Stalins Purge The Greater Holocaust Essays - Old Bolsheviks

Stalin's Purge: The Greater Holocaust Joseph Stalin was leader of the Soviet Union from 1929-1953. While he was in power the Great Sorrow crushed the world economy, the Nazis attacked the U.S.S.R., Berlin was cut off from the rest of the world, and the Cold War started. In numerous nations his ways of thinking were accepted to be profoundly compelling, yet a portion of his activities are simply being revealed , and condemned, in ?Western? nations like the US. One piece of Soviet history, just presently being seen the truth about, is the ?Great Cleanse? Stalin started to free the Stalin(Groilers-Communism) nation surprisingly who didn't bolster him as ?the incomparable leader of the Soviet Union?. Stalin was conceived on December 21, 1827 in Gori, Georgia, and given the name Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili. He embraced the name Joseph Stalin later in the course of his life. (World Book 825; Groilers-Stalin,Joseph) His dad was a heavy drinker, beat his significant other, just as, Stalin. Stalin's dad kicked the bucket in a battle when his kid was just eleven. His mom needed Stalin to turn into a cleric, so she sent him to theological school when he was 14 years old. (Groilers-Stalin,Joseph) At the school, Stalin found out about progressives and became one himself. In the end he quit school and turned into ?a full-time progressive? against the Czar and the Russian government. He was captured in 1904 and joined the Bolsheviks. Stalin was captured and ousted four additional occasions somewhere in the range of 1906 and 1913. (World Book 825) At the point when Stalin got away from oust he met Lenin and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1912 he was delegated to the Bolshevik Central Committee. Captured and banished by the Czar in 1913, he returned in 1917 after the ?November Revolution?. (Groilers-Stalin, Joseph) Stalin was delegated secretary of the Focal Committee in 1922 and became ?power hungry?. Prior to his demise, in 1924, Lenin composed a not saying that Stalin was foolish and should have been expelled from power. The main Bolsheviks overlooked the note and kept expanding the measure of intensity Stalin had. Somewhere in the range of 1924 and 1928, Stalin utilized his position to expel his restriction from ?the Party?; he was the unchallenged pioneer of the Soviet Union by 1929. (Groilers-Stalin, Joseph) As pioneer of the Soviet Union he requested the making of the aggregate ranches to help in the quick industrialization of the nation. Poor administration of the ranches caused a great many individuals to pass on in a starvation; Stalin proceeded with collectivization at an expanded r! ate after the starvation. (World Book 826) Stalin's cleanse started after the passing of Sergei Kirov. It is accepted that the ?murder was likely orchestrated by Stalin as a guise for disposing all things considered.? (Groilers-Great Purge) Stalin utilized Kirov's demise as a reason to charge Party individuals and Army officers with treachery or scheme and sentence them to death. Practically the entirety of the individuals from the Central Committee and the seventeenth Congress were executed or captured; some were sent to work camps known as Gulags. From the outset, the cleanse was mystery; show preliminaries in Moscow were proof of the cleanse's presence, later on. The cleanse spread from high-positioning authorities to individuals related with Lenin and afterward to normal laborers and ranchers. Anybody saw as a danger to Stalin's capacity was slaughtered. The ?official corps? were so Stalin would have absolute help in the lower positions of the military. (Groilers-Great Purge) Everyone was viewed as a suspect by the mystery police. During this time Stalin started to create his own character ?religion?. A few people utilized this religion as an approach to abstain from being slaughtered by the mystery police. (Groilers-Stalin, Joseph) During the cleanse the mystery police requested keeping an eye on significant industrialists. They likewise requested neighbors to keep an eye on one another, kids to give an account of beneficiary guardians, youngsters to watch their kin, and grown-ups to keep an eye on their bosses/workers. (World Book 826) With so may individuals being captured or slaughtered, or simply vanishing, many started to lose confidence in Stalin's administration. Very few talked straightforwardly talked out against Stalin inspired by a paranoid fear of their lives and Western countries didn't discover the genuine degree of the cleanse since it was not examined out in the open. (Soviet Political System 28) One of the most antagonistic effects of the cleanse was that when World War

Juan Bolivar Soto Essays - Speculative Fiction,

Juan Bolivar Soto Mr. Budhram Pre-AP World Literature February 2017 Managing New Beginnings Lian Hearn is an Australian creator, enthralled by the Japanese culture since youthful. Entranced by the differing customs, Hearn had the chance to learn numerous parts of the rousing progress once she visited Japan in 1993. All through her book, Over the Nightingale Floor, she depicts these landscapes and customs utilizing a few strict gadgets to portray the occasions and detail anecdotal pictures of the circumstances occurring for the peruser. Enduring a mass homicide upon your town isn't a simple undertaking, starting from the very beginning once more? Significantly harder. In the story the fundamental character, Takeo, unwinds his dread yet assurance to turn into the new man he needed to befit, through anguish and distress, boldness is appeared just as desire to seek after enormity among the Otori and retaliate for the homicides upon his past area. The story starts with the hero Tomasu, later known as Takeo, whom creates uplifted faculties of hearing and interchange controls in the wake of losing his because of the separating oppression defended by the degenerate methods of master Ida Sadamu. His area being the most impressive of the 3 factions: Ida, Otori and Noguchi, gains power through savage success, fights and torments. Takeo impulsive, and loaded with distress is spared by Lord Otori whom discovers him confused in the forested areas running from Ida's men those which sought after him from making their master tumble off his pony. Declining to relinquish the outlaw Otori takes Tomasu in allowing him to begin another life as an individual from the Otori Clan, change his name and convictions with the chance to vindicate his family. Lian Hearn, the writer of the book, utilizes symbolism to speak to the view and intense hearing Takeo encounters during the creation of his new disentangled self. During the movement to the Hagi Village where the Otori live, they go through different towns and mountains where Takeo portrays the landscape through symbolism and allegorical examination. This is executed as a method of speaking to our faculties while in detail portraying the freshly discovered capacities he finds and tests during his stay in every single one of the towns. Through the story, Takeo can hear sounds, for example, water tumbling from far away, winged creatures peeping high up in the sky, the applauding of fish swimming on the outside of lakes miles away and most precisely the voice of hirelings and house keeper's rooms away yet with a similar quality as though they were murmuring their discussions right onto the sides of his ears. The creator additionally applies embodiment to depict the forces Takeo acquires after his experience with Lord Ida The mumble of a stream sounded to me like the voice of the water soul, and each time a fox woofed or an owl hooted I came alert, my heartbeat dashing. This representation is utilized to portray Takeo's impression of sounds around evening time while he attempts to rest however pitilessly bombs because of the numerous sounds he's accomplishing at the same time. They don't permit him to center, the littlest of murmurs shock him up, prohibiting him to rest or enjoy a reprieve. This makes Takeo apprehensive, for he had never known about such thing yet didn't talk on it so others wouldnt consider him as insane or a mistake to Lord Otori. He previously owed him enough and couldn't chance the opportunity of humiliating his friend in need over silly suppositions. Due to this he decides to remain quiet about it and keep up his conduct at its best close by Lord Otori. Lian Hearn likewise utilizes Metaphors to depict the connection among Takeo and Lord Otori, the character looks at the circumstance to that of a Heron chasing for fish Otori Shigeru was the heron, and I was the small wriggling thing he had gathered up, diving down the mountain into my reality and dipping endlessly again through this illustration the character clarifies how Otori secured him, encouraged him without requesting anything other than gratefulness, plunging him away from all that he has ever known into an odd world he still can't seem to get familiar with. Everything happens rapidly like heron's go after their fish,

udemy

udemy INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco  with Udemy. Eren, who are you and what do you do?Eren: Hi, my name is Eren Bali and Im the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Udemy. We are a market place for online courses. We have thousands of instructors around the world who are really passionate about their subjects and they are so skilled so they come to Udemy to create courses and share it with the rest of the world.Martin: Great!Martin: And, what did you do before you started Udemy?Eren: I think while I was in college, I already knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So there wasnt a lot of other things. I was in college, I went to school in  Turkey, I grew up in  Turkey. I went to college there to study computer science and mathematics. And in the last year of the college, we started our first company with my co-founder, whos still with me on Udemy.Initially, we were doing some other projects. We had created a 3D simulation for constructions. It was how we started. Bu t I always wanted to work in education, so we built a company that were close, similar to Udemy in terms of supervision in Turkey, almost 8 years ago. So we launched it, but we realized that wasnt the right time and the right place.It wasnt the right time because all this different section wasnt ready, bandwidth was expensive and audio conversation wasnt really working well. And  Turkey  wasnt the right place. We needed tons of influences to make the idea work. And the product wasnt right either, because we relied on  niche  market place. And in market place, liquidity is the biggest problem, meaning if a user comes to the site, there should be enough courses interesting for them so they will stick. And if you make it live, its even harder to make the liquidity first. So, there were a lot of mistakes and we had to shut it down in Turkey, but me and my co-founder still believe that was kind of a neat idea and it should have existed. So, we moved over to  Silicon Valley, it took me 4 years in the process. And I worked as an engineer, like one of the first employees at a startup called SpeedDate. We did a pretty good job there. Actually the funny thing is, we built SpeedDate from the early code of Udemy. We had a video conferencing tool that we built for our live classrooms, we coordinated a video dating application for SpeedDate. It was a fun experience but we eventually knew that we wanted to try this idea again. And this time, it worked out.Martin: OK. Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF UDEMYMartin: Can you tell us how the current business model of Udemy works?Eren: Sure. So we have around 15,000 instructors, we have published courses on Udemy. They choose their course subject and build a course. Typical courses are like video base and some are interactivities, like quizzes and discussion boards and things like that.But the big difference between the site like Youtube is, its not just small  short-form content. The course I designed, to take you from knowing nothing abou t the subject to a decent level, right. So, and when they start publishing course, they can either publish it for free, I think its free for them. If they want to charge for their course, we take a cut from that. So in that sense, its pretty close to Apples app store model.Martin: So basically its just a revenue share model?Eren: Yes, revenue share model.Martin: Okay, the instructors can free to choose what he wants or is there any fixed fee involved?Eren: Theres no fixed fee. If its a free course, we think its good for the world, so we kind of do our part in it. If its paid, then we start making money.Martin: Can you tell us a little bit more about the demographics and statistics in terms of users?Eren: Yes. We have over 4 million users right now. I think 50% of them are in the  United States, 50% outside the  US. Weve seen a lot of growth in  Germany,  Spain, some of the European countries and even Asian countries, but probably  Germany  is like the second largest non-English mark et, at this point. So, usually our top verticals are development, design and business.Martin: What do you mean by development?Eren: Development means learning how to become a web developer, IPhone applications, mobile applications like game programming, those are usually the most popular subjects. And then there are other technological subjects like softwares, Excel, Office. Business categories are entrepreneurship, marketing, finance. And design categories are always pretty strong. But beside these, there are others like hobbies, like photography and yoga. Those are also big, but usually as I said technology, business and design are the leading categories.In terms of demographics like, right now, there are more male users than female, which is the complete consequence of the development category. So unfortunately, there are still a lot more men, who are  interested in development than women. We also want to contribute in changing it. But thats  the current state.There are categori es that are uniform, non-technical categories are uniformed between men and women. And in terms of  Asia, we see age ranging from 18 to 50 55. There are more of younger users but thats more because they are more younger as in internet. But proportionately its kind of interesting,  some of the  older user are more heavily represented in Udemy community than the rest of the Internet.Martin: Interesting. When you started this type of market place, what has been the major obstacle for creating a lot of inventories, so people who come to your website see your value proposition?Eren: Thats why were straight forward. In any market place, like Udemy, there are 2 types of users. There is an asymmetric market place. The most important problem and probably the only problem that you should really worry about, is the chicken and egg problem. If there are enough courses, why would the students come, and if theres not enough students why would instructors create courses. So this is a huge proble m in the beginning, and I said that kind of converge into competitive advantage as you become larger. Because once theres Udemy, its really hard for the competitor to do this, because all types of instructors would want to create their courses on Udemy. So, as I said theres an obstacle in the beginning that becomes a big advantage as you grow.Martin: How did you take tackle in the first place?Eren: We did a lot of tricks. The number one thing is you have to worry about is liquidity, meaning when you are an instructor can you get him enough users and if there are users can you give them enough courses. So, we tested a lot of things. We tried to do some BD, Business Development, it didnt work out. We try to launch it kind of vertical, that didnt worked out as well either.I think what worked for us was going and doing a lot of unscalable things to make the first video instructor successful.Martin: What does it mean?Eren: Actually, I kind of give you the birth story. So, I was in a brea kfast meeting in one of our investors house. And AirBnB was just getting traction at that point. They were big but they were just getting off the ground.And I was asking these questions to everybody. I would say how did you get the first 100,000 users? How did you solve the initial traction problem? And he kind of.., Brian gave me such a suggestion: do things that dont scale. So meaning, there are things like SEO and advertising are scalable things in getting users. Those tend not to work in the early days of a startup because most of the scalable methodologies were better on scale.As you get more inbound pages and you get inbound links, your SEO goes up and advertising is better. But they dont really work in the beginning. And there are things which are unscalable, which you can not do as a large company but for small service can do those. And those unscalable ways of doing are actually what makes you successful.So what AirBnB was doing was they were going to houses of each host an d taking professional photos of room. They were making the place look really good. And this is completely unscalable, but it was creating a magical experience. So we kind of mimic the same idea. Like I said earlier, when he said those 3 words that immediately clicked for me. We went back and said, you know what lets help the creation of the first few courses.We want to create 3 entrepreneurial courses because we knew people who could teach those. Even that didn’t work out, because it was too much work. Initially without their proof point. So instead, me and my co-founder, Gagan, organized entrepreneurial events. The first one was called Raising Money for Statups.And instead of asking people to create a full course, we brought the subject in 6 pieces, like the first one was getting leads, then doing a pitch tag and then like the last one was closing the round. So you kind of add what  the  Laissez faire  raising  money course would be.And when we invited people, we said Okay, you a re going to talk about this particular subject. So when the event finished, we were able to video-taped everything, edited it and converted it into a course. Actually we start charging for it. It was 30 dollars. Even with the first course, we got a lot of sales from it because it was a pretty good course. It was the first time where people uses or get practical advice about raising money. Not like high level follow your passion bullshit. It was like, this is exactly the email you sent, this is the type interview you get, this is when you email them back. This was very tactical. So the tactical aspect really worked out.It was 2 more of those events, we get the first 3 paid courses. Before, I was kind of passive about that, we were also crawling all the open courses from universities and we were publishing it on Udemy with their permission, that helped us get some traction but they were all free courses. It was still not proofing financial model here. So the first 3 courses we made we re proofing the fact that there was this one person in the world who could buy them. And they were actually like almost 1,000 people who bought that courses.Martin: Did you just wanted to check whether there was some kind of willingness to pay for such a course?Eren: Yes.Martin: Okay, and this was the major force why you decided not to put it for free but want to charge?Eren: Yes, I remember there was an email discussion with our investors, and got their opinions. There was a big debate whether course should be free or paid. My visual was that, although a lot of entrepreneurial talks like this are free, theyre usually motivational, theyre not tactical.When I go to a conference and give free talk, I dont talk about, like this is like how we do. Its just motivational, the most strategic maybe. But the tactical piece was missing and if we charge 30 dollars for it, and if it makes 0.1% easier to raise money, its definitely worth it. And we tell them that we would like to see whether peo ple would pay for it. I said people would pay and they were super happy with it. Nobody thought that 30 dollars was too much for it. So, we launched 3 of those courses in entrepreneurial subjects and then we found  some newsletters which has relevant traffic to Udemy. So we started promoting those courses from these newsletters. And people who signed up to this newsletters really like the courses. And then, what we did next was, we went to some other instructors who werent affiliated with us and we said, would you create a course. We have all this distribution of newsletters signed up to promote your course. They said yes, why not try it. They promoted their courses in the newsletters and we went to more newsletters and said, you know what, we do this course, would you mind to promote and get their share? They said yes and we kind of, similarly we jumped back and forth between the supply and demand. As I said, the key things like liquidity and making your early customers happy, righ t. We made them really happy by actually do a lot of distribution work for the instructors and a lot of content work for potential distribution channels. So we were like being their technological platform between the distribution channels and the supply side, the content creators. At one point, we had enough users accumulate on Udemy that we didnt rely on external distributions anymore. So many people