Fox School of Business - Temple University

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Linh Hoang Dang

Fox School of Business - Temple University

1801 N 10th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Writing Samples

Page number:

-Unpublished article on internal hiring: 2

-(excerpt) Marketing case analysis: 3-4

-(excerpt) Essay on video game industry: 5-7

-(excerpt) Essay on short stories: 8-12

The HR “Acres of Diamonds”

Are you still looking to fill this one job? And none the candidates have turned out OK ? You are clutching your head and asking yourself if you are looking at all the wrong places. Maybe you are.

Not every newly-created position requires a new person to fill. Each time you bring in a potential new hire, reflect on the arduous processes you have to go through, which may include:

• Onboarding:First, you hand them the rope. Then you have to hold their hands and teach them what to do with it. While in the onboarding period, you must constantly assist recruits in integrating into your structure, people and culture before they truly become productive assets. According to the experts at PeopleAdmin, a proper onboarding process may take from one to two long years.

• Seeing them leave: and taking with them the time and money you invested. According to the SHRM, one-third of new hires leave within the first six months. In a CareerBuilder survey, American companies lost more than $50,000 per bad hire. Total loss becomes a simple math problem.

Are those things worth it? Yes, if you are looking for fresh perspectives and specialized expertise, but certainly not all the time. Do not forget the treasure lying under your nose: your own team. Hiring internally means getting all these advantages:

-You know your team: They have been there with your company through its ups and downs. You already know they would be a good fit; they are the ones staying. As Talent Management Systems are popular nowadays, combing through your HR files may be less of a trouble than doing the same for the prospective recruits. You know their strengths, aspirations, and potential. In other words, they are known variables, unlike the strangers whose hidden mismatches with your company only become apparent after a certain time.

-Two birds with one stone: talent retention and organizational growth at the same time. Employees want to grow on the job and take on new responsibilities. A Cornerstone OnDemand survey found that 66% of employees would look for positions inside their organizations before considering anywhere else. At the same time, employees understand where the organization is heading, which is likely one of the reasons they want to work here in the first place. By challenging them with new job roles and promoting inside talent to positions they are qualified for, you are keeping your top talent productive, engaged, and rapidly developing.

-It saves money: If you do it right, you have a compatible worker who is not likely to quit any time soon. You cut back on the onboarding periods where the new hires are not fully productive. That’s quite a good deal.

At the end of the day, to hire or not to hire internally depends on you and the position you want to fill. Just remember that before you start spending millions looking for talent elsewhere, look for the acres of diamonds in your own backyard. You may find talented people who are ready to contribute to your success, but only if you let them to.

Marketing Case Analysis – Final assignment

The course forbade students from revealing the prompt of the assignment, so any information that may do so will be omitted or changed. The assignment also allows students to make reasonable assumptions.

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Place - Channel

I encourage ABC Company to sell to big-box retailers to take advantage of the channel's high traffic volume and diverse customer base. Grocery stores might accept a smaller margin than big retailers, but they are limited in both traffic and the number of demographics they can attract. Since local grocers cover only a certain number of blocks, there is a smaller possibility that many business-owners and other professionals will be in their scope. If ABC decides to work with big retailers, it should prepare to give retailers a 30% margin, since products of this category usually earn higher margins than the store average. If the company start small by going into 24 chains nationally, it will likely incur about $240,000 in slotting fees (an average of $10,000 per SKU per chain).

Retailers may not be the ideal channel to serve the industrial segment due to their focus on common consumers. However, as a new company, ABC has little experience in managing freight and B2B marketing, and thus should establish themselves in retail before considering more direct distribution methods.

Pricing

Based on the estimation that the average hourly wage of an employee tasked with handling traps and dead rats is $11, the alternative’s actual cost for an industrial consumer ranges from $488 to $856 a year (Exhibit A). ABC should sell the base for $43.75 and a battery pack for $131.25. The retailers’ mark-up will make the product’s first-year annual cost range from $500 to $1000. After year 1, consumers will save on bases and have to pay only $375 - $750. The suggested prices allow the saving from bases to immediately compensate the higher up-front cost of buying the set.

At these prices, the unit contribution for a set will be $35. Given ABC’s estimated annual fixed cost, including promotion expenses, of about $1 million, the company will need to capture 4% of the industrial market to break even in the first year. In four years after, the established user basewill generate around $2.78 million in life-time value.

