MBA 665 Final Project Essay Sample

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MBA 665 Final Project Essay Sample

MBA 665 Final Project Essay Sample

Background Information

The internet has been around for a couple of decades and has increased speed and communication throughout the entire world. Products and services are now available with the push of a button, and can be on your front door step within two business days and even same day as well. Amazon.com has transformed the retail industry in just this manner. The company offers many different products and services at a fraction of the price of their competitors. Amazon.com started off as an online book buying company that transformed its way into a retail giant across the globe.

Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos took the company public as Amazon.com Incorporated in 1997 (La Monica 2017). Amazon can be seen being traded through the stock market as AMZN. Amazon has diversified itself in so many different ways in the past by offering the same competitor products and services, but at a lower price. This company has always been about the customer and continues to cater to the customer’s needs. Jeff Bezos finds that if the customer is giving feedback on what they want to be seen from the company, and they give it to them, Amazon will be able to take over the retail industry. This can be shown through Jeff Bezo’s “empty chair” that he has in his conference meetings (Anders 2012).

This chair represents the customer and what they would want in the product and service. As the owner, he cannot forget what his dream has always been, which was to please the customer. Customer satisfaction started when Amazon.com started the two day shipping to its customers which has eventually evolved into what we now call Amazon Prime. This service offers free shipping and two day delivery to its members who only have to pay a one-time fee once a year to enjoy it. Although Amazon.com is currently only seen around the internet, Jeff Bezos is currently looking in to how they can open up shops so people will be able to get their services and products right away (Thomas 2018). This option would put Amazon in complete control of the retail market and consume its competitors quickly.

A service that I believe would benefit Amazon.com is a service that would be called Amazon Classroom. Amazon Classroom would be a year round, membership type service that would discount school supplies to college and university students. Lots of competitors offer back to school savings a week or two in the fall and summer to get students ready to go back to school, but some students might come across things that they still need in the middle of the semester. With Amazon Classroom, these students would still be able to find that discount in the middle of the semester. Once the enrollment was verified, the student would pay an annual fee on top of their prime membership fee in order to receive the expedited shipping as well as the discounted school supplies. Each student would be offered a one-time discount on the big ticket items such as electronics and laptops. By having Amazon classroom, we would be able to reach out to the student population which seems to be growing every year.

As far as the stakeholders of Amazon.com, everyone up to individual employees can be stakeholders in the company. In fact, as incentives to working at Amazon, Jeff Bezos would offer an incentive of purchasing stocks in the company (Farfan 2018). Jeff had envisioned that if people had a stake in the company, they would want to work harder in order to gain profit. If an employee believed that the customer was to be first and have the most impact, then they would put the customer first, which would in turn raise the price of AMZN. It might not be an immediate rise, but by working the way the company expects its employees to, the long term investment would be worth it.

Trends

There are many startup companies out in the economy that are struggling to survive. This is due in part because of how well the company is able to adapt to the situation around them. Are they able to give these consumers what they want while still being able to make a profit for the company? It also has a lot to do with the business environment of a company. The business environment has a lot to do with what the internal and external factors of the company are. The company that we will be researching these factors with is Amazon.com. Amazon has been around for many years at this point, and has adapted to the internal and external environment in order to make it to where it is today.

The internal factors related to the business environment of Amazon.com are organizational culture, organizational structure, and management structure. Jeff Bezos has been the CEO of the company from the ground up and has a very specific way of doing things. Jeff has made it a known fact throughout his organization that it is okay to fail. Failure is a huge part of the company, and nothing is ever going to be accomplished if no one is able to fail (Hoffman 2017). Bezos explains to his employees that they are encouraged to fail until they get something right, or at 100% (Hoffman 2017). Another thing that Jeff Bezos does to promote a healthy culture inside of Amazon is what he calls “Two Pizza Teams.” These teams are made up of a specific amount of people that are able to eat two pizzas (Baldacci 2013).

