Despite lavish-sounding marketing gush from franchises who want to attract new franchisees, there is no guarantee that you will turn a profit at all, let alone run your business from a laptop in the Bahamas as you soak up the sun. Some franchises are genuinely great propositions (if you run them well), and others look good on paper but are minefields in reality. An aspiring franchisee’s mind should be buzzing with questions.
It’s understandable for a Westerner to assume that Chinese is terrifyingly difficult to learn. With its impenetrable written characters and unfamiliar sounds, at first sight it can seem like a complex machine that only highly skilled experts are capable of understanding and using.
But when you take a little time to scratch the surface and pick up its principles one step at a time, not only is it quite similar to English but also refreshingly logical and simple. For example, here is an introduction to Chinese characters from the British Council:
Blockchain is one of the most disruptive technologies to impact business in recent years. Its significance is such that understanding its ramifications is an interdisciplinary subject spanning technology, business, law and education. Its applications extend far beyond the cryptocurrency applications – Bitcoin, Ethereum and others – for which it is best known. Blockchain’s ability to generate a distributed ledger of events and transactions that cannot be retrospectively altered makes it ideal for academic records, for example.
Dissatisfied with your job or can’t find one that fits you? Then create your own! Starting a business isn’t easy, but the self-empowerment of taking the initiative is incalculable. Creating your own company is one of the most concrete ways of turning dreams into reality. Not only will it generate cash for your own pocket, but if the business grows it will provide livelihoods to others who work for you – that is until they start their own companies, for which of course you will have been the inspiration (keep telling your ego that).
Football (soccer) is an industry like many others. But its pull is exceptionally strong for young people. Many years before they hear the call of operations management or get their heads round freight forwarding, they kick a ball around and fantasise about scoring at Wembley. This simple passion creates a funnel of eager souls wanting to get into the football industry.
Companies in the United States need to know business law in order to sustain and grow their operations without falling foul of the system. With areas from bankruptcy to information privacy, business law finds its way into almost everything firms and their employees do. It defines the responsibilities of directors and company officers, the rules of partnerships and limited liability companies, securities regulation, intellectual property, corporate finance and a great deal else.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Those involved in decision-making in business and law might have heard of the OODA loop. Standing for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, it is a methodology for treading carefully, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and winning in challenging situations by performing actions based on rational decisions. To make those decisions, one must first fully understand the situation by observation, and get to know one’s opponents’ intentions and likely actions by orientation. The four steps in the loop are:
