Ben & Jerry's
Ben & Jerry's Joy Gang
History: The Ben & Jerry's Joy Gang was started in 1987 in response to the increasing demands upon our employees. Our first Joy activities included pizza and 15 minute massages for our manufacturing employees who were working 12 hour marathon shifts. Jerry suggested that we should try to make fun an official part of our company culture. The Joy Committee changed its name to the "Joy Gang" due to the fact that we felt the word "committee" was too official.
Mission: To infuse joy into everything we do.
The Joy Gang approaches fun at work in 3 ways:
Joy Grants: cash grants of up to $500.00 to accommodate an idea that will bring more joy to a particular department. (A hot cocoa machine for our freezer crew, a stereo for our production crew, etc.)
Joy Events: planned, announced, organized activities that are sponsored by the Joy Gang. They usually include food, fun & prizes.
Joy Guerilla Tactics: secretive activities that are not previously announced, which are intended to surprise employees.
Doing Joy: A Compendium of Gang Activities at Ben & Jerry's
Name That Face Contest: Employees brought in photos of themselves from their past which were displayed in a collage on the company bulletin board for other employees to guess who was who.
Holiday Gift Box Exchange: Every year Ben & Jerry's exchanges ice cream products for
products from our vendors and various other Vermont businesses. A small group of employees volunteers a few hours of their time to make up boxes filled with nuts, cheese, coffee, donuts, etc. for all of their coworkers to take home over the holidays. One of the items we always get is a package of smoked hamhocks -- most employees enjoy them as an ingredient for soups and stews, but there are always a few folks who seem totally perplexed when they receive their first hunks 'o hocks, so over the years the hocks have gained a sort of legendary notoriety.
Manufacturing Appreciation Day: To recognize the ongoing efforts of Ben & Jerry's
Manufacturing Cluster, non-manufacturing employees dressed up as their favorite production, freezer, or maintenance worker.
Barry Manilow Day: In celebration of Barry Manilow's birthday (an otherwise uneventful day), Manilow tunes were played in the lunchroom and occasionally over the paging system. Manilow buttons were distributed, pos...
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... all who did get involved received the same results - free breakfast for school children.
Reinforcement
Ben & Jerry’s employees maintain their motivation though continuous reinforcement. The motivation that drives the company and their employees is constantly reminded through their mission statements and through their business practices. Mission statements are written on the walls of every store and manufacturing facility to remind everyone involved that the business has certain values that is to be applied in all facets of the company. It also helps that the people who work for Ben & Jerry’s maintain their values intrinsically because they truly believe that what they are involved in are a worthy cause.
Job Design
Job rotation/enlargement allows Ben & Jerry to reinforce the motivations of the workers. Employees are paid to work in the community doing some kind of social service. The program known as Making a Difference Day allows a typical manufacturing employee to go out into the community to paint a fire house or plant trees. This allows the employee to realize that the money made by Ben & Jerry’s does indeed go to community services and reinforces their values.
At the beginning of the novel, Suyuan Woo begins telling the story of The Joy Luck Club, a group started by a small family of Chinese women during World War II, where "we feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky.
The need among Americans to be diverted in ever more imaginative ways -- through high-thrill parks, virtual reality arcades, and theme restaurants, plays right into the hands of Dave Corriveau and Buster Corley, co-founders and CEO’s of Dave and Busters. The duo’s 50,000 square foot complexes include pool hall, an eye popping, cutting edge midway arcade, a formal restaurant, a casual diner, a sports bar and a nightclub rolled into one sprawling complex. In business since 1990, this is a high energy, highly efficient operation that’s comparable to a Vegas extravaganza. As a matter of fact there are even “for fun” cashless blackjack tables, with fake $10,000 chips. Pricey, but not outrageous, and you get value for your money.
Most religions of the world address moral issues that arise from people's sexuality within the human interactions. “Sex and religion- two of the most powerful, passionate, and poetic aspects of human existence”( “Manning and Zuckerman pg. 1“). There are many distinct religious beliefs about the complexion of sexuality and the appropriateness of various sexual behaviors. “Some religious (or aspects within them) can be described as comparatively “sex positive”. By “sex positive“, we mean that sensual, erotic activity involving the consensual pursuit and / or actualization of gratifying bodily pleasure is understood as natural and acceptable , even holy. Conversely, some religions (or aspects within them) can be described as “sex negative”, that is, sensual, erotic activity involving the consensual pursuit and / or actualization of gratifying bodily pleasure is understood as unnatural and unacceptable, even sinful” ( “Manning and Zuckerman pg. 2“).
The Joy Luck Club is a representation of the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between mother and daughter in a Chinese American society. The book illustrates the hardships both the mother and daughters go through in order to please the other. Also, it shows the troubles the daughters face when growing up in two cultures. This book reveals that most of the time mothers really do know best.
