you are referring to, Skype and Google Hangouts and all of that, were designed to support people working at their laptops or at their desktops. Sky pe specifically was designed for grandparents to talk to their grandchildren in our personal lives but they were not really designed for the needs of us at work. At work, our requirements are unique. When you think about people at work, what ends up happening is you have groups of people that are in the office and you have groups of people that are remote. Those groups of people in the office tend to go into a conference room to work together. The people that are remote, they might be working from home or in a different geography and they need to connect to those groups of people in the conference room. The thing that makes Highfive unique is that we bring together in conference room experience with a user experience for people that are outside of that conference room so that everybody can very easily get connect together. The big difference is that we bring together the physical in-room experience with the people that are mobile or working from remote locations. No other product do es that effectively, affordably or as easily as we do. We put everything together in a great user experience to make it easily used. That is ultimately, what makes us different.At the large end, there are many traditional incumbent companies like Cisco and Polycom working here. All their products are antiquated, they are outdated, they are massively expensive and they are just unapproachable for most companies that are just trying to get work done.Martin: How does it work normally for a small company that is buying your products? Are they only buying for one office or are they buying for the whole company for connecting international office?Shan: The pattern that we have seen over the course of the last year is that we started shipping our product in January (2015) so we have only been in market for 9 months now. One of the interesting things for us was that we spent two and a half years really building a product that made sense for businesses. The pattern that we have seen is typic ally a company will say, Let me bring Highfive in for a team of people and what we will do we will outfit a couple of offices where that team is distributed. As that tends to work, what would end up happening is that they will tend to roll out Highfive more broadly across their organization. The thing that we have been excited about is that companies have been responding very, very favorably to the overall user experience. They are giving us high marks for the ease of use and simplicity. People are able to join calls without having to go through all of the complexities that people run into. We have got over a thousand customers now. We are processing only a million minutes a weak of calls. Our largest customers are deploying hundreds and even thousands of users now within their organizations.Martin: What have been the major challenges for you? Was it really understanding the problem or finding a good user experience or was it more technology point of view?Shan: There has been a bunc h of challenges that we had to solve along the way. I think we are probably still at the earlier phases of working throughout those challenges. We are just starting to go through our growth and scale phase right now but the biggest challenges that we have had to solve a kind of stem from a few things:One is that we have had to solve the problem of bringing something that is hard to build, hard technology and to bring that into an end user experience that is easy to use. The thing that is unique about our particular product is that the category feels like something that should just be easy. I want to do a call with a group of people. I just wanted to work. It turns out that just in that call what you are actually trying to do is maybe fifteen different things and all of those different use cases have to be woven together into an easy to use experience. That has been one big problem that we had to solve.The second big problem is that the technology infrastructure has to It has to be reliable. It has to be something that is rock solid and in order to do that there is a lot of engineering required to make all this work well over the public internet.The third problem is more of a user behavior problem that we have to solve. What is unique about Highfive is that we are asking people to work in a different way and figuring out how you evangelize that new way of working. You should use video when you have typically been used to using conference calls. How do you encourage and drive that user behavior change is a whole set of problems that we have begun to get good at but continued to have more work to do there. When we think about what makes Highfive a hard business to build it boils down to hard technology that has to be easy to use and you have to drive user behavior change. The good news is that when you get all that right you actually enable a brand new change inside companies. You enable that new change in the way that people work. That part is most exciting whe never you see that business is fundamentally working differently than they did before.Martin: Shan, when you look at the communication network once you built a small company, is it only closed so that means from office A of the same company I can only call office B if it has the same hardware from you installed? Or is it also that I can combine with my Skype account and some other people that are using your hardware and software?Shan: It is a good question. We are built on open standard. We built our product on top of the standard called WebRTC. The great news about the WebRTC is that it is a new standard that is being built into platforms all around the world into all different products. The way that we approach the ability for people to talk to each other regardless of whether they have our system is to take advantage of that standard.The way that Highfive works is if I happen to have Highfive in my conference room and I wanted to talk to you, Martin, in Germany, what I could do i s I could send you a link and even if you dont have Highfive hardware you could just join from your laptop or mobile device by opening up that link. Click on that link and you will be in a video call with us.The user experience is one that can support all of those types of scenarios becauseIt is cloud-based;It is built on open standards.You will be able to join calls directly from a set of web applications that we built that you will be able to access wherever you are.Martin: Imagine, I am buying your hardware and install it in my company and after maybe twelve months or so there is some kind of issue with your hardware are you then responsible for the maintenance or are you sending somebody to solve the problem or is it me who should fix it or buy a new one?Shan: No. We have warranties and guarantees for customers so that they can buy Highfive and if anything goes wrong with the devices that you have in your offices weve got a support team that can take care of all issues. The inte resting thing