create their courses, we had enough users on Udemy so that their course would be successful.Martin: At what point did you recognize that youve reached that critical mass?Eren: The critical mass is not just one single number. So, similarly as a market place, you go up in phases. The first phase is  you do whatever possible to get the first few customers and first people on the supply side happier, right.And then, over time, like at that point, you kind of switch into kind of more a scaled approach to getting instructors and the scale that meaning that, it was not like me and my co-found er meeting with each instructor in their house to convince them. Instead, we had people, like business people who are reaching out to instructors to kind of convince them to teach courses. So it was kind of like sales model of reaching out to actively instructors.And in the user side, we start things slightly more scalable and slightly more scalable thing. Like maybe some SEO  worked out and we had more partners, we had like an affiliate network and we had a growing organic traffic that was the largest traffic driver.And then over time, that changed also, because right now theres so many people come to Udemy to teach a course. I think every month, 10,000 people start creating courses. Not all of them do it, but a lot of people are willing. So we dont have to do outreach anymore.We have a large content team whose job is just helping the instructors that already coming. We don’t reach out to people anymore, except for strategic courses. As I said, now is a different phase and overti me, even that phase has changed. Now, honestly the only thing that the content team can do is barely: they do work and create new verticals, and they do more highly work in managing verticals and working at the course thats scalable and article variable like data science  team analysis, like  which course are doing better job and which courses are doing worse job.So, that has come to a new phase, were data driven and big data and even more scientific. As I said, its phases, its just as you grow, you start changing how you do stuff.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Lets talk briefly about the corporate strategy of Udemy. I totally understand that once we have this scalable mass that you create a competitive advantage. If you put it into a single company perspective, how do you perceive having other competitors like Coursera, etc.? Whats your competitive advantage over them and what makes you be able to build up on that?Eren: Thats a good question. I mean there are a lot of competitors. Ther e are primary competitors which mean there are other market places for teaching. Right now we are the largest, we are leading that one, so were not too worried there. But then, there are publishing companies, companies which produce content and sell it.So in users side, they might be considered as competitors. And then there are companies like Coursera, which we are not really competing with in the market. I think its just our psychological competitors. We are more like friends with them, so we kind meet each other and help each other if possible. Those are really different. Coursera for example, they are focused on higher education. There are companies which are really focused completely on K-12 kind of academics. K12 international academy is focused on  K-12. And Udemys focus has always been skill based adult training. So its not K-12 or higher education, its like after that. We believe that learning has to be lifelong. And our courses are usually more tactical,  you learn how to build an IPhone application, you dont learn the computer science fundamentals as much. Although we have courses  around it, but thats not our strong suit. Our strong suit is,  Im going to learn something very practical and Im going do something with it.So that has been large enough differentiator,  just some notes that we start a lot early than those other companies. I think we could say, we kind of, we start this online course market. So there were companies before us doing some sort of learning but constructive online course that anybody can take, like we were the company that initiated that move, and hopefully we have some help in the popularizing concept like MOOCs. Coursera just came  around 2 years after us. And when they launched, we already have our model which was working. I think they look at our model and kind of, look higher education could do the same thing.Martin: You beautifully described the different phases of a company. What would be the next phase of Udemy?Eren: I think the next phase is right now, we solved the problem of creating an ecosystem about casual learning. We have done that. As instructors are making enough money to live their lives, we signed about 6,000 checks every months, like 6,000 people are making money from us every month. And some of them are making millions of dollars. And for some of them its like passive income.But I think the most important that weve created is the job. Teaching online is formidable job right now. So the next phase is taking on demand learning from where it is right now to its next level. So Udemy is and should  always be the frontier of learning online, especially on demands.Because you can also do 1-on-1 live classes, thats a different world. Skills on demand learning is our focus and we are awaiting a new phase to do this and we are building a lot of science about what makes a course better. So we obsessively analyze action that users are doing during the courses and now we can actually we have t housand of courses, so we have that unique position where we can crawl what aspect of the course make it stick better.Martin: I would call it educational analytics.Eren: Yes, more like educational analytics,  but people call it big data education. But  then you see, that a lot of assumption people make about education is incorrect. Even like assumption made by professors who have been doing this for a long time or educational scientists, they have  a lot of small studies, observations, now we have real data. And we see a lot of them are incorrect, and you see it in a lot of large scale across verticals. Its not like one vertical, we can see like this learning theory can I apply it in this vertical but not that vertical. We are in the position, I want Udemy to become a company which is pushing the boundaries in on demand learning. This is the main thing and other stuff is opening up internationally, so we opened our first  Europe  office.Martin: Where?Eren: In  Dublin, I really want  Berlin. I went to  Berlin  a year ago, its a great city. I really love that. Hopefully, we have an office there too at some point, but the first is in  Dublin  for more practical reasons. Europe market is very important and so we start opening up to South America, Europe,  East Asia.And the other thing is actually making the model work in some other niche verticals. We are pretty strong in the top 3 4 verticals but I would expect musicalcourse would be very successful in Udemy. So we already have somebody, its not like as strong as we wanted. Like maybe hobby courses and some other sophistication base courses. Theres always new vertical that we wanted to have, build liquidity at.Martin: Sure.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, how do you perceived the offline education versus the online education, and even maybe a specific sub segments in between?Eren: If you look at the education market or the world virtually first divided by age group. Theres K-12 was a se parate base, right. Second its about learning release, like education means something different for them. And theres higher education, college, maybe grad degrees, and theres lifelong learning.And lifelong learning can happen at home, youre learning for yourself, it could be at work, or it could be in some kind of institution. If you look at them, for each of the verticals theres an offline element to it, and theres an online element to it. So in K-12 for example, still dominantly offline. Theres some online movement but its very small in proportion.Lifelong learning actually is the  part where online gets a much larger chunk. Thats why we actually focus on that. And higher education is kind of small slowly transitioning, its a slow transition, its not going to happen overnight. For us, with  lifelong learning, like offline, theres some offline component, you could go to a certification program in a place, or you could  take a high end boot camp. Those tend to be really expensive and limited to a very small local.We are happy to admit that might be a better experience, so I dont claim that learning online is better than in person, because if you can find a top Stanford professor, or like an amazing person to sit next to you and give you a course directly to you, it might be better if you can access that. But its going to be 100 times more expensive than an online course. And youll be kind of limited by the time and location, so to me that education is for elite group of people in the world.And for everybody else, thats not a solution, thats why we started Udemy. So, I think on demand  and offline are sometimes used in conjunction together to a hybrid learning. But for majority of people in the world, I think online education is the only viable way to get them up to speed with the skill that they need for jobs or even hobbies. I think online is the only viable way to do that.Martin: In terms of certification of a specific skill, do you think that having this kind of certification later on in the future or do you really think its just about showing people who you have the skills?Eren: This is the point where I and the rest of the market is in disagreement. A lot of companies are trying to get certification up, maybe try to raise the money, all the inventors were saying, why dont you use certification, I would only invest if theres a degree or diploma behind this.I kept saying no, does not make sense. Because people look at universities and theyre just trying to move that model while you go to the university, theres some learning there, theres a certification that you have diploma. It does work in a small constraint environment, but when you go to internet, things changed. You cant move things from physical world and just digitized it.So, in world of  internet, you can access a lot more people. Accessing a lot more people also make it harder to make a reputable certification. Because Stanford or Harvard has a pretty strong brand in thei r certification, if Harvard has 5 million students, they wouldnt be nearly as good brand. So the value of the brand of your certification and the number of people who are able to get it, they are inversely correlated. So thats why, I think if you want to help hundreds of millions of people, you cant at the same time try to create that high, strong brand in your certification.So I thought, in the world of open digital education, these 2 things should be separated. There should be companies like Udemy, whose job is only to help you learn your subject because you want to learn it for something. I dont care for what, but you want to learn a subject. I think our company or other organization which feel whose job is going to be certifying that you are good at a particular skill, assessing your skill. I think trying to merge them together, will  really break the experience, it makes both parts function worst.So from that, I believe we should separate, so we never get into that. We do like course completion certificate, like light weight badge, but were not trying to make it completely a diploma. So we never thought this is critical.What we do    more often is a real life certification, which is  accepted in the market like Cisco network administration certificate, or Adobe design certificate, or Microsoft Office certificate. So we try to get, we have a lot of courses that we are preparing for those existing certifications. So people can go and take a course in Udemy to prepare themselves and they go to Cisco to get the network certificate. And Cisco network certificate will always be more valuable than a certificate that we made up.