Business at the Base of the Pyramid Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Business at the Base of the Pyramid - Essay Example 4). Survival for companies, at the base of the pyramid, directly hinges on the level of innovation that is put into the products (Prahaland 2002, p. 5). Achieving new levels of capital efficiency is a pre-requisite to profitable operation at the base of the pyramid (The European Alliance 2008, p. 11). The emphasis of business structure remodeling should be to produce innovative product using innovative means. This in turn necessitates the need to adopt innovative manufacturing processes. The guiding principle that should be adopted is the production of commodities that aid the community in meeting its development objectives (The European Alliance 2008, p. 10). The simple fact is that positioning a product to enhance the lives of the poor has a variety of advantages, chief of which is the financial advantages that will accrues from this approach (London 2007, P.9). The approach that should be adopted by the firms, which focus on the bottom of the pyramid, should entail employing an in novative manufacturing process, which will reduce the overall cost of production. This is in line with the fact that operating at the bottom of the pyramid entails lowering of prices and repackaging products into financially friendly units. This is best exemplified by the approach adopted by HLL India (Prahaland 2002, p. 6). The firm launched a new product called Wheel which essentially reduced the ration of oil to water in their detergent. When this was coupled with the low cost pricing strategy that they had set up, the result was a booming product which appealed to the poor consumer. This then ushers in the point of distribution. In order to target, effectively, the bottom of the pyramid, there must be systems that have been put in place, to ensure that the distribution mechanisms are able to access, effectively, the poor people (Prahaland 2002, p. 5). The lack of equitable wealth distribution restricts the poor to the sidelines of the global economy. This is regardless of the ve rity that they comprise a significant portion of the population. The status and nature of the poor makes it extremely difficult to reach via the conventional models that have reigned supreme using traditional business models (International Finance Corporation 2007, p. 3). The appropriate structure should be to position sales points to the small outlets, which are frequently used by the poor. These small outlets are characteristics of the dwellings of the poor. As such, should constitute as sales points for the business models of the bottom of the pyramid. Efficient distribution systems have greater potential of providing to large and untapped market. The largest being sourced from the rural poor. As such, with models that encompass structuring distribution points in the rural areas are better placed to tap these large and exponentially growing markets (Schrader, Freimann and Seuring 2012, p. 289). This is best done by structuring the business model to bring the product closer to the customer (The European Alliance 2008, p. 13). This in turn ushers in the need to check on the infrastructure. As such, this necessitates the need to incorporate NGOs and the government into a mutually benefitting partnership (The European Alliance 2008, p. 10). Aside from this, another vital aspect, to take into consideration is

A case of executive hypertension Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

A case of executive hypertension - Essay Example Blood pressure illustrates arterial pressure on the systemic circulation (Samia 2010). A sphygmomanometer is the device that is applied in measuring arterial pressure. d) Systolic pressure is generated by the contraction of the left ventricle. The pressure is normally between 100 and 140 mmHg. Blood that flows to the aorta through the left ventricle increases aortic pressure to the same level as the left ventricle (Neubauer 2007). f) Heart valves prevent blood from flowing backwards. The valves involve flaps which are based at the end of the ventricles (Newburger 2009). The valves are one way blood inlets on one ventricle side, and one way outlet on the other ventricle side. The four heart valves are; tricuspid valve, aortic valve, pulmonary valve and mitral valve. g) Stenosis occurs when the blood flow from the heart is reduced through the failure of the valve to completely open. If the valves do not close completely, it results to pulmonary regurgitation that enables blood to leak back to the ventricles (Davis 2008). Regurgitation enables the right ventricle to relatively harder in comparison to the left part of the heart. h) Low systolic pressure illustrates abnormally low blood pressure in the arteries. Very low blood pressure restricts the volume of blood that flows through vital organs, and thus causes dizziness and fainting. High systolic pressure occurs if the reading is more than 140mmHg. It is caused by conditions like artery stiffness and the heart valve problems (Ross 2011). i) Denises initial reading 150/95mmHg blood pressure. The reading illustrates high pressure because it is more than 140/90mmHg (Talley 2013). The hypertension is due to the high blood pressure, and can cause stroke and heart attack. j) Denises has high blood pressure because of diet and lifestyle. Hypertension may also be due to genetics and family history (Samia 2010). Stress levels at the workplace, can also lead to