By doing this, Jeff sees it as an opportunity for the right amount of people in a group to participate, have their voice heard, and not feel overwhelmed (Baldacci 2013). When a team is given a task that they need to get done, they can order two pizzas and converse on how to solve the problem or task at hand. This internal culture has an immediate impact on the organizational and management structure of the company. The organizational structure is made up of function based groups, global hierarchy, and geographic divisions (Meyer 2018). This type of structure can be seen all around the world in the different subdivisions of Amazon.com Inc. There are many different places that Amazon.com has around the world that are considered their own groups. With having little groups around the world, they make up what they call a global hierarchy, which in turn is a type of chain of command through communication.

The management in all of these geographic divisions in the world are hired and told the same thing through the headquarters based out of Seattle, WA. One example of this is Jeff Bezos idea of the empty chair that is put in during meetings (Baldacci 2013). When these managers around the world have their meetings with their employees, they are to have an empty chair in the room that signifies the customer. By doing this, the team is forced to look at the customer and what they would like to see from the company. I believe that this is the most important internal factor that Amazon.com should focus on. This is because having a customer focus like this has enabled the company to come so far.

Every company is going to have internal factors that affect how they do, but they are also going to have external factors as well. The external factors that Amazon.com has are political, social and technological. Political factors can play a huge role in how a company does in day to day operations. When a person of a political party says something about a company, all of those supporting voters are going to take into account what they say. There has been a lot of pushback from these politicians about how Jeff Bezos is the highest grossing CEO in the retail marketplace, and yet his employees are leaving home and living off food stamps (Luhby 2018). When the public sees this, they start rallying and try to make this change by asking Jeff Bezos to raise the minimum wage. This is where the social factor comes in to play as well. When enough people are protesting Amazon.com, eventually there becomes a change, for whatever the public thinks is best. The change of the minimum wage to $15 an hour for Amazon employees may look like a good deal on the outside, but some people where effected for the negative (Weiss 2018). Mr. Bezos was forced to take other types of compensation from the employees, such as stock options and benefits. This was frowned upon by the workers that have been there for some time and were also earning a stock in the company. As far as the technological factors that affect Amazons business environment,” there is quite a lot. Amazon was started at the turn of the century when the internet was just starting up. Jeff Bezos understood the growth opportunity that was at hand and jumped at it. Mr. Bezos invested in the technology of tomorrow, and I believe he is still doing the same thing. He has thought up of things from drone delivery, to Amazon Go stores coming to a store near you (Wingfield 2018). By staying ahead of the curve in the technology realm of things, Jeff can really stay ahead of the competition, and even consume them as well.

Once we have looked at the internal and external factors, we need to take a look at the trends of the economy, and what other large business are doing. When the economy tasks a company to change for the better of the economy or environment, the company needs to decide to conform or not to. We will discuss the corporate social responsibility of the company, and many companies like it, while also looking at the trend in sustainability and business ethics. Some of the current corporate social responsibilities that we see right now are the end of workplace harassment, expanding diversity, going green, climate resilience, higher standards for supplies, and data protection (McPherson 2018). Workplace harassment is being met more with an equal opportunity point of view for everyone. This is definitely looking more towards treating woman as equals compared to men. Expanding diversity within the company has been a goal since Amazon started. When a company has more diversity within its culture, they are able to expand easier while also catering to multiple cultures around the world. By hiring people with different backgrounds, they are able to spread the word more easily about a company, and help with growth. Going green has been a big one in the past couple of decades due to fear of global warming and such.

Amazon.com is mostly an online resource which requires a lot less than these other retail giants need. When we talk about going green, there is also talk about climate resilience. This means that we are trying to stop the problem before it starts when it comes to hurting the environment. Instead of trying to put a band aid on the different problems these companies are encountering, we need to take a step back to reevaluate how we can prevent these problems from happening in the first place. Higher standards for supplies entails making sure that the people who are supplying the products are doing so with all of these things in mind. By upping the bar for everyone, we should be able to see a better living community for everyone in the future. The last one is data protection, which is probably the most important. This is because Amazon.com so far is strictly online. Data Breaches have been happening everywhere and more frequently than before. When we look at all of these responsibilities, we wonder if the companies are going to be able to uphold these standards. The sustainability of these ideas is not something new for Amazon.com. This company has been on the up and up for many years now and has also been consuming its competitors as well. I feel as if Amazon.com is going to eventually be the end all be all for everything that the average consumer needs. It is slowly taking over every industry out there, so it seems to be able to hold up with the sustainability. But in order to be sustainable, they will need to abide by the rules that are laid out in front of them as part of the corporate social responsibilities.

