Week 6 Activity-Storytelling in organisations

1. Reminder: Upload peer review
2. Identify a story about our organisations that help explain issues that need to be addressed.

Qi Yang (Carol):

One of my co-workers at IKEA told me his story and feeling of discarding used furniture. He said that when he throws away old home furnishings, actually he felt reluctant. Although they are used, or broken, they seem to have other extra values, or not worthy being discarded. He thought that recycling used furniture can not only prevent wood, fabric, etc from going to the landfill where its decomposition produces greenhouse gases and leeches toxic substances into soil and water. It also reuses natural resources, including wood, cotton, and petroleum-based products. Few years before, he tried to break apart an old couch and a bedroom set to salvage the constituent parts. He said, it can be an effective way to reuse various materials, although it is time- and labor-intensive. Thus he agreed and supported that recovery system at IKEA was a sound improvement worth long time developing.

Learn from the story: With the enhancement of environmental awareness in recent years, it also attaches great importance to the waste materials, and discarded furniture. Among home appliances and furniture discharged, 70% can be reused after repair and mending. Waste materials for recycling can save resources which contribute greatly to environmental sustainability. On the other hand, it is also pretty economic, which can help to reduce manufacturing costs.

Of waste furniture recycling industry beginning to take shape, IKEA also established their own old furnishings Recycle Factory, the second-hand furniture and waste wood recycling processed into a variety of available materials, and then supplied to the market again. The new product-recovery concept is implemented in more than 100 IKEA stores in Europe to ensure that returned products are, where possible, repaired instead of being wasted.

Tang Lu  (Theresa):

The story of my organization:

This kind of kind of story can be counted as incident story.

The story happened when I took my part time job as a receptionist in KFC back five years ago. One manager of my branch restaurant made a mistake by taking advantage of the leak of the supervise system of the organization. He literally stole the profit of one deal with the customer on one night around 12am when the restaurant is about to close. There is no other’s presence, so the general manager took nearly one whole day to figure out what had happened when she dealt with the monthly income and expenses. Finally she found out the truth and fired the manger.

What have the organization learned from this lesson:

After what had happened in this specific branch, the general mangers in that district had a meeting afterwards. The aim of the meeting is to work out a solution to perfect the supervise system and indeed made a big change in this area. For that was a very serious, typical and related to every staff in this organization, therefore the change came into effect in a short time and staffs felt it was necessary to accept this change. The specificity of the incident enable the change came very easily without taking too much effort.

Yanny Sit:

There is this story about how Rogers’ marketing team has a funny way of running the business. One example is how the price of phones can sometimes change from day to day. At one point a Samsung Galaxy S3 changed prices every second day. Reps were joking that when they sell phones, they tell customers they cannot even guarantee the price of a phone beyond their conversation. Other changes involve how they adjust the prices based on the competition. Reps are saying that Fido always lowers their prices if others have done so in the first place.  As such, during the Holiday rush period, there was this mini ridiculous price war where cellular phone companies were lowering their prices of their plans by a dollar every week. On top of having the general rush of Holiday shoppers, reps in store were also dealing with customers who thought they got cheated because the price of their plan was now a dollar lower than it was last week. Since the month of March however, prices have stayed stable for both plans and phone prices because of customers calling in.

Lessons learned?

After the ridiculous amounts of calls forwarded to the call centre for a plan change of one dollar, Rogers figured it may be best to simply set a price and stick with it as the costs involved in changing the customers plans are far too great for the little return they bring. Prices are now changed based on set financial quarters and some promotions are rolled out throughout the quarter based on competitive reponse.

Yike Wang ( Daisy):

Wal-Mart’s founder – Mr. Walton was born in Oklahoma in 1918 and in middle school and university period, he have a part-time job in restaurants, shops, to get the money for school. After graduation, from the university, he worked in a chain store for two years, and was be a solider from 1941 to 1945. In 1962, in a small town in Arkansas, Walton opened the first Wal-Mart, setting every day lower price as its starting point. In his expanding, he only choose those downtown just have 5000-20000 people. In those small places, there have no competition, when opened a new Wal-Mart, every one there will know that. It seems that he even don’t need any expense of advertisements. By 1969, Wal-Mart has opened 18 stores and all of them are in the downtown which population is less then 20000. To the 1990s, 1/3 of the supermarkets are in those less competition small towns, at there, Wal-Mart has a quite strong pricing setting power. Since there is no wholesales willing to delivery goods to Arkansas rural, at the beginning of 1964, Wal-Mart had to build their own logistics inventory center. Although this is forced to do, Wal-Mart can avoid the wholesales directly with manufacturers to have a lower price.

What have learned in that story?

From this story, we can find that at the beginning of set up Wal-Mart, the goal of every day lower price has never be changed. Choosing of those less population downtowns makes Wal-Mart has less competition with other big supermarkets. However, in small towns, every new thing will be spread so fast which can cut down the advertisement costs. Because of the small towns, most wholesales would consider the sales would be small and don’t want to delivery goods, that also makes Wal-Mart to have its own wholesales to have a lower purchasing   price then offering a lower price for customers.

HE Yingying (Helena): 

In the Hong Kong HSBC IT department, I heard a piece of news about money laundering. On March 12 this year, a judge of the High court of Hong Kong announced that a house wife who money laundering nearly an amount of over $ 68 billion was sentenced to jail for 10 years. The house wife deposits nearly 40,000 times in the three years between 2002 and 2005. The judge said that although the transaction does not involve cross-border crime, and she is not the mastermind, she has 9 different accounts for money laundering. This case has also become the second largest money laundering case in Hong Kong.

The house wife deposit about 5.18 million yuan daily during the three years. How could she not be suspected for such a long time? Probably the house wife knew the suspicion boundary of per deposit, and she deposit the amount just below the boundary in purpose. And she had 9 different accounts, which are difficult to be tracked.

Lesson learnt:

The bank is also a victim in a case like this. To avoid this kind of case, the bank should more focus on the training of the stuff. The stuff should not only be familiar with the transaction procedure, but also should raise the awareness about the financial crime. The bank can implement relevant e-learning courses to address the issue, including some vivid video clips.