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM EREN BALI In San Francisco, we meet co-founder and Chairman of udemy, Eren Bali. He shares his story how he co-founded this startup and how the current business model works (supply and demand side), as well as what the current plans for near future, and some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcript of the interview is included below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in  San Francisco  with Udemy. Eren, who are you and what do you do?Eren: Hi, my name is Eren Bali and Im the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of Udemy. We are a market place for online courses. We have thousands of instructors around the world who are really passionate about their subjects and they are so skilled so they come to Udemy to create courses and share it with the rest of the world.Martin: Great!Martin: And, what did you do before you started Udemy?Eren: I think while I was in college, I already knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So there wasnt a lot of other things. I was in college, I went to school in  Tu rkey, I grew up in  Turkey. I went to college there to study computer science and mathematics. And in the last year of the college, we started our first company with my co-founder, whos still with me on Udemy.Initially, we were doing some other projects. We had created a 3D simulation for constructions. It was how we started. But I always wanted to work in education, so we built a company that were close, similar to Udemy in terms of supervision in Turkey, almost 8 years ago. So we launched it, but we realized that wasnt the right time and the right place.It wasnt the right time because all this different section wasnt ready, bandwidth was expensive and audio conversation wasnt really working well. And  Turkey  wasnt the right place. We needed tons of influences to make the idea work. And the product wasnt right either, because we relied on  niche  market place. And in market place, liquidity is the biggest problem, meaning if a user comes to the site, there should be enough courses interesting for them so they will stick. And if you make it live, its even harder to make the liquidity first. So, there were a lot of mistakes and we had to shut it down in Turkey, but me and my co-founder still believe that was kind of a neat idea and it should have existed. So, we moved over to  Silicon Valley, it took me 4 years in the process. And I worked as an engineer, like one of the first employees at a startup called SpeedDate. We did a pretty good job there. Actually the funny thing is, we built SpeedDate from the early code of Udemy. We had a video conferencing tool that we built for our live classrooms, we coordinated a video dating application for SpeedDate. It was a fun experience but we eventually knew that we wanted to try this idea again. And this time, it worked out.Martin: OK. Great!BUSINESS MODEL OF UDEMYMartin: Can you tell us how the current business model of Udemy works?Eren: Sure. So we have around 15,000 instructors, we have published courses on Udemy. Th ey choose their course subject and build a course. Typical courses are like video base and some are interactivities, like quizzes and discussion boards and things like that.But the big difference between the site like Youtube is, its not just small  short-form content. The course I designed, to take you from knowing nothing about the subject to a decent level, right. So, and when they start publishing course, they can either publish it for free, I think its free for them. If they want to charge for their course, we take a cut from that. So in that sense, its pretty close to Apples app store model.Martin: So basically its just a revenue share model?Eren: Yes, revenue share model.Martin: Okay, the instructors can free to choose what he wants or is there any fixed fee involved?Eren: Theres no fixed fee. If its a free course, we think its good for the world, so we kind of do our part in it. If its paid, then we start making money.Martin: Can you tell us a little bit more about the demog raphics and statistics in terms of users?Eren: Yes. We have over 4 million users right now. I think 50% of them are in the  United States, 50% outside the  US. Weve seen a lot of growth in  Germany,  Spain, some of the European countries and even Asian countries, but probably  Germany  is like the second largest non-English market, at this point. So, usually our top verticals are development, design and business.Martin: What do you mean by development?Eren: Development means learning how to become a web developer, IPhone applications, mobile applications like game programming, those are usually the most popular subjects. And then there are other technological subjects like softwares, Excel, Office. Business categories are entrepreneurship, marketing, finance. And design categories are always pretty strong. But beside these, there are others like hobbies, like photography and yoga. Those are also big, but usually as I said technology, business and design are the leading categories.In terms of demographics like, right now, there are more male users than female, which is the complete consequence of the development category. So unfortunately, there are still a lot more men, who are  interested in development than women. We also want to contribute in changing it. But thats  the current state.There are categories that are uniform, non-technical categories are uniformed between men and women. And in terms of  Asia, we see age ranging from 18 to 50 55. There are more of younger users but thats more because they are more younger as in internet. But proportionately its kind of interesting,  some of the  older user are more heavily represented in Udemy community than the rest of the Internet.Martin: Interesting. When you started this type of market place, what has been the major obstacle for creating a lot of inventories, so people who come to your website see your value proposition?Eren: Thats why were straight forward. In any market place, like Udemy, there are 2 ty pes of users. There is an asymmetric market place. The most important problem and probably the only problem that you should really worry about, is the chicken and egg problem. If there are enough courses, why would the students come, and if theres not enough students why would instructors create courses. So this is a huge problem in the beginning, and I said that kind of converge into competitive advantage as you become larger. Because once theres Udemy, its really hard for the competitor to do this, because all types of instructors would want to create their courses on Udemy. So, as I said theres an obstacle in the beginning that becomes a big advantage as you grow.Martin: How did you take tackle in the first place?Eren: We did a lot of tricks. The number one thing is you have to worry about is liquidity, meaning when you are an instructor can you get him enough users and if there are users can you give them enough courses. So, we tested a lot of things. We tried to do some BD, Bus iness Development, it didnt work out. We try to launch it kind of vertical, that didnt worked out as well either.I think what worked for us was going and doing a lot of unscalable things to make the first video instructor successful.Martin: What does it mean?Eren: Actually, I kind of give you the birth story. So, I was in a breakfast meeting in one of our investors house. And AirBnB was just getting traction at that point. They were big but they were just getting off the ground.And I was asking these questions to everybody. I would say how did you get the first 100,000 users? How did you solve the initial traction problem? And he kind of.., Brian gave me such a suggestion: do things that dont scale. So meaning, there are things like SEO and advertising are scalable things in getting users. Those tend not to work in the early days of a startup because most of the scalable methodologies were better on scale.As you get more inbound pages and you get inbound links, your SEO goes up and advertising is better. But they dont really work in the beginning. And there are things which are unscalable, which you can not do as a large company but for small service can do those. And those unscalable ways of doing are actually what makes you successful.So what AirBnB was doing was they were going to houses of each host and taking professional photos of room. They were making the place look really good. And this is completely unscalable, but it was creating a magical experience. So we kind of mimic the same idea. Like I said earlier, when he said those 3 words that immediately clicked for me. We went back and said, you know what lets help the creation of the first few courses.We want to create 3 entrepreneurial courses because we knew people who could teach those. Even that didn’t work out, because it was too much work. Initially without their proof point. So instead, me and my co-founder, Gagan, organized entrepreneurial events. The first one was called Raising Money for St atups.And instead of asking people to create a full course, we brought the subject in 6 pieces, like the first one was getting leads, then doing a pitch tag and then like the last one was closing the round. So you kind of add what  