I believe Amazon will not have a problem following what the public wants from these corporations. Although it might not be beneficial for the company to start using more “green” products and services, I think they have no choice. I truly believe Amazon.com will not have a problem with following these rules because they are so customer focused. As far as the ethics of the whole thing go, this should be an easy way for Amazon.com to continue honoring their mission statement and giving the customer what they need. When we look at these trends of the corporate social responsibility, we can see that corporate America is trying to become a better place to live and work at. I believe Amazon.com has been well on its way in every aspect of these trends, and will continue on the path while also staying ahead of the competition.

Ethics

Now we can look at the Ethics and regulations that could potentially affect Amazon.com. When someone says the word “ethics” we think of what is the best for the company. Jeff Bezos has a very unique look on the way he does business. When owning a business, there should be a little give and take with the managers, and the shareholders of the company. The managers might want to do one thing, where the shareholders might want to do another thing because it will increase the amount of money in their pocket. Jeff Bezos is all about the customer in this situation. To the shareholders, they might look at it like Jeff is going behind their back and allowing free returns, or credited accounts on the shareholders dime. What the shareholders don’t know is that if they give up the short term guilt of helping the customer out, the long term will benefit them two-fold. This is because Jeff Bezos focuses on the customer, and by doing so, you get return customers and free advertisement. Some regulation’s that have come in to play lately that we see in the news are taxation, tariffs and trade policies, data protection, and wage increases (Uzialko 2018).  These regulations are set forth to limit the competition, protect consumers, promote equality and safety, protect the natural environment, and promote ethics (Weiss 2014). There has been a lot of political talk about whether or not Amazon.com should be charged some sort of tax for all of their packages that they use day in and day out of their operations. If this were to be the case, we could see our profit margin as a company decrease due to higher taxes. When it comes to importing and exporting into different countries, this also might make it more expensive for Amazon.com to go about its regular everyday business. As far as data protection goes, there have also come out with federal regulations regarding what needs to happen and the level of security that needs to be implemented with an online business. Now when it comes to wage increases, the people responsible are the politics. These people are all trying to make themselves look good when they are running for office that they would like to get their communities on board by increasing the minimum wage. Like we talked about before, this is perfectly fine and dandy, until we start taking away from other people’s benefits. The corporate strategy behind Amazon.com is to market to people everywhere in the world and for them to be able to get whatever it is they want or need in one place. These ethics and regulations might make it a little more challenging for us as a company to reach other parts of the world and start selling to them, but at the end of the day we can still try. Amazon.com has grown so fast and great over the past couple of decades that the company has enough money to put towards helping out the greater cause if need be. As far as the ethics standpoint goes, the shareholders will just need to continue what they have been doing in the past, which is watching their investment slowly increase over time while making the customer first priority. When it comes to brand development, Amazon is slowly increasing their own brand while coming up with new ideas as well on how to incorporate their brand into every day competitors’ products. With the decision making process that Amazon.com uses, I think it is clear that they are going to continue down the road they are headed on because it has seemed to be working. The only decision making process that Amazon.com possesses is what would the customer think of this product or service if they were to be sold it right now, and would it be good enough for them. When we take a look at all of these ideas and how they affect each other, we need to be weary of the future. Although there may be speed bumps ahead with more money being paid out in order to reach customers around the world, is this new plan going to be sustainable? I truly believe that when a company comes up with their business model, along with their corporate strategy, brand development, and decision making processes, they can truly see the affect they have on their employees and customers. If a company starts off with putting the most important key to success in the middle of their plan, there is no doubt on whether or not they will be successful, it is just a matter of time.

