Marriage is a Sacred Union between Man and Woman Essay -- Gay Marriage

Marriage is Sacred Marriage has always been a sacred agreement between a man and a woman. This definition was written in the Bible and sanctified by God. Our country was founded on the principles of the Bible and therefore should not support an action, such as legalizing gay marriage, which goes against our founding beliefs. When it comes to the issue of gay marriage, Americans have many different views. Research shows that the majority of Americans oppose gay marriage, but when it comes to deciding who should make the laws, Americans are split in half (Bayles 6). 48% of Americans said that the federal government should make the laws and 46% say it should be left to the states (6). This information shows that the majority of Americans have strong opinions about the issue, but don’t know of any way to solve the issue (6). The controversy of gay marriage is seen even in groups who support strong marriages. Author Karen Peterson uses her article to address the issue of how gay marriage sits with the â€Å"marriage movement,† the coalition of professionals dedicated to strengthening marriages (7). This movement has successfully included pro-marriage initiatives across America and formed new high school courses on relationships (Peterson 7). Peterson finds that the â€Å"marriage movement† has many different views within itself and struggles with the question of â€Å"How can one be a proponent of marriage in general but oppose marriages between gays† (7). David Blankenhorn who is the founder of the Institute for American Values and an important member of the coalition, says that they hope to settle the issue and no longer be silent about it. The coalition hopes to participate in and improve the nationa... ... come from this decision. Allowing gays to marry will go against American history and simply cause problems for the people of America now and in the future. Works Cited Bayles, Fred, and Andrea Stone. â€Å"Gay-marriages foes try to stop ‘activist courts.’† USA Today 25 Feb. 2004: 06a. Bennett, William. â€Å"Leave Marriage Alone.† Newsweek 3 June 1996: 27. Breslau, Karen, Brad Stone, Debra Rosenberg and Tamara Lipper. â€Å"Outlaw Vows.† Newsweek 1 Mar. 2004: 40. â€Å"Broken marriages, not gay nuptials, pose risk to kids.† USA Today 23 Feb. 2004: 18a. Peterson, Karen S. â€Å"On gays, ‘marriage movement’ is on both sides of the aisle.† USA Today 4 Aug. 2003: 07d. Sullivan, Andrew. â€Å"Let Gays Marry.† Newsweek 3 June 1996: 26. Taylor, Chris. â€Å"I Do: No You Don’t.† Time 1 Mar. 2004: 3c. â€Å"USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll.† USA Today 24 Feb. 2004: 06d.

