Values and attitudes toward learning and human capital development

Learning is a non-stop process. That is a reason a company hires a qualified candidate with hands-on experience. Most business schools hire renowned professors and experienced guest lecturers to update enrolled students with both relevant knowledge and future-in-trend business practices. For a fundamental requirement, a student or employee all gets multi-dimensional inflow of information and news as renewal and refresh reservoir of knowledge. Social networks, blogs and mobile technologies have not only benefited business clients over effective and efficient marketing and product development platforms, but also connected customers and producers over virtually interactive environments. Text books are revised and re-published every three or four years to pocket profits into publishers and professors who use those books in curriculum. Daily and weekly lectures must be embedded with both online news and seminar discussions to enrich contents of those lectures. Students and employees can evaluate qualities and reality of their professors’ creditability and content-oriented lectures. Executives at multinational firms are not prestige school professors, but earn ten times or hundred times a salary a professor makes a year. But a professor knows how to deliver his or her messages to inspire and inform audiences. A dynamic learning environment is not limited to a school campus or classroom, but also a workplace.

A future of students and employees is determined on three primary factors or elements:

1. Academic performance and background
2. Actively engagement and job delivery
3. Teamwork and individual improvement 

With new technologies and teaching methods, both business schools and business organizations can run at a similar mode and pace – becoming a non-stop learning environment. A new student at a business school is excited to accumulate new knowledge from professors and peers and use all efforts to gain A+ grade on assignments. An employee wonders how to fit him or her into a new workplace where a boss and colleagues can become allies and supporters. After 2 years or 4 years, both persons – student or employee – is supposed to gain something called experience and hands-on values. Guest lecturers deliver good stories and lessons from their business worlds. Bosses and colleagues push a new employee into a new shape of routine works and relationships. Both parties have experienced changes in two environments. New high-tech tools and new effective information deliveries are deployed and designed at both places – school and business firms.

A business firm can set a priority agenda on managing human resource based a firm’s interest or employee-oriented mutual goals. For the second case, a firm will re-evaluate employees’ rights from qualifications, market oriented wages, future career development to teamwork performance, personal life. But a firm is also an interdependent entity in a broader market or society where levels of capital-intensive and labor-intensive implementation change from one entity to another. Labor-intensive running businesses care less on employees’ rights because objectives of knowledge, output, marginal profits and self-responsibility. Capital-intensive firms can pay more attention to their employees who can produce higher marginal profits. In such sense, a free and open market has decided a dual employee-oriented defined-benefit system.

Philanthropy at first plays a social role of PR runs for individuals and business firms. But for long-term benefits, their money and efforts have transformed many aspects of life and society into better conditions, especially when a government cannot fulfill its role as a public and generous guarantor to everyone. Millionaires and billionaires sometimes hate to pay more tax on their annual earnings, but they are likely happy to take out a big blank check to donate to some good cause programs. Non-profit organizations receive funds and endorsement from sponsors and donors to provide special goods and services at zero charge or minimum charge. That means more people can access such services than previous years and time. But each new initiative or pilot project needs to convince listeners and prospective donors who can join a project from a beginning day to a next in-progress phrase. Investors can consider three funds of their net-worth assets – investment funds, property funds and charity funds. If they are generous, they can set a size of 10% to 20% of their annual profits into charity funds. Furthermore, they know how their endorsed money is used and invested for good mission. For tax revenues, they only pay to the government who can allocate those funds into public and other types of programs. IT technologies and innovative education are two areas for philanthropists and donors to consider and commit to.

Innovative businesses have not done miracle things, but provide favorable conditions and management strategies to inspire employees to think and contribute in active-engagement manner. Employees can access useful tools and resources to add new ideas and solutions to change their products and services into a new concept and format. Apple Inc has initiated new ideas and offered new products and engaged customers into their app stores. A business firm has tried to offer from both hardware and software products and services to redefine so-called one-stop shopping center. Amazon has emerged and raised its value in a similar method Apple Inc did. Sony has tried to pay off shares in Erikson to consolidate and focus on new strategies. CEOs and executives can react with changing environments by choosing a right model, but all needs a harmony of using financial capital, human capital and technological capital.