about Highfive is that unlike previous generations of hardware companies when you buy a piece of hardware it does not really change after a couple of years.One of the interesting things about Highfive is that we are primarily a software company but we are building a piece of hardware. In addition, the nice thing about being a software company is that we have adopted all the best practices of how software companies work. We have automatic updates. Every time we push out a new release, every single person who has Highfive or who has Highfive installed in their offices will get all of that new functionality. We push our releases very frequently, generally anywhere from every two to six weeks. We have designed our hardware in a way that it can automatically be updated and take advantage of all the new functionality that we are releasing. Your product will always get better. It will automatically be improving over time but if you do run into issues, you just work with us an d we will take care of it all.Martin: How hard was it to design the hardware and find a supplier?Shan: This was my first company where we built a piece of hardware. This is my fourth startup company now. I did three other startup companies, they were all building software. But this is the first time that I got involved in building a piece of hardware. For anybody who is contemplating building hardware, internet of things is a common theme these days, what I will share with the folks based on our learning is that while it is easier than it has ever been to build a hardware-based product its still hard. Moreover, it took us nearly two years to go from concept when we had even a napkin sketch idea of what we were trying to build to something that was fully production grade and ready to be manufactured. It turns out that all of the problems you have to solve along the way, they just take time. Anytime you are discovering an issue, it is a six-week turnaround before you can build a new v ersion of it. As a result any mistake you make along the way will get fell down the line because of the time required to iterate. Theres a lot of learning that we had around being able to pull together and build the device particularly those ones connected to the internet and particularly one that needed to be affordable, easy to be used and reflect the margins that we need to be able to operate a business. We have been successful. I think it creates significant differentiator for us. Ultimately, it was the user experience that customers needed.Martin: Where do you perceive the market will go in terms of conferencing systems?Shan: I think what you are seeing is that there is a general transition away from the way that conferencing systems worked before. Conferencing systems tended to be special purpose, big iron types of products that customers had to customize and deploy. These are products from companies like Cisco, from companies like Polycom. When it comes to business communica tions these are the companies that were building products. For todays world, they just require too much customization, too much deployment costs, too much complexity to manage and as a result, they have not been able to be deployed very broadly.I will give you a statistic that we like to think about. There are over 50 million conference rooms in the world today and only one million of them have been wired with video. Most of them have nothing but a TV screen and a speakerphone in them. Our bet is that every single one of those rooms will be wired with video. Cisco and Polycom just do not have products that you can deploy at that kind of scale because they are either too expensive or too hard to manage. Software tools are not going to enable you to put video and all those conference rooms either. What we have found is that the market size is enormous for a new generation of products. I think customers are creating tools to work better. People are frustrated and not happy with tools l ike WebEx and GoToMeeting. They are looking for a new generation of tools to do better. I think we are in that category.Where we see the world going is that our bet is that video and conferencing is going to continue to be a significantly growing market. People are more distributed. People are looking for new ways to connect. They have mobile phones and devices that they need to connect with their co-workers from wherever they are. They have broadband connections everywhere. The tools that exist today that people are using were all invented in a time before all those things were realities. I think what youre going to see over the next several years is a set of tools that emerged that are designed for todays world where we are connected from everywhere. They assume that we have high band connections; they assume we have smart phones in our pockets. They are easy to use and they are lightweight. You can just walk into a room, click a button and be connected to the group of people that want to talk to you.Martin: Shan, it seems that currently you are only building intra-companies communication networks. Are you also planning to do inter-company networks? Either imagine you are going on Linkedin searching for some people that you thought would be worth that you thought you can sell or buy something from them. You both check: Am I in the Highfive communication network. Yes. We are. Let us have a video check and make a transaction virtual.Shan: What we tend to find is that most people are looking for more ways to communicate, not less, because oftentimes what you really want to find is the right form of communication for the situation. Sometimes an email might make sense, sometimes an instant message might make sense, sometimes a text message might make sense and sometimes a phone call might make sense. What we find is that the way that we have developed Highfive is that people can talk to whomever they want. For example, one of our customers, Cloudera, is using Hig hfive for recruiting conversations. We want to recruit somebody into the company and it is a way better to do a video call than it is a phone screen. The way that Highfive works is that a recruiter can send the customized link for their candidate and a candidate can join the conversation. You get a much richer initial conversation when you are able to see them and so. What we have created allows people to communicate with people both inside their company and outside the company but the thing that is most important about the way we think about the world of Highfive is that we want to give people the option to use video, all those situations where email or a phone call does not quite make sense and it does not quite make sense to go travel and meet somebody at person. Recruiting and initial screens are a great example of that. Another great example of that is that I might be working with a partner, I might be working with a design agency, I might be working with a marketing vendor, an d I might be working with the supplier. We talk to each other every day and we would be much more effective if we could just see each other. Highfive enables that because