Throughout the novel, The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan explores the issues of tradition and change and the impact they have on the bond between mothers and daughters. The theme is developed through eight women that tell their separate stories, which meld into four pairs of mother-daughter relationships.
The Joy Luck Club, is a film that shows a powerful portrayal of four Chinese women and the lives of their children in America. The film presents the conflicting cultures between the United States and China, and how men treat women throughout their lives. People living in the United States usually take for granted their roles as a male or female. The culture of each country shapes the treatment one receives based on the sex of the individual. Gender roles shape this movie and allows people, specifically the United States, to see how gender are so crutcial in othe countries.
The Joy Luck Club is the telling of a tale of struggle by four mothers and their four daughters trying to understand the issue of gender identity, how they each discover or lose their sense of self and what they mean to one another. Throughout the book each of the mothers works hard at teaching their daughters the virtues of Chinese wisdom while allowing the opportunities of American life. They try passing on a piece of themselves despite the great barriers that are built between the women. Each of the stories gives a wonderful glimpse into the Chinese culture and heritage that the mothers are trying to reveal to their daughters through the use of festivals, food dishes, marriage ceremonies, and the raising of children, essentially their past experiences.
Overall, each mother in The Joy Luck Club went through something emotionally exhausting and saddening in her life. The mothers use their experiences to try to direct the course of their daughters' lives, to make them simpler and more carefree. Initially, however, the daughters only see that their mothers want to make decisions for them, not to help them. Ultimately, the daughters realize their mothers' intentions, but not all accept them. The important thing, however, is that each daughter learns a valuable lesson and comes to peace with her mother.
The Joy Luck Club daughters incontestably become Americanized as they continue to grow up. They lose their sense of Chinese values, or Chinese tradition in which their mothers tried to drill into their minds. The four young women adopt the American culture and way of life, and they think differently than their traditional Chinese mothers do, upsetting the mothers greatly. The daughters do not even understand the culture of their mothers, and vice versa. They find that the American way of thinking is very different from that of the Chinese.
... and in her hurry to get away, she (falls) before she even reach(s) the corner,” (87). This foreshadows the relationship between the mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. The daughters can not understand the reasoning behind their mothers’ decisions. However, the mothers realize their daughters are so much like them and they do not want this to happen. The daughters grow up being “Americanized,” but as they grow older they begin to want to understand their Chinese culture. All of the characters learned many valuable lessons that will be passed on to their own children.
First, Suyuan Woo who is actually dead but story is told by her daughter Jing-Mei Woo. Suyuan Woo started the Joy Luck Club when she came to America so she and other Chinese immigrants could talk about Chinese culture and how to carry on traditions and make living conditions better for her...
Sadly, the characters revealed in The Joy Luck Club have personal histories so complicated by cultural and emotional misunderstandings that their lives are spent in failed attempts to cross the chasms created by these circumstances.
In 1945, Sam Walton opened his first variety store and in 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. Now, Wal-Mart is expected to exceed “$200 billion a year in sales by 2002 (with current figures of) more than 100 million shoppers a week…(and as of 1999) it became the first (private-sector) company in the world to have more than one million employees.” Why? One reason is that Wal-Mart has continued “to lead the way in adopting cutting-edge technology to track how people shop, and to buy and deliver goods more efficiently and cheaply than any other rival.” Many examples exist throughout Wal-Mart’s history including its use of networks, satellite communication, UPC/barcode adoption and more. Much of the technology that was utilized helped Sam Walton more efficiently track what he originally noted on yellow legal pads. From the very beginning, he wanted to know what the customers purchased, what inventory was selling and what stock was not selling. Wal-Mart now “tracks on an almost instantaneous basis the ordering, shipment, and delivery of literally every item it sells, and that it requires its suppliers to hook into the system, enabling it to track most goods every step of the way from the time they’re made and packaged in the factories to when they’re carried out store doors by shoppers.” “Wal-Mart operates the world’s most powerful corporate computing system, with a capacity (as of late 1999) of more than 100 terabytes of data (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or roughly the equivalent of 250 million pages of text.).
As a student enrolled in a particularly large state university, I am consistently exposed to numerous individuals who hold different belief and value systems that guide their lives on a daily basis. One of the most fundamental systems that people adopt is a religious belief, varying widely from the Atheist to the Buddhist to the Christian, and these beliefs have the potential to have a profound impact on many of the key elements of a human experience, one of the most important being the sexual experience. Researchers have long sought out relationships between factors of different religious beliefs and practices and their effect on the individual’s approach to sexuality, finding varying results (Ahrold 619).
McDonalds has always been a leader in the fast food industry. Through its dynamic market expansion, new products and special promotional strategies, it has succeeded in making a name for itself in the minds of the target customers. However, McDonald’s earnings has declined in the late 1990’s and 2000s. This is mainly due to a fiercely competitive industry and variety in customer tastes and preferences.