Week 1 When one door closes another door opens. The gathering swarm implies that in times of struggle people will come together for the greater good of the economy and make their own impact with their emerging and creative ideas/solutions to everyday problems. With the current pandemic everyone’s lives have changed, and people are spending more time at home. Many of those staying home are taking this opportunity to learn new hobbies/skills and taking on projects that they would have not necessarily have had time to do. With people finding new hobbies, there will be a boom in an entrepreneurial spirit. Such as when Airbnb launched at the height of a financial crisis, they were called cockroaches, which they took as a compliment. It meant to them that they had the ability to survive some of the biggest disasters. It took only one investor to believe in the product they were selling for the company to begin to prosper and become what it is today. Many small businesses are still struggling, especially this past year during the pandemic. The pandemic has closed many businesses, restaurants, and forced our everyday lives to change. However, online business has grown exponentially due to stay at home orders and work/home lives changing. This can be observed through many places offering online ordering, delivery, or curbside pick-up; whereas, if the pandemic had not happened then these businesses may have never offered these options. The pandemic has allowed some businesses to grow and reach customers that they may not have otherwise reached outside of their local business. I am fortunate enough to work in the healthcare field, where unfortunately business is booming with those that need care. At first with everyone unsure of what to think of COVID-19, people who would typically seek care were not seeking care. People that needed regular care were unable to receive this due to shutdowns of medical offices and urgent care centers; so, their only choice for care was to go to the emergency room, where they were being told to avoid because the hospital needed to keep resources available for those with the virus and to reserve personal protective equipment (PPE). This caused the healthcare field to take a big financial hit. There were many lay-offs or furloughs, to help reduce costs and unnecessary staffing due to the lack of people seeking care. I believe this was due to people’s uncertainty in the virus, its capability, and not wanting to get sick. During this time, many of the local distilleries switched from producing bourbon to hand sanitizer and donating it to the local area hospitals to help the frontline workers with some of the supplies that they needed to protect themselves and their patients. Some of the automotive plants switched to making face shields for frontline workers, along with the schoolchildren mentioned in the article. This allowed the schoolchildren to give back to their community while learning about basic economics and supply and demand. The year 2020 really turned our lives around, but it has allowed some companies the opportunity to rise above the challenges the year presented us with. Week 2 Resource Allocation Our lives have changed, and in some aspects they have changed drastically. Not only have our lives changed, but so has our economy. During this pandemic we have watched our economy have its highest of highs and what feels like its lowest of lows. With that comes lay-offs, hiring freezes, and hiring surges. The article refers to a study done from “January to April concerning a surge in job reallocation and concluded that 42% of lay-offs liked to the pandemic are likely to be permanent.” While lay-offs were occurring for some businesses, others were experiencing the need for a hiring surge. Some businesses experiencing hiring surges were online shopping businesses, telemedicine, and online learning. The article uses Amazon as an example of an online shopping business that experienced a hiring surge of 175,000 workers. There was also a shift in education for students, which allowed for a hiring surge for online learning businesses; this is due to many schools being forced to shut down in person learning and transition to online learning. Many other businesses, especially office work, were forced to make a shift for their employees to work from home as well to help curve the spread of COVID. The hiring surge that the online shopping giant Amazon experienced, allowed for our economy to be stimulated with the movement of money. More people were ordering online, Amazon had to act swiftly to fulfill these orders, and the new workers were earning money to go buy other products/goods to provide for their families. The article states that “as a higher stock price makes it easier for companies to raise funds in order to expand, they also represent a mechanism by which capital flows from endangered firms to flourishing ones.” The article specifically refers to computer-related products and pizza delivery firms versus mining firms. The firms producing computer-related products and pizza delivery are referred to “pandemic-resistant”, while mining firms were referred to as a highly vulnerable business. I think of pandemic resistant businesses as those that there will always be a need for during any time of crisis. Families were needing computers for their children to continue their education and some school districts were able to buy and provide their students with laptops to take home during this time, which stimulated the computer-related product industry allowing it to flourish. The pizza delivery businesses flourished during this time because people want to eat and do not always want to cook at home. Pizza is relatively inexpensive and can feed a family at a reasonable price per person and has a possibility of providing two meals for a family instead of just one, which lowers the cost per person even more. On the other side of this the highly vulnerable businesses, such as mining firms, were at risk because many plants, machines, and workers being idled, there was not a large demand for mining firms’ products. Therefore, these businesses had to make a decision to downsize or close the business permanently. Overall, I enjoyed reading this article and seeing how one small piece of the puzzle has a major impact on the larger picture. Week 3: The Replacements This article focuses on our current lives and how much they have changed in the last year during the pandemic and how automation technology could contribute to more changes. I agree that many people are working from home than ever before, except for high demand jobs that unfortunately cannot be done from home. The article refers to businesses that are considered high-risk environments, such as slaughterhouses, and how they are considering automation to complete the work. I believe that right now where we are as a society, automation costs companies a lot of money upfront. When a company spends more money to try to make/offer a better or faster product, then the cost of that product to the consumer will ultimately rise. The rise in the cost of the product can either help or hurt the demand for the product. Consider the rise in meat costs during the pandemic, slaughterhouses had to shut down, which stopped production and caused a shortage of meat (especially pork), shelves in the grocery stores were empty or very scarce in variety, and the cost of meat rose because of the demand of the product. Farmers