December 12, 2006
Mgmt 250
Last Thursday, I got a new puppy. He is a purebred Pitt Bull named Hank, and he is the sweetest thing ever. He's very cute, and has blue eyes, chews on everything, and eats and poops a lot. A big challenge for me now is training him. Training a puppy is a lot like training employees. First of all, it is impossible to go into training a puppy without knowing a lot about it. Training employees, too, takes a lot of education before anyone can be ready to do it on their own. Training a puppy is all about giving them positive reinforcement when they are good and negative reinforcement when they are bad. It is important to let puppies learn from their own mistakes. Training employees is the same way. You can try to tell them how to do it, but the important part is letting them do the job and letting them know when they do something good or do something bad. Employees also become stronger by making mistakes and learning from them. It is easy to coddle a puppy, and it is also easy to coddle employees and do things for them when they are having trouble doing it on their own. And, most importantly, I need to house train Hank. I will also need to make sure that my employees don't poop on the floor.
Mgmt 250
I really look forward to being able to run my own business. I really enjoy exercising my leadership skills, and I haven't been able to recently because going to college and having two horses takes up a lot of my time. In high school, though, I was part of an organization called The B'nai B'rith Youth Organization. It is a Jewish youth group divided into chapters where we run our own programs, go to conventions, and do thing to be ative members in the Jewish Community. I held many leadership positions in this chapter like MIT-Mom, S'ganit, and N'siah. The position of MIT-Mom is the vice presidency of recruitment, retention, and re-education. I developed many skills with finding people for our chapter, keeping people going to programs, and making sure everyone knows about BBYO. I would say that this would be the HR position of the chapter. S'ganit is the vice president of programming. In this position, I did a lot of delegating of responsibilities by finding people to plan programs. Delegating responsibility is a good skill to have for running a business. The N'siah of a chapter is the president. My biggest responsibility in this position was running the other seven people on the executive board. Making sure that everyone does what they are supposed to and doing all of the other random things that need to be done is the biggest thing that the owner of a business needs to do. I also got to work closely with all of the other positions, so I got practice doing things like the responsibilities of my previous positions, plus Jewish heritage, managing the budget, recording minutes from meetings, and writing newspapers. All of these things will help me a lot in my management career.
Mgmt 250
I just recently wrote my final learning plan, and I didn't like the assignment very much. This paper is worth a good portion of our grade, and it doesn't have much to do with management. This seems more like a paper I would write for a guidance counselor. Although I think it is a good idea to lay out our goals for the future, I don't feel it should be done for a grade in this class.I don't do very well with the touchy-feely "tell me about your life" papers. Since I am an introvert, I'd rather keep that information to myself and not discuss it with other people. I wish more of our assignments could be about management, not our life.
Mgmt 250
Up until recently, I had thought that the HR simulation had been going well. My team has still been working well together, and we do our assignments and write our papers well. But, Brandon, the team leader, noticed that our choices for the incidents didn't go through the system properly. The letter choices were different on our sheet from the choices in the system, so all of the choices we made came out as different choices. It upsets me that a lot of the work that we put into our project didn't even matter. Since the incidents in the project were the only qualitative decisions we made, that means that the only decisions that counted were the quantitative decisions.
Mgmt 250
I think our discussion about recruitment of employees was very interesting. We discussed how old people generally make better employees than younger people. I can see why this is true, because my grandpa always tells me about how important having a good work ethic is. But, although my grandpa has a good work ethic, he is also kind of crazy. If my grandpa had gotten a new job a few years ago when he was a bit younger, he would have been a great asset to the company for ten years or so. But, then he would have gone crazy. And I don't think it would be very easy to fire him. They couldn't just say "Sandy, I need to fire you now because you've gotten too crazy to work for us." Nontheless, old people are good workers for a limited period of time.
November 10, 2006
Mgmt 250
We recently did a lot of discussing about training. Learning training methods can be very important for a company. There are many things to take into consideration, like learning styles. Employers must understand the different kinds of learning styles, and what learning styles their specific employees might have. For example, people who work with computers might be more convergers. People who do work behind desks might be more divergers or accomodators. Another thing to take into consideration is how the specific skills for each jobs would be better taught. Some jobs might be best taught with experience, others might work well if they use reading or verbal training. An employer needs to know not just the different methods but what kinds of things they can apply to.
Mgmt 250
One thing I don't understand about this class is the way that they grade. I've written many papers in this class, and with each paper I've tried to change my writing to conform to what the professors want. But, each paper I get back I get a bad grade on. There are some things that they always want that I am not inclined to use, like subheadings. What bothers me the most, though, is how strict they are with the paper answering each and every question they ask. I've always learned that when there are questions in an assignment, the questions are supposed to be used as guidelines. Once I realized that in this class I need to answer every question they ask thoroughly, I did so, but they still said that I didn't answer some of the questions. If there are two questions that are almost the same thing, I will answer both in one idea and get points off for not answering the other question. Sometimes I will blatantly answer a question and get feedback that I did not answer the question. I think these professors are being a bit too anal about this.