“Ayala Corp adopts new "philosophy"; releases Sustainability Report - ABS-CBN” plus 4 more |
- Ayala Corp adopts new "philosophy"; releases Sustainability Report - ABS-CBN
- Using the iCalendar File - Colorado College News
- ChooseDirect Offers a New Business Philosophy Featuring a True Factory ... - PRWeb
- National Implications: McDonnell’s Win Is a Model for Conservative ... - Richmond Times-Dispatch
- Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss remembered - CNN
Ayala Corp adopts new "philosophy"; releases Sustainability Report - ABS-CBN Posted: 04 Nov 2009 09:05 AM PST Ayala Corp adopts new "philosophy"; releases Sustainability ReportBy Felipe F. Salvosa II with Don Gil K. Carreon, BusinessWorld | 11/05/2009 12:47 AM
MANILA - A new "philosophy" may limit the kind of businesses Ayala Corp. will go into in the future, top executives yesterday said as they vowed to pursue a "triple bottom line" of economic, social, and environmental performance. But Ayala is not entirely closed to diversifying into industries with a poor environmental track record such as mining and power, its chairman Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala told journalists, as there is a "better way" of harnessing natural resources for public benefit. Ayala released its first "sustainability" report yesterday -- the first conglomerate in the country to do so -- in what will be a biennial exercise of measuring the group's impact on the community and the environment to encourage "good corporate behavior" among its business units. The Zobels believe the strategy will raise the public image and further ensure the longevity of Ayala Corp., which at 175 years is the Philippines' oldest business powerhouse engaged in real estate, banking, telecommunications, water, electronics, and car distribution. Jaime Augusto said consumers were beginning to demand good behavior from corporations and that there were "pockets of money" in the global markets interested in investing in "responsible" firms. But he and brother Fernando, Ayala Corp. president, said this should not necessarily sacrifice profitability. In the future, good practices should also translate to higher share prices. "[This] new philosophy about doing business should hopefully not take away from efficiency, profitability, and intelligent use of risk capital and getting a good return on it. "They're not mutually incompatible. Because you are a responsible business entity doesn't mean you are a disaster from the financial point of view," Jaime Augusto said. To make this sustainable, the group will integrate "corporate social responsibility" projects into the overall business model and as much as possible create new businesses out of them, not just engage in philanthropy, Fernando said. For instance, the Ayala-led Manila Water Co. -- the first Philippine-based firm to issue a sustainability report in 2004 -- has reduced leaks and at the same time created a business out of a project to supply water to poor barangays. It has also been farming out contracts such as for painting and making street signs to surrounding communities to create "goodwill." "What it has done for the community to protect the water system and to love the company is many, many times bigger than the little extra headache," Fernando said. Another example is a micro-finance tieup between Bank of the Philippine Islands and Globe Telecom, Inc., providing banking services to the "unbanked" using mobile phones. Some 250 Ayala executives will meet in Makati next week for a "sustainability summit" to set the group's directions. The sustainability report said the Ayala group consumed 482.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and nearly 3.1 million cubic meters of water in 2008 while producing 260,358 tons of carbon emissions. No comparative figures were provided. In Ayala shopping malls, power use may still be reduced by a fifth, complementing existing solid waste management and recycling programs. Manila Water will continue building water treatment plants and make sure other firms don't discharge waste and further pollute the Pasig River. On the economic side, the Ayala group paid P24.2 billion in taxes in 2008, gave P22 billion in salaries and benefits to more than 36,400 workers, and donated P333 million to charity, the report said. Ayala said the report complied with the minimum level "C" of the Global Reporting Initiative, an international body which has set standards in sustainability reporting. Arnold P. Salvador, executive director of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP), said a few companies have started producing sustainability reports. He said the association's yearly competition for the best annual report already gives "bonus" points for companies that include a sustainability assessment in their reports to stockholders. Of the 38 publicly listed companies that made it to the semifinal round of this year's MAP best annual report competition, a little over 15% had sustainability reports, he said. There are more than 240 companies traded on the stock exchange. For now there will be no marching orders or targets, Jaime Augusto said, adding that the message to Ayala managers was that business doesn't have to be "cutthroat." "These are not the traditional metrics required of a manager," he said. "We prefer the soft approach." The Zobel brothers said it was still "a matter of choice" to enter new businesses like mining and power, but Jaime Augusto said Ayala would be comfortable in renewable energy given the "right opportunity." "Why should mining not be an important industry in our country? We only have so many natural resources, we should use it for the betterment of our people ... It's terrible that we should not be in mining as a progressive industry," Jaime Augusto said. In the end, Ayala will tend to shy away from businesses that "don't feel right." "You'd be surprised at the amount of debate that takes place when we are deciding on a particular sector to find exactly what the implications are. It is really changing the way we think. In that sense it may limit the things that we do and don't do," Fernando said. "At the end of the day what has served us well as a group over the years is the reputation of the company and the brand. We need to constantly reinforce that." This content has passed through fivefilters.org. | |
Using the iCalendar File - Colorado College News Posted: 04 Nov 2009 10:59 AM PST Lecture: "Living with Contradictions: The Logic of Kantian Moral Principles in a Nonideal World"Robert Hanna, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder will speak on Kantian moral philosophy as part of the 2009-10 Philosophy Colloquium Series. Professor Hanna's areas of expertise include Kant, the philosophy of mind, cognition, action and ethics. Hanna is the author of four books: "Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy" (2001), "Kant, Science and Human Nature" (2006), "Rationality and Logic" (2006) and "Embodied Minds in Action," co-authored with Michelle Maiese (2009). Sponsored by the department of philosophy. Location: W.E.S. Room, lower level of Worner Campus Center, 902 N. Cascade Ave. (map) Tickets: free This event is open to the general public. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. | |