of the way that we have architected our system. We have maintained the security that you need for people inside your company as well as giving you the ability to talk very easily to people outside your company.Martin: Shan, how did you acquire the customers and how hard was it especially with the first 10 or 15 customers?Shan: That is an interesting story actually. Before we had any product we knew that it was going to take us a while to build our new technology. What we did was we decided to go and start talking to customers right away. The reason we did that was to go learn about how big our market was and what value proposition we needed to be selling to our customers. The thing that we found was that the response was overwhelming. Everybody was looking for a solution. The way we found our customers ironically w as before we had any product. The first version of our product, without exaggeration, was a PowerPoint slide or PowerPoint Tech that had a set of mock-ups of the product that we were intending to build. What we would do is we would go and reach out to customers directly, oftentimes just knocking on their doors and asking them if they are interested in our product. It turns out that customers ended up being very, very interested. Our first 15 customers essentially came from that effort. They just waited for us to build our product because they knew that what we were building was what they wanted. The way we found our first 15-50 customers, in fact, was through this effort of reaching out and trying to look for customers before we actually had any product. The first version of our product was a pure mock-up of a set of capabilities that we were only imagining being built. A couple of years later we finally have all that built. I think that was a good indication of how much interest we were getting from the market.Martin: Are you currently only having a direct sales force or are you using also distribution patterns?Shan: It is a very good question. It is a very hot topic for us right now internally. Today we have largely been selling purely direct. We have a sales team that is handling all of our business today but most of the interest that we are getting from customers is largely inbound and it comes over the website. We are exploring a number of different options for how we continue to distribute and certainly, distribution partners are one of the things that is potentially part of that equation.Martin: And the direct sales are they currently only focused on the U.S., or is it really like international?Shan: Today we are primarily signed to the U.S. but most of the companies that we sell to have offices overseas and so what they are doing is they are buying Highfive and setting Highfive up across their offices around the world. We have been deployed in over 55 countries now. People are regularly doing calls from all around the world.SHAN’S ADVICE TO ENTERPRENEURSMartin: Shan, you started like four companies. What advice can you give to new entrepreneurs so that they make less error?Shan: That is a good question. This is my third startup company. I am sorry. This is the third startup company that I have been a founder of. I was an early engineer at my very first startup company.First of all, I think making errors is part of the process. By definition, I think if there is one thing that I have learned is what you are doing, as a startup company is something that has not been done before. It is unreasonable to expect you not to make any mistakes. The way I think about the world is that your goal is to make different mistakes and mistakes that you have not made before and ultimately keep learning through that process of making mistakes.I think the biggest lessons that I tried to carry with us into Highfive number one is focus on being fast, focus on making decisions quickly because it turns out that the number of decisions that can truly sink your company are truly be disastrous is very, very, very small. It is not a zero but the number of decisions that are truly either irreversible or something that you cannot recover from tend to be very small. The faster you make decisions and the faster you go and try something ultimately makes the difference between whether you are going to succeed or not because every time you make a decision and try something you learn something.One of the pieces of advice I give to folks when they are recruiting their initial teams is to look for people that can execute. There is often times a tendency to go and try to find the smartest person who has great pedigree. That can be very valuable but if they cannot execute it turns out that certainly in the early stages, and by early stages I mean the first several years, thinking about your strategy and thinking about a sort of high-level challe nges in your company are 5% of the problem. To give you a sort of the best illustration of that we came up with our product concept 3 years ago. We are still working on it. There have not been material changes to what our core strategy is because we have been validated along the way. We got lucky that the ideas that we had turned out to be the ones that match pretty well with our market. At the end of the day, what we needed were people that could execute that can bring something to market and have the mentality of solving problems and getting something over the finish on. When you are recruiting people, one of the big pieces of advice that I give to folks is to find people that can execute and get things over to finish on.Another big one that all highlight would be is how you think about competition. Oftentimes, I am an angel investor now at a number of startup companies. Sometimes you talk to founders, there is a tendency to be worried about what competition is doing. And one of m y prior investors had a great saying: You cannot control what competitors are going to do. You can only control what you are going to do. If you can keep your focus on customers, focus on solving the problems that they need, by definition you were competing. Doing things as a reaction to what competitors do is always a bad formula because 9 times out of 10 youre not going to fail because a competitor went off and did something but it is going to be because you didnt execute against an insight or observation or something that you knew about your customers.Focus on your value proposition, focus on your product, find people that can get things over the finish line and really think hard about what your value proposition is, and keep moving fast making decisions and learning. Those are probably the biggest lessons I always take away. I have a saying inside my team where if you do not have data then go and try to get it. If you have no way to go get that data, then make a decision and go because otherwise you are not going to learn. I think that embodies many of those characteristics that I was describing.Martin: Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, Shan.Shan: Martin. It was very nice to meet you.Martin: Next time when you are thinking about starting a company, focus on execution. Thank you so much.