were unable to make money from the sale of their livestock to the slaughterhouses, so they were having to either wait to sell or sell directly to the consumer. While in the long run this could speed up production of goods, especially goods that are in high demand, it could also save them money in the long run by lowering the number of workers they have to hire and pay. While this seems beneficial at first, companies must consider that machines breakdown and they still must hire people to monitor and maintain the machines. They also must consider the service contract costs to have a trained specialist come in to perform preventative maintenance (PMs) services. With some companies the service contracts are only valid Monday through Friday from eight in the morning to five in the evening and if you need service on the weekends there is an additional cost. While automation seems like a great idea to help lower costs, it could end up costing the company more in the long run. From personal experience with automation in the healthcare field, specifically laboratory, automation can help to ease the workload on the workers; however, there is constantly a problem or something going wrong. For instance, the current hospital that I work at has a large, automated analyzers for almost every test that we run in the laboratory. We are constantly having to call service to either get the engineer in to fix the machines or try to fix it ourselves. For instance, the analyzer that performs COVID testing was having issues running the tests and giving accurate results the first go around. We had to call the company’s service department to make them aware of the issue, send them files of the errors, wait for them to analyze our files, send a field engineer to the hospital to see if they could correct the issue (turns out they could not), wait for the part to be ordered (which was on backorder due to COVID and the company could not get the materials to make more of those parts because most of the medical grade plastics are from China), when the part was found and shipped to us, we had to wait for the field engineer to come back out to install the part and run qualifications and verify it was working properly. While this might seem like it did not take that long, it took over a month and a half; however, the COVID virus did not take a break with us. We were sending out the specimens to be tested at another laboratory, which costs the hospital more money because we no longer received the reimbursement for us performing the testing at our location, and there was a delay in patient care because the doctors were not receiving the results within a 12-hour time frame. All in all, I believe that automation is a wonderful tool because it helps to alleviate human error, allow for less supplies to be used, and help to lower the level of stress in the work place it does come at a large cost to the company. Week 4: Supply Chain and Bound China and the US have always had a give and take relationship. So, it is no surprise to me that China is still struggling with, what this article refers to as, slave labor and a militia that seeks out extremism. The news of China’s treatment of its people and workforce has been a known issue for many years. However, American brands continue to use these imported goods from China because they are cheap and allow the brand to make a larger profit from the good. I believe that if we want to truly call these brands American, then we as a country need to support these brands to have factories here in America to produce their goods. The cost to the brand will increase and therefore increase the selling price of their product, but I truly believe that Americans would rather pay for something made in their country rather than an imported product. On the flip side, as consumers we need to raise our standards for these products if we are going to be paying more for the good; I would be highly upset if I paid three dollars for a product that said Made in China and then paid ten dollars for the same product that said Made in the USA, and the product from China lasted longer. I also believe that if we were to bring these factories back to the US and paid a decent wage, it would help this struggling country come back together and start believing in themselves and renew the American spirit/dream. The article states that it would like a backing from Uncle Sam, why has the government not done this? Could they not receive a tax break for bringing jobs back to the US? Why is the government not helping these American brands with the negotiations with China? Why have we not threatened and kept the promise of pulling out of these areas in China and putting the jobs back into the US? How long have they not been able to do audits in the factories overseas, and why would you as a brand want to be associated with that kind of treatment of humans? These are just a few of the questions that this article left me pondering about. I know that the answer is probably due to how cheap the overseas factories can produce the materials for the good and how much more expensive it is to produce the same materials here in the US. However, again how can it truly be called an American brand when it is typically just an imported product with an American label? These brands need to take the first step and renew the American spirit and bring/keep the business in America. Week 5: The fall of GE is an interesting read because it shows that even one of the largest companies can rise and fall, just as we have seen with many smaller businesses. The failures of this company cannot be placed on the head of the company, but the steep decline seems to be due to multiple factors, such as poor leadership, lack of innovation, lack of using newer technologies, too many hands in the pot, and lack of financial responsibility/accountability. When a company gets in this much financial trouble, sometimes you have to go back to your roots as a company and do what you are good at. Stick with what you know, and success will come; consumers want a quality product, not a quantity product. Going bigger is not always better, sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. As the article states the more complicated a business becomes, the greater the information gap between managers and markets; that makes it easier to disguise what is really going on. In a company as large as GE, you would expect there to be some sort of transparency or honesty with the strengths and weaknesses. This becomes even more difficult when both major roles are held by one person because there is less of a fight when bigger decisions need to be made that will affect the company as a whole. As the article states, he [Mr. Immelt] came up with little that was fresh or exciting; he wasted money on dinosaur industries like oil and gas. Being in such a widely competitive market, you must stay current and show the consumer that your company has the latest and greatest innovation on the market. Having such a large company, it seems that when trouble approaches, why would you not turn to your employees for thoughts/ideas/innovations? They are a wonderful resource that the company does not have to spend extra money on an outside service. Who else knows your company better and what consumers want than the employees? Turning to the employees to help better the company shows that the company believes in its employees, this could help boost the morale among employees.
