Entries in the Category "250"
When you label me...
I found the whole concept of the personality testing very interesting. I was in the Student Government for high school senior year, and the moderator for the class thought it would be an interesting conversation starter amongst all the new members of the student government to do personality testing. We did the MBTI and another personality oriented designation called the Enneagram. I don’t pretend to be an expert on it and probably would fail at adequately explaining it; but I would definitely suggest you guys check it out. It’s pretty interesting.
At first, I was hesitant about the whole idea of personality testing because I felt it put you in a box, or gave you a label…the typical argument I suppose. But after going through the whole step by step process in class as closely as we did, I can now see the real value behind it. If nothing else, it assists you in analyzing what your motivations and methods are.
Sometimes I wonder how it is I came to be in the Management program at Case. In no way do I regret it, but the in-class conversations about career possibilities and interviewing does make me wonder exactly what I see myself doing in my adulthood for a career. Had you asked me three years ago what I would be doing now, I would not have said an undergraduate business student. I would have said either construction or culinary arts. Truth be told, I was between the Culinary Institute of America and Case for a college choice senior year in high school. My parents, teachers, mentors, and friends thought it would be best that I give a more conventional college education (relatively speaking of course) a try before honing in on a specific vocation such as construction or cooking.
So if you ever see me sitting in the back of the room breaking out in a cold sweat when people say they’re between equity, consulting, or other specific fields of business for a career - please understand where I am coming from. I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do with a major in business, in all honesty, but I know it gives me a lot of options and a wide preparation for most other fields that I may choose to get involved in.
Introductory Entry
Although it sounds rather cliché, I honestly did not know what to expect at the beginning of MGMT 250. I could tell rather quickly from the books that we had to order the class would be covering the different aspects of human relations, but how we would progress in class was another matter entirely. We jumped right into the material with the opening class material when we were assigned the “Strategy that Wouldn’t Travel” memo. The memo illustrated what I had been taught since I was a kid; don’t mess with organized labor. It is a bad decision for all involved. I have been involved in the construction industry since I was a little kid. My dad is a general contractor and has held various big title jobs that I have been involved with, at some level, as an employee of his firm. I also took Construction Management courses at Drexel University in Philadelphia over the summer. In our classes we would meet with both CM’s (construction managers) and union bosses, who would share their work experience with us. As a class, we also visited the site of the Comcast Tower, the biggest construction project and soon to be the tallest skyscraper in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Our visit on the site coincided with a strike that the local plumber’s union was engaged in concerning the use of waterless urinals in the skyscraper’s public bathrooms. Yes, hundreds of plumbers had in fact walked off the job site because of urinals.
But therein lays the point. If a manager, in this case the CM of the jobsite and the executives in charge of financing and leasing are not in touch with their workforce, major problems will eventually ensue. Karen should have worried more about her workers then her policies or company protocol. Policy or protocol will never and have never solved a problem in any period of history. It is always people. That is the most important tool I took away from my years of construction experience and something that I will probably repeat in class consistently. It is not to be repetitive, I assure you. It is because I believe the biggest flaw in business as it is practiced today, is that we, as members of the business world, tend not to focus on the human aspect. We forget what makes businesses great; not the technology, the supply chains, the advertisements, but the creative and resourceful people behind the scenes making it all happen.
In no way am I trying to condemn the current business models of the world, but instead hope to emphasize the fact that through my experiences the managers who focus on their workforce and the people their business affects will yield the most goodwill and the most profit. My fellow classmates brought this up as well when we discussed the importance of older workers in a company. But I will discuss that at another time.