Analysis on the Shift of Business Strategy for Ge Into the 21st Century Essay

Question 1: In what ways has Jeff Immelt redirected the strategy of GE? In 2001, shortly after Jeff Immelt became the CEO of GE, a series of events changed and impacted the corporate landscape. The immediate challenges that he faced included 9/11, and a subsequent series of high profile corporate scandals (Enron, WorldCom). In 2008, the financial crisis hit and had a severe impact on GE’s primary growth source, GE Capital causing it to accumulate bad debts and asset write-downs. These events caused slow domestic economic growth, crisis of confidence among investors and more global competitors. Due to the change in environment and the need to adapt Immelt shifted the focus of GE from cost cutting and deal making to new products, services and markets. He particularly focused on redirecting the strategy of GE through: organic growth, customer focus, and innovation. In 2002, Immelt committed GE to an organic growth rate of 8% per year. He identified a number of emerging global trends – the ageing population, the demand for sustainable energy, the necessity of improved infrastructure, and opportunities in the emerging markets. He aimed to create value for customers by leveraging GE’s core competencies particularly in advanced technology and related service by delivering superior, customized products and services to high-growth markets. A core component of his growth strategy was to create new ‘Growth platforms’ which could be either extensions of the existing businesses or entire new commercial areas. Through identifying a new growth platform, it would then be executed through a series of divestments and strategic acquisitions in sectors with high growth potential. Technology was seen to be a key driver of GE’s future growth which led to the launch of Imagination breakthrough. New technologies were seen as an essential ingredient to successful product innovation and quality improvement. GE expanded its research and development capabilities and supported them with adequate financial backing. Another vital part of Immelt’s growth strategy has been the implementation of the Customer Focus initiative. This lead to the revitalization of GE’s marketing function – most notably through the creation of GE’s Commercial Council and a number of customer-oriented programs. Through this customer focus imitative it became one of Immelt’s value creation strategies: exploit linkages across GE’s many companies. His efforts started off with product bundling and cross selling, which eventually led to enterprise selling. This meant seeking out customers that would benefit from GE’s broad portfolio of businesses and deliver highly customized solutions. The strategic focus was on creating differentiation advantage through innovative product-service bundles and enhanced customer focus Question 2: To what extent is this strategy well aligned: a) with the requirements of 21st century business environment Jeff Immelt took over the reins of General Electric at the end of an Era where the Market economy was buzzing with optimism, confidence and growth, and was now heading into a downturn. This shift in the Business environment and economic instability instigated a crucial issue for Immelt, which was to identify the likely sources of profit for the future. Under Jack Welch the potential for value creation through cost reduction and the elimination of under performing assets had mostly been completely utilized. So from Immelt’s view, in the current Market situation, the primary driver of growth was going to be organic growth. With the poor state that the world economy was in, the central challenge for Immelt was going to be identifying where the most promising opportunities for profitable growth would lie. He identified a number of key significant emerging global trends—the ageing population, the conflicting forces of growing energy demand and concerns over global warming, the advent of biosciences in conjunction with global warming and nanotechnology, and new commercial opportunities in the emerging markets. In order for GE to position itself for stronger growth in the changing business environment, Immelt saw the need to exit form slow growth business, and reallocate its resources where growth prospects were strong, taking advantage of the emerging global trends. At the heart of Immelt’s growth strategy for General Electric’s was the development of new Growth Platforms, which could be either extensions of the existing businesses or entire new commercial areas. Even though Immelts core focus was on organic growth, repositioning to take advantage of the emerging market trends and opportunities would require acquisition. Then once a new Growth Platform was identified, GE would build a leading position in those sectors through small strategic acquisitions and the deployment of its financial, technical and managerial resources. GE was entering a new generational era, one where technology is at the forefront of growth and adaptation. Immelt identified Technology as one of GE’s major drivers for future growth which was signaled by his expansion of GE’s R&D budgets. He shifted the importance of Technology within GE by focusing on the R&D projects that offered large scale market potential, reffered to as â€Å"Imagination breakthroughs†. Within this new business environment that GE was facing, customers needs, wants and expectations of what products can offer them is forever changing. Immelt saw and understood this from the amount of time spent with customers, and implemented this idea within GE through the IT redesign process becoming increasingly customer focused. One of the most important outcomes of GE’s enhanced customer focus would be the ability to better meet the customers needs through bundling products with support and technology services, and combine product and service offerings from different businesses (Enterprise selling) to enhance customer value. Also by increasing customer orientated products, this would also help GE to increase its success in international markets by involving more local product development and emphasis on truly aligning products and services to meet local market needs. (b) GE’s resources and capabilities The backbone GE’s success over time has been its ability to combine massive size with constant adaptation. Over the decades GE has successfully adapted both its business portfolio and its management systems to the demands and opportunities of the ever-changing business Environment. GE’s success in innovation has been built on the back of their ability to nurture ideas and innovations, and expertly managing and formulate them into successful investments. This is clearly shown through General Electric’s â€Å"Imagination breakthroughs† through Immelt. These imagination breakthroughs are promising technological R&D projects, that have the potential to create $100 million in sales over three years. Immelts emphasis on technology reflected his belief and the Belief intrinsic to GE which is that the primary driver of sales is great products. Immelt’s assessment of emerging global trends and his strategic direction demonstrate his understanding of the external opportunities and threats, and internal strengths and weaknesses. Technical leadership has proved to be not only a source of GE’s competitive advantage but it is also an important barrier to entry. For example, GE is the only US-based company with all the necessary capabilities to build a nuclear power plant. This is an example of General Electrics ability to marry Industrial and technological R&D to a business system capable of turning scientific and technological discoveries into marketable products. Question 3: What organizational changes has the new strategy necessitated? Will GE be able to successfully execute the strategy? Through placing greater emphasis on customer focus, organic growth and innovation, GE’s systems and structure must be realigned to better manage the complex situation of diversified businesses and to maintain its efficiency and performance. Immelt’s focus on greater cross integration, new growth platforms and enterprise selling lead to a major structural change in 2002. GE divisions were reorganized into a smaller number of broad based sectors. By 2008, there were 5 sectors and each of them focused on broad markets, in which they had a scale, market leadership, and superior customer offerings. GE’s 5 broad markets were: technology, infrastructure, industrial and commercial, GE capital, healthcare and NBC Universal. Through regrouping the various businesses into their markets it would be easier to identify the various connections between the businesses. Becoming a more customer focus business had a huge impact on the organization; it led to the revitalization of GE’s marketing function. A number of customer – orientated programs were created, most notably GE’s Commercial Council. The key initiative of the six part growth process in terms of marketing and sales were introduced, there were increasingly many metrics driven analysis on customer satisfaction and attitudes. This whole phase of becoming a customer focus business instead of an operating efficient one demanded the managers to become less of an operator and more of a marketer. Immelt’s reshaping of GE’s Business portfolio, through Growth platforms, required acquisition. Developing these opportunities required high levels of coordination across multiple organizational units. This further increased the organizational complexity of GE, and great difficulty in performance management as it was hard linking individual incentives to individual’s organizational performance hard to implement. Other issues arose through the organizational changes necessitated through the new strategy. Immelt had changed the rganizational structure to further integrate the different businesses, however this lead to a complex coordination problem as they have gone beyond cross selling to enterprise selling. Also through placing heavy emphasis on customer focus this caused the sales and marketing department to put less focus on particular business and just look at opportunities that they can exploit this can be seen from the example of GE medical systems. Through constantly acquiring new businesses to further fuel growth in technology and the energy sector this has made the organizational structure even more complex. Focussing on customers and enterprise selling requires a simple structure. It can be seen that if Immelt wants to successfully implement his strategies he needs to find a solution to change the organizational structure to mitigate the complexity of it, while being able to acquire new businesses for growth. Whether Immelt can execute these strategies due to these organizational issues are discussed in the further sections of this essay. Will Immelt’s strategy be successful? Are there alternatives corporate strategies that GE should consider – break up in particular? We believe that Immelts strategy will be successful and recommend that he continue to pursue his strategy of greater emphasis on technology, customer focus and increased integration. In order for this to happen in the context of the economic situation of the 21st century, we feel that it is important for GE’s emphasis to be shifted to risk-taking, sophisticated management, and innovation in order to deliver new products and services, and to penetrate new markets Immelt should continue to divest companies of low profit, growth and returns, and focus on those whose are aligned with their competencies are as a future possible growth platform. To reduce organizational complexity GE should also introduce competitive based pay which will link to all levels of employers from base workers to managers. This is to encourage collaboration through all levels of the employment ladder both vertically and horizontally. The success of Immelt’s strategy of combining innovation and efficiency in a fast-moving business environment will allow GE to capitalize on the demands and opportunities of a changing world. Thus, GE will play a leadership role as it sets the trend for the conglomerate business model to maintain its relevance. Breaking up GE There are several advantages in breaking up GE. GE will be able to focus on innovation and reinvest back on innovation and technology through the funds acquired from selling some of their businesses. There is also no need for having a complex organizational structure if GE would only focus on one segment of their business. The source of competitive advantage for GE is integration of business in its portfolio. GE Capital contributes 32% of total revenue. This is a stable source of revenue for GE. Spinning it off the business portfolio will reduce the funding for other GE initiatives. By doing so, they will not be able to address the challenges facing the business environment in the future. This proved as a disadvantage as it will alter the competitive scope of the company and will ultimately lose their capability to compete in global markets. GE should not break up as it will lose its core competencies and won’t be able to compete and enjoy the current market position that they are in. Focusing On Technology and Energy  Based on 2010 GE annual report, technology and energy infrastructure has the highest profit and revenue contribution for GE. This is the main focus of their business today. Although GE capital is not as profitable as before, it still contributes 32% of the total GE revenue. Overall, it is still growing from the period of 2009 – 2011. While GE Capital revenue does not contribute as the main source of contribution in both revenue and profit of GE, it is essential as a source of revenue to pursuit and invests in innovation that drives the Energy and Technology Infrastructure sector of GE.

