Gung Ho, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles was a wonderful book that discussed many important factors involved in making a company truly successful. It had a good storyline to help to tell the story of Gung Ho. When I first picked up the book to read it I really had no idea what to expect to learn from the book. The points that were made in this book were very simple and common sense principles. I say that these principles are simple, but many companies do not think of these little things when running a large business. They try to go “by the book” and get too caught up in sticking to their rules and regulations. Sometimes you just have to use a little common sense when running a business.
Gung Ho is a great idea to help a business become as successful as possible by looking at the internal workings of the company. The idea of Gung Ho starts with the most basic part of a company, the employees. If your employees are happy and excited about working at your company, then productivity will increase. Everyone will work harder for something they think is worthwhile. Take my classes and myself for example. I will be tempted to work harder and study more in a class that I think is worth my time and a class that I enjoy. Professors at Methodist College could learn a lot from this book. If they would try to make classes more enjoyable, instead of standing up and lecturing and reading straight from the book, then perhaps students would be more interested. Some of my favorite classes are with Mr. Hogge. Not because they are easy classes, because its not, but because he makes class fun with the stories and the way he teaches the material.
One of the three main principles of the book Gung Ho is the principal of “The Spirit of the Squirrel”. Two words that are very important in a business are “worthwhile work”. People will work harder at something that they think is worthwhile. The last two summers that I was in High School I was a manager in a Bar and Grille at a local golf course. I enjoyed my job and worked closely with my employees to help the Bar and Grille is successful. I attribute this very method of Gung Ho. We all worked very hard at what we did because we had a worthwhile goal. The Grille had gone through some very rough spots and had changed owners many times in the pa...
... middle of paper ...
... The workers were taking great pride in their work. Something else that set them apart was their mission. They had a five-point constitution. The very first point was to protect the health, safety, and well being of every person in the department. Every other department in the factory was putting profit first in their missions.
Any business can highly benefit from the Gung Ho approach. If a business utilizes all of the methods used in the Gung Ho approach they greatly increase their chances for success. Busy golf facilities can also benefit greatly from the Gung Ho approach. This approach can help maximize productivity in what can be a hectic business. It also helps bring the different departments of a golf facility closer towards their goals.
Gung Ho was an excellent book with excellent theories on how to make a business more productive. Many of the points are already know by many businesses, however they are not know in great detail as this book describes them. This book has taught me many things in the business world and I know that I will continue to read this book and have my employees in the future read this book.
Factory workers worked twelve to fifteen hours a day in hazardous condition. There were no protective rules for women and children and no insurances for job-related accidents or industrial illness. The workers were obliged to trade at company store
By 1927, Ford was a very successful industrialist, who had made a fortune out of manufacturing cars and displayed a new model of industrial production. He paid his workers much higher than average wages and offered various other incentives to encourage them to live the lives he thought they should. However, he was not a totally honest employer. He was violently anti-union and employed thugs to intimidate anyone who tried to organize and represent his workforce. Ford's generosity as a boss was dependent on letting the company make decisions for the workers, not just in the factories but in the way employees lived their lives, spies were actively out and about observing workers' off duty lives. Ford thought he could create a vast rubber plantation in Brazil, thus ensuring a reliable supply of latex for his new Model A as well as for his Ford trucks and tractors. In the process, he intended to show the world that his system of production would also elevate the lives of his workers.
The working class faced conditions in the factory that wealthier skill workers did not have deal with. These men were not in a comfortable financial situation at home, and could not find comfort in hazardous working conditions with the dangerous machines they had to operate. Workers were harmed daily and among these injured employees were children (Shi 62). Many of these children were as young as nine years old, and due to financial reasons their families sent them away to work in workshops, mines, and even in factories surrounded by dangerous machinery. Realistically, these children were doomed to working in a factory for their entire lives.
While this is a dramatized statement regarding the plight of the worker under the new machine driven industrial system, rhetoric such as this did represent the fears of the working class. Over time, as industrialization appeared more common, there emerged more heated debates between the working class and business owners. The struggle between the two opposing classes of labor was the embodiment of the argument for national identity, according to Trachtenberg. His attention to detail of the divide between the lower class workers and the rich upper crust industrialists, serves to illustrate the varying changes which occurred across the country.
Factory workers of this time had very little freedom. Aside from having to work outrageous hours for 6 days of the week, there was no job security, no solid way to survive day-to-day, and if a family member were to suffer an accident, families had no financial means to carry on. In the early 1900s, there were no labor laws, including the right to organize, an eight-hour day, safety standards, or unemployment/disability pensions. M...
Coulter, M., Decenzo, D. A., & Robbins, S. P. (2013). Fundamentals of Management (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Many people believe that in order to succeed in a business that is having difficulties, it is important to focus on a particular area in order to be better productive in each of them, and be able to reach the goal. Instead, Goldratt and Jonah demonstrates that is important to focus on the company as a whole, but at the same time, it shows that it is incorrectly to only focus in an specific manufacturing department, or one plant, or a department within the plant, because people should not be concerned in local optimums.
It is the worker’s condition that he truly focuses on. Many of the problems that people faced during this time include: tenement housing, poor working conditions, child labor, monopolies of business, social and political inequality, and most importantly people putting profits over lives. It is around the same time that a terrible fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The unsafe working conditions made the employees escape nearly impossible.
Working conditions were described as dangerous, dirty, unhealthy, polluted, dark, dim and drafty. These workers who worked very hard with their strong muscles in these horrible conditions were not valued. If they were hurt and could not work, they were simply replaced. This was also stated in Document 4, with the same thing happening to children. In conclusion, both adult and child workers were not valued equally and treated like garbage.
Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton PhD tells what good bosses do and learn what not to do by bad bosses. Dr. Sutton breaks the book down into nine chapters that cater from having the right mindset to it is all about you. The book breaks down situations into common sense thinking.
The documentary strived to show us how factories were corrupt that they couldn’t provide good working conditions for the workers until we lost people. This documentary is about the tragic fire that took place on March 25, 1911 in the Triangle factory. We can clearly see through this documentary that these people didn’t matter to the factory owners because their needs were not met. The documentary shows that the year before the fire took place the workers led a strike asking for better working conditions, but obviously their voices were not heard. After the fire took place this is when factories started improving working conditions. It is sad to learn that it took 146 lives of innocent people in order for factory owners to be convinced that they need to improve the poor working
The meeting the workers had been concerning the low wage pay and poor treatment from the employers. The workers gathered and hailed a strike “yes we must strike!...
This article is about Harrah’s Entertainment; one of the largest casino entertainments made a decision to move away from being a product based company to a strategic marketing company geared towards customer satisfaction by implementing a customer focused rewards program. Bill Harrah, the founder of the company established the company’s reputation on the premise of pride of the employees working for “the best in the business” while given more attention to the condition of the properties. However, when Gary Loveman joined the company as the new Chief operating officer, he made a move towards customer service. Gary Loveman hired Marilyn Winn, the head of Human Resources, to change how the company engaged in people development. Winn came up with a strategic plan to develop Harrah’s human capital. As a result, Winn is faced with the difficult task of improving employee motivation and job satisfaction in a rough economy after 9/11, which changed our nation forever. Although, the company gained market share it did not quite meet the company’s projected level.
Robbins, S.P., DeCenzo, D.A., & Coulter, M. (2013). Fundamentals of management (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Robbins, S., Decenzo, D., & Coulter, M. (2013). Fundamentals of management. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.