The CEO of Starbucks and the Practice of Ethical Leadership

Sara Tangdall

Background

One year after becoming CEO of Starbucks, Kevin Johnson faced a leadership test when two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks. The men were waiting to meet a business associate, but they didn’t purchase anything while they were waiting. The store manager asked them to leave, and they refused, explaining that they were there to meet someone. The manager called the police because the men refused to leave, and the police arrested them.

Another patron at Starbucks recorded the arrest on her cell phone, and it quickly went viral. In an interview after the arrest, the woman who took the video mentions that she had been sitting there for a while, and she wasn’t asked to leave even though she didn’t order anything. Additionally, the video shows the business associate of the black men show up during the arrest, and he asks the manager and the police what the men had done wrong. The general public and those who witnessed the arrest labeled it as discriminatory and racist.

This happened on a Thursday and the following Monday, Johnson said that the manager no longer worked at the store. The arrests led to protests and sit ins at the Philadelphia Starbucks the days following the event.

In his apology statement and follow up video release shortly after the arrests, Johnson said, “The video shot by customers is very hard to watch and the actions in it are not representative of our Starbucks Mission and Values. Creating an environment that is both safe and welcoming for everyone is paramount for every store. Regretfully, our practices and training led to a bad outcome—the basis for the call to the Philadelphia police department was wrong.”  

Before the incident, Starbucks had no companywide policy about asking customers to leave, and the decision was left to the discretion of each store manager. Because of this flexible policy, Starbucks had become a community hub--a place where anyone could sit without being required to spend money. Johnson mentioned this community in his apology when he said Starbucks works to create an environment that is “both safe and welcoming for everyone.”

Also in his apology, Johnson outlined the investigation he and the company would undertake. The apology detailed actionable steps Starbucks leadership would follow to learn from the situation, including meeting with community stakeholders to learn what they could have done better. Johnson took full responsibility for the actions of his employees, and he acknowledged that Starbucks customers were hurt by the arrests. Johnson acknowledged that employees needed more training, including about when to call authorities, and that the company needed to conduct a thorough analysis of the practices that lead to this incident.

After issuing his apology, Johnson went to Philadelphia and met with the two men face to face to involve them in dialogue on what Starbucks needed to do differently.

The week following the arrests, Starbucks announced it would temporarily close 8,000 stores to conduct unconscious bias training, which they did on May 29, 2018. A month after the arrests, Starbucks released a new “Use of Third Place Policy,” which states that anyone can use Starbucks and its facilities without making a purchase; it also explains what managers should do if a customer becomes disruptive. Additionally, the policy says that Starbucks seeks to create “a culture of warmth and belonging where everyone is welcome. This policy is intended to help maintain the third place environment in alignment with our mission ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.’”

Practice of Ethical Leadership

How is Johnson practicing ethical leadership? Additionally, we can consider what we learn about his character through his actions and his impact.

1. Did his decision to close all Starbucks stores for unconscious bias training and to create a new “Third Space Policy” align with Starbucks’ mission and goals? If so, how?

2. Explain everything Johnson did right and what positive outcomes resulted from his actions?

3. What leadership traits did Johnson exhibit?

Learning Objectives

• Writing classes that represent objects
• Define object's state (Instance variables)
• Define objects constructors
• Write getter (accessor) and setter (mutator) methods.

As in previous labs, please write the Java code for each of the following exercises in BlueJ. For each exercise, write a comment before the code stating the exercise number.

Make sure you are using the appropriate indentation and styling conventions

Exercise 1 (15 Points)

• In BlueJ, create a new project called Lab5
• In the project create a class called DogDemo with a static method called makeDogs
• Create a second class in the same project called Dog that will represent a single dog (just a class header and an empty body for now).
• In the makeDogs method, create a Dog object called myDog. Note that the Dog and DogDemo classes are now connected by a dotted arrow in the project window to show that DogDemo depends on (uses) the Dog class.

Exercise 2 (20 Points)

• In the Dog class, create a variable at the class level (also called instance data or a field) that will represent the dog's name (a String).
• Declare this variable as private. This puts the Dog class in charge of how the name gets updated. This variable is not DIRECTLY accessible from outside the Dog class.
• In the declaration of the variable, initialize it to "Lassie".
• Create a toString method that returns the dog's name.
• In the makeDogs method of the DogDemo class, print the Dog object you created. Run the makeDogs method.

Exercise 3 (15 Points)

• This would be OK if all dogs were named Lassie!! Each instance of Dog (each Dog object) will have its own name variable, which contain different values. So create a constructor in the Dog class that accepts a parameter which is used to set the name variable.
• In the makeDogs method, create a new dog and pass in the name "Lassie" to its constructor.
• Create a second Dog object with a different name, "Rover" for example.
• Print the two dog objects.

Exercise 4 (15 Points)

• Add another field to the Dog class representing the dog's breed (a String) and one representing the dog's age (an int). Both fields should be private.
• Modify the Dog constructor to set these values as well, based on parameters.
• Define a new Dog objects in makeDogs and give them a name, breed and age.
• Modify the toString method to return a string in the following form:

Fido is a 3-year-old German Sheppard

• Test the updated makeDogs method. Think through what is happening at each step.

Exercise 5 (10 Points)

• Add standard "getter" methods for all three fields. Remember that getter methods just returns the value of a private instance variable (field). This will make the value of a private variable accessible ONLY through this method.
• In the makeDogs method, get and print just the breed of one of your created objects.
• Then get and print just the name of another one of the created objects.

Exercise 6 (10 Points)

• In Dog, add a "setter" method for the age field. Don't change the age if the parameter is less than 1.
• In the makeDogs method, try to set the age of yourDog to 0, then print the Dog object to make sure the age did not change.
• Then set the age of yourDog to 4 and print it again.

Exercise 7 (15 Points)

• You may have heard the expression "That's 21 in dog years" or something similar. The idea is to come up with a number to make it easy to compare a dog's age to that of a human in terms of overall life span. The calculation used is real age multiplied by 7. So a dog that's 3 years old is "21 in dog years".
• Add a method in Dog called getDogYears that returns the dog's age in dog-years. Do NOT create another field for this. Just return the dog's current age multiplied by 7.
• In the makeDogs method, print each dog's age in dog-years:

Rover is 28 in dog-years.

Who is the Protagonist and who is the Antagonist in the following short story?

How does the story let you know that one character is the protagonist and that another character is acting as the antagonist?

What specific cues does the story provide for the reader to know the roles of the characters in the conflict, theme, and plot?

Why are the characters not easy to define as good and bad?

What cues does the author provide for the reader to decide individually about the meaning and moral of the story?