Promotion

ABC’s promotional budget is estimated at 3% of its projected sales, an equivalent to $150,000. To make sure it reaches its sales goal, ABC should use $88,000 to cover ads for the Wall Street journal, USA Today and a business-centric newspaper for a one year because their sizeable business readership can help ABC reach its target segment. ABC should use the rest to broadcast in at least one radio station in each of 314 counties, approximately 10% of the counties in the U.S. The rationale for this is the assumption that radio as a channel presents less distraction than television and is often used by people with limited downtime, making it a good choice for reaching our busy business owners.

Promotional content should align with ABC’s positioning, emphasizing time-saving capability, the reduced possibility of complications, and lower annual cost. It should also counter the possible negative perception of the product by focusing on the energy and power aspect while downplaying its chemical and physical mechanism. For instance, “energy”, “power”, or “mega” are preferable to “radiate” or “disintegrate”.

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Essay on video game industry

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TRENDS INCOMPETITION CLIMATE

Technologydrives competition

Technological warfare is commonplace in the console manufacturing segments. Console manufactures compete intensely on hardware, spending as much as 12 % of the console segment revenue on R & D (Alvarez, NN003 Video games in the US 26). The extent to which new technologies have an influence on this segment is reflected in market reactions. Before new consoles launches, stock prices usually increase (Gallagher). Near the release of Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, stocks price of Sony Corp.’s SNE and Microsoft’s MSFT both rose. In another noteworthy case, MSFT had 1.69% increase after Microsoft announced backwards-compatibility (Lee 2015), a feature allowing players to enjoy games meant for older Xbox systems, on Xbox One. Technology also played a big role in game development, affecting both quality and cost. For instance, advances in motion capture have reduced expenses as well as creating more realistic movements in video games(Alvarez, NN003 Video games in the US 41). Meanwhile, low-budget and free development tools have helped independent developers cut production cost (41).

Rise of Digital Distribution

Video games distribution is increasingly digitized. In 2013, gaming content in digital format accounted for 47% of all sales. (EAS, 13). Digital content in overtook physical content in 2014 as sales rose to 52% (13). Major console makers currently offer digital distribution services through Internet connection from their own devices, allowing customers to download games directly to their gaming machines and (Alvarez, 51121e Video Game Publishing in the US 5). The trend is likely attributable to the growing number of both internet broadband and mobile internet connections, which are expected to increase during 2015 (5). Another reasonable assumption is that because games in digital format are not tied to physical mediums and retail stores, companies can price them more flexibly and cut operating expenses (10).

The trend has various effect on the industry’s competition dynamics. Digital distribution on console systems has created new and exclusive channels for big players (IBIS World). Interestingly, prices in digital console stores have yet to become cheaper than those of physical copies (Dave). CEO of Ubisoft, a leading game developing and publishing company (Ubisoft.com), offered an explanation for this phenomenon, saying that it results from an effort to keep digital sales from interfering with sales of physical copies and a careful approach to a new trend. (Dave). Having less resources than large firms, independent (abbreviated as “indie” in the gaming world) producers benefit greatly from digital distribution as they can reduce cost and dependence on third-party retailers or publishers (Forbes). Microsoft and Sony, two major producers of consoles, support indie games in their newest gaming systems and implement various supportive policies for indie producers. (Suddaby, “Making Indie Games on Xbox One", “Making Indie Games on PS4."). In the PC segment, Valve-owned platform Steam is the largest digital distributor (Edwards par.1) with more than 100 million active accounts. By means of various initiatives, Steam actively aids indie developers in breaking the entry barriers (“Value launches Steam Discovery Update.”). A Steam-based platform that many indie developers can utilize is Greenlight, a system for users to vote on which games to put on the shopping list (Steamcommunity.com). In addition, Steam practices flexible revenue sharing and strikes “unique deals” with each developers (Vanderhoef 2011). Using Steam’s reach and popularity to significantly boost sales, many small developers have propelled themselves to success (Griffiths 1).

Growth of Mobile Games.

Average time spent on mobile gaming has increased substantially, from 1 hour 20 minutes per day in 2012 to 2 hours in 2014 (NPD.com). In addition, developing cost for mobile game is significantly smaller than in other platforms. These trends in mobile gaming, combined with low cost of production, have an encouraging effect on entry. In fact, in the last five years, the number of enterprises has increased at an average rate of 45.7 % a year and is projected to reach 25,225 in 2015. (Alvarez, 51121e Video Game Publishing in the US 8).

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Academic Writing – Essay onshort stories

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Now that we know emotions and personality traits of characters in “Fits” and “The Progress of Love” play a role in shaping storytelling perspectives, we can investigate characters’ narratives for hidden clues about the narrators.

