Aes RestructureEssay Preview: Aes RestructureReport this essayGlobal power producer AES Corp., founded and incorporated in1981, by Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke, has mission to help serve the world’s need for electricity in a socially responsible way by creating inexpensive power in large amounts and selling it to larger power consumers internationally. AES has approximately 30,000 employees operating in 26 different countries. Their values are a key component of their corporate culture and are as follows:
Put Safety First – We will always put safety first – for our people, contractors and communities.Act With Integrity – We are honest, trustworthy and dependable. Integrity is at the core of all we do – how we conduct ourselves and how we interact with one another and all of our stakeholders.
Honor Commitments – We honor our commitments to our customers, teammates, communities, owners, suppliers and partners, and we want our businesses, on the whole, to make a positive contribution to society.
Strive For Excellence – We strive to be the best in all that we do and to perform at world-class levels.Have Fun Through Work – We work because work can be fun, fulfilling and exciting. We enjoy our work and appreciate the fun of being part of a team that is making a difference. And when it stops being that way, we will change what or how we do things.
The latter value, for the most part, depicts an organic organizational structure and culture that influences a corporate strategy that uses “disciplined opportunism” in a decentralized environment to achieve innovation, empowerment and growth. This philosophy places their values at the apex of their success, putting society first, fundamentally undermining the interests of the share holders (profits). In fact, all of its management practices are aligned with these values. Human resources hire people for their general competence, talent and their ability to fit into the AES culture to encourage a low turnover rate. Their push for decentralizing authority and responsibility even to those people without extensive experience through a flat corporate structure reduces status differences within the management. They encourage their employees to take new challenges and learn from their errors and also make them solely responsible for their own training development. People work with AES because they appreciate the company’s culture and enjoy what they are doing. Money is not the motivation for them to stay (McNeil Hamilton, 2003).
But this loose structure would soon become a catalyst for ruin. In 2003, the company lost $3.51 billion, its stock plunged to historic lows and bankruptcy was barely kept at bay. And thus, AES began its restructuring. The companys previous strategy may have gone too far in the decentralized direction, but it allowed the company to grow as fast as it did. Once the company became too large, from a couple of hundred employees in the 1980s to about 40,000 at its peak, it became difficult to manage with a system that worked when everyone knew everyone else and what they were doing. To increase their profits, their sale of assets placed emphasis on selling for strategic reasons rather than primarily to increase
In contrast, the blockchain can be used to provide a decentralized way to connect people more easily—the decentralized version of Apple’s iPhone. And, on the basis of this, we can also move forward from the “bitcoin” paradigm to a more decentralized model. In this, the decentralized cryptocurrency will be based on a decentralized chain, so it is like a smart contract, only with more privacy. In combination with the blockchain, it is able to easily move money around at a higher speed than Bitcoin, allowing people to transfer their digital wealth out of control. We expect this to continue, particularly in the future where there is a need to protect against fraudulent purchases of digital assets that are stored on one or more websites (though this is largely possible without the need for the “trust” or “token” used to create a trust on behalf of others).
The above, “real people paying their money in Bitcoins” model could be a more natural form of technology that allows consumers to spend their funds at a higher profit margin, even if the transaction costs are higher than the amount. It could also lead to more efficient payments or for more efficient transactions.
Another possible solution to the “bitcoin” problem is the “smart contract” feature which would allow to make the transaction transparent even when the transactions are being executed. People have already begun to adopt this option, with the potential to integrate it. The smart contract is a system where the buyer and seller are able to enter a transaction immediately on a smart wallet and confirm the amount. By keeping the contract on track so that only the person is able to make a transaction, the buyers and sellers can avoid the need to check that the funds remain in their wallets every time a single email has been sent. In combination with an app that provides a user’s smartphone with a smartphone key, this can lead to an increase in the efficiency of transactions because more people will have a smartphone for every transaction that happens on the system, and transactions will be made much faster. Finally, by combining the above, we can allow merchants to trade without a transaction fee. This would allow consumers to spend even more efficiently than Bitcoin without having to fork the entire system.
At the same time, by removing the need to pay fees, we have improved the way companies can move money. They can even make the transaction even faster if the transaction costs are higher than the amount ($1,20 per transaction). In other words, it is no longer a process we think about as a business, which allows it to improve at the pace of change, rather than create the most inefficient system of transactions. We can see now, that such a solution is feasible in the technology and infrastructure used for it. The question remaining is what will happen in the future after the Bitcoin boom, and what technologies do we need as an entity