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According to SAMHSA (2014), â€Å"Anxiety disorders are characterized by excessive fear or anxiety that is difficult to control and negatively and substantially impacts daily functioning†Read MoreThe Negative Side of The Internet Essay1761 Words   |  8 Pageswhere one can draw the line on spending too much time on the computer. The Internet has become a serious issue in society today because it causes people to neglect work, social relationships, and in some cases, it could alter one’s health. A large portion of Americans are involved with social-networking websites and this can lead to a very serious addiction. â€Å"The average teen chooses to spend an average of 16.7 hours a week reading and writing online†(Goldwasser 239). By focusing on how much reading

Dbq Red Three Free Essays

Red Three: Notes for the Strict/Broad Construction With respect to the federal Constitution, the Jeffersonian Republicans are usually characterized as strict constructionists who were opposed to the broad constructionism of the Federalists. To what extent was this characterization of the two parties accurate during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison? Document A: Identify who and when: Jefferson, 1800 What does this tell you? Strict constructionist, during Adams’ presidency What outside information/events does this refer to? Constitution gives states’ power, anything that goes to the states, independence – states. What is this event about? Election of 1800. We will write a custom essay sample on Dbq Red Three or any similar topic only for you Order Now Democratic Republicans to keep majority in legislative branch: What does this document say? Relies on the Constitution as the best structure of the government. Strict Document B: Identify who and when Jefferson to Miller (a minister) 1808 What does this tell you? End of Jefferson 2nd term, Madison to be president What outside information/events does this refer to? Separation of church and state. What is this event about? The presidents before him had asked people to fast for a day, this precedence is over What does this document say? The president is not allowed to make any decisions that require the government to make religious choices for the people. Document C: Identify who and when Anderson cartoon, 1808 What does this tell you? Embargo Act 1807 (Ograbme backwards) What outside information/events does this refer to? Signed by Jefferson – stopped all trade between America and all countries. Goal was to get France and GB to restricting US trade, eliminate GB’s higher quality of production so that the US would have more power. Drew GB and US into War. What is this event about? What does this document say? Turtle is the Embargo Act (stepping on the act), person is trying to trade Superfine tobacco with GB. By biting him in the butt, holding him back. Document D: Identify who and when Daniel Webster, New Hampshire Federalist – Conscription Bill a draft for soldiers (1814) What does this tell you? What outside information/events does this refer to? A draft What is this event about? Recruiting soldiers for the War of 1812 What does this document say? Madison – was loose in interpretation because he found this necessary. Loose Document E: Identify who and when Hartford Convention, 1814 What does this tell you? New Englanders who were looking to amend the Constitution to give congress less power and states more power. What outside information/events does this refer to? end of the War of 1812. What is this event about? What does this document say? States to adopt these changes to the constitution. 2: No new state can be added, #3: Congress can’t lay an embargo, #4: Congress can’t regulated trade without 2/3 of Congress. Were these passed, yes, by the Hartford Convention. Added to the Constitution, no. Document F: Identify who and when, John Randolph, 1816, proposed tariff a. What does this tell you? D/R Madison is president, is turning into old Federalism – Federalists are generally in NE What outside in formation/events does this refer to? manufacturers are in NE and house the factories that the south depend on. Now that the Hartford Convention has threatened to secede from the nation, Madison must keep the country together. To do so, he offers an incentive. What is this event about? What does this document say? Loose! Document G: Identify who and when, Jefferson, 186 (way after his presidency) What does this tell you? While he is not in power, he reflects on the current political state. What outside information/events does this refer to? What is this event about? What does this document say? Government must change with the changing times. Therefore a strict reading of the constitution is not always the best idea. Loose Document H: Identify who and when, Madison, 1817, final year of his 2nd term What does this tell you? What outside information/events does this refer to? Madison has just used his executive privilege of veto. He vetoed an internal improvement bill (to make roads and bridges better between states) What is this event about? While bridges and roads that connect states may be important, it is not directly written into the Constitution, therefore left to the states to deal with. It is because of this that he cannot sign the bill. VERY Strict! How to cite Dbq Red Three, Papers

Changing Role of Hr Management free essay sample

The Changing Role of Human Resources Management The ever-changing roles within human resources management (HRM), in response to trends, are from a dynamic environment and the importance of HRM. Every changing organization has a need for a HRM to respond and implement changes. The organizations driven by e-business and technology need to be ready to respond and adapt to the environmental changes and should focus on satisfying the company’s customer needs. In this role, the HRM contributes proactively to the development of global strategic plans and objectives.This essay will explain the changing roles in human resources management to the trends of: (a) globalization, (b) technology, (d) diversity, (e) e-business, and (f) ethics. Globalization The globalization of a business is the major challenge in human resources within the management of the business, new competitive aspects, and the cultural diversities are adding frequently (Gale Group, 1999). To reach the demands, the HRM is developing new business procedures and practices to adopt the shifting patterns of business. We will write a custom essay sample on Changing Role of Hr Management or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The human resources must deal with numerous challenges like maintaining proper coordination from the business activities in multiple locations around the globe. Human resources must prepare and have an understanding of the increase in global competition. The human resources departments are gaining awareness globally for the development of the human resources teams with activities dealing with the multicultural diversity. Technology The performance of HRM relies largely on the technological aspects.With the introduction and use of advanced technologies, the abilities and performances of the human resources are in need of required output. Businesses are incorporating advance technologies for meeting the demand of the consumers. This development has the human resources beginning to train continuously on the newer technologies in an effort to create processes, which are more effective. HRM is requiring changes in its practices to accommodate the advance computerized technologies and information systems (Frantzreb, 1998).All work done manually by the department must change to a more technical form to maintain and control the processes and data for a business to be more effective and productive. The technological skills within the human resources require coordination with the advance technology-based processes. Diversity The multicultural practices in business are making the environment within a business more diversified. In business environment today, a human resources professional come from multiple cultures and are working side-by-side in the same company meeting the same goals.For these professionals, it is paramount in maintaining a complete and thorough understanding of the morals, ethics, and values of the multiple cultures. The human resources professionals are developing innovative ways of managing the knowledge to deal with the diversity of the cultures. In addition, business environments that have diverse cultures are educating the HRM to perform the activities to the local consumer driven demands. Fast implementations in cultures are because of advancing technologies, which are causing the human resources to change its practices (Collins Clark, 2003).E-Business In an effort to eliminate the work burden, businesses are transforming normal operations to the e-business technologi cal form. Business in the electronic form is causing the HRM to transform and develop newer procedures and practices. The human resources of companies have to maintain new skills and change the understanding from the brick and mortar style of business to the more advanced technological business environment, which is in a computerized form.To advance the performance levels, the HRM is starting to incorporate training in information technology to the human resources professionals in an effort to maximize the adaptation to the rapid changes to the practices for the e-business model (Mitchell, 2001). The human resources professional is requiring the computer and Internet-based business technologies to follow the accounting and marketing practices. Ethics In addition to being competitive, business professionals must maintain an even balance with the organizations ethics (Vickers, 2005).The HRM must create a business environment that is suitable with the company’s ethics policies. The HRM mu st maintain the interests of the stakeholders to an equal level without any discrimination. The first priority must be to the consumers’ best interest. To accomplish and maintain a balance between maximizing profits and maintaining consumers’ satisfaction, the HRM must make the business’s practices in such a manner. Conclusion Human resources management must be a major section within the business’s environment, which must adapt its roles to accommodate the ever-changing trends of the global practices.The HRM roles must not change for only a single aspect, but simultaneously alters according to all the factors. The most important aspect is in globalization. Other aspects like technology, as with e-business, makes the need for the knowledge of professionals within the HRM to be more technologically advanced. The ethics and diversities in business demand the management to maintain the vision of its employees to an equal level.