The King of Sharks: A Native American Myth from Hawaii retold by S. E. Schlosser One day, the King of Sharks saw a beautiful girl swimming near the shore. He immediately fell in love with the girl. Transforming himself into a handsome man, he dressed himself in the feathered cape of a chief and followed her to her village. The villagers were thrilled by the visit of a foreign chief. They made a great luau, with feasting and games. The King of Sharks won every game, and the girl was delighted when he asked to marry with her. The King of Sharks lived happily with his bride in a house near a waterfall. The King of Sharks, in his human form, would swim daily in the pool of water beneath the falls. Sometimes he would stay underneath the water so long that his bride would grow frightened. But the King of Sharks reassured her, telling her that he was making a place at the bottom of the pool for their son. Before the birth of the child, the King of Sharks returned to his people. He made his wife swear that she would always keep his feathered cape about the shoulders of their son. When the child was born, his mother saw a mark upon his back which looked like the mouth of a shark. It was then she realized who her husband had been. The child's name was Nanave. As he grew towards manhood, Nanave would swim daily in the pool beside the house. Sometimes, his mother would gaze into the pool and see a shark swimming beneath the water. Each morning, Nanave would stand beside the pool, the feathered cloak about his shoulders, and would ask the passing fishermen where they were going to fish that day. The fisherman always told the friendly youth where they intended to go. Then Nanave would dive into the pool and disappear for hours. The fishermen soon noticed that they were catching fewer and fewer fish. The people of their village were growing hungry. The chief of the village called the people to the temple. "There is a bad god among us," the chief told the people. "He prevents our fishermen from catching fish. I will use my magic to find him." The chief laid out a bed of leaves. He instructed all the men and boys to walk among the leaves. A human's feet would bruise the tender leaves, but the feet of a god would leave no mark. Nanave's mother was frightened. She knew her son was the child of a god, and he would be killed if the people discovered his identity. When it came turn for the youth to walk across the leaves, he ran fast, and slipped. A man caught at the feathered cape Nanave always wore to prevent him from being hurt. But the cape fell from the youth's shoulders, and all the people could see the shark's mouth upon his back. The people chased Nanave out of the village, but he slipped away from them and dived into the pool. The people threw big rocks into the pool, filling it up. They thought they had killed Nanave. But his mother remembered that the King of Sharks had made a place for her son at the bottom of the pool, a passage that led to the ocean. Nanave had taken the form of a shark and had swum out to join his father, the King of Sharks, in the sea. But since then, the fishermen have never told anyone where they go to fish, for fear the sharks will hear and chase the fish away.