ChooseDirect Offers a New Business Philosophy Featuring a True Factory ... - PRWeb Posted: 04 Nov 2009 07:53 AM PST | ChooseDirect's philosophy eliminates the retailer and the distributor to offer true factory direct pricing to consumers. San Francisco (Vocus/PRWEB ) November 4, 2009 -- ChooseDirect has a new way of thinking about pricing. It offers a true factory model for distributing products to consumers that eliminates the retailers and the distributors so links in the distribution process are eradicated. No one else in the industry models its business on this philosophy. Choose Hot Tubs Direct.com offers the best philosophical model for this consumer advantage. It manufactures its own line of Island Escape Spas exclusively to sell directly to its customers. Therefore, the company can offer an $8000 hot tub for only $4000, for example, with the same quality and features. This process cuts out two steps in the traditional distribution model. "The Island Escape brand is our first own product line where we are truly testing our factory model. We often hear from our customers that our prices are too good to be true. We just chuckle a little bit, because it's not such a bad thing for our customers to be saying," says CEO Steve Barbarich. Choose Outdoor Kitchens Direct.com, another line in the ChooseDirect arsenal of price saving e-commerce sites, has begun work on its own line of outdoor kitchens, grills, pizza ovens and more. However, it does rely on manufacturers for many of its products. Nevertheless, these outdoor kitchens and other products are drop shipped directly from the factory to the consumer to save purchasers money. Its newest site, Choose Fireplaces and Stoves.com, is not manufacturing its own fireplaces and stoves yet because of more complex issues. For instance, fireplaces and stoves must conform to EPA testing, which makes manufacturing them more intricate. However, ChooseDirect plans to eventually manufacture its own fireplace products. Currently, ChooseFireplacesandStoves.com is a distributor who buys directly from the manufacturer and sells to customers, not to retailers, so markups do not exist. About ChooseDirect.com: ### Post Comment: Bookmark - Del.icio.us | Furl It | Technorati | Ask | MyWeb | Propeller | Live Bookmarks | Newsvine | TailRank | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Stumbleupon | Google Bookmarks | Sphere | Blink It | Spurl This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
National Implications: McDonnell’s Win Is a Model for Conservative ... - Richmond Times-Dispatch Posted: 04 Nov 2009 12:54 PM PST It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Bob McDonnell's comfortable win in the race for governor of Virginia -- not because it necessarily portends a GOP sweep in the 2010 midterms, but because it serves as a model for conservative and Republican victories in battleground states across the country. McDonnell's election last night -- and his impressive coattails -- are the product of personality and philosophy. McDonnell triumphed, in a state that Barack Obama carried by 6 percentage points, by running as an unabashed conservative -- but never an angry conservative. In at least one respect, the governor-elect resembles Obama: His public persona is utterly unflappable, always cool, calm, and collected. McDonnell revived the sunny side of conservatism that has for too long lingered in the shadow of wedge-issue attack politics. It is, once again, no exaggeration to compare McDonnell's style -- friendly but focused, relaxed but relentless -- to that of Ronald Reagan, the ultimate master of melding the conservative philosophy to a positive outlook. McDonnell was able to run against Obama's policies -- higher taxes, expanding government, skyrocketing public debt, increasing regulation -- without ever attacking the president personally. In public and private, McDonnell tended to be vaguely complimentary of the president, noting, for example, Obama's support for charter schools. At the same time, he skillfully exploited growing concerns about the president's policies. But he never made it explicitly about the man in the White House. And McDonnell's television commercials included more African-Americans than any Virginia Republican's in recent memory -- almost certainly more than any GOP candidate in the state's history. Still, there's no doubt that McDonnell ran as a clear-cut conservative -- as did his running mates for lieutenant governor and attorney general, who both won, sealing the first statewide GOP sweep in Virginia since 1997. His final TV ad, which ran endlessly in the last few days of the campaign, emphasized four words that epitomize fiscal conservatism: "low taxes" and "control spending." That simple message, of course, also serves as an unmistakable condemnation of everything going on across the Potomac in Democratic-controlled Washington, D.C. It was no accident that McDonnell's stump speech in the past week was liberally sprinkled with references to limited government. While he stressed pragmatic, conservative economic principles, McDonnell never shied away from his pro-life, socially conservative beliefs -- other than to ease back from some of the more inflammatory language in his 20-year-old graduate school thesis, an ancient academic pursuit that had virtually no impact on the election. McDonnell chose to focus on jobs, roads, and schools rather than abortion -- an eminently sensible approach for anyone running for governor of Virginia because the office offers numerous opportunities to craft policy affecting economic development, transportation, and education, but relatively few chances to change abortion laws, except at the margins. "Government shouldn't do things that undermine the family, shouldn't do things that undermine traditional values that have served Virginia well," he said this fall during a conversation with the paper's Editorial Board. "But government shouldn't be the moral police." His campaign understood from the beginning that a social conservative can win if voters know that he understands their most fundamental concerns and government's role in addressing them. Talk about low taxes, good schools, and sensible transportation plans instills confidence. Shrill rhetoric about gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the death penalty does not. Like the Obama campaign last year, McDonnell's was deeply disciplined. During a lunch meeting with the paper's editorial writers in the late summer, someone asked the candidate about the RV he would be using to barnstorm across the state. "What's the brand?" Before McDonnell could answer, his communications director, Tucker Martin, deeply engrossed in his BlackBerry, piped up: "Bob's for jobs!" McDonnell roared -- OK, laughed enthusiastically, he doesn't roar -- while his aide sheepishly returned to his typing. "Well, at least we've made that clear," the candidate said. This fall, McDonnell made his philosophy clear to an electorate that had been trending Democratic since 2001. Last night, he proved -- or reminded the forgetful -- that a solidly conservative message, delivered with clarity and good humor, can prevail in a highly competitive state. Republicans across the country should pay very close attention.