In “The Progress of Love,” the inconsistency between Fame’s memory and her narrative reflects the dual influence of her aunt Beryl and mother Marietta: Fame’s insistence on her ideal view of love bears great resemblance to her mother’s sentimentality, while her memories and life decisions exhibit Beryl’s rationality and practicality. The discrepancy in narrative also reflects the clash between these two sources of influence. Fame is as emotional and empathetic as her mother. As a kid, she was frightened when she “could not think what [her] mother’s face was like” (9). So was Marietta, who “was scared” of “a silent house” absent of her mother’s presence (10). Their reactions to their respective mothers’ troubles also show how alike they are. After listening to her mother’s story about the suicide attempt Fame recognized that “[t]here was a cloud, a poison, that had touched my mother’s life” and she “had become part of it” (13). Marietta, similarly, had the same feeling about her own mother; she panicked upon seeing her mother with a rope around the neck and strongly disagreed with Beryl: “[Mother] meant it more than you gave her credit for” (22). In terms of life choices, however, Fame is very much like Beryl: independent and career-driven. The first clue to Beryl’s influence on Fame is that Fame considers Beryl’s advice to comb hair wet to be “the one that [she] followed most carefully ”(14). It is also worth noticing that Fame took her life in a direction similar to her aunt’s. Upon hearing her mother saying that God “doesn’t care two hoots” about “what kind of job or what kind of education anybody has,” Fame believed that God was “a real opponent” to her quest for education. Instead of staying in her small hometown as expected of her, she “[ran] away from home to work in a restaurant when [she] was fifteen, [went] into night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into the real estate office, and finally [became] a licensed agent” (30). This parallels the story of Beryl, who decided to move away from their childhood home, and went from “a stenographer” to having “her own typing and bookkeeping business.” The fight between truth and fabrication in Fame’s narration also mirrors the clash between Marietta and Beryl’s views and personalities at the dining table. Beryl claimed that their mother was just pushing a “joke” too far. Motivated by hatred for her father, Marietta responded that their mother fully “meant” to commit suicide (22). Beryl had to admit that Marietta would hardly consider any other idea: “I know Marietta’s always had a different view” (22). Within Fame’s narrative, there are also a Marietta and a Beryl. The Marietta in Fame was motivated so much by a powerful emotion - love - for her parents that she created an ideal scene of loyal support. Just as her mother had to face Beryl, Fame’s fantasy and imagination was confronted by her realistic thoughts – her own Beryl. Her own memory tells her that “[her] father did not stand in the kitchen watching [her] mother feeding the money into the flames” and that like Beryl, she would not approve of her mother display of hatred (29, 30). Last but not least, just as Marietta never changed her view in the end, Fame “[has not] stopped believing” in her own fictional story.

Analyzing narratives also provide insights into a major character in “Fits,” Robert. Robert, an information maven, gathers and retells the stories of all other characters. Interestingly, because of this unique status, Robert’s narrative becomes a crucial key to understanding his nature with both its darkness and benevolence.

Readers have good reasons for distrusting Robert and his narration. Late in the story, Robert remembers his relationship with Lee, his former lover. In a heated argument, Robert and Lee let out the nastiest, most repressed gripes about each other, including this comment that casts great doubt on Robert’s truthfulness:

You always make me think of one of those dogs that push up on people and paw them, with their big disgusting tongues hanging out. You’re so eager. All your friendliness and eagerness- that’s really aggression. I’m not the only one who thinks this about you. A lot of people avoid you. They can’t stand you. You’d be surprised. You push and paw in that eager pathetic way, but you have a calculating look. (128)

Readers are treated to the image of an unctuous man who put up a front of cordiality to satisfy socializing needs while he himself is “calculating” and full of “aggression” (128). Given the scarcity of direct descriptions of Robert in “Fits,” one may take this as an unveiling of Robert’s character. oThe analysis of Charman, author of the article “There's Got to be some Wrenching and Slashing,” reveals Robert’s flaws through his narrative. Using storytelling techniques of horror movies,Charmanexamines and exhumes terrible aspects of events and characters – “the horrors” - of the story “Fits.” He argued that although the readers “tend to take Robert’s story at face value”, they will “quickly realized that although [they] might trust Robert’s vision at first, [they] quickly realize that his vision, and consequently his version of the story, is flawed” (Charman 19). Charman pointed out the reasons why Robert’s narrative perspective is inherently subjective, such as the “retrospective commentary on second-hand versions of events” and “several layers of memory” he needs to tell stories through (19). The scholar also asserts that “[p]art of Robert’s difficulty in establishing what happened before the murder is related to his lack of understanding of Gilmore” and that an occasional “third-person parenthetical voice” suggests Robert’s faulty memory (20). The flashback and the mistakes with which Robert conveys the story of “Fits” cast him in a terrible light.