Write a one-page article summarizing what you've read. Use Times New Roman 12 font, 1.5 spacing, with no spacing between paragraphs and 1 inch margins. IT STARTS WITH a single cell. The first cell splits to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty-seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion (10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to spring forth as a human being.1 And every one of those cells knows exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of conception to your last breath. You have no secrets from your cells. They know far more about you than you do. Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code—the instruction manual for your body—so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body. Never in your life will you have to remind a cell to keep an eye on its adenosine triphosphate levels or to find a place for the extra squirt of folic acid that’s just unexpectedly turned up. It will do that for you, and millions more things besides. Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce. But yeast cells are as nothing compared with human cells, which are not just more varied and complicated, but vastly more fascinating because of their complex interactions. Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in junior high school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defense the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve. We understand a little of how cells do the things they do—how they lay down fat or manufacture insulin or engage in many of the other acts necessary to maintain a complicated entity like yourself—but only a little. You have at least 200,000 different types of protein 1 Actually, quite a lot of cells are lost in the process of development, so the number you emerge with is really just a guess. Depending on which source you consult the number can vary by several orders of magnitude. The figure of ten thousand trillion (or quadrillion) is from Margulis and Sagan, 1986. laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do. (Others put the figure at more like 50 percent; it depends, apparently, on what you mean by “understand.”) Surprises at the cellular level turn up all the time. In nature, nitric oxide is a formidable toxin and a common component of air pollution. So scientists were naturally a little surprised when, in the mid-1980s, they found it being produced in a curiously devoted manner in human cells. Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then scientists began to find it all over the place—controlling the flow of blood and the energy levels of cells, attacking cancers and other pathogens, regulating the sense of smell, even assisting in penile erections. It also explained why nitroglycerine, the well-known explosive, soothes the heart pain known as angina. (It is converted into nitric oxide in the bloodstream, relaxing the muscle linings of vessels, allowing blood to flow more freely.) In barely the space of a decade this one gassy substance went from extraneous toxin to ubiquitous elixir. You possess “some few hundred” different types of cell, according to the Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve, and they vary enormously in size and shape, from nerve cells whose filaments can stretch to several feet to tiny, disc-shaped red blood cells to the rod- shaped photocells that help to give us vision. They also come in a sumptuously wide range of sizes—nowhere more strikingly than at the moment of conception, when a single beating sperm confronts an egg eighty-five thousand times bigger than it (which rather puts the notion of male conquest into perspective). On average, however, a human cell is about twenty microns wide—that is about two hundredths of a millimeter—which is too small to be seen but roomy enough to hold thousands of complicated structures like mitochondria, and millions upon millions of molecules. In the most literal way, cells also vary in liveliness. Your skin cells are all dead. It’s a somewhat galling notion to reflect that every inch of your surface is deceased. If you are an average-sized adult you are lugging around about five pounds of dead skin, of which several billion tiny fragments are sloughed off each day. Run a finger along a dusty shelf and you are drawing a pattern very largely in old skin. Most living cells seldom last more than a month or so, but there are some notable exceptions. Liver cells can survive for years, though the components within them may be renewed every few days. Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued a hundred billion or so at birth, and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you have any serious thinking to do there really isn’t a moment to waste. The good news is that the individual components of your brain cells are constantly renewed so that, as with the liver cells, no part of them is actually likely to be more than about a month old. Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665. It revealed to an enchanted public a universe of the very small that was far more diverse, crowded, and finely structured than anyone had ever come close to imagining. Among the microscopic features first identified by Hooke were little chambers in plants that he called “cells” because they reminded him of monks’ cells. Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork would contain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers—the first appearance of such a very large number anywhere in science. Microscopes by this time had been around for a generation or so, but what set Hooke’s apart were their technical supremacy. They achieved magnifications of thirty times, making them the last word in seventeenth-century optical technology. So it came as something of a shock when just a decade later Hooke and the other members of London’s Royal Society began to receive drawings and reports from an unlettered linen draper in Holland employing magnifications of up to 275 times. The draper’s name was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Though he had little formal education and no background in science, he was a perceptive and dedicated observer and a technical genius. To this day it is not known how he got such magnificent magnifications from simple handheld devices, which were little more than modest wooden dowels with a tiny bubble of glass embedded in them, far more like magnifying glasses than what most of us think of as microscopes, but really not much like either. Leeuwenhoek made a new instrument for every experiment he performed and was extremely secretive about his techniques, though he did sometimes offer tips to the British on how they might improve their resolutions.2 Over a period of fifty years—beginning, remarkably enough, when he was already past forty—he made almost two hundred reports to the Royal Society, all written in Low Dutch, the only tongue of which he was master. Leeuwenhoek offered no interpretations, but simply the facts of what he had found, accompanied by exquisite drawings. He sent reports on almost everything that could be usefully examined—bread mold, a bee’s stinger, blood cells, teeth, hair, his own saliva, excrement, and semen (these last with fretful apologies for their unsavory nature)—nearly all of which had never been seen microscopically before. After he reported finding “animalcules” in a sample of pepper water in 1676, the members of the Royal Society spent a year with the best devices English technology could produce searching for the “little animals” before finally getting the magnification right. What Leeuwenhoek had found were protozoa. He calculated that there were 8,280,000 of these tiny beings in a single drop of water—more than the number of people in Holland. The world teemed with life in ways and numbers that no one had previously suspected. Inspired by Leeuwenhoek’s fantastic findings, others began to peer into microscopes with such keenness that they sometimes found things that weren’t in fact there. One respected Dutch observer, Nicolaus Hartsoecker, was convinced he saw “tiny preformed men” in sperm cells. He called the little beings “homunculi” and for some time many people believed that all humans—indeed, all creatures—were simply vastly inflated versions of tiny but complete precursor beings. Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process. 2 Leeuwenhoek was close friends with another Delft notable, the artist Jan Vermeer. In the mid-1660s, Vermeer, who previously had been a competent but not outstanding artist, suddenly developed the mastery of light and perspective for which he has been celebrated ever since. Though it has never been proved, it has long been suspected that he used a camera obscura, a device for projecting images onto a flat surface through a lens. No such device was listed among Vermeer's personal effects after his death, but it happens that the executor of Vermeer's estate was none other than Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the most secretive lens-maker of his day. In 1683 Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, but that was about as far as progress could get for the next century and a half because of the limitations of microscope technology. Not until 1831 would anyone first see the nucleus of a cell—it was found by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, that frequent but always shadowy visitor to the history of science. Brown, who lived from 1773 to 1858, called it nucleus from the Latin nucula, meaning little nut or kernel. Not until 1839, however, did anyone realize that all living matter is cellular. It was Theodor Schwann, a German, who had this insight, and it was not only comparatively late, as scientific insights go, but not widely embraced at first. It wasn’t until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from preexisting cells. The belief became known as the “cell theory,” and it is the basis of all modern biology. The cell has been compared to many things, from “a complex chemical refinery” (by the physicist James Trefil) to “a vast, teeming metropolis” (the biochemist Guy Brown). A cell is both of those things and neither. It is like a refinery in that it is devoted to chemical activity on a grand scale, and like a metropolis in that it is crowded and busy and filled with interactions that seem confused and random but clearly have some system to them. But it is a much more nightmarish place than any city or factory that you have ever seen. To begin with there is no up or down inside the cell (gravity doesn’t meaningfully apply at the cellular scale), and not an atom’s width of space is unused. There is activity every where and a ceaseless thrum of electrical energy. You may not feel terribly electrical, but you are. The food we eat and the oxygen we breathe are combined in the cells into electricity. The reason we don’t give each other massive shocks or scorch the sofa when we sit is that it is all happening on a tiny scale: a mere 0.1 volts traveling distances measured in nanometers. However, scale that up and it would translate as a jolt of twenty million volts per meter, about the same as the charge carried by the main body of a thunderstorm. Whatever their size or shape, nearly all your cells are built to fundamentally the same plan: they have an outer casing or membrane, a nucleus wherein resides the necessary genetic information to keep you going, and a busy space between the two called the cytoplasm. The membrane is not, as most of us imagine it, a durable, rubbery casing, something that you would need a sharp pin to prick. Rather, it is made up of a type of fatty material known as a lipid, which has the approximate consistency “of a light grade of machine oil,” to quote Sherwin B. Nuland. If that seems surprisingly insubstantial, bear in mind that at the microscopic level things behave differently. To anything on a molecular scale water becomes a kind of heavy-duty gel, and a lipid is like iron. If you could visit a cell, you wouldn’t like it. Blown up to a scale at which atoms were about the size of peas, a cell itself would be a sphere roughly half a mile across, and supported by a complex framework of girders called the cytoskeleton. Within it, millions upon millions of objects—some the size of basketballs, others the size of cars—would whiz about like bullets. There wouldn’t be a place you could stand without being pummeled and ripped thousands of times every second from every direction. Even for its full-time occupants the inside of a cell is a hazardous place. Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged once every 8.4 seconds—ten thousand times in a day—by chemicals and other agents that whack into or carelessly slice through it, and each of these wounds must be swiftly stitched up if the cell is not to perish. The proteins are especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into each other up to a billion times a second. Enzymes, themselves a type of protein, dash everywhere, performing up to a thousand tasks a second. Like greatly speeded up worker ants, they busily build and rebuild molecules, hauling a piece off this one, adding a piece to that one. Some monitor passing proteins and mark with a chemical those that are irreparably damaged or flawed. Once so selected, the doomed proteins proceed to a structure called a proteasome, where they are stripped down and their components used to build new proteins. Some types of protein exist for less than half an hour; others survive for weeks. But all lead existences that are inconceivably frenzied. As de Duve notes, “The molecular world must necessarily remain entirely beyond the powers of our imagination owing to the incredible speed with which things happen in it.” But slow things down, to a speed at which the interactions can be observed, and things don’t seem quite so unnerving. You can see that a cell is just millions of objects—lysosomes, endosomes, ribosomes, ligands, peroxisomes, proteins of every size and shape—bumping into millions of other objects and performing mundane tasks: extracting energy from nutrients, assembling structures, getting rid of waste, warding off intruders, sending and receiving messages, making repairs. Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules. “This means,” says Nuland, “that even if we count only those molecules present in amounts of more than 50,000 each, the total is still a very minimum of 100 million protein molecules in each cell. Such a staggering figure gives some idea of the swarming immensity of biochemical activity within us.” It is all an immensely demanding process. Your heart must pump 75 gallons of blood an hour, 1,800 gallons every day, 657,000 gallons in a year—that’s enough to fill four Olympic- sized swimming pools—to keep all those cells freshly oxygenated. (And that’s at rest. During exercise the rate can increase as much as sixfold.) The oxygen is taken up by the mitochondria. These are the cells’ power stations, and there are about a thousand of them in a typical cell, though the number varies considerably depending on what a cell does and how much energy it requires. You may recall from an earlier chapter that the mitochondria are thought to have originated as captive bacteria and that they now live essentially as lodgers in our cells, preserving their own genetic instructions, dividing to their own timetable, speaking their own language. You may also recall that we are at the mercy of their goodwill. Here’s why. Virtually all the food and oxygen you take into your body are delivered, after processing, to the mitochondria, where they are converted into a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. You may not have heard of ATP, but it is what keeps you going. ATP molecules are essentially little battery packs that move through the cell providing energy for all the cell’s processes, and you get through a lot of it. At any given moment, a typical cell in your body will have about one billion ATP molecules in it, and in two minutes every one of them will have been drained dry and another billion will have taken their place. Every day you produce and use up a volume of ATP equivalent to about half your body weight. Feel the warmth of your skin. That’s your ATP at work. When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The process is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every day billions of your cells die for your benefit and billions of others clean up the mess. Cells can also die violently—for instance, when infected—but mostly they die because they are told to. Indeed, if not told to live—if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell— cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance. When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term. The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch. They do so by constantly sending and monitoring streams of messages—a cacophony of messages—from all around the body: instructions, queries, corrections, requests for assistance, updates, notices to divide or expire. Most of these signals arrive by means of couriers called hormones, chemical entities such as insulin, adrenaline, estrogen, and testosterone that convey information from remote outposts like the thyroid and endocrine glands. Still other messages arrive by telegraph from the brain or from regional centers in a process called paracrine signaling. Finally, cells communicate directly with their neighbors to make sure their actions are coordinated. What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is all just random frantic action, a sequence of endless encounters directed by nothing more than elemental rules of attraction and repulsion. There is clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably that seldom are we even conscious of it, yet somehow all this produces not just order within the cell but a perfect harmony right across the organism. In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed, some organisms that we think of as primitive enjoy a level of cellular organization that makes our own look carelessly pedestrian. Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be. And that’s because of a curious, determined, barely understood molecule that is itself not alive and for the most part doesn’t do anything at all. We call it DNA, and to begin to understand its supreme importance to science and to us we need to go back 160 years or so to Victorian England and to the moment when the naturalist Charles Darwin had what has been called “the single best idea that anyone has ever had”—and then, for reasons that take a little explaining, locked it away in a drawer for the next fifteen years.