Candide By Voltaire Essays (598 words) - Picaresque Novels

Candide By Voltaire Candide on the surface is a witty, gelastic story. However when inspected deeper it is a philippic writing against people of an uneducated status. Candid is an archetype of these idiocracies, for he lacks reason and has optimism that is truely irking, believing that this is the best of all possible worlds. Thus Voltaire uses a witty, bantering tale on the surface, but in depth a cruel bombast against the ignoramuses of his times. Candide has reason only in the form of a companion upon which he relies for advice. His companion is of course Dr. Pangloss. He consistently dribbles to Dr. Pangloss about what should be done. At last to the happiness of readers Pangloss is killed by being hanged. But this means that Candide's reason is also dead! No problem he just goes finds a new companion, "Lacking him [Pangloss], let's consult the old woman" (37). He soon loses her, gains another, looses him, and then gains another. Thus we see that Candide can only think if he has a companion. Voltaire is thus saying that all the nobles are really idiots and says they are only smart because they have philosophers. This is typically Enlightenment, because nobles, are stupid and must have philosophers to make them Enlightened. For example L'Hospital's a French Noble had in his "possession" mathematicians that developed new ways of taking limits (a Calculus idea). Yet in today's society we call this way "L'Hospital's Rule," not Bernoulli's rule who is the one who "invented" it (Stewart 310). Candide is consistently being brainwashed by reason (Pangloss) saying that we live in"the best of Yet it quite obviously that he does not. For how can there be, in the best of all worlds, war, slavery and many more abominations. Half-way through the book it would appear that Candide has given up his optimism when he looked at the Negro slave. "Oh Pangloss... I'll have to give up your optimism at last" (73). But to the distress of the readers he has not given up his chafing optimism. "Since I found you [an Eldoradian sheep laden with stones], I'm sure I can find Cunegnde again" (79). Thus we see that he has quickly recovered his optimism. Voltaire is using Candide's blatant optimism to relate to the people of his time that also have the same type of optimism. He also bombasts the philosophy that states all actions are a part of an illustrious, benevolent cosmic plan. It is Pangloss who says "it is impossible to for things to be where they are. For all is well" (30). What Pangloss is saying that a thing greater then man (God) has everything laid out, and everything "is for the best" (30). It is here that Voltaire's attack on Christianity begins. He bombasts them for believing that all the world is a stage, and that God has written the script. This idea of predestination is the antithesis of the Enlightenment period, and thus it is only natural that Voltaire, a typical Enlightenment writer, harangue these notions by means of a person who believes in this until his death- Candide. Finally we can see that Voltaire is writing a typical Enlightenment work because Candide is a jeremiad against those people that are lacking Enlightenment knowledge, by this of course, lacking the epitomes of the period: reason, senses and self-interest. Thus Voltaire is using a charming story to attack the people of his time who are against or are not Enlightened. Many other writers also attacked the ignoramuses of their time. For example Montesquie, a French philosopher use The Persian Letters to bombast French culture. Hence one reason that Candide is typically Enlightenment is because it makes fun of the reader who thinks that it is merely a comical story of a man and a quest for his lover.