Decision Making

The responsibilities that we talked about before were workplace harassment, expanding diversity, going green, climate resilience, higher standards for suppliers, and data protection. Many businesses these days are finally opening up to how the workers and employees are being treated. A larger company such as Google just recently scheduled a walkout worldwide over employees that have faced sexual harassment and are just now getting the courage to speak up (Wakabayashi 2018). As the years go by and more rules are coming out, employees everywhere are finally finding their voice, and they are not afraid to speak it. In order to avoid these outbursts, we as a company need to focus on respecting the employees while also being able to give the customers what they want.

Amazon.com has a headquarters in Seattle, Washington, as well as many other supplier warehouses placed throughout the world. These are the places where workplace harassment is going to be seen, if at all. As a company we would need to revisit the harassment policy and make sure that it is spot on with our beliefs as well as how people should be treated in the first place. At that point we could pass out a memo to the whole company asking if they had any suggestions or ideas on how to improve the policy and make it better for everyone. Once we come in agreement with how people should be treated equally, we could open the door for potential victims in the past. By handling these issues ethically and internally, the company will grow stronger as a whole and be able to overcome things in the future.

When it comes to expanding diversity within the company, we would need to start reaching out to other cultures and bringing them on board to the company. There are many things that we could do as a business that will help out our diversity. With another headquarters being place somewhere in the United States, we could start off by hiring a larger background of people that have the qualifications to work for the company. Another thing that we could do that would be good for the employees is to promote from within. By having a diverse group of people that already work at the company and promoting them up, it will raise the moral of the employees. We could also implement a business leadership class for employees that would like to expand their career with the company.

Becoming an environmentally friendly business is the key to the future success of a company. In fact, there has been a lot of recent media coverage about banning plastic straws in California, which has taken the world by storm (Fleishman 2018). This is when all the companies that are using plastic straws need to conform to a new idea in not using plastic straws, or people are just going to stop going to that restaurant. By Amazon using mostly the World Wide Web as a base for the company, there is a lot less waste being thrown around than many other companies. An idea that Amazon could use is a “return box” to ship all the boxes that people are getting due to high demand of products. By taking back the consumer’s boxes after they open their packages, we would essentially save a lot more cardboard, thus saving costs to the company.

Amazon.com deals mostly with the 3^rd party suppliers who ship their products all around the world. There are product recalls on many different things still to this day, and this is one thing that we need to be weary of. As such a large supplier of products, we need to ensure that our suppliers are giving the customers the best products on the market. “In the 1900s, the concept of “let the seller take care” placed responsibility of product safety on corpora-tions (Weiss 2014).” This takes the responsibility off of the buyers and places it on the corporations, which is a good thing for the consumer.

That leaves us with data protection, and what we as a business can do to help protect our consumers from online scammers. Weiss 2014 explains that Congress has tried to implement new legislature to prevent identity theft and prevent internet fraud, but aren’t sure if it is able to work. Although having legislature in place to stop these internet thieves, it hasn’t stopped them before. This is where it would be nice for Amazon.com to implement their own type of cyber security to help out their customers. Just by taking their system an extra step further and adding another step of protection for their customers, Amazon.com could help deter criminals.

As far as the regulations that we will have to follow such as taxation, tariffs and trade policies, and wage increases, we must be ready to adapt as well. Taxation could hit the company big and should be prepared for in the upcoming future. We should be able to have some firepower in our back pocket to go up against things such as taxation against the delivery system that we are using, such as implementing the pick-up of peoples used Amazon boxes. Tariffs and Trade policies could have a large impact on the company as well. We would need to know when to hold strong with other countries, and when to back down with working out of them. And wage increases should be taken in to consideration when talking to the employees about whether or not they want more benefits or more pay. We would let the majority of the company decide on what they would want more and go from there.