Hi, I need this paper to be fixed for grammar, word replacement, spelling, and correct sentences. My professor really focuses on that, is about answering questons she said its alright to include these questions in the essay with its number.

1. Polio is a communicable disease that is caused by a virus and spread from person to person. Give an example of a communicable disease that is of an issue today and apply the Model of Disease Causation to its disease process

Poliomyelitis often called polio, or infantile paralysis is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus.

Incubation period:

The virus can act from few hours to few days

Mode of transmission:

Poliovirus is usually spread from person to person through infected fecal matter entertaining the mouth.

Spread through the food and water containing human feces. Saliva also infects it.

The people infected may spread the infection up to six weeks.

This disease is preventable by with polio vaccine; however, multiple doses are required to be effective.

Some of the communicable diseases are like Lassa fever, hepatitis A, yellow fever, seasonal influenza dengue, measles, Borna disease virus.

The model of disease causation depends on the relationship between an agent, a host, and the environment.    

2. Compare and contrast the ethical issues identified in the development of the polio vaccine. Does the idea of benefiting the greater right balance out the freedom of choice or protection of the individual Discuss a similar Public Health topic relevant today in the United States and compare and contrast the ethical issues surrounding it

Vaccine plays an essential role in the reduction of infectious diseases like smallpox poliomyelitis and measles. But it is always concerned with some ethical issues. The critical moral debates are related to vaccine regulation and development .a

Its use depends on mandates research and testing informed consent access disparities

Freedom of choice is more significant some refuse it based on their family religious beliefs; culture may develop some other problem. The polio vaccine accepted many people.

One of the public health problems regarding a particular vaccine is HPV vaccine (Human Papilloma Virus) for girls between age 12 -16.

As this is given to prevent STD, still there are a controversy and mandates parents and people do not accept it because of some reason like why administered only to one gender (girls), why and how a child could get STD against some religious beliefs. Nowadays many states accept the religious exemption when it comes to the part of vaccination or immunizations on their ideas and freedom.

3. The iron lung was invented as a short-term aid to breathing, not as a long-term device to live. "It was meant to bring people back to health, not keep hopelessly damaged bodies alive." (p. 62, Oshinsky). What are the economic considerations of long-term therapy such as the iron lung? Discuss who pays for the treatment and who gets to decide who gets such treatment. Give an example of similar cost/benefit situation in today's healthcare environment

Iron lung was indeed invented during the epidemic of Polio when people needed short-term respiratory support. The mechanism of iron lung was more of traumatic, but the modern age mechanical ventilator has replaced iron lung, which is efficient, least traumatic, the patient can get support for long duration and the duration of mechanical support solely decided by the caregiver despite lousy prognosis of the patient. With great inventions in medicine render more choices to an individual about healthcare.

Chronic ventilator patients are a significant burden to individual, hospital as well as to insurance companies and overall to the country. There have been various studies conducted to determine if care to terminally ill is a boom or a curse. Economic consideration includes the charges applied for per machine ventilator. The trained personnel to take care of a patient on a ventilator, the medication administered to keep improving the patient status and the physical supports like an air mattress, foot blocks, DVT compressor, cardiac monitors for continuous monitoring, changing the equipment according to protocols for preventing infections, etc.

Insurance agencies aid payment of such long-term therapy but not very willingly. Medicare, Medicaid does give reimbursement according to the level of long-term care which compromise on such patient. Due to this issues, various units are solely created to care for patients with long-term therapy to grant Prospective Payment System (PPS) waiver, but in many states, such facilities are unavailable leading to a significant financial burden on the caregiver and family. Decision making in such units is done based on mental capacity, the role of caregivers and self-advocacy. In case of long-term pediatric therapy, the decision wholly taken by the parents. Mainly such choice is chosen jointly by the caregiver- physician interaction about the patient prognosis and outcome, but the financial burden is definitely to the caregiver in the form of self-aid or insurance.