Being A Passive Listener English Language Essay

Being A Passive Listener English Language Essay Listening is a prerequisite of learning. It involves hearing, attending, understanding, remembering, evaluating and responding to spoken messages. We cannot understand , learn or remember something unless we pay attention. A passive listener is one who pays low concentration and effort into what is been communicated, which may be attentive or supportive but occurs without further conscious engagement from the listener, this unresponsiveness may represent a failure on the part of effective listening skills with school,family ,friends and co-workers. There are numerous disadvantages of passive listening. Being a passive listener is an unresponsive act, it may affect an individuals academic progress, social and official interactions. In class participation may be highly important but being a passive listener deprives one the opportunity of staying focused. it brings about low intake during lectures and study hours. More concentration could have been made within the time spent on mopping or interacting with other folks. The passive listener tends to hear words but does not really listening to the words nor the deep meaning of them. The listener is known for staying at a surface communication level and never understands the deeper significance of what was being said. Being a passive listener is a very bad skill for students because they tend to loose a lot during lectures and classes. A passive listener might be present in class but isnt paying total attention to what is been taught . They could be easily distracted when been spoken to because they tend not to have their minds on what is being taught and because of this they tend to loose the most vital information during lectures ; instead of taking down important notes in class, their minds wander so they only collect little or no points and information which is not really important. Hence, they do not get most out of a lecture can affect a student during exactly because they tend to be lost. It is a largely inactive process which leaves the individual clueless. They do hear the words but find it extremely difficult to understand or to empathize with the speakers intention. The listener tends to listen logically and is more concerned for content than for feeling ; this makes the listener emotionally detached from the conversations, by this attitude friendships may be ruined as well. Passive listeners tend to destroy their short or long term relationships and friendships, it also gives an unpleasant impression about people, it sends around the idea that the listener isnt interested in paying attention to what is been said, due to the fact that they do not take in a lot from the senders messages , this could be either personally or professionally informations. Personal information could include social relationship , marriage complains , school issue , break ups, unwanted pregnancy and so on. If sender could find confidence in an individual. Being a passive listener can also affect ones communication with friends and family or even in work places due to the fact that passive listener makes one not to communicate properly because the passive listener cannot give inputs, opinions and supportive words but instead waits for a speaker to response what the individual has to say . being a passive listener also makes one not to react while listening or even give verbal dues to show they are listening e.g. nodding , blinking of eyes , questioning etc. Hence, if you care for someone you would pay attention to their lives too, thats what good friendships are made of. Being a passive listener does not motivate one to be active student because passive listeners tend to be dull and not responsive in class because they tend not to understand the speakers pattern of organization. i.e. what the speaker is ariving at and how the speaker is getting there. passive listening can also make one to be an unmotivated listener because a passive l istener may not know why listening is important because they do not even have the time to determine why what the speaker is saying is important to them. Low motivation to examine the text critically or at an in-depth level. other factors may include ; low motivation to study , poor reflection skills and unprogressive reading. Important pieces of data and assumptions may be missed. Data and assumptions that are perceived by the passive reader are accepted at face value or are examined superficially, with little thought. Being a passive listener can also affect ones communication with friends and family or even in work places due to the fact that passive listener makes one not to communicate properly because he/she cannot give supportive words but instead waits for a speaker to response what he/she has to say . being a passive listener also makes one not to react while listening or even give verbal dues to show they are listening e.g. nodding , blinking of eyes , questioning etc. They receive information has though bing talked to rather than as being an equal partner in the communication process. A passive listener is a big assumer. they believe the communication is the responsibility of the speaker. Little do they know such listening habit can lead to dangerous misunderstandings because there is insufficient communication. Being a passive listener can make one not to have high grades during tests or exams , which have happened due to the fact that the listener did not develop organized notes for study time and has less knowledge when it comes taking in good ideas from class topics. Getting low grades is an end factor of being a passive listener , not only does it reduce the performance of the passive listener but it may also decrease the individuals self confidence academically and socially. They tend to tune in and tune out unexpectedly. They are somewhat aware of others but mainly pays attention to self thoughts. They follow the discussion only enough to get a chance to talk. Their listening is quiet and unresponsive, such a listener will often fake attention while thinkin g about unrelated matters , forming rebuttals or preparing what he wants to say next. According to the english writer Chesterton G.K there is a lot of difference between listening and learning. Listening is when an individual puts full concentration or is consciously aware of the communication from the speaker while learning is perfectly likewise to listening but the big difference is the response and features of the listener when questions are being asked. The passive listener tends to misunderstand the of actually relating with each sentences that comes from the speaker; and writing it down on paper for more understanding However, every individual should master good listening skills as it is important in every aspect of our lives. Poor listening skills brings about nothing but no preparation and unawareness for an individual. A good listener will defiantly learn and progress more with academics and social interactions with friends and family. It takes a great individual to be a good listener