Helping Students Move Beyond General Goals

Helping Students Move Beyond General Goals Once you have determined a general goal and you think you know why it appeals to you, you are ready to write it in a way that will help you make it happen. Goals Studies of successful people have shown that they write goals that contain similar elements. To write a goal like winners do, be sure that: It is stated in a positive way. (eg. I will... not, I might or I hope...It is obtainable. (Be realistic, but dont sell yourself short.)It involves your behavior and not someone elses.It is written.It includes a way to measure successful completion.It includes the specific date when you will begin working on the goal.It includes a projected date when you will reach the goal.If it is a big goal, it is divided into manageable steps or sub-goals.The projected dates for working on and completion of sub-goals are specified. Despite the length of the list, great goals are easy to write. The following are examples of goals containing the necessary components. General Goal: I will be a better basketball player during this year.Specific Goal: I will get 18 baskets in 20 tries by June 1, 2009.I will begin working on this goal January 15, 2009.General Goal: I will become an electrical engineer some day.Specific Goal: I will have a job as an electrical engineer by January 1, 2015.I will begin working on this goal February 1, 2009.General Goal: I will go on a diet.Specific Goal: I will lose 10 pounds by April 1, 2009.I will begin dieting and exercising February 27, 2009. Now, write your general goal. (Be sure to start with I will.) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Now make it more specific by adding the manner of measurement and projected completion date. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I will begin working on this goal on (date) _______________________________ Considering how completing this goal will benefit you is quite important because this benefit will be the source of motivation for the work and sacrifice needed to complete your goal. To remind yourself why this goal is important to you, complete the sentence below. Use as much detail as you can by imagining the goal completed. Begin with, I will benefit by meeting this goal because... _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Because some goals are so big that thinking about them makes us feel overwhelmed, it is necessary to break them into sub goals or the steps you need to take in order to meet your major goal. These steps should be listed below along with a projected date for completion. Creating Sub-Goals Since this list will be used to schedule your work on these steps, you will save time if you set up a table on another piece of paper with a wide column for listing the steps, and a number of columns to the side which will eventually be used to indicate time periods. On a separate sheet of paper, make a table with two columns. To the right of these columns, attach gridded or graph paper. See the image at the top of the page for an example. After you have listed the steps you will need to complete in order to attain your goal, estimate the date by which you can complete all of them. Use this as your projected ending date. Next, turn this table into a Gantt chart by labeling columns to the right of completion date with appropriate time periods (weeks, months, or years) and color in the cells for the times you will work on a particular step. Project management software usually contains features for making Gantt charts and make the job more fun by automatically changing related charts when you make a change in any one of them. Now that you have learned to write a great specific goal and to schedule sub-goals on a Gantt chart, you are ready to learn how to maintain your motivation and momentum. Back to Goals and Resolutions: Writing Great Goals

Reflection paper about the annishnaabe people Research - 1

Reflection about the annishnaabe people - Research Paper Example Clearly, the residential schools system had a massive effect on the culture of the Anishinabe. While the white Christian faithful saw the system as a way of assimilating them and promoting peaceful coexistence, the school stream eroded the culture of the Anishinabe. The federal policy of residential schools made the engaged Anishinabe unacceptable in their society. They were detached from their system while the federal system did not fully accept them. The federal policy did more harm than good. It was wrong for people who claimed to follow the Christian guidelines to put Anishinabe children forcefully in residential schools and force them to disown their language and cultural practices. The white community of the time showed double standards as they advocated autonomy in their society. In God is Red, Vine Deloria condemns the hypocritical nature of the white people in the society and the government. More so, Deloria sees the religious imposition on the Anishinabe as hypocritical (43 ). These claims are very accurate. It is regrettable that the white people in the residential schools mistreated the Anishinabe children, degraded them and eventually made them lose their cultural identity. Basically, the white people used religion hypocritically to pursue their agenda of dominion over the native people in the region. The Anishinabe’s resistance to residential school was justified. After all, the residential schools only made them lose their identity, face physical and sexual abuse and become physiologically crippled. Though they were overwhelmed due to the superiority of the white Christian settlers, their cause was worthwhile. They could not have experienced relief later on such as the right to conduct their traditional rites if they did not rise against the residential schools. Benton-Banai writes, the clan system of the Anishinabe was instrumental in directing resistance. As a governing body, their actions were entirely

Can Environmental Insurance Succeed Where Others Have Failed Essay

Can Environmental Insurance Succeed Where Others Have Failed - Essay Example The researcher states that there are many protective measures put in place by firms in order to reduce environmental pollution. It ranges from environmental policies, health policies as well as the safety risk policies. However, these protective measures may not be socially efficient. In such cases, these firms have to be liable to the negative externalities developed due to their actions. Such externalities include loss of well-being of people exposed to pollution or those individuals who are not willing to use unhygienic recourses. In such situations, environmental may levy a post-damage fine, directly proportional to the extent of the external damage violated. For smaller firms, this fine may exceed their limited assets, therefore, making the firm declare they are bankrupt and avoid paying the fine altogether. Environmental agencies, therefore, came up with a pre-damage risk management process. In this process, firms will pay smaller fines frequently for not implementing the oblig atory environmental practices. Examples of such management process include Project Safety Management (PSM) programs, Risk Management Program (RMP), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and also Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Since post damage fines are often limited by bankruptcy and, on the other hand, pre-damage process mandates are constrained by monitoring. And, therefore, the best alternative will be to buy the environmental insurance policy. The paper, therefore, researches on mandatory insurance for Underground Storage Tanks (USTs) in order to come up with answers if environmental insurance policy succeeds where the traditional policies failed. Pre-damage fines could have been the best alternative to address the issue of bankruptcy, but the implementation is constrained by regulatory agencies’ narrow monitoring capabilities. Environmental Protection Agency has limited auditors to do facility inspection in order to ascertain whether all firm s have effectively put into practice all the risk management practices.