In various countries, healthcare has reached it's best inventions and many more options to sustain life but whether this option is worth its cost is the real dilemma. Another example of cost/ benefit situation in today's healthcare environment is a treatment for Cancer. The enormous advances in treatment modalities for cancer have developed but the medical prognosis highly uncertain. The cost of chemotherapy, the quality of life after cancer treatment and the uncertainty of its effect on cancer cells or even remission after complete healing is a tremendous upcoming challenge in today's healthcare environment.

4. In spite of its governmental-sounding name, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later renamed the March of Dimes) was a private organization that obtained all funding through private donations. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of private financing for the development of the polio vaccine. Compare and contrast the development of the polio vaccine with today's development of vaccines that are, for the most part, publicly funded

Advantages of private funding development for polio vaccine:

The private organizations they will donate the money for the welfare of any organization.

The organization will provide storage and transport facilities for the polio vaccine.

The private organization will provide polio vaccine supply for the villages. They are also offering cold chain.

Disadvantages:

If the private organization asks to stop the supplies to any organization, they will stop the amount of material. Sometimes they will do recycling for a vaccine, and they will supply.

Sometimes after the expiry date also they will supply for the people.

It is a life-threatening situation.

Difference between polio vaccine earlier and new vaccines. There is a lot of vhachan in the past years. Supply more storage facilities; transportation facilities are more; cold chain management is present, providing the pentavalent vaccine.

5. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was revolutionary in the way it raised money for charity. Even though there are many other potentially threatening diseases, describe how the Foundation was able to be a dominant source for its cause. Does the concept of "philanthropy as consumerism" belong in the field of public health? Why or why not?

Poliomyelitis is a disease, which affects the motor function of the body causing paralysis of limbs (upper limb and lower limb) National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was later, renamed as March of Dimes Foundation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt founded the organization in 1938, to combat Polio. He is an adult victim of polio.

{C}{C}It helps to improve the health of mother and babies by preventing congenital disabilities. Premature birth and infant mortality.

A fundraising campaign for this made through the radio. Eddie coined the term "The March of Dimes." This campaign helped to provide money for the development of two effective vaccines

Philanthropy as consumerism in public health is significant. That is because of the money raised by the organization as to be used in the right way, instead of spending it for no reasons. Here the people are more involved in their health for making decisions of their own. Experts believe that consumerism is more prevalent now than before.

Roosevelt himself paralyzed after being stricken by Polio in 1921.

The first task of this foundation was to create a network of local chapters that could raise money and deliver aid for more than 3100 countries. Charity drives started to raise money to care for matters of Polio survivors.

This foundation provided not only helps but also hope for the nation of terrified people. It was a potential disease result in impairment and disability. Worldwide and NFIP become an excellent source of charity to eliminate this disease. After NFIP they gave "Salk" trial, which was a great success.

Financial inclusion: R8 15 lacks per annum can help to access R8 3 impact your contribution 1:20

Access to health care: R8 lack per annum can help 1,000,000 poor access health care impact 1:20

  Right to education: 25 lack can help 2000 children to get free education in private schools 1:80

Read the July 9, 2006 the Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine uploaded in the docs and stuff section of this site. The authors examine a simple supply-and-demand gap with tragic implications: the shortage of human organs for transplantation. In the space of just a few decades, transplant surgery has become remarkably safe and reliable. But this success has bred huge demand: as more patients get new organs, more patients want them. So, while the number of kidney transplants has risen by 45% in the past 10 years, the number of people on a kidney waiting list has risen by 119%. Consequently, some 3,500 people die each year while waiting for a kidney transplant. A big problem is that would-be suppliers of kidneys, whether living or dead, are not given very strong incentives to step forward.

1. Summarize the main arguments about providing incentives for the supply side of this volunteer market.

2. Evaluate the argument carefully. What do you think? Why?

July 9, 2006
Freakonomics
Flesh Trade
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
Weighing the Repugnance Factor

How's this for a repugnant situation? Take someone you love, perhaps your spouse or your sibling, and find a stranger who will accept a really big bet that your loved one will die prematurely — and if indeed that happens, you pocket a few million dollars.

This, of course, is how life insurance works. And most Americans don't find this idea repugnant at all. They used to, however. Until the mid-19th century, life insurance was considered "a profanation," as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has written, "which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity."

Alvin Roth, a Harvard economist who studies the design of markets, has done a lot of thinking about repugnance. On some issues, he notes, repugnance will recede, as with life insurance — or, even more momentously, the practice of charging interest on loans. In other cases, the reverse happens: a once-accepted behavior like slaveholding comes to be seen as repugnant.

One case of repugnance is far from settled: the dispute over how human organs for transplantation should be allocated — and, perhaps, even sold. If you happen to have a failing heart or liver or kidneys, you will almost certainly die without a transplant, but if you aren't lucky enough to get an organ through an official registry, you can't legally purchase one at any price. So instead of a free market in organs, we have a volunteer market. Some people agree to give up their usable organs once they die. In the case of a living donor, someone sacrifices a kidney or a portion of a liver to a recipient, most likely a family member.
In the space of just a few decades, transplant surgery has become safe and reliable (to say nothing of miraculous). But success breeds demand: as more patients get new organs, more patients want them. In 2005, more than 16,000 kidney transplants were performed in the U.S., an increase of 45 percent over 10 years. But during that time, the number of people on a kidney waiting list rose by 119 percent. More than 3,500 people now die each year waiting for a kidney transplant.

To an economist, this is a basic supply-and-demand gap with tragic consequences. So what can be done to increase the supply of organs?

A big problem is that would-be suppliers are not given very strong incentives to step forward. In much of Europe, the choice is made for them: instead of "opting in" to donate, the default assumption is that your usable organs will be harvested upon your death unless your family "opts out." But Europe, too, still has a sizable organ shortage, in part because traffic fatalities — which tend to produce desirable organs for harvest — are on a downward trend in Western countries.
If it's hard to get people to give up their organs upon death, consider how much harder it is to persuade a living person to donate a kidney. (From a medical perspective, a kidney from a living donor is far more valuable than a cadaver kidney.) Even though most people can live safely on one kidney, there is still a price to be paid in discomfort, risk, fear and lost wages. But the United States, like pretty much every other country in the world, forbids a donor to collect on that price, or any other.

It is hard to find an economist who agrees with this policy. Gary Becker and Julio Jorge Elias argued in a recent paper that "monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets, and the suffering and deaths of many of those waiting, without increasing the total cost of transplant surgery by more than 12 percent."

Some noneconomists may well find this reasoning repugnant. There are many reasons, after all, for banning the sale of organs. Some people consider it immoral to commodify body parts (although it is now commonplace to not only sell sperm and eggs but also to rent a womb). Others fear that most organ sellers would be poor while most buyers would be rich; or that someone might be pressured into selling a kidney without fully understanding the risks.