Hammurabis Code of Laws Essay -- essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Hammurabi was the sixth king of the first Amorite dynasty of Babylon. He supposedly ruled from 1792-1750 BC. During his rule, he wrote a code of law, which was the first to be translated from cuneiform. The code was written on several stone tablets so that all people could see them. It had a prologue, an epilogue, and 282 articles, and included rights for women, even though they didn’t have as many rights as men did.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Hammurabi’s code was based on the saying ‘an eye for an eye’. This means that the retribution for the crime would roughly fit the severity of the crime. For example, if someone poked someone’s eye out, someone would poke that someone’s eye out. I think this is fair because it doesn’t make sense any other way. For instance, if one was jailed ten years for a minor theft (a purse, a bike, etc.) and someone else was jailed ten years for a major theft (robbing the bank, stealing a valuable painting, etc.), that wouldn’t be reasonable. In Hammurabi’s ‘an eye for an eye’ theory, all the punishments are equal to the crime, which is very practical. Most of his laws are based on this.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In Hammurabi’s code, there were different fines for crimes on certain classes of people. For instance, if one freeborn man were to hit another freeborn man or someone of equal rank, the first freeborn man would have to pay one gold mina in gold. However, if a freed man were to hit another freed man, the...

A Letter to His Parents by Dr. Jose Rizal Essay

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM Psychoanalytic criticism: * It adopts the methods of reading. It argues the literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author. * A literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses. * It usually assumes that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche. * It validates the importance of literature. * Seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilt, ambivalences and may result to a disunited literary work. * The author’s own childhood traumas, sexual conflicts and fixation can be traced within the behavior of the characters in his/her literary work. Key terms in Psychoanalytic criticism by Freud: 1. repression. Every human has to undergo a repression of the pleasure principle by the reality principle; for some, even whole societies, repression may become excessive and make us ill. The paradox at the heart of Freud’s work is that we come to be what we are only by massive repression of the elements that have gone into our making. A vital conception in Freud’s thought is that that which is repressed will ‘return’ in some way — among the ways are parapraxis and psychic disorders. 2. sexuality The zoning of pleasure — through oral, anal and phallic stages; a gradual organization of the libidinal drives. The object of drives is flexible, changeable. Freud considered the biologically appropriate ‘phallic’ stage to be the proper, mature phase. The drives can be ‘hung up’, as it were, on objects, which are thus fetishized, wrongly experienced as the goal of the drive. 3. self. The early years of child’s life are not those of a unified subject but are a complex, shifting field of libidinal force in which the subject has no centre of identity and has indeterminate boundaries with the external world. The self which emerges, however, from the Oedipus complex (see below) is while more stable, a split subject, torn between conscious and  unconscious being, as it is forbidden to consummate the union it desires and so must repress those desires and substitute more acceptable objects of desire. 4. the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is/marks the structure of relations by which we are produced and constituted as subjects. The self must be taken in hand to exist in the world — formed as an individual, a gendered subject through the Oedipus complex, and the threat of castration. The child desires (union with) mother, the father intervenes and bars this union; the son sees his difference from mother (her lack of a phallus), adjusts to reality by seeing its capability of being like the father who is also his enemy and whose power threatens to castrate him. This is not an easy or unproblematic process but is deeply disturbing and marks the child as he represses his true desire. This process is less clear for women, who resign selves to being like the mother, and displace their desire for, in their case, the father, onto a desire to have a child. 5. dream interpretation. The aspects of a dream are condensation (focusing various meanings in one referent), displacement (something like the use of tropes, allusions), regressive transformation (replacing ideas and feelings with images), secondary revision (making everything fit into a story ): all concepts which can easily be transferred to the function of literature. 6. unconscious Produced through repression, the unconscious peaks in the world through dreams, through parapraxes (slips, ways in which the unconscious speaks despite the vigilance of our conscious selves). The unconscious is powered by libidinal drives, and is an inevitable force in our lives. 7. disorders 1. neurosis [obsessional, hysterical, or phobic]: the result of internal conflict as the ego defensively blocks the intrusion of desire; these begin during the Oedipal phase, arrested or fixated ; analysis uncovers the hidden causes and acts to re-live, re-interpret the failed development, in order to relieve the patient of her/his conflicts, so dissolving distressing  symptoms. 2. psychosis: the ego comes under the sway of the unconscious — paranoia, schizophrenia; a harder case to treat than neurosis, as the self has been virtually subsumed. 8. transference. As the patient talks to the analyst, he transfers his conflicts onto analyst: this creates a controlled situation, a form of repetition of the conflict, in which conflict the analyst can intervene; what is repaired in analysis is not quite what is wrong in real life, but the patient is able to construct a new narrative for herself, in which she can interpret and make sense of the disturbances from which she suffers. 9. the early theory of the self: According to Silverman(see particularly Ch. 2 and 4) the earlier theory of the self is a more flexible, dynamic concept than the later. In the early theory, or ‘topography’, found in The Interpretation of Dreams, the mind is divided into three areas, the memory, the unconscious, and the preconscious. There are as well two temporary conditions, memory, which leaves sensory mnemonic traces (fully accessible to the unconscious, but fully accessible to the conscious self), and the motor response. The unconscious is, of course, not itself accessible to the conscious self except in disguised form. The cultural norms and repressions are stored in the preconscious, which is somewhat available to the conscious self. It is the preconscious which substitutes attainable gratifications for unattainable ones, and which works to substitute thought for sensory and affective memories. The pleasure principle is in fact the motive to avoid discomfort, not t o seek pleasure; the discomfort is produced by the conflicts that we inevitably feel through repressions, prohibitions and so forth. 10. The later theory: the Id operates at the behest of the pleasure principle; the ego, formed through a series of identifications with objects external to the self, carries out the commands of the reality principle; the superego in an internalized ideal image of the father in his power, his privilege, his repressiveness, and his genuinely-experienced superiority.