Abraham A Paradigm of Faith Essay - 1565 Words

Introduction Standard readings of the Akedah (Genesis 22.1-19) promote Abraham as a paradigm of faith because of his limitless and unwavering commitment to God. God speaks to Abraham, demands a painful violence that threatens to shatter his soteriological promises to Abraham, and Abraham marches forward fully complaint with the injunction. These actions certify Abraham as faith-hero par excellence; Abraham obeys regardless of obstacle or cost. This traditional interpretation is so readily accepted that even Kant fails to question its validity. Consequently, he chastises Abraham for his complete lack of moral when tasked with sacrificing Isaac. Even more awkwardly, while Maimonides argued that this pericope established the â€Å"extent and†¦show more content†¦Dating of Genesis 21.1-14 The two main data points for dating Genesis 22.1-14 comes from the verb ×  Ã— ¡Ã—”, â€Å"test,† (v. 1) and the reference to Mount Moriah (v. 2). Veijola boldly asserts that these two indicators give a post-exilic date to the text based on the presence of Moriah in 2Chr 3.1 and the frequent use of ×  Ã— ¡Ã—” in Deuteronomy (4.34; 6.16; 8.2, 16; 13.3; 28.56; 33.8). However, Noort rightly tempers this assertion by identifying that while those indicators do in fact give a post-exilic date for final composition, they also more directly reveal the text’s myriad layers of composition. The presence of E-material and J-material do not warrant an exclusively post-exilic date. Noort’s main point of reference for a layered-composition comes though usage of Elohim in verse 1-10 and then YHWH in 11 and 14. For Noort, the text most likely began developing around the 6th-7th centuries BCE before reaching its final post-exilic form. While it is risky and speculative to d ate any text solely by two common Hebrew words and Documentary Hypothesis speculation, Noort’s dating rightly affirms a longevity and continual contemporary validity to the pericope; Noort’s dating recognizes the abiding value of the Akedah for the faith community. The Akedah offers identity to pre-monarchy, landless sojourners. It comforts the fear and uncertainty of a nation amidstShow MoreRelatedExplain The Significance Of The Five Pillars Of Islam1360 Words   |  6 PagesExplain the significance of each pillar for the expression of the faith of Islam The Five Pillars of Islam are pivotal in expressing the Islamic faith for the global community and individual adherent. It unifies adherents with a common spiritual identity within the umma which in turn encourages social cohesion. Many Islamic nations incorporate the faith in laws and promote social welfare to inspire moral behaviour within the society. 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