the  Laissez faire  raising  money course would be.And when we invited people, we said Okay, you are going to talk about this particular subject. So when the event finished, we were able to video-taped everything, edited it and converted it into a course. Actually we start charging for it. It was 30 dollars. Even with the first course, we got a lot of sales from it because it was a pretty good course. It was the first time where people uses or get practical advice about raising money. Not like high level follow your passion bullshit. It was like, this is exactly the email you sent, this is the type interview you get, this is when you email them back. This was very tactical. So the tactical aspect really worked out.It was 2 more of those events, we get the first 3 paid courses. Before, I was kind of passive about that, we were also crawling all the open courses from universities and we were publishing it on Udemy with their permission, that helped us get some traction but they were all free courses. It was still not proofing financial model here. So the first 3 courses we made were proofing the fact that there was this one person in the world who could buy them. And they were actually like almost 1,000 people who bought that courses.Martin: Did you just wanted to check whether there was some kind of willingness to pay for such a course?Eren: Yes.Martin: Okay, and this was the major force why you decided not to put it for free but want to charge?Eren: Yes, I remember there was an email discussion with our investors, and got their opinions. There was a big debate whether course should be free or paid. My visual was that, although a lot of entrepreneurial talks like this are free, theyre usually motivational, theyre not tactical.When I go to a conference and give free talk, I dont talk about, like this is like how we do. Its just motivational, the most strategic maybe. But the tactical piece was missing and if we charge 30 dollars for it, and if it makes 0.1% easier to raise money, its definitely worth it. And we tell them that we would like to see whether people would pay for it. I said people would pay and they were super happy with it. Nobody thought that 30 dollars was too much for it. So, we launched 3 of those courses in entrepreneurial subjects and then we found  some newsletters which has relevant traffic to Udemy. So we started promoting those courses from these newsletters. And people who signed up to this newsletters really like the courses. And then, what we did next was, we went to some other instructors who werent affiliated with us and we said, would you create a course. We have all this distribution of newsletters signed up to promote your course. They said yes, why not try it. They promoted their courses in the newsletters and we went to more newsletters and said, you know what, we do this course, would you mind to promote and get their share? They said yes and we kind of, similarly we jumped back and forth between the supply and demand. As I said, the key things like liquidity and making your early customers happy, right. We made them really happy by actually do a lot of distribution work for the instructors and a lot of content work for potential distribution channels. So we were like being their technological platform between the distribution channels and the supply side, the content creators. At one point, we had enough users accumulate on Udemy that we didnt rely on external distributions anymore. So many people create their courses, we had enough users on Udemy so that their course would be successful.Martin: At what point did you recognize that youve reached that critical mass?Eren: The critical mass is not just one single number. So, similarly as a market place, you go up in phases. The first phase is  you do whatever possible to get the first few customers and first people on the supply side happier, right.And then, over time, like at that point, you kind of switch into kind of more a scaled approach to getting instructors and the scale that meaning that, it was not like me and my co-founder meeting with each instructor in their house to convince them. Instead, we had people, like business people who are reaching out to instructors to kind of convince them to teach courses. So it was kind of like sales model of reaching out to actively instructors.And in the user side, we start things slightly more scalable and slightly more scalable thing. Like maybe some SEO  worked out and we had more partners, we had like an affiliate network and we had a growing organic traffic that was the largest traffic driver.And then over time, that changed also, because right now theres so many people come to Udemy to teach a course. I think every month, 10,000 peop le start creating courses. Not all of them do it, but a lot of people are willing. So we dont have to do outreach anymore.We have a large content team whose job is just helping the instructors that already coming. We don’t reach out to people anymore, except for strategic courses. As I said, now is a different phase and overtime, even that phase has changed. Now, honestly the only thing that the content team can do is barely: they do work and create new verticals, and they do more highly work in managing verticals and working at the course thats scalable and article variable like data science  team analysis, like  which course are doing better job and which courses are doing worse job.So, that has come to a new phase, were data driven and big data and even more scientific. As I said, its phases, its just as you grow, you start changing how you do stuff.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: Lets talk briefly about the corporate strategy of Udemy. I totally understand that once we have this sc alable mass that you create a competitive advantage. If you put it into a single company perspective, how do you perceive having other competitors like Coursera, etc.? Whats your competitive advantage over them and what makes you be able to build up on that?Eren: Thats a good question. I mean there are a lot of competitors. There are primary competitors which mean there are other market places for teaching. Right now we are the largest, we are leading that one, so were not too worried there. But then, there are publishing companies, companies which produce content and sell it.So in users side, they might be considered as competitors. And then there are companies like Coursera, which we are not really competing with in the market. I think its just our psychological competitors. We are more like friends with them, so we kind meet each other and help each other if possible. Those are really different. Coursera for example, they are focused on higher education. There are companies which are really focused completely on K-12 kind of academics. K12 international academy is focused on  K-12. And Udemys focus has always been skill based adult training. So its not K-12 or higher education, its like after that. We believe that learning has to be lifelong. And our courses are usually more tactical,  you learn how to build an IPhone application, you dont learn the computer science fundamentals as much. Although we have courses  around it, but thats not our strong suit. Our strong suit is,  Im going to learn something very practical and Im going do something with it.So that has been large enough differentiator,  just some notes that we start a lot early than those other companies. I think we could say, we kind of, we start this online course market. So there were companies before us doing some sort of learning but constructive online course that anybody can take, like we were the company that initiated that move, and hopefully we have some help in the popularizing concept like MOOCs. Coursera just came  around 2 years after us. And when they launched, we already have our model which was working. I think they look at our model and kind of, look higher education could do the same thing.Martin: You beautifully described the different phases of a company. What would be the next phase of Udemy?Eren: I think the next phase is right now, we solved the problem of creating an ecosystem about casual learning. We have done that. As instructors are making enough money to live their lives, we signed about 6,000 checks every months, like 6,000 people are making money from us every month. And some of them are making millions of dollars. And for some of them its like passive income.But I think the most important that weve created is the job. Teaching online is formidable job right now. So the next phase is taking on demand learning from where it is right now to its next level. So Udemy is and should  always be the frontier of learning online, especially on demands .Because you can also do 1-on-1 live classes, thats a different world. Skills on demand learning is our focus and we are awaiting a new phase to do this and we are building a lot of science about what makes a course better. So we obsessively analyze action that users are doing during the courses and now we can actually we have thousand of courses, so we have that unique position where we can crawl what aspect of the course make it stick better.Martin: I would call it educational analytics.Eren: Yes, more like educational analytics,  but people call it big data education. But  then you see, that a lot of assumption people make about education is incorrect. Even like assumption made by professors who have been doing this for a long time or educational scientists, they have  a lot of small studies, observations, now we have real data. And we see a lot of them are incorrect, and you see it in a lot of large scale across verticals. Its not like one vertical, we can see like this learnin g theory can I apply it in this vertical but not that vertical. We are in the position, I want Udemy to become a company which is pushing the boundaries in on demand learning. This is the main thing and other stuff is opening up internationally, so we opened our first  Europe  office.Martin: Where?Eren: In  Dublin, I really want  Berlin. I went to  Berlin  a year ago, its a great city. I really love that. Hopefully, we have an office there too at some point, but the first is in  Dublin  for more practical reasons. Europe market is very important and so we start opening up to South America, Europe,  East Asia.And the other thing is actually making the model work in some other niche verticals. We are pretty strong in the top 3 4 verticals but I would expect musicalcourse would be very successful in Udemy. So we already have somebody, its not like as strong as we wanted. Like maybe hobby courses and some other sophistication base courses. Theres always new vertical that we wanted to h ave, build liquidity at.Martin: Sure.