Archives for the Month of September 2006 on Matthew Gardner's Online Journal
My First MGMT 250 Entry: Decisions, Decisions
Hey now, everyone. This is my second attempt at the first entry of my MGMT 250 blog...I was wise enough to accidentally delete the old one. Well, you know how this works: what I lose in patience, you lose in details. Definitely a lose-lose situations. Consider it 30 seconds of your life you just got back. What makes an appropriate first entry in my blog. What is a worthwhile first topic for an assignment whose guidelines state simply that the entries must relate to the class. With an assignment so open-ended, how can I decide the best place to start? Decisions, decisions.
This reminds me of a situation I was in for another of this class's assignments, the "My Values" exercise. From a list of 40 or so "values," we were supposed to select our top 15, reduce it to our top 10 and then rank our top five values. This assignment was probably expected to take no more than 20 minutes, yet it took me nearly 90. Something about limiting myself to the values listed on a sheet of paper just didn't sit well with me, especially when my top value was not listed. I have never sat around, trying to sort my values to determine which means the most to me. I'd like to think that I hold all values equally strong and in doing so would always strive to live to the requirements of the values. If this was the case, the only way to rank the values is by measuring the requirements to fulfill a life supporting the particular value. The other way to look at it is through my perspective of which values are most necessary for achieving a certain quality of life. At any rate, the result was my difficultly in determining my values. Given my indifference of choosing one value over another, I realize now I critical flaw in my management of the situation. I spent four and a half times as long as any one else on the assignment as a result of my indecisiveness. That's four and a half times more for something I cared less about. I realize now that there is some importance to making a choice for the sake of making one. The time I wasted carefully evaluating each value was not worth the result I got for making sure I made the absolute right choice. Time is a precious commodity. If I am not carefully monitoring my use of time, I'm wasting the one thing I can not get back. Indecisive management is a huge obstacle in the efficiency of businesses. It doesn't matter if I determine the best way to capitalize on a certain market if a competitor already stole a significant portion of the market share while you were thinking.