Integrity in Business

I attended the Dean's Convocation today with Bill Child and Jeff Benedict. The session was great! Each speaker had good remarks that built off of the other's. They talked about a variety of topics. The topic I felt they seemed to emphasize the most was integrity.

Why is integrity so important in business? Business if often built on, and thrives on good relations with employees, employers, suppliers, customers, corporate partners, etc. There is a quite in the book How to Build a Business Warren Buffet Would Buy that epitomizes the importance of integrity. "Integrity is the foundation of any good relationship. This is especially true in business, where trust is the key to opening doors, extending credit, and cultivating loyal customers."

Another important aspect of integrity that Jeff Benedict hit on was staying true to your core principles and values. In business you will often be face with situations that challenge these. It may seem easy to slide just a little on your values at first, but in the long run it usually comes back to haunt you. It's always easier in the long run to stick to your values, even when it's not popular.

Job Hunting Revisited

After reading through quite a few of the class blogs I'm realizing just how important networking is. Of course getting good grades and other experience is very important. Getting to know people, however, is just as important. I had one thought about why it's so important. I remembered back to my internship at Geneva Rock Products during the summer of 2008. One thing that impressed me about my mentor was his ability to form good relationships with customers and other contractors. This was valuable because if he needed something, he knew because of the relationships he formed with people they would understand he wasn't trying to swindle them. I realized that forming relationships of trust is also a fundamental part of networking. Networking shows employers that you are willing to go out of your way to form relationships and build their trust in you. Sometimes relationships of trust are more important than any skill you can bring to the job place.

Job Hunting

This subject is near and dear to my heart. I spent a majority of the summer in Logan searching for a job. I finally found one though. I was lucky to have a good friend working at the copy center where I landed the job. She was a real help when it came to them making their decision about me. Knowing people and networking, to me, is very important in the job search.

I think the reason that knowing someone that has ties to the company is so important is that it makes you more of a real person to the company. Otherwise you are just another name on another resume, crammed in between a hundred other resumes. If you know someone who works in the company they can vouch for you and help those in charge of hiring see you as a person with real worth and with real skills to contribute. However, as important as networking is, it can never really replace having a good work ethic, a strong education, and the ability to think critically. You still have to have those core competencies to be successful in the world.

Partners in Business

Before last week, I had never attended a Partners in Business seminar. After going to one this past week I think I'm hooked! I was only able to attend one session but it was very good. I attended the session that Gwendolyn Galsworth spoke at. She spoke on "The Visual Workplace." She taught how visual cues in the workplace can decrease lost time and help employees use their time better. A lot of times there is a great disconnect between what is supposed to happen in the workplace, and what actually does happen. Visual cues can help resolve this performance gap. They help employees see what needs to happen and accomplish it in the most efficient manner.

Overall it was a very interesting topic she spoke on. The whole time I was thinking of past and present jobs I've had and how the topic could apply to those. I also thought about how this could apply in future jobs I have. I'm looking forward to learning even more from future seminars.

Using What I've Learned...

Have you ever had an experience where you just out of the blue used something you had just learned in school that day? I had something like that happen last week. I was writing a note at work for the morning shift. While I was writing the note I realized I put a comma in where I normally would have missed it. I looked back and realized that we had just talked about that type of sentence and comma usage in class the day before. I just stepped back and thought it was great that I was already starting to incorporate what I was learning.

I know this is a very small, insignificant thing to have happen. But it was nice to see the money I'm spending on school is paying off somehow. It will be interesting to see what happens when I enter the real business world after graduation. Hopefully a lot of what I'm learning will be popping up in situations I face all the time.

What can professional blogs do for businesses???

One of the age old questions in business is: "How do I get customers coming to my business?" Marketing has played a key role in bringing customers to businesses for a long time. Since the invention of the personal computer, and more importantly the Internet, businesses have had numerous doors open to create new marketing strategies. Blogging is one that has become very popular in recent years.

Why is blogging so popular for businesses? What is the advantage of having customers read a web log of a business? For some companies, it is yet another means of advertising and letting the public know about their products. A great example of a professional blog is the Official Google Blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/). At this site people visiting the site can read about how other people in the world are using google. They can also read about various efforts by google to make surfing the web easier, safer, and more efficient.

Business can use blogs to show a more human side to the business. They can blog about their efforts in improving the community or doing humanitarian work. This give a customers a more positive view about the company, and can lead to them deciding to spend their money on that company because of its humanitarian efforts. They feel that by supporting that company, they are in a way supporting those efforts.

The list of possibilities for blogging is large. These are just a couple of ideas for using blogging in the professional sense. Sometimes, the best blogs for companies are the ones that are just fun! It just depends on how the company wants to connect with those who view the blog.