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: In terms of market development, how do you perceived the offline education versus the online education, and even maybe a specific sub segments in between?Eren: If you look at the education market or the world virtually first divided by age group. Theres K-12 was a separate base, right. Second its about learning release, like education means something different for them. And theres higher education, college, maybe grad degrees, and theres lifelong learning.And lifelong learning can happen at home, youre learning for yourself, it could be at work, or it could be in some kind of institution. If you look at them, for each of the verticals theres an offline element to it, and theres an online element to it. So in K-12 for example, still dominantly offline. Theres some online movement but its very small in proportion.Lifelong learning actually is the  part where online gets a much larger chunk. Thats why we actually focus on that. And higher education is kind of small slowly transitioning, its a slow transition, its not going to happen overnight. For us, with  lifelong learning, like offline, theres some offline component, you could go to a certification program in a place, or you could  take a high end boot camp. Those tend to be really expensive and limited to a very small local.We are happy to admit that might be a better experience, so I dont claim that learning online is better than in person, because if you can find a top Stanford professor, or like an amazing person to sit next to you and give you a course directly to you, it might be better if you can access that. But its going to be 100 times more expensive than an online course. And youll be kind of limited by the time and location, so to me that education is for elite group of people in the world.And for everybody else, thats not a solution, thats why we started Udemy. So, I think on demand  and offline are sometimes used in conjunction tog ether to a hybrid learning. But for majority of people in the world, I think online education is the only viable way to get them up to speed with the skill that they need for jobs or even hobbies. I think online is the only viable way to do that.Martin: In terms of certification of a specific skill, do you think that having this kind of certification later on in the future or do you really think its just about showing people who you have the skills?Eren: This is the point where I and the rest of the market is in disagreement. A lot of companies are trying to get certification up, maybe try to raise the money, all the inventors were saying, why dont you use certification, I would only invest if theres a degree or diploma behind this.I kept saying no, does not make sense. Because people look at universities and theyre just trying to move that model while you go to the university, theres some learning there, theres a certification that you have diploma. It does work in a small constrai nt environment, but when you go to internet, things changed. You cant move things from physical world and just digitized it.So, in world of  internet, you can access a lot more people. Accessing a lot more people also make it harder to make a reputable certification. Because Stanford or Harvard has a pretty strong brand in their certification, if Harvard has 5 million students, they wouldnt be nearly as good brand. So the value of the brand of your certification and the number of people who are able to get it, they are inversely correlated. So thats why, I think if you want to help hundreds of millions of people, you cant at the same time try to create that high, strong brand in your certification.So I thought, in the world of open digital education, these 2 things should be separated. There should be companies like Udemy, whose job is only to help you learn your subject because you want to learn it for something. I dont care for what, but you want to learn a subject. I think our c ompany or other organization which feel whose job is going to be certifying that you are good at a particular skill, assessing your skill. I think trying to merge them together, will  really break the experience, it makes both parts function worst.So from that, I believe we should separate, so we never get into that. We do like course completion certificate, like light weight badge, but were not trying to make it completely a diploma. So we never thought this is critical.What we do    more often is a real life certification, which is  accepted in the market like Cisco network administration certificate, or Adobe design certificate, or Microsoft Office certificate. So we try to get, we have a lot of courses that we are preparing for those existing certifications. So people can go and take a course in Udemy to prepare themselves and they go to Cisco to get the network certificate. And Cisco network certificate will always be more valuable than a certificate that we made up.ADVICE TO E NTREPRENEURS FROM EREN BALIMartin: Lets talk about what type of advice, you can share with entrepreneurs or what type of lesson you learned. I mean in one of your startups you failed, then you work in another startup and now youre quite successful with Udemy. What are the major learning that you can share with our readers?Eren: Sure. Therere a lot. So I start what  comes to my mind first.First of all, when you build a startup, you can look at how things currently work or how other people do things. And you can just assume the world is in a certain way because it is. Thats  the wrong way. Because as an entrepreneur, you have to forget how currently the world works and say how should it work or could this work. Because there are thousands of reasons why Udemy wouldnt work. That what some investors brought up to us, and they said that they passed on us, they say this is never going to work. Because most of those reasons they were coming up with, were just how things are currently were happening. But if you kind of forget about them and you say that there are millions of people and there are also millions of experts in the world and billions of people who love to learn from them. Why wouldnt this exist?  Just starting the first principle and kind of ignoring how things are currently happening, is really important.The second part is that you need a laser focus in execution. Pretty often people try to do a lot of different things. I mean, testing a lot of things is Okay, but you have to be laser focus on what you execute. For example, for us in the beginning, we said that we need to figure out the early traction problem. We have to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. Everything we were doing was to solve that problem. And once we grow older, there was a scale problem and quality problem. So we always were very focus on what the problem we were solving. You said be focused is like a dummy advice, because people think they have to do less things, sometimes you do more things but your purpose has to be extremely clear. Thats the focus you have to be very clear.Martin: And did you already think, like when you wanted to create this kind of product market fit, in terms of what are the scaling problem or quality problems, or did you just take one problem at a time?Eren: Especially when young, we try to take, just tackle a problem at a time. Because I can admit in the first year, therere for the courses we had the quality wasnt very high. Because we were just barely trying to make the course successful, so we had to have a low barrier, but as we grew we start increasing the barrier and started really focusing in the quality. So you cant just try to  achieve  everything at the same time. That kind of change per company.If youre building a  utility tool  for example, building a network and  utility tool  are very different. If youre building a  utility tool, you have to be laser focus on the experience of users from day one. You should think, are my fir st 10 users extremely happy about this. But if youre building a network business, then the way to make your users happy is usually rely on getting the other part of the market so then you have to build a separate model. So the model changes but you kind of have a real purpose of what youre trying to achieve and try to achieve one and two things at a time.Martin: What else that you learn?Eren: I mean like so much. I think we should start with things which more like  counterintuitive side Ive learned. Because I think a lot of standard advice you hear everywhere.For example, in terms of product success, especially if you are coming from an engineer background, youre usually convinced as important are hard. Like things which are hard just seem to be important to you, because theyre hard and youre an engineer and you think because you solved it youll be having success. That might be true for school but its really untrue for business. What is really valuable and important could be somethi ng simple to you, you just need to consistently do it. For example, for us, the live education component was a lot technically harder and cooler for them because its a sexy product. We even have raised money for what its worth, but it wasnt really bringing much value for users. Were on demand, kind of crude video courses actually being valuable, and I think people were ignoring the importance of this, because it wasnt a new technological achievement.It was easier to do. And it wasnt a success for other people because they werent consistent in doing this on a lot of subjects. I still see this, people who want to get into education, they wanted to do something big and they always have cruel ideas about how to teach something. They just ignore certain things because theyre straight forward. I think the value you can provide is not like crazy, weird ideas. Its consistently doing something good and iterating step by step.Martin: Okay. Great. Do you want to share any further?Eren: Not muc h, but if youre more for  Germany, I would say,  Germany  is one of my favorite markets. I think we have a unique position to observe the learning skill of doing learning courses in different countries. We see that a lot of people are real passionate about learning and their engagement are really high for a lot of German users. So if this kind of clear that people in  Germany,  they really care about bettering themselves and learning new things. And theres a lot less age fragmentation which is also very cool to see. So were pretty happy with the demographic that we are getting from there, so well definitely double count  on  Germany  as a country.Martin: Great! Eren, thank you very much and if you want to start your own company and learn how to code, maybe look at Udemy.