Impacts of Drug Related Crime

Impacts of Drug Related Crime Within this module the author is going to explore the impact of drug related crime, anti- social behaviour and drug abuse within society. The author is also going to investigate theories that increase the risk of an individual misusing an illegal substance. (Weisheit, 1990)   Moreover how nature vs nurture biological and environmental factors can contribute to drug abuse. This will include areas such parenting skills and the community in which a person lives can play a major role in enhancing the risk factors. (Ungar, 2004)  The gateway model focuses on how an individual will start using an illegal substance and move on to harder illegal substances. Furthermore, by implementing methods this will reduce the risk factors within substance misuse. The author is going to investigate methods and theories for reducing the impact of drug abuse. This will include the governments implementation of the 1998 10 year drug strategy. Moreover, how the drug strategy has progressed over the ten y ear period. (Drugscope.org, 2012) Drug abuse is a major problem within the UK from the individuals personal circumstances to war against organised crime. There are many factors why people initially take illegal drugs. Such as peer pressure, to escape or to experiment but can initially to addiction which can have a massive effect within society. An addict will have to maintain their addiction which will be done through committing petty and serious crimes. (Rasmussen. 200) Such as; shoplifting lifting, burglary and theft as most addicts, cannot maintain full time employment due to not being able to function properly within society. Although, some addicts will start to supply their drug of choice so they now they have a constant supply. Many drug dealers already live within the community to where they sell illegal drugs. This is another major impact within an area in need of urban regeneration as individuals are selling illegal drug on street corners. That is now having a snow ball effect and causing gang culture and ga ng related crimes. As inner city gangs become larger and try attaining additional territory Knife and gun crime is at all time high. (Bean, 2002)   A clear indication of the severity of drug related crime within the UK as it drains  £13.3 billion pounds out of public resources. (Gov.uk 2013) Furthermore, with a rise in anti- social behaviour local residents are feeling alienated and have nowhere to turn within their own communities. Due to being in fear of becoming targeted by local gangs and being attacked in the street our having their home targeted. (Hallsworth, 2005) As the individual drug addiction spirals out of control, family members are going to notice significant changes within their son our daughter. Such as mood swings, electrical items are missing such as ipods and mobile phones. Moreover, an untidy appearance and new friends, because an addict will associate themselves with other users to be able to access drug more frequently. (Harrell and Peterson, 1992) Banduras Social learning theory reinforces this notion and referrers to observational learning and this is done by observing the behaviour of others. The client has been encoding the behaviour of their peers, which have been influential to the individual. The client has encoded this information and later on imitates this behaviour to bond with their peers associated with their drug use. The individual does this without any regard for the own health or safety as suggested by Eysenck and Keane. (2010) Furthermore, the strain on the individuals family would also be a significant impact a s there being labelled within their local community. These actions could inevitably lead to arguments physical abuse and divorce within their home life. As their son our daughter may have been cut off from their own family due to being deceitful and dishonest. A person will initially use cannabis and is the most widely drug available within the UK. As indicated by H.M Government (2010) cannabis is used by more than 22,152,000 in 2009/10 and is classed as the gateway drug. This model was developed to explain how three factors associated with cannabis can lead on to harder substances. Firstly, a cannabis smoker is at a higher risk of using harder drugs than non -users. Second factor relates to how the national framework of drugs works as an individual will normally work their way up from softer drug to harder drugs. However, there are less than 1% of users who started using harder drugs first. The third factor indicates individuals who smoke cannabis more than 50 times a year are significantly at higher risk to progress onto harder illegal substances and is called dose-response effect. (Jrf.org, 2008) There are many factors that have to be taken in to consideration that contribute to an individual self harming with illegal drugs which will include: the biological and environmental factors of the individual. These factors play a significant role in an individuals personal development and are called Nature vs Nurture. Nature relates to the genetic factors in an individuals behaviour. However, genetics only play a small role as there is no actual gene that will make an individual an addict. But if a gene is missing others factors such as genetic and biological aspects that will make an individual more susceptible to drug use. (Fitzduff, and Stout, 2006)  This is because if a gene is not present the protein that controls the function of a physiological structure may not be formed. This is clearly evident within certain diseases however; others are less obvious such as the impact of genes on behaviour can influence and individuals disorders or traits including drug addiction. (Chasno ff, 2001)   Nurture relates to the environment in which the individual has been raised up in. There are many factors which need to be considered that could contribute to drug addiction. Such as the family environment the individual may have not been raised within a stable environment. There may been an indication of domestic abuse, history of substance misuse or criminal activity. If the individual has been brought up in a chaotic environment all increase the risk of substance misuse. (Chasnoff, 2001)   Furthermore, the community in which the individual lives is going to be a major factor. If they live in area with high drug rates, drugs are going to be easily acceptable and peer pressure will be a significant problem to resist. Individuals who lived in areas with no safe place to play or activities for people to engage in. All these factors contribute in a higher risk of substance misuse. (Fitzduff, and Stout, 2006) However, these high risk factors can all be reduced by the individual by having positive peer relationships. By having positive relationships the individual will build their social skills and confidence within society and is done by social learning. Also having self control, being able to assess a situation and realise when to say no. Furthermore by taking part in activities within your local community and continuing their academic studies can contribute to having a positive mind. (Buchroth and Parkin, 2010)   Moreover, by having a stable family environment, the protective factors of the parents all contribute to lowering the risk factors. Such as good parenting skills, communicating effectively and offering their child encouragement and support will also help develop their confidence and social skills. By reducing all of the high risk factors the child will be able to make a positive contribution to society. (Inciardi, and Horowitz, et al.1993)   Substance misuse costs the British government  £373 million pounds every year as they try to eradicate illegal drugs from our UK borders. Furthermore, fighting street suppliers and funding multidisciplinary teams to support service users receive treatment and abstain from their addiction altogether. (Goodman. 