The great Duke of Wellington, of Waterloo Victory fame, once saw the boys of Eton public School playing on the field and was moved to say, There our great battles were won” He meant that young lads acquire on the playground not only physical stamina but discipline, the habit of obedience, the will to win, -and these virtues make them good soldiers when their country calls them to the field of battle. It is good to enjoy the delight of running about in the open field and to ‘feel life in every limb’.But that only makes the lesson that we learn, of discipline, obedience and tenacity, all the more pleasing. To develop character not by arid and dry moral lessons, but in the course of our enjoyment of games, is a privilege which we must set store by. The most important lesson that sports of all kinds teach us is a sense of discipline. A good sportsman must always learn to obey the rules of the games and the orders of the captain. He knows the value of the proverb – “He who knows how to obey will know how to command”.Discipline goes hand in hand with duty.

Davenport’s article “Putting the Enterprise into the Enterprise System” discusses the pros and cons of Enterprise Systems. These systems gather data—manufacturing, sales, logistics, financial, etc. , and then pull this data into a central warehouse that helps companies make informed business decisions. However, the Article’s main theme is, that while these can be powerful tools for an organization, the adoption of a cookie cutter solution may be counterproductive.The part that most interested me was the Article’s discussion that very often a software system designed by the software experts may, in fact, remove the competitive edge of that company. While we tend to think of computing systems as enhancing operations and making them more efficient through faster communication, automation, removing the need for people, etc. , I had never thought of them as having the potential to remove a company’s competitive advantage.Competitive advantage, of course, is doing something different that makes your company better than the others.

Huck Finn’s Experiences         In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain presents the problem of slavery in America in the 19th Century. Twain poses this problem in the form of a character named Huckleberry Finn, a white boy raised in the antebellum South.  Huck starts to question his view regarding slavery when he acquaints himself more intimately with a runaway slave while he himself tries to run away. Huck’s development as a character is affected by society’s influence on his experiences while growing up in the South, running away with Jim, and trying to save Jim. Although Huck decides to free Jim, Huck’s deformed conscience convinces him that he is doing the wrong thing. 

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