What management essentially is?

The best minds of my generation go to Baruch College.

They work hard and embark on their everyday trip with a vision:

Knowing not accounting, but accountability is a more important heritage,

And the first step to success is to have the right goals and a mission.

Since the very old times that we all have our growth needs,

And a task of managers to recognize what blossoms each one of us
Like a gardener cultivate and water our motivation and esteem seeds

To prevent us suffering from cognitive dissonance.

I am for example. I have a need for power, for achievement and for affiliation,

But a guy with a mustache don’t believe me, his name is Maslow

His progression principle states that lack of rest and job can lead to alienation

So in order to be on the top of his triangle you’ve got to hassle.

A good manager provides workers with a feeling of job enrichment,

He can put the right players with variety of skills in a team,

But without maintenance and inspiration of a group he’ll face impeachment

And he’ll never be a leader with a high level of esteem.

Manager’s emotional intelligence affects our performance, satisfaction

It may lead to high achievement of a task and team viability.

Managing by wondering around, in turn, prevents discrimination,

If eliminates social loafing and results in better company’s transparency.

How fair was Fair Kurpis Doctrine in spreading extra credit around?

I recently listened to Ken Robinson lecture "Schools kill creativity" that was uploaded on TED web-site. A few points brought my attention. The main one addressed importance of not being afraid of making mistakes in fostering of one's creativity. He gives an example of children that usually are the most creative in their answers. In the early age they don't have goals and don't obey social norms. Instead, they do what they enjoy the most and what makes them happy. But as soon as they get into school, they start being trained not to make mistakes, get right answers instead and be "a good girl" or a "good boy".

Ken believes there's a straight correlation between entrepreneurship and ability, readiness of an individual to make different mistakes. Instead, in school we are taught how you how to minimize mistakes, how to mitigate risks and how to make right decisions. They give you an ideal picture of what you should be: a banker, a lawyer. And they kill you desire to be a dancer, an artist, a musician, because in the heads of many it's a synonym of "poor". And you, they believe, want to be reach: to get more stuff and to life life that you not necessary wanted to live when you were a kid or a teen.

On my job interview recently I mentioned that I like skydiving. I drew correlation between taking risk and jumping from the plane. I said that may be this was the craziest thing I've done in my life, but I learned a big deal from it. My interviewer didn't like this response and mentioned instead that one should always be careful in assessing risks, which should always be calculated and etc...Again, I though, the same story - don't make mistakes, be reasonable...But should you always?

A friend of mine told me a story when he broke his hand, but had a job interview scheduled. He didn't want to miss a chance to get a job and decided to attend the meeting. When shaking his interviewer's hand, a guy asked my friend what happened to his hand.

- My other interview just didn't go well, said my friend (obviously he was kidding), who has a good sense of humor and who tried to break ice. The interviewer didn't get the joke. My friend concluded that he would want to work for a boss that doesn't understand jokes. The result? Five month after starting a job of a financial analyst my friend worked as a managing director within another company. He helped it aquire a few profitable mergers. How did he get hired? He just took a risk and mentioned the same joke on his next interview....

If you look around, current social and economic system fosters productivity, intellect and absence of mistakes. But if you never make mistakes, you can never learn how to think creatively. You will always be tightned to a standartized approach of solving problems. Instead, I believe if you make something not right, you really put effort and did your best, you should be rewarded. For example, my management professor gave us an example of the times when his idea resulted in big losses for a company. Nevertheless, he received a big bonus for that mistake. And I think that this is essentially what company's management should be: encourage people not to be afraid to make mistakes, not to be afraid to take risks, allow them trust their inner self. 

Finally, this blog entry has something to do with a management class that I took in college. Every week we had an opportunity to get extra credit for our exam. Only a few people got the extra credit. I never got one, even though i was motivated to receive one, because my management exams were really hard. What I've noticed is that with each missed opportunity I was less and less motivated to keep going. As well as other people in the group I was with. Some didn't even pretend they were not interested at all in completing the assignment, because just like in casino the odds of winning "extra credit" were against the bettors (on average 5 people out of 30 had a chance to get a credit, which is around 16% chance to win).

When I think about the way to improve this situation and students' motivation what comes into my mind is prof's Kurpis bonus example. His mistake was rewarded. In a similar manner, allowing a few teams to win and receive half of the credit would do a better job to motivate them, for in the future they would wish for more points. Encouraging them take a risk (even if that involves making a mistake) with two or three points of extra credit would motivate them more, especially giving the fact that three additional points wouldn't really boost one's grade when the median for exams was either 60 or 75. My next idea may sound even crazy, but giving extra credit to a group that performed the worst in case they can explain what went wrong would also motivate them to reach higher and perform better next time. the team that found the worst way out of a situation can be seen as a creative team simply because if offered its unique approach and din't follow common rules. Tomas Edison said that he discovered 1000 ways not to get electricity, but in the end he got it. He loved mistakes and kept going and essentially he came where he wanted to. 

Anyway, this is what I think. Personally, I will continue to keep wondering on the trip of my life. And i will continue making mistakes as well as learning from them. I'll keep diving for new discoveries. 

Full material about creativity can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

To Blog or Not to Blog?

To be perfectly honest, I appreciated the importance of writing this blog only until the end of the semester. Not that I don't like to write or not that I'm not a big fan of social networks, but the assignment was so challenging, that I couldn't tell from the very beginning if I was going to like it.

In general a course ends in the classroom and you hardly ever critically evaluate the information that you received. this is very common for the majority of liberal arts courses. Unlike them, science, math, finance, accaunting requires a lot of extra work. You go over the problems and you finally understand what it's all about. In a similar way my management class required a lot of brain stretching, problem-solving skills, thinking outside of the box. Having a blog was useful, because I actually had to sit and rethink what I've done, how I could do better and therefore, improve my future performance.

Another feature of this blog assignment that I truly enjoyed is ability to find out more about your classmates. If you think about social life in public schools as it is, students just meet for classes and then go to work. There's not a lot of interactions and, therefore, less possibilities to network or exchange ideas. Blogging is a way of speaking with your classmates in a less formal setting. It gave me an exposure to what other people think and how they think and I found it very useful.

However, despite the fact that we had to respond to three classmates' blogs, I felt sometimes that it was just part of everyone's routine. I didn't really notice bloggers responding to the comments, as well as I myself never responded to other people's comments on my own page. Involving into a conversation could result into new ideas, findings and discussions. And this is how I see the way to improve this blog assignment. Have less blog topics (I think that 5 is enough - I would get rid of culture shock and may be smth else), but have students collect more than 7 responses to their blog entries. It will definitely foster each student's creativity and change the way of delivering information. It should also improve virtual interactions among classmates.

Finally, meeting deadlines, I think was also a good part of this blogging exersise. In order to get a full credit we had to be consistent and organized during the entire semester. We didn't have an option to write 5 papers at a time over the weekend, which I'm actually very good at. However, motivation to receive full 20 points for this assignment was so strong that I never missed a deadline. I knew that class was not going to be easy and having some room for a grade would never heart. Again, having my grade under control allowed me to improve my time-managment skills in allocating time to different classes.

Finally, being ESL student who lived in this country for 3 years and learned english basically from the scratch allowed me better memorize terminology and concepts. Not having english classes in my curriculum anymore hurts, because I can't really practice my writting and observe how effective I am in delivering my ideas to the public. I do appreciate everyone's feedback and comments left to my blog! I read them all.

Thank you everyone, for you cooperation and for the wonderful semester!