2009) The National treatment Agency created the models of care; this is the national frame work for adults in the treatment of drug addiction in England. The model or care was created to help a number of diverse communities all around the country. The services for treatment of addiction first came available in 1998 within the NHS. (H.M Government, 2010)  Furthermore, was part of the ten year drug strategy which is divided into four main categories and include: educating and prevention, support, treatment and counselling for people with substance misuse, using the law to combat the war against drug and fight the supply of illegal substance arriving in the UK. (Drugscope.org.u k 2012)   By 2008 the National Treatment Agency predicted a 100% increase in service users into treatment. In the treatment of substance misuse the services were delivered by Drug Action Teams within local areas. These services are arranged in to four different tiers depending on the service users level of need and mental health issues. Tier one service includes the initial assessment of the client to move onto specialist tiers within the service. Tier one also includes giving advice and information on a range of services such as housing, benefits and vocational qualifications. (Addictiontoday.org 2008)   Tier two services include harm reduction services such as needle exchanges by supplying clean equipment to inject with. Furthermore, advice and guidance and genera support without the need for a care plan. Tier three and four are specialist services for individuals who have a structured care plan. (Goodman. 2009) This can be community based treatment and residential rehabilitation. The bio-psychosocial model is very effective within the treatment of addiction. It focuses on a multiple pathways on how a person became an addict; this model acknowledges treating the person as a whole. It relates to biological, psychological and sociocultural theories within this model. The assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning and interventions all relate to this model. The practitioner will have to take into consideration the biological, psychological and sociocultural factors when assessing the client. (Rasmussen, 2000) In 2008 a review was taken within the drug strategy to target the most deprived areas and those who are significantly at a higher risk and need. By 2005 the government will spend a staggering 1.5 billion pounds on the war against drugs. Since 1998 there has been a major change in the prevention and education in substance misuse as 80% of primary and 96% of secondary schools have it within their curriculum. (Addictiontoday.org, 2008)  Furthermore, within the 2002 drug strategy reducing the supply of drug within local communities is another major priority. There has been a significant increase within the seizures including cocaine and heroin by 53% and 30% since the strategy began in 1998. The 2008 drug strategy aim to reducing drug related crime and how they affect local communities by making available  £100 million pounds. This has been made ready available to strengthen communities by disrupting local drug suppliers and reducing drug related crime. (Strong, and Gossop, eds. 2005) Furthermore, for every  £1 spent on tackling substance misuse a further  £3 pound is saved within the criminal justice system. This shows how effective war against illegal drugs is progressing. (Weisheit, 1990) With a range of interventions to help and support an individual who is in need. The interventions will include; rehabilitation, advice for the client, prescribing and harm reduction. As the drug strategy has developed over the years, the government assesses and reviews the strategy to improve the efficiency of it services within the UK. In 2008 Drug Strategy recorded the lowest level of drug use in over ten years. Gov.uk (2013)   Conclusion As indicated within the 2008 drug strategy for the campaign against drugs to be successful education and prevention are the key strategies. By educating the younger generations of the dangerous effects and the serious harm illegal drugs can do. Play a major factor in reducing the devastating effects drugs have on society. By getting adolescents to say no to drugs, the supply will reduce within communities. This will inevitably reduce drug related crime and anti-social behaviour and will also reduce the substantial costs within the criminal justice system. The police will be able to effectively save thousands of man hours and use their time more efficiently. (H.M Government, 2010)   The nature vs nurture is an excellent theory in examining the biological and significant number of environmental factors that need to be taking into consideration if a person is at risk of substance misuse. However, the bio-psychosocial model is an excellent tool to combat these factors. As indicated earlier this model concentrates on the biological psychological and sociocultural aspects within the model. Furthermore, is widely used within the treatment in substance misuse in tier 3 and tier 4 community based and residential rehabilitation across the country. (Chasnoff, 2001)   However, the fight on illegal drugs is going to be an extensive campaign, as there will always be a supply if there is a need for illegal drugs within deprived areas. On the other hand, the drug strategy is making significant progress in cutting the supply by within communities across the UK with 186,028 drug seizures. Criminal Assets have also been seized worth a staggering  £135.7 million pounds which has gone back into the war in fighting drugs. (Gov.uk 2013)   As within the gateway model suggests that cannabis is the normally the first illegal substance a person will try. Due to cannabis being readily available and regarded as being a less harmful substance. The drug strategy have seized within the UK over a half million plants worth an astonishing  £60 million pounds. This indicates that the drug strategy is effective but at a staggering cost to the tax payer  £20 billion pounds.  £13, 3 billion pounds is on drug related crimes and  £7.3 billion pounds and health iss ues. These are staggering amounts of money which could go into education and the NHS. (Jrf.org, 2008)