Odysseus and Penelopes Suffering - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 687 Downloads: 5 Date added: 2019/04/01 Category Literature Essay Level High school Tags: Odyssey Essay Did you like this example? The book The Odyssey, by Gareth Hinds, is about Odysseus and how he battles mythical creatures and faces the anger of the gods. His wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, avoid many suitors contending to marry Penelope try to take Ithacas throne until Odysseus returns home. The Odyssey ends when Odysseus wins a contest to prove his who he really is and takes back the throne of Ithaca again. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Odysseus and Penelopes Suffering" essay for you Create order One of the main themes that comes up throughout the story is suffering. Types of suffering that come up are personal suffering, suffering you share with other people, and finally how those problems are resolved in the end. Personal suffering in this book is usually caused by wars or other depressing events. One example in this book is when Odysseus spent a long time looking for his family. This clearly had a big impact on his journey. He did everything for his family and to try to get to them but in the story, it clearly shows that he was suffering because of the way he missed them and how long it took him to find them. Between Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope, the stress in all of them tested and affected their mental strength while being sorrowful because they were being separated from each other. When Odysseus left for the war, Penelope stayed at home with Telemachus. After many years passed by, people thought Odysseus was dead and a new kind of pain and suffering both Telemachus and Penelopes life was created because of that. Because of this, suitors harshly ravaged their house and this caused her a lot of pain for many years. Penelope wished for Odysseus to one day come back home, but after many years of hoping, it seemed like it would never come true. This same kind of hardship that Penelope experienced was also shared with Telemachus in a very similar way. He was always looking to find a way of his father to come home but he would never come back. In the book, there were many wars of different kinds, some of which involved violent wars and lots of killing but also wars within yourself and other people. The wars affected the story greatly because it showed how it impacted people greatly. One example of this affecting people is when Odysseus was away and is trapped on Calypsos island. Once Calypso lets him leave the island, he goes on many adventures that cause many members of his crew getting killed. Odysseus feels like it is his fault that they have died because he was the one that brought them along on the journey. He thinks deeply about what is going on and how it would have been if they werent with him. Before much of the misfortunes of them getting killed, Odysseus and his crew get stranded with a lady that poisons them but then Odysseus gets them out of the poison. While they were there, they were out of worries that they would get killed in any place they walked. In the end, all of these problems were eventually solved, and characters attitudes were clear to change when they did. When Odysseus returned home, Penelopes problems with the suitors got resolved. When he got there, he took back her hand and the throne of Ithaca again. She no longer had to deal with them fighting over who would marry her or who would take the throne. Even though nothing can change the grief of the loss of a loved one from the war, a lot of the depression from the crew stopped because they no longer had to live with the worry of getting killed overnight or Odysseus not coming back home. To conclude, The Odyssey can teach us many things about suffering and the ways people suffer. Even though problems may be hard on you and other people, most times they can be resolved, just like they were with Odysseus and Penelope. Penelope didnt have to worry about many problems when Odysseus came home and Odysseus didnt have to worry about someone taking the throne while he wasnt at home.

Leadership Styles That The Leaders Of The Ancient World

Title Page Boudi Haj-Ayoub Ms.Cross Class code Intro: There are many different leadership styles that the leaders of the ancient world used to create and expand their empires. Each leader used a combination of different leadership styles during their rule. Two leaders that share very similar leading styles were Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. They both were Situational leaders, management leaders and relations leaders. They both used their skills against each other in a battle for the holy lands. Paragraph one: Situational leadership theory states that the best leaders are flexible and adaptable, able to modify their plans or make quick decisions that benefit their rule and their people. According to this theory, situational leaders possess the ability to analyze a situation and its variables and come up with the best course of action. Both Saladin and Richard Lionheart were situational leaders because they both had the ability to adapt quickly to what was happening around them and make crucial decisions with little notice. For example, during the siege of Jerusalem, Saladin modified his battle strategy in order to bring about success: Saladin saw that he was making no progress†¦. At dawn on a certain day [Sept 26] the King of Egypt (that is, Saladin) ordered the camp to be moved without any tumult or commotion. He ordered the tents to be pitched in the Vale of Jehoshaphat†¦.When morning had come the men of Jerusalem lifted up their eyes and,Show MoreRelatedInfluence Of A Great Philosopher And The Metaphysic Of Divine Providence1162 Words   |  5 PagesCicero returned to the republic government after the late Julius Caesar death Cicero became an enemy to Mark Anthony. After a power struggle Cicero was executed being an enemy to the state by the second Triumvirate in 43 BC. 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Decision Support System and Harvard Cooperative Society Free Essays

Chapter 2: Information Systems and Knowledge Management From his office window overlooking the main floor of the Harvard Cooperative Society, CEO Jerry Murphy can glance down and see custom- ers shopping. 19 They make their way through the narrow aisles of the crowded department store, picking up a sweatshirt here, trying on a baseball cap there, checking out the endless array of merchandise that bears the Harvard University insignia. Watching Murphy, you can well imagine the Co-op’s found- rs, who started the store in 1882, peering through the tiny win- dowpanes to keep an eye on the shop floor. We will write a custom essay sample on Decision Support System and Harvard Cooperative Society or any similar topic only for you Order Now Was the Harvard Square store attracting steady traffic? Were the college students buying enough books and supplies for the Co-op to make a profit? Back then, it was tough to answer those questions precisely. The owners had to watch and wait, relying only on their gut feelings to know how things were going from minute to minute. Now, more than a hundred years later, Murphy can tell you, own to the last stock-keeping unit, how he’s doing at any given moment. His window on the business is the PC that sits on his desk. All day long it delivers up-to-the-minute, easy-to-read elec- tronic reports on what’s selling and what’s not, which items are running low in inventory and which have fallen short of forecast. In a matter of seconds, the computer can report gross margins for any product or supplier, and Murphy can decide whether the margins are fat enough to justify keeping the supplier or product on board. We were in the 1800s, and we had to move ahead,† he say s of the $55 million business. Questions 1. What is a decision support system? What advantages does a decision support system have for a business like the Harvard Cooperative Society? 2. How would the decision support system of a business like the Harvard Cooperative Society differ from that of a major corporation? 3. Briefly outline the components of the Harvard Cooperative Society’s decision support system. How to cite Decision Support System and Harvard Cooperative Society, Essay examples

Conceptual Framework and Inclusion of Prudence

Question: Discuss about the Conceptual Framework and Inclusion of Prudence. Answer: Introduction Conceptual framework of accounting have major role in the preparation and the presentation of the financial statements. It provides the basis on which the financial statements of the company are prepared and presented. In case there has no such framework then the company would have ended up with nothing. This framework requires necessary compliances with the applicable provision of the accounting standards, auditing and assurance standards and the requirements of the Corporations Act or any other law for the time being in force. For making the analysis, Suncorp Limited has been selected. The company is registered in Australia and listed in the Australian Stock Exchange and is engaged in the banking sector and the insurance sector and is regarded as the number one company across Australia and New Zealand for insurance business. From the annual report of the company for the current year ending, this report has been prepared. At first the conceptual framework characteristics have been d etailed with examples from annual report and it has been ascertained whether the same has been followed throughout the annual report. Thereafter the concept of prudence has been explained and the effects on annual reporting have been discussed after its inclusion in the conceptual framework of accounting. At the end the concluding paragraph has been along with the recommendation as to whether the company adheres to the requirement of conceptual framework or not. Conceptual Framework And Its Adherence Framework is regarded as the main component for the success of the organization. Framework is defined as the plan or layout which will