The process that we will use in order to start implementing these changes is to start within the company and talk of our new plans amongst each other. When we have decided on the direction to go concerning what is best for the company and the customers, we can then start implementing new policies and taking the decisions public. And when I say public, our shareholders must be the first ones to know of our plans in order to avoid any turmoil. Once the shareholders understand our perspective, and why we are doing what we are doing, we then will be able to announce it to the rest of the public.

Impact

Once these decisions are put in to affect, there will be a lapse of time before they are implemented. There will need to be investments strictly for everything we spoke about before in order to protect our future as a company. Although these investments might cost a little in the beginning, once again, that is why it is called an investment. If our company is turning cash into helping the environment by doing things differently, it will be beneficial in the end for both the consumer and the environment. By thinking about the future, the sustainability of the company will follow. This will play in to corporate citizenship because it will show the world that this company will be able to participate in all economic and social responsibilities. Philanthropy will follow suit by investing in these decisions to help the environment which inadvertently helps the public. Once the public notices that Amazon is trying to help the world and their local communities, I believe that they will be more apt to be involved in their community by participating in things such as sending the boxes back, and maybe even waiting a couple days on delivery in order to mass deliver products to people. The environment will be affected overall in the long term by lessening the amount of waste that goes into it as well as recycling the delivery boxes.

The stakeholders are always going to have the looking glass on the company when the company is implementing large changes. When Amazon decides to start with these decisions that they have in mind, they will be in need of more money to go in to these projects rather than going in to the stakeholders pockets. Now the stakeholders might frown at this in the beginning, but that is why we are going to have a meeting with them before any of this happens. They need to know that their little dip in their individual stake in the company is going to benefit them more in the future. Weiss 2014 makes a good point when they say “Consumers may be the most important stakeholders of a business. If consumers do not buy, commercial businesses cease to exist.” Although stakeholders play an important role in how the company is run, at the end of the day, there will need to be consumers to purchase these goods from the company.

Since Amazon is strictly an online company as of now, we will focus on its headquarters which is located in Seattle, WA. This is going to be the place that affects the most people because it employs so many people, and starts all of its new ideas in that city. Seattle kind of has been the test city for many different products and services that are run by Amazon such as Amazon Go (Wingfield 2018). By starting off in Seattle, we will be able to measure how well the company is doing based upon that city alone. Some of the best practices in CSR are as follows: Set Measurable Goals, Stakeholder Engagement, Sustainability, Lifecycle assessment, and CSR reporting (Lu 2011).

We can set measurable goals in Seattle by implementing our different ideas and asking for consumer responses in the form of questionnaires, as well as watching how the company does financially. Stakeholder engagement would simply mean getting their ideas and engaging with them all the way through with new thoughts and ideas about where to go with the company. Sustainability would go hand in hand with how the company is run, and we could try and having the consumers who are located in Seattle. Another idea that Amazon could try is making the packaging for items more eco-friendly by making them biodegradable. It would be extremely environmentally friendly it Amazon could advertise planting trees and using a box to help with the growth. Lifecycle assessment can be used to assess how these new ideas are going to pan out over the whole life of the idea. If we think that the process will be sustainable over the course of the life of the company, then we can go ahead and use it. And by using CSR reporting we can use this as a “check-up” for the company to make sure that we are following the rules of what the economy and society wants from us.

When we look on the global scale of things we can take what we learned from Seattle, and use that globally. If things ended up working out in Seattle, then it would make sense to take them to the global scale. And if things were not working out in Seattle, and all we needed to do was tweak them a little bit, we could do that. Now we would be able to take those same measurements and take them globally. We could measure how the company does overall to see if it has any effect in the long run. Stakeholder engagement could spread the news about how well the company is doing, potentially having more people buy into the company, thus raising the company’s worth. The sustainability portion of the company will hopefully be taken to the global scale as well due to the company following the rules and regulations set forth by CSR. The lifecycle assessment would be used as seeing how these new services and ideas would last on a global scale. This would go for CSR reporting frequently to make sure that Amazon falls in line with other companies as well as the wants and needs of the society. The global environment can only be effected for the better as long as the CSR’s are put in to place and the company follows them.

