Onassis

Introduction

It is important for anyone who seeks success in practical life to study others' success stories, learn about how they could reach such success, know their strengths and weaknesses and understand how they could face any challenges or problems they faced and how they could overcome them. In this assignment, Aristotle Onassis' success story will be discussed in order to learn how he could succeed in business world and become the richest man in the world. His strengths and his weaknesses will also be discussed in addition to approaching means he used to overcome any failure he faced in order to learn from such a successful model.

Body

Aristotle Onassis was born in 1906 in Karatass which is one of Smyrna suburbs. He mastered four languages when he was sixteen years old , he spoke English, Greek, Spanish and Turkish. The World War 1 caused great loss for his family as they lost all their properties and they escaped poor to Greece and became refugees as Smyrna was fired. During the fire, three of his relatives died burnt. In 1923, he traveled to work in Buenos Aires in a British telephone company and that was his first job. His father helped him in importing tobacco which was the business that helped him form the first million dollars. He established many companies such as Olympic Airways, worked in oil shipping, established whaling companies but his big failure was losing a part of the Omega project for oil factories in Greece. He got married to  Athina Livanos then to Jacqueline Kennedy and got two children, Alexander and Christina.(Prionas et al, 1996)

To reach success, Onassis had strengths as well as weaknesses. Among the strengths are his cleverness and professionalism when he was a telephone engineer, he had intelligent thinking as he found that soft Turkish tobacco will be better used for women, he had marketing abilities as he used to study the markets' needs and make use of them and he was distinguished with the ability of making the right decisions at the right times. His relatives provided him with the aid as he was lucky for having a father working in shipping and helpful cousins. In the beginning of his life, his family lost everything they had and turned to be poor which was a very dangerous situation for Onassis but he was full of enthusiasm and ambition accompanied with insisting on success. There were also many times when failure threatened his business career and weaknesses were embodied in the limit use for women cigarettes, failing in signing many business contracts and taxes that the Greek government set on shipping. (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2013)

Onassis managed to overcome the problems he faced during his business career as he was clever in having social relationships with important people in the society and in the Greek government as well as his ability to take quick actions such as when he was endangered with taxes and he discovered that such taxes will endanger the whole country finance which he explained to the government in a memo sent to them and this helped in solving the problem. His deep thinking and creativity helped him when the women cigarettes business failed as he established his own company for cigarettes and then success came soon to him. He was dare and this is a critical matter that could lead a businessman to failure or success but Onassis once took a loan from the bank to buy 16 liberty ships with contracts with companies made at a time he had no money and this was intelligent but risky. Another obstacle was when he needed to buy T2 oil American tankers which were intended to be sold for Americans only but quickly he established American company and shared American citizens and then he managed to buy the tankers and the company was closed after that. (Prionas et al, 1996)

Conclusion

The youth who wish to succeed in their business career and reach their goals need to read and study the success stories of great famous and successful people who did not let despair destroy them and continued in their work facing any barriers that could hinder their success track. Onassis was presented as a model for those who wishes to success in business or in any other field and to challenge failure whenever and wherever it appears.

Employees turnover

Employees turnover is a great human resource problem that many business organizations suffer as it affects the organization's productivity and profitability due to the gap that occurs in the number and capacity of employees as any organization that exerted great efforts to train its employees and prepare them to be an asset of the organization suffers when these employees leave the organization to join another organization.

Employees turnover can be resulting from many reasons such as the employees desire of getting better jobs opportunity, their feeling of not being appreciated by the organization, lack of motivation or the employees who are not native may like to return to their home countries. Many organizations try to investigate the reasons behind employees' turnover and try to shed the light on specific reasons for it in order to try to put an end to that problem so they try to communicate with employees and try to realize their complaints about the work and what can be made to satisfy them. This can be effective and supportive for retaining employees as retaining employees can be achieved by searching for the reasons behind their turnover and then try to motivate them and engage them more to feel they are part of the business organization and then to encourage them to have better positions and better salaries within the organization. Ensuring a safe work environment can be a good solution for employees' turnover as the work environment may be poor and lack many important elements such as communication, cooperation, respect, support and encouragement. Asserting the need for innovation and creativity in the business organization can encourage employees to stay in it as they feel more promising future is waiting for them and that creativity can provide them with better opportunities in that organization. Another solution is nationalization of employees as, for example, many of the Arabian Gulf countries suffer high rates of employees turnover as many of those employees are not native ands decide to stay for a period of time in the Gulf organizations and then to return to their countries.

Employees' turnover can affect the business organization and lead to much loss in efforts and time exerted to train employees and prepare them for achieving the tasks of those retired employees or those who quit the job so there should be a deep study for the real reasons behind employees turnover and then to try to ensure employees' job satisfaction and raise their morale to be retained in the business organization.    

The impact of leadership styles on performance of human resources

Introduction

Many business organizations today focus on promoting its position in the market by improving the organizational performance through the improved performance of human resources and this can be well managed through the proper application of the different leadership styles and the right employing for each leadership style in the different organizational business situations. Leadership helps business organizations to be more profitable and productive as success levels depend on how leaders apply different leadership styles in addition to the resultant environment leaders create        

Different leadership styles

Transactional leadership

Many studies and researches that investigated the effect of leadership on employees' performance showed that there are certain leadership styles that can cause effective results with employees and raise or reduce the level of human resources performance; Flood et al, (2008) referred to the transactional leadership style and how it can improve the human resources performance as it is based upon the exchange model which focuses mainly on rewarding the good behaviors and actions of employees and punishing the wrong behaviors acted by employees or the employees with poor performance; it also focuses on the relational dimensions of the different leadership behaviors. Ling, Jen and Wang, (2010) discussed how human resources management strategies can identify the effect of leadership styles on the organizational performance and how leaders can choose the suitable leadership style to suit different organizational situations as charismatic leadership is that wise leadership that can employ the different leadership styles each in its position.                               

Transformational leadership

According to Saleem, (2015); transformational leadership is said to leave a great impact on attitudes of employees within the organization and it is usually preferred in many job situations rather than transactional leadership, it is associated with high employees' performance due to the amount of freedom and communication it ensures for human resources via leaders who are able to build a successful leader follower relationship that ensures a deep understanding for employees' needs by their leaders who are able to raise employees' morale and make them job satisfied. Bass and Riggio, (2006) also discussed the positive impact transformational leadership leaves on the performance of the company's human resources and referred to the different techniques used by a transformational leader to raise the employees morale in order to get better performance such as rewards, recognition, engaging employees in decision making processes and ensuring their rights in promotion and taking leadership roles. This was confirmed by Avolio and Yammarino, (2013) who reported that many business organizations try to apply transformational leadership to apply changes, reach competitive advantage and push their human resources towards high working performance.