The Top 10 Famous Meteorologists Throughout History

Presidents and Vice Presidents - How They Are Elected

The president and vice president of the United States campaign together and are elected as a team and not individually following the adoption of the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was drafted to prevent the nations two highest elected officials from being from opposing political parties. The amendment made it more difficult, but not impossible, for voters to elect members of two political parties president and vice president. Candidates for president and vice president have appeared together on the same ticket since the election of 1804, the year the 12th Amendment was ratified. Prior to the adoption of the constitutional amendment, the office of vice president was awarded to the presidential candidate who won the second-largest number of votes, regardless of which political party he represented. In the presidential election of 1796, for example, voters chose John Adams, a Federalist, to be president. Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, was the runner-up in the vote count and thus became vice president to Adams. How a President and Vice President Could Be From Different Parties Still, theres nothing in the U.S. Constitution, particularly  the 12th Amendment, that prevents a  Republican from choosing a Democratic running mate or a Democrat from choosing a Green Party politician as her vice presidential candidate.  In fact, one of the nations modern-day presidential nominees came very close to selecting a running mate who wasnt from his own party. Still, it would be extremely difficult for a president to win an election in today’s hyperpartisan political climate with a running mate from an opposing party.   How could it happen? How could the United States end up with a Republican president and a Democratic vice president, or vice-versa?  Its  important to understand, first, that presidential and vice presidential candidates run together on the same ticket. Voters do not elect them separately but as a team. Voters choose presidents primarily based on their party affiliation, and their running mates typically are only minor factors in the decision-making process. So, in theory, the most obvious way for there to be a president and vice president from opposing political parties is for them to run on the same ticket.  What makes such a scenario unlikely, though, is the damage the candidate would sustain from members and voters of his party. Republican John McCain, for example, withered from the â€Å"outrage† of Christian conservatives when they found out he was leaning toward asking U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, a pro-abortion rights Democrat who left the party and became an independent. Theres one other way the U.S. could end up with a president and vice president could end up from opposing parties: in the case of an electoral tie where both presidential candidates receive fewer than the 270 electoral votes needed to win. In that case, the House of Representatives would choose the president and the Senate would choose the vice president. If the chambers are controlled by different parties, they would likely pick two people from opposing parties to serve in the White House. Why It's Unlikely thePresident and Vice President Would Be From Different Parties Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, the authors of The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014, describe a â€Å"new emphasis on loyalty and competence and the new care invested in the selection process† as a reason presidential nominees choose a running mate with similar positions from the same party. â€Å"The modern era has been marked by an almost complete absence of ideologically opposed running mates, and those vice-presidential candidates who have differed on the issues with the head of the ticket have hastened to gloss over past disagreements and deny that any exist in the present.† What the Constitution Says Before the adoption of the 12th Amendment in 1804, voters chose presidents and vice presidents separately. When a president and vice  president were from opposing parties, as Vice President Thomas Jefferson and President John Adams were in the late 1700s, many thought the split provided a system of checks and balances just within the  executive branch.   According to the National Constitution Center, though: The presidential candidate who received the most electoral votes won the presidency; the runner-up became the vice president. In 1796, this meant that the president and the vice president were from different parties and had different political views, making governance more difficult. The adoption of Amendment XII solved this problem by allowing each party to nominate their team for president and vice president. Support for Electing Presidents and Vice Presidents Separately States could, in fact, allow separate votes for a president and vice president. But all of them now unify the two candidates on one ticket on their ballots. Vikram David Amar, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, wrote: â€Å"Why are voters denied the chance to vote for a president of one party and a vice president of the other? After all, voters often split their votes in other ways: between a president of one party and a House member or senator of the other; between federal representatives of one party and state representatives of the other.†