But why, Becker and Elias ask, should poor people "be deprived of revenue that could be highly useful to them"? Even more compelling is the fact that a poor person is just as likely as a wealthy person (if not more so) to need a new kidney — and, with no legal market for organs, is just as likely to die while waiting on a list.

Alvin Roth, even though he is an economist, is smart enough to realize that repugnance will keep Americans from embracing a true market for organs anytime soon. So, along with several other scholars and medical personnel, he has helped design a clever alternative, the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. Imagine that you have a wife who is dying of renal failure, and that you would give her one of your kidneys, but you are not a biological match. Now imagine that another couple is in the same bind. The kidney exchange locates and matches the couples: you donate your kidney to the stranger's wife, while the stranger gives his kidney to your wife; the operations are performed simultaneously to make sure no one backs out. Although this system has yielded only a couple dozen transplants so far, it illustrates an economist's understanding of incentives: if you can't get someone to give an organ out of altruism, and you can't pay him either, what do you do? Find two parties who are desperate to align their incentives.

Otherwise, who in his right mind would step forward to donate a kidney to a stranger? In fact, we recently spoke to one such potential donor who asked to remain anonymous. Donor is married, with four children and a precarious financial situation. Because Donor had a sibling who nearly needed an organ transplant, the idea got into Donor's head to perhaps sell a kidney to a stranger. Through a donor Web site, Donor met a potential recipient, whom we'll call Recipient. It wasn't until the process was well under way that Donor learned it was illegal to be paid. In the end, however, Donor's moral mission overrode the financial need, and Donor decided to go ahead with the transplant.
Donor has undergone extensive testing at the hospital where Recipient will have the transplant. Both Donor and Recipient have had to lie repeatedly to the doctors, pretending they are old friends. "If they find out you met on the Internet," Donor explains, "they assume it's for money, and they'll call off the operation."

If all goes well, the transplant may happen soon. Consider the parties who stand to profit from this transaction: Recipient, certainly, as well as the transplant surgeons, the nurses, the hospital, the drug companies. Everyone will be paid in some form — except for Donor, who not only isn't being paid but, in return for carrying out a deeply altruistic act, also has to pay the additional price of lying about it.

Surely there are some people, and not just economists, who would find this situation — well, repugnant.

Question 5

An urban planner is researching commute times in the San Francisco Bay Area to find out if commute times have increased. In which of the following situations could the urban planner use a hypothesis test for a population mean? Check all that apply.

1. The urban planner asks a simple random sample of 110 commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area if they believe their commute time has increased in the past year. The urban planner will compute the proportion of commuters who believe their commute time has increased in the past year.
2. The urban planner collects travel times from a random sample of 125 commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area. A traffic study from last year claimed that the average commute time in the San Francisco Bay Area is 45 minutes. The urban planner will see if there is evidence the average commute time is greater than 45 minutes.
3. The urban planner asks a random sample of 100 commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area to record travel times on a Tuesday morning. One year later, the urban planner asks the same 100 commuters to record travel times on a Tuesday morning. The urban planner will see if the difference in commute times shows an increase.

Question 6

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a U.S. government agency that regulates (you guessed it) food and drugs for consumer safety. One thing the FDA regulates is the allowable insect parts in various foods. You may be surprised to know that much of the processed food we eat contains insect parts. An example is flour. When wheat is ground into flour, insects that were in the wheat are ground up as well.

The mean number of insect parts allowed in 100 grams (about 3 ounces) of wheat flour is 75. If the FDA finds more than this number, they conduct further tests to determine if the flour is too contaminated by insect parts to be fit for human consumption.

The null hypothesis is that the mean number of insect parts per 100 grams is 75. The alternative hypothesis is that the mean number of insect parts per 100 grams is greater than 75.

Is the following a Type I error or a Type II error or neither?

The test fails to show that the mean number of insect parts is greater than 75 per 100 grams when it is.

1. Type I error
2. Type II error
3. Neither

Question 7

Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) has been collecting data about expectant mothers in Oakland, CA since 1959. One of the measurements taken by CHDS is the age of first time expectant mothers. Suppose that CHDS finds the average age for a first time mother is 26 years old. Suppose also that, in 2015, a random sample of 50 expectant mothers have mean age of 26.5 years old, with a standard deviation of 1.9 years. At the 5% significance level, we conduct a one-sided T-test to see if the mean age in 2015 is significantly greater than 26 years old. Statistical software tells us that the p-value = 0.034.

Which of the following is the most appropriate conclusion?

1. There is a 3.4% chance that a random sample of 50 expectant mothers will have a mean age of 26.5 years old or greater if the mean age for a first time mother is 26 years old.
2. There is a 3.4% chance that mean age for all expectant mothers is 26 years old in 2015.
3. There is a 3.4% chance that mean age for all expectant mothers is 26.5 years old in 2015.
4. There is 3.4% chance that the population of expectant mothers will have a mean age of 26.5 years old or greater in 2015 if the mean age for all expectant mothers was 26 years old in 1959.

Question 8

Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) has been collecting data about expectant mothers in Oakland, CA since 1959. One of the measurements taken by CHDS is the weight increase (in pounds) for expectant mothers in the second trimester. In a fictitious study, suppose that CHDS finds the average weight increase in the second trimester is 14 pounds. Suppose also that, in 2015, a random sample of 40 expectant mothers have mean weight increase of 16 pounds in the second trimester, with a standard deviation of 6 pounds. At the 5% significance level, we can conduct a one-sided T-test to see if the mean weight increase in 2015 is greater than 14 pounds. Statistical software tells us that the p-value = 0.021.

Which of the following is the most appropriate conclusion?

1. There is a 2.1% chance that a random sample of 40 expectant mothers will have a mean weight increase of 16 pounds or greater if the mean second trimester weight gain for all expectant mothers is 14 pounds.
2. There is a 2.1% chance that mean second trimester weight gain for all expectant mothers is 14 pounds in 2015.
3. There is a 2.1% chance that mean second trimester weight gain for all expectant mothers is 16 pounds in 2015.
4. There is 2.1% chance that the population of expectant mothers will have a mean weight increase of 16 pounds or greater in 2015 if the mean second trimester weight gain for all expectant mothers was 14 pounds in 1959.

Question 9

A researcher conducts an experiment on human memory and recruits 15 people to participate in her study. She performs the experiment and analyzes the results. She uses a t-test for a mean and obtains a p-value of 0.17.

Which of the following is a reasonable interpretation of her results?