help to define what the organization is required to do so or how the organization can achieve the organizational goals by having the defined structure. Frameworks are of two types namely theoretical framework and practical framework (Anastasia, 2015 and Capital Markets Advisory Committee Meeting, 2013). Conceptual framework has been defined as the platform or the structure which allows the financial statements to be prepared in accordance with the relevant laws, guidelines, rules and regulations and importantly the Australian Accounting Standards and Auditing and assurance standard (Financial Statement Analysis, 2017). The companys financial statements will be useless for the users of the financial statements if it does not contain any type of framework whether theoretical or practical. As per the norms, conceptual framework consists of three characte ristics which includes faithful representation, relevancy and reliability. All the three characteristics though work separately but are linked by way of many reasons (IASB, 2010 and Weiss, 2014). If the financial statements are free from any error or bias then the data so obtained will always be reliable and thus will be relevant for the users of the financial statements. Its adherence in the annual report of the company has been checked and confirmed from the various sections of the annual report of the company itself. These are as follows: Remuneration Report Remuneration report is the report prepared for apprising the users of the financial statements the amount of the remuneration paid to the key managerial personnel of the company. Key managerial personnel of the company are those persons, who have the authority to plan, manage, control and directs any activities of the company for the achievement of the organizational goals. In this report the basis of the remuneration structure so formed and paid is described. In the starting when the remuneration report is addressed to the shareholders it has been mentioned that the company is striving for its remuneration policy which is described as pay for performance which means that the key managerial personnel will be paid on the basis of the performance of their work. This pay for performance is generally described as the remuneration received for taking risk. It is because the key managerial personnel receives some part of payment only when their performance gives the be st results to the organization and increases the turnover of the company. Thus, this is financial linked remuneration. The company also gives the long term and short term incentives described as LTI and STI. Long term incentives are determined with the value of the Total Shareholder Return (TSR) and short term incentives are determined by the score that each executive will get on the analysis of the financial and non financial achievements made by him during the year. Further the remuneration is recommended by the remuneration committee. The recommendation is made only after due consultation with the experts and consultants hired by the company in respect of any legal changes. The committee has met for the six times for the year ending 30th June 2016 and fully supported the board in fixing the remuneration and complete its responsibility towards the shareholders in relation to adequate and proper management of remuneration with prudence and to comply with the prudential standards is sued by APRAs (Annual Report, 2016). GPFR - These are known as the General Purpose Financial Statements specifically for the users who makes their decision with respect to financing or investment. The company has adhered with the same as it has been mentioned in the statement of compliance that the consolidated financial statements for the year end are the general purpose financial statements and have been prepared in accordance with the Australian Accounting Standards and comply with the provisions and requirements of the Corporations Act, 2001 (Annual Report, 2016). Inventory The inventory consists of the derivatives and securities and the same have been valued at cost (Annual Report, 2016). Accounts Receivable The accounts receivables are covered under the head of Receivables due from other banks amounting $595 million in 2015 and $552 million in 2016. The receivables are only on account of the financial services made by the company. It has been mentioned in the annual report that no adjustments have been made for the collateral or any other security obtained and no impairment has been done as there are no chances in nit getting the recovery from the debtors (Annual Report, 2016). Property, Plant and Equipment The assets contribute under this amounts to $183 million in 2016 as compared to $191 million in 2015. The depreciation and the amortization expense have been charged to Profit and Loss statement and the expense has been allocated to different segments of the business including Insurance, Banking, Life and Corporate in order to provide the necessary disclosures as per the conceptual framework and in accordance with AASB (Annual Report, 2016). Leases The distinction has been made between the operating lease and the financial lease as per Note 37.19 of the financial statements. The operating lease has been written off as per the straight line method of amortization. It has been stated in the annual report that the AASB 16 on the Leases although are available for early adoption but the company has not incorporated the same as it will become mandatory for the year ending 2020 for the company. Thus, the company has followed the running AASB 117 and have followed the conceptual framework (Annual Report, 2016). Taxation The taxation part has been mentioned area wise. Firstly, Australia taxation has been mentioned where the tax is charged partly on the basis of product and partly on the basis of profits and therefore has different rates of tax like superannuation business is taxable at 15% and normal business at 30%. In the New Zealand, there is the corporate tax rate of 28% and is applied for all classes of business. Therefore, at the end the company has $462 million as tax liability for the year ending 2016 (Annual Report, 2016). The above instances explain that the company has followed the conceptual framework of accounting and is in accordance with AASB. Inclusion Of Prudence In Conceptual Framework Prudence is the concept which entails that the company shall provide and anticipate for all expenses and losses and shall not provide for any gains and incomes. Concept of prudence has been regarded as the major concept that shall be kept in consideration while preparing the financial statements of the company and finalizing it. Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has defined the Prudential Standards which shall be considered by the company while framing the books of accounts (HAL official website, 2013). The fact of having APRA framework for level 3 companies have been mentioned in the annual report and it has been stated that the same will be applicable from the financial year 2017 and company is ready for it. The annual report has stated the instances where the requirements of APRA have been met: Liquidity Coverage Ration as per APS 210 Policy liabilities in Australia as per LPS 340 Equity Reserves for Credit Losses as per APS 220 Capital and Credit Commitments as per APS112 (Annual Report, 2016). Effects On Reporting Although the conceptual framework along with the AASB and APRA guidelines has been followed by the company but there remains the issue of Self Interest among the executive and the key managerial personnel of the company. The self interest is mainly in the remuneration. It is because the executives gets the remuneration on the basis of the performance and in order to improve the Total shareholder return or the financial performance of the company, the executives might get themselves engaged into the practice of manipulating the accounts by inflating the revenues or reducing the expenses. Thus, there may be the issue of self interest which might affect the conceptual framework of accounting. Therefore, the prudence in conceptual framework can affect the reporting in the financial Statements of the company. Conclusion Conceptual framework of accounting is very important in preparation of the financial statements of the company and it provides the structure through which true and fair view of the financial statements can be prepared. The inclusion of the prudential norms has further gained the weight age in the conceptual framework of accounting. Although it may affect the reporting purpose by engaging the company in the manipulation or other mal practices in relation to the financial statements, but its key for financial statements. To conclude, the report has come out with new facts. Recommendation In view of the report, it is recommended to have many more prudential standards so as to make the financial statements representing the true and fair view and not letting anyone to do wrong practices. References Anastasia, (2015), Financial Statement Analysis : An Introduction available on https://www.cleverism.com/financial-statement-analysis-introduction/ accessed on 24/04/2017 Capital Markets Advisory Committee Meeting, (2013), Conceptual Framework available on https://www.ifrs.org/Meetings/MeetingDocs/Other%20Meeting/2013/March/AP%203%20conceptual%20framework.pdf accessed on 24-04-2017. Financial Statement Analysis, 2017 available on https://www.business-solutions-and-resources.com/financial-statement-analysis.html accessed on 24-04-2017.. HAL official website, (2013), Should Financial Statements Represent Fairly or be Relevant, available on https://hal.inria.fr/halshs-00873959/document accessed on 24-04-2017. International Accounting Standards Board, (2010), Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting 2010 , pages 16-21 Suncorp Official Website, Annual Report 2015 available on https://www.suncorpgroup.com.au/investors/reports accessed on 24-04-2017. Weiss D, (2014), Faithful Representation available on https://bschool.huji.ac.il/.upload/Seminars/Faithful%20Representation%20October%202014.pdf accessed on 24-04-2017.