Outcomes

Once Amazon Classroom is up and running through the website, the next plan is going to be to take to the streets of these colleges and universities to acquire some office space at every location. By establishing a physical location with a school, we would be able to get students on demand discounts with them leaving the store with the books they need as well as the supplies they need for the semester. At any time during the school year they would be able to come in and get these supplies at a discount. Amazon Classroom would require many employees located throughout the United States. With a lot of employees, there is potential for dysfunction in the workplace. In order to avoid this dysfunction, we as a company are going to try and impose cultural awareness as well as civic engagement.

Cultural awareness is “about making the proper responses/accommodations to behaviors/norms exhibited by people from outside of one’s own culture (Orin 2018).” When we look at cultural awareness, we can see that our employees are going to need the ability to communicate with a diverse background of people. We will start internally with who we would like to hire for these positions. This needs to take in to consideration the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which “makes discrimination on the basis of gender, race, color, religion, or national origin in any term, condition, or privilege of employment illegal (Weiss 2014).” By doing this, it allows anyone from any background to come and apply for these jobs. We will also be an equal opportunity employer giving everyone a chance to work for us who wants one (Weiss 2014). Now that we are allowing anyone to come in and apply to work for Amazon Classroom, there will be a variety of age groups that will be qualified for the job. These age groups include people from all different generations. Once we have at least two people who are working for us that are coming from two different generations, we need to do a generational analysis in order to maximize the efficiency of our workers. “Generational analysis looks at differences among worldviews, attitudes, and values of generations of Americans. Large differences in the generations from World War II to the present in the U.S. population have had a substantial influence on government, corporate, and workplace policies (Weiss 2014).”

Although we hire people to do the same job, there is always going to be a different interpretation from the different generations. As a manger of these Amazon Classrooms throughout the country, I believe our best bet to solve this crisis is to have an open line of trust and communication. “Trust generally leads to open communication, which, in turn, provides an environment of collaboration and productivity (Weiss 2014).” If the employees can trust me when I make decisions for the company on how to do certain things, and we can communicate effectively, I believe our business plan would prove to be successful. Colleges and Universities already have a diverse group of people attending their school, and if our employees are educated in how to interact with these students, our business plan should work.

Next up is to focus on how to make our employees happy in the workplace. People everywhere go to work every day not happy with what they are doing. When a person is not passionate about something that is taking up 1/3 of their day, it stresses them out and gives them a bad attitude towards work. If they have a bad attitude at work, it will come out when they speak to our customers and try and get them to join Amazon Classroom or buy merchandise from our store. A couple ways that we can make the workplace a better place to be for our employees is to add a balanced lifestyle, promote health and safety, and protect against wrong doings. Our company should understand when it comes to our employees’ health, wellness, and family life. We could promote health by working with the schools that we are set up at and give our employees free access to their gyms. This way they would be able to stay in shape and work out if they wanted to. We would also be able to give our employees mandatory breaks during their shift that they had to step away from work and just take a breather. As for family, we would promote a culture of family first, and if anything were to happen to a family, we would allow that employee time off including the Family Medical Leave Act. The Family Medical Leave Act is a law put in place that allows people to take leave while securing their job for up to 12 weeks (Weiss 2014). We would make sure that we were in competition with others on how much we pay our employees, while even offering them incentives, such as a stake in the company. By offering them a stake in the company, our employees would be motivated to do good things for the company because in turn the stock would rise, making them gain more money. We would provide a safe work environment and working conditions in order to empower our employees (Weiss 2014).

Last but not least, we would protect our employees against Sexual Harassment, and our whistle blowers if need be. Sexual Harassment has been a growing concern this day in age, and must be stopped. At any point in time employees would be able to report sexual harassment up their chain of command, and be able to go around their chain of command if they felt uncomfortable. When it comes to Whistle Blowers, we wouldn’t penalize them in any way if they were to come forward. Whistle blowing is “the attempt of an employee or former employee of an organization to disclose what he or she believes to be wrongdoing in or by the organization.” We would take wrongdoings in our organization very seriously and investigate every claim that came down the pipe. These are the ways that our company would engage in cultural awareness.