1. This suggests that her experimental treatment has no effect on memory.
2. If there is a treatment effect, the sample size was too small to detect it.
3. She should reject the null hypothesis.
4. There is evidence of a small effect on memory by her experimental treatment.

Question 10

A criminal investigator conducts a study on the accuracy of fingerprint matching and recruits a random sample of 35 people to participate. Since this is a random sample of people, we don’t expect the fingerprints to match the comparison print. In the general population, a score of 80 indicates no match. Scores greater than 80 indicate a match. If the mean score suggests a match, then the fingerprint matching criteria are not accurate.

The null hypothesis is that the mean match score is 80. The alternative hypothesis is that the mean match score is greater than 80.

The criminal investigator chooses a 5% level of significance. She performs the experiment and analyzes the results. She uses a t-test for a mean and obtains a p-value of 0.04.

Which of the following is a reasonable interpretation of her results?

1. This suggests that there is evidence that the mean match score is greater than 80. This suggests that the fingerprint matching criteria are not accurate.
2. If there is a treatment effect, the sample size was too small to detect it. This suggests that we need a larger sample to determine if the fingerprint matching criteria are not accurate.
3. She cannot reject the null hypothesis. This suggests that the fingerprint matching criteria could be accurate.
4. This suggests that there is evidence that the mean match score is equal to 80. This suggests that the fingerprint matching criteria is accurate.

Question 11

A group of 42 college students from a certain liberal arts college were randomly sampled and asked about the number of alcoholic drinks they have in a typical week. The purpose of this study was to compare the drinking habits of the students at the college to the drinking habits of college students in general. In particular, the dean of students, who initiated this study, would like to check whether the mean number of alcoholic drinks that students at his college in a typical week differs from the mean of U.S. college students in general, which is estimated to be 4.73.

The group of 42 students in the study reported an average of 5.31 drinks per with a standard deviation of 3.93 drinks.

Find the p-value for the hypothesis test.

The p-value should be rounded to 4-decimal places.

Question 12

Commute times in the U.S. are heavily skewed to the right. We select a random sample of 240 people from the 2000 U.S. Census who reported a non-zero commute time.

In this sample the mean commute time is 28.9 minutes with a standard deviation of 19.0 minutes. Can we conclude from this data that the mean commute time in the U.S. is less than half an hour? Conduct a hypothesis test at the 5% level of significance.

What is the p-value for this hypothesis test?

Your answer should be rounded to 4 decimal places.

Please read through the article below and answer the question at the end of the article.

High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It

“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. He knows the results of the tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance, which revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.

Ancient evolutionary adaptations explain why psychological safety is both fragile and vital to success in uncertain, interdependent environments. The brain processes a provocation by a boss, competitive coworker, or dismissive subordinate as a life-or-death threat. The amygdala, the alarm bell in the brain, ignites the fight-or-flight response, hijacking higher brain centers. This “act first, think later” brain structure shuts down perspective and analytical reasoning. Quite literally, just when we need it most, we lose our minds. While that fight-or-flight reaction may save us in life-or-death situations, it handicaps the strategic thinking needed in today’s workplace.

Twenty-first-century success depends on another system — the broaden-and-build mode of positive emotion, which allows us to solve complex problems and foster cooperative relationships. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina has found that positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking — the cognitive process underlying creativity.

When the workplace feels challenging but not threatening, teams can sustain the broaden-and-build mode. Oxytocin levels in our brains rise, eliciting trust and trust-making behavior. This is a huge factor in team success, as Santagata attests: “In Google’s fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers.”

So how can you increase psychological safety on your own team? Try replicating the steps that Santagata took with his:

1. Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary. We humans hate losing even more than we love winning. A perceived loss triggers attempts to reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement, which is a form of workplace-learned helplessness. Santagata knows that true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, “How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?”

2. Speak human to human. Underlying every team’s who-did-what confrontation are universal needs such as respect, competence, social status, and autonomy. Recognizing these deeper needs naturally elicits trust and promotes positive language and behaviors. Santagata reminded his team that even in the most contentious negotiations, the other party is just like them and aims to walk away happy. He led them through a reflection called “Just Like Me,” which asks you to consider:

This person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.

This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.

This person has friends, family, and perhaps children who love them, just like me.

This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.

This person wishes for peace, joy, and happiness, just like me.

3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves. “Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego,” explains Santagata.

Skillfully confront difficult conversations head-on by preparing for likely reactions. For example, you may need to gather concrete evidence to counter defensiveness when discussing hot-button issues. Santagata asks himself, “If I position my point in this manner, what are the possible objections, and how would I respond to those counterarguments?” He says, “Looking at the discussion from this third-party perspective exposes weaknesses in my positions and encourages me to rethink my argument.”

Specifically, he asks:

What are my main points?

What are three ways my listeners are likely to respond?

How will I respond to each of those scenarios?

4. Replace blame with curiosity. If team members sense that you’re trying to blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed tiger. John Gottman’s research at the University of Washington shows that blame and criticism reliably escalate conflict, leading to defensiveness and — eventually — to disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you already know what the other person is thinking, then you’re not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset, knowing you don’t have all the facts. Here’s how:

State the problematic behavior or outcome as an observation, and use factual, neutral language. For example, “In the past two months there’s been a noticeable drop in your participation during meetings and progress appears to be slowing on your project.”

Engage them in an exploration. For example, “I imagine there are multiple factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?”

Ask for solutions. The people who are responsible for creating a problem often hold the keys to solving it. That’s why a positive outcome typically depends on their input and buy-in. Ask directly, “What do you think needs to happen here?” Or, “What would be your ideal scenario?” Another question leading to solutions is: “How could I support you?”

5. Ask for feedback on delivery. Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message disarms your opponent, illuminates blind spots in communication skills, and models fallibility, which increases trust in leaders. Santagata closes difficult conversations with these questions:

What worked and what didn’t work in my delivery?

How did it feel to hear this message?

How could I have presented it more effectively?

For example, Santagata asked about his delivery after giving his senior manager tough feedback. His manager replied, “This could have felt like a punch in the stomach, but you presented reasonable evidence and that made me want to hear more. You were also eager to discuss the challenges I had, which led to solutions.”

6. Measure psychological safety. Santagata periodically asks his team how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics. Some teams at Google include questions such as, “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?”

If you create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.

QUESTION:

Have you been a part of a High Performing Team in the past? Have you witnessed a High Performing Team in Action? What if any benefits from that team did you see from a sense of Psychological Safety? If you have not ... what benefits do you think you would get from having that level of safety on a team? Do you think that is enough to elevate a mid-level team to High? What other things does Psychological Safety bring to a team? Or just talk about the article. Answer in 2 - 3 paragraphs.