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Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss remembered - CNN Posted: 04 Nov 2009 02:20 PM PST (CNN) -- Anyone who has taken an anthropology course has probably heard of Claude Levi-Strauss, who died recently at age 100. Born in Brussels, Belgium, in November 1908, Levi-Strauss was a eminent intellectual who had a profound influence on modern anthropology. "He was the last of the greats, the last of the great anthropologists who had a worldwide view," said Marshall Sahlins, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago in Illinois. From 1935 to 1939, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. He became the chair of social anthropology at the College of France in 1959, a position he held until his retirement in 1982. His well-known work, "The Savage Mind," was published in 1962. The Academie Francaise, of which he had been a member since 1973, said he died October 30 in Paris, France. His writings about the importance of culture in human thought are so "eye-opening" that they inspired Tanya Luhrmann, professor at Stanford University in California, to go into anthropology. "You think about the way you are created in a social [context] through interaction with other people in a way that doesn't occur to you really until you read his books," she said. "It's so brilliant, it's sui generis." Much of Levi-Strauss' widely-taught anthropological writings contain charts and maps of concepts that explore key elements of culture. In trying to explain various myths, such as the Oedipus story from Greek mythology, he assigned key themes and events to columns to explore the relationships and values within. He found that myths were a way of retelling stories such as the relationship between the living and the dead, Lurhmann said. The myth form makes these difficult-to-deal-with concepts more complicated, but also softens them and makes them more comprehensible. "His fundamental lesson was that culture shapes the way we think far more fundamentally than we are aware," she said. Levi-Strauss wrote that people are accustomed to understanding the world in terms of binary opposites -- for instance, hot and cold, hard and soft, up and down, and the title of his seminal work, "The Raw and the Cooked." "I think he didn't appreciate how important he was himself," Sahlins said. "He was underappreciated at the end, I think, but he will come back, as long as there's a discipline of that kind." Unlike anthropologists who have spent many years living in one place as both participants and observers of a culture, Levi-Strauss didn't dwell in any particular location in Brazil for very long, she said. Many of his ideas were more general, abstract and philosophical than other anthropologists -- and for this level of removal from his informants' way of life, he was criticized by Clifford Geertz, who also helped shape modern anthropological theory. Still, Levi-Strauss remains relevant to anyone who is trying to figure out how cultures are shaped. His ideas are essential "for us to be able to reconstruct any part of the human past or the cultural experience," said Scott Thompson, an archaeologist and doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. "Levi-Strauss's ideas really brought to the forefront how shared cognitive ideas between people come together to make cultural norms," he said. Levi-Strauss also contributed seminal ideas to philosophy, said Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The anthropologist criticized the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for his idea that people are free to do anything they want. For Levi-Strauss, this "freedom" is mostly out of the individual's control. Forces such as culture and language constrain a person in what he or she says and does. This issue of whether people are indeed responsible for their own actions comes up all the time in modern life, Gutting noted. "You're better off if you're aware of the tensions between those two viewpoints," Gutting said. The philosophical movement Levi-Strauss led is called "structuralism," which essentially means that to see something, you have to put it in a system of other things that define it, Luhrmann said. The subsequent reaction to Levi-Strauss' structuralism by such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault is called "post-structuralism." "Tristes Tropiques," which chronicles Levi-Strauss' travels in Brazil and other countries, is "surely one of the greatest travel books of all time even if you don't count its prodigious contributions to social theory," said Ari Samsky, who recently finished a Ph.D. in anthropology at Princeton University and is now at the University of Iowa. "He showed the world that you could be a brilliant, empirical social scientist with a poet's soul," Samsky said in an e-mail. This content has passed through fivefilters.org. |
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