Civic Engagement “means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference (Ehrlich 2000).” Since Amazon Classroom is going to be in every populated area that has a school, civic engagement is going to be an important factor in our success. People are going to be interacting with our employers quite a lot during the school year so we will need to think of ways that we can influence the community around us. We will already be giving these students discounted prices for their textbooks that could save them thousands of dollars at the end of their education. Another idea would be to have a scholarship opportunity for people who signed up for Amazon Classroom. Whoever applied for this scholarship would get books free for that academic year. Another type of scholarship that Amazon Classroom could supply to the public is hand out vouchers for students using financial aid through the school. If a student qualifies for financial aid, I believe Amazon Classroom should also give these students help when it comes to purchasing books. By all of the profit that Amazon makes through its regular company and online business, there should be no reason why these ideas couldn’t be funded for the first couple of years to get it off the ground. These are just a couple of ideas in which Amazon Classroom could engage in their local communities.

The desired outcome from having cultural awareness and civic engagement is for a happy work environment. With cultural awareness in the workplace, we can have people from different cultures and backgrounds come together to help out the company as a whole and sell to a diverse group of students at schools all across the country. When it comes to civic engagement, we hope to connect with the community around the schools and get students active and spread the word about Amazon Classroom. With more people engaged in Amazon Classroom, and the more it is talked about, the more users we will get, and the greater we can grow.

 By remembering the mission, vision and values of our company every time we do something, we can focus on our goals, and achieve the greatest amount of success.  Amazons Mission statement is as follows: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience (Gregory 2018).” By being located on campus, as well as online, we are giving our customers the most convenience ever. If our books are not in the store that the students need, we would be able to order it from online and have it in store within two business days. And by having our members subscribe to Amazon Classroom, they would receive a discounted price from retail competitors giving them the lowest price out there. Amazon’s Vision is “to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online (Farfan 2018).” Amazon Classroom fulfills this vision because by Amazon offering anything the customer wants, we are able to provide textbooks to our college students year round. These customers would also be able to search around on Amazon.com for more than just their college textbooks for a discounted price as well as school supplies. Amazon’s values are customer obsession, innovation, action, ownership, high hiring bar and frugality (Martins 2011). By obsessing over our customers, we are able to fulfill their every need. We at the company are able to innovate to make things easier for the customer, and take action and ownership of our products and services offered to our members. We would do all this while watching our money and where it was going. By being frugal within the company, we are able to focus on what we truly need, and easily monitor how we are doing as a company.

When it comes to the financial aspect of all of this, it will help us as a company save money, maximize profit, and self-advertise. This is done by looking at return on investment, sustainability, and the community. Return on Investment is defined as “a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments (Investopedia 2018).” When we treat our employees with the utmost respect and allow them to grow with the company, we are then investing in our employees. When we invest in our employees, they will in turn work hard for the company thus making more profit for us over time. When the employees feel invested, they will invest in their customers who in turn spread the word on how the felt when purchasing from Amazon Classroom, thus increasing our exposure. “Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (Investopedia 2018).” When we focus on the present in our company and working on people’s needs now, we will indirectly be focused on the future by building a solid foundation. The community will definitely be able to feel the presence of Amazon Classroom in their community. With what Amazon wants to give back to the community that they will be thriving in, there is no wonder why people would want to spread the word about it.

Conclusion

All of these ideas are in relation to the Corporate Social Responsibility addendum, or how the company is going to act in relation to other companies. The laws and policies that we have discussed have all been around for quite a while because of things that have happened in the past. With cultural awareness and civic engagement being a part of our company there become intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for our company. The intrinsic rewards would be things such as a happy workplace, motivated employees, and higher morale. With all of these intrinsic rewards, they naturally are producing extrinsic rewards for the company. The extrinsic rewards for the company are things such as growth and profit. The more the company grows the more money we will be able to make. The more money we make, the more money we can invest back into our company and employees to continue the trend.

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