1.Identify the main research problem.

2.Analyze the main underlying causes of the existing problem.

3.Establish the cause-and-effect relations between the various aspects.

4.Formulate the best solutions to address the problem.

CASE 1: ZAPPOS FACES COMPETITIVE CHALLENGES

Zappos Faces Competitive Challenges

Zappos, based in Las Vegas, is an online retailer with the initial goal of trying to be the best website for buying shoes by offering a wide variety of brands, styles, colors, sizes, and widths. The Zappos.com brand has grown to offer shoes, handbags, eyewear, watches, and accessories for online purchase. The company’s goal is to provide the best service online, not just in shoes but in any product category. Zappos believes that the speed with which a customer receives an online purchase plays a critical role in how that customer thinks about shopping online again in the future, so the company is focusing on making sure the items get delivered to its customers as quickly as possible.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has shaped the company’s customer-service-focused culture, brand, and business strategy around 10 core values:

•           Deliver WOW through service.

•           Embrace and drive change.

•           Create fun and a little weirdness.

•           Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded.

•           Pursue growth and learning.

•           Build open and honest relationships with communication.

•           Build a positive team and family spirit.

•           Do more with less.

•           Be passionate and determined.

•           Be humble.

“Deliver WOW through service” means that call center employees need to provide excellent customer service. Call center employees encourage callers to order more than one size or color because shipping and return shipping is free. They are also encouraged to use their imaginations to meet customer needs.

Zappos has received many awards for its workplace culture and practices, including being frequently recognized in Fortune magazine’s annual rankings of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. The job of human resources at Zappos is more than just a rule enforcer. HR’s job is to protect the culture and to educate employees. HR focuses on interactions with managers and employees to understand what they need from HR (HR is even invited to attend work teams’ happy hours). Zappos’s employment practices help perpetuate its company culture. Only about 1 out of 100 applicants passes a hiring process that is equally weighted on job skills and on the potential to work in Zappos’s culture. Some managers at Zappos believe that if you want to get a job the most important value to demonstrate is “be humble” including a focus on “we” instead of “I.” Job candidates are interviewed for cultural fit and a willingness to change and learn. For example, they observe whether job candidates talk at lunch with others or just the person they think is making the hiring decision. The HR team uses unusual interview questions—such as, How weird are you? and What’s your theme song?—to find employees who are creative and have strong individuality. Zappos provides free lunch in the cafeteria (cold cuts) and a full-time life coach (employees have to sit on a red velvet throne to complain), managers are encouraged to spend time with employees outside of the office, and any employee can reward another employee a $50 bonus for good performance. Call center employees can use an online scheduling tool that allows them to set their own hours, and they can earn more pay if they work during hours with greater customer demand. Most of the over 1,500 employees at Zappos are hourly. Every new hire undergoes four weeks of training, during which the company culture must be committed to memory, and spends two weeks dealing with customers by working the telephones. New recruits are offered $2,000 to leave the company during training to weed out individuals who will not be happy working at the company. Zappos provides free breakfast, lunch, snacks, coffee, tea, and vending machine snacks. Work is characterized by constant change; a loud, open office environment; and team interactions. Employees at Zappos move around. For example, call center employees can bid for different shifts every month.

To reinforce the importance of the 10 core values, Zappos’s performance management system asks managers to evaluate how well employees’ behaviors demonstrate the core values such as being humble or expressing their personalities. To evaluate task performance, managers are asked to regularly provide employees with status reports on such things as how much time they spend on the telephone with customers. The status reports and evaluations of the core values are informational or used to identify training needs. Zappos also believes in helping others understand what inspired the company culture. The company created the Zappos.com library, which provides a collection of books about creating a passion for customer service, products, and local communities. These books can be found in the front lobby of Zappos offices and are widely read and discussed by company employees.

Corporate culture is more than a set of values, and it is maintained by a complex web of human interactions. At Zappos, the liberal use of social media including blogs and Twitter facilitates the network that links employees with one another and with the company’s customers. Zappos takes the pulse of the organization monthly, measuring the health of the culture with a happiness survey. Employees respond to such unlikely questions as whether they believe that the company has a higher purpose than profits, whether their Page 63own role has meaning, whether they feel in control of their career path, whether they consider their coworkers to be like family and friends, and whether they are happy in their jobs. Results from the survey are broken down by department, and opportunities for development are identified and acted upon. For example, when it was clear from the survey that one department had veered off course and felt isolated from the rest of the organization, a program was instituted that enabled individuals in the group to learn more about how integral their work was. To keep the company vibrant, CEO Tony Hsieh spent $350 million to develop a neighborhood in downtown Las Vegas, which is the home of Zappos.com’s new headquarters. Hsieh wants to provide employees with a great place to work as well as to live and socialize.

Recently, Zappos adopted a management philosophy, holocracy, which gives employees the freedom and responsibility to decide how to get their work done and eliminated people managers. Hsieh’s intent was to allow employees to act more like entrepreneurs and help stimulate new ideas, bring their full selves to work, and have a purpose beyond making money, all of which he believes will benefit the business. Employees work in teams or “circles” rather than as individuals, and team membership can change. However, employees are finding the new management system confusing and requiring them to spend more time in meetings. Also, they wonder how they will earn raises and advance their careers without management jobs. In all, 210 employees found the new philosophy so dissatisfying that they took three months of severance pay and left the company. Zappos is changing its recruitment process to ensure that its new hires are comfortable with holocracy’s self-management style.

Despite this setback, other companies are trying to learn from Zappos’s practices. Zappos Insights is a department within Zappos created to share the Zappos culture with other companies. Zappos Insights provides programs about building a culture (3-Day Culture Camp), its WOW service philosophy (School of WOW), the power of a coaching-based culture (Coaching Event), how the HR function protects the culture and how its programs support it (People Academy), and custom programs. The cost to attend these programs ranges from $2,000 to $6,000 for each attendee.

QUESTIONS

1.         Zappos seems to be well-positioned to have a competitive advantage over other online retailers. What challenges discussed in Chapter 1 pose the biggest threat to Zappos’s ability to maintain and enhance its competitive position? How can HRM practices help Zappos meet these challenges?

2.         Do you think that employees of Zappos have high levels of engagement? Why?

3.         Which of Zappos’s 10 core values do you believe that HR practices can influence the most? The least? Why? For each of the core values, identify the HR practices that are related to it. Explain how the HR practices you identified are related to the core values.

4.         How might the change to the holocracy management style undermine Zappos’s core values and cause employees to have lower levels of engagement?