December 04, 2005
Learning Plan
The more and more that I continue to think about my learning plan, the more I want to continue change it. I continue to have problems distinguishing between career goals and life goals. Sometimes, I even think of it as my diary and want to write on and on about my life and how I’m going to fix them. I am really happy that we have to write this for class, because it is forcing me to think about other areas in my life, but I also find it hard to write this because it seems impersonal, because it is only dealing with concrete things. But I was able to create some diagrams out of my goals and my paper continues to look better and better. Is anyone else having problems?
To fire or Keep
Last week, we faced a difficult decision in our HR Simulation. We all know the situation: who do you fire or give a written warning to: the manager accused of sexual harassment or his subordinate that lied on her resume. Both are grounds to be fired. The female did get very good reviews, but she lied. I believe that they both don’t have a case to argue that they didn’t do this. Because the two offences separate would have caused both of their firing, putting these two employees together, doesn’t change the situation to have only one of them fired. In our group we were split. Two of us wanted to fire both, the other two to fire the manager and written warning to the girl, and the last to not fire anyone. Who knows what the right decision was? I guess we’ll see.
Punishment v. Discipline
Punishment, when it comes to the workplace, can be considered ultimately as just getting the boot: fired. However, there is more apparent punishment when you don’t get that raise you thought you deserved, or you’re not getting as much money based on sales.
There can also be discipline such as a warning, talking to the supervisor. I would think that even evaluations and follow ups for that if performance isn’t where it should be would go under here. There is more social pressure with discipline to do better, than punishment which is more monetary.
December 03, 2005
4 credit class
There are many language classes that shouldn’t be considered a 4 credit class because they have included a one-hour online lab on there. However, many teachers don’t actually use it and the ones that do, don’t really keep track of it as part of our grade. But the class continues to be 4 credit hours.
Management 250 should go up for consideration to become a 4 hour credit class. Our teams meet for at least an hour every week to complete everything we need for the HR Simulation. We had a lot of readings in the class, especially during the middle of the semester, and having 4 credit hours would make it easier.
Feedback
I forget when we were talking about class evaluations but I wanted to talk about a couple of ways to improve the system so the feedback is more relevant.
1. If we had mid semester feedback sheet, I know I would provide more feedback. At the end of the year, with everything else going on, I don’t remember as much detail about the class. Also if I think I’m getting a good grade, I won’t remember the things that I was frustrated and weren’t working during the entire semester. Does anyone else agree with this?
2. Class evaluations should also be given at the beginning of the class, so the length of the class doesn’t depend on how fast we finish our evaluations. We would still have class afterwards, so students would put more time in and giving more examples.
November 06, 2005
Career Interview
For my learning plan I decided to interview two people from the finance world but in two different divisions: investing and accounting. I really enjoyed the interview with my boss, Dave, on investing. I have been interning with him for about three months and have really enjoyed the experience. Dave had worked almost 25 jobs by the time he was 25. There was a time in his life where he was living out of a suitcase with little money trying to find a job in a foreign city. It amazes me that he was able to find a job that lead to an investing job at Morgan Stanley and he now owns his own business and loves it. He is the first successful entrepreneur that I have met, and I learned a little bit about all the paperwork that are needed to be kept on file as well as different licenses he needs. Now he is a acquiring a license to be able to sell life insurance to his clients. I don’t know if owning my own business is something that I want but I understand all the benefits as well as the disadvantages.
Leadership vs. Management
I am currently reading the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and I found some great thought on the differences between leadership and management. “Management is a bottom line focus: how can I best accomplish certain things?” Leadership determines what needs to be accomplished. Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis describe “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things” Sometimes we are so busy trying to be managers and just reach a goal without really evaluation if that goal is right. Effective leadership is more necessary than ever. We need more a vision of the end. It is easier to come up with what needs to be done after but a lot of thinking needs to be done first. It seems that with this management class we are truly learning how to manage. We are not really taught how to be leaders but rather just go through the motions so that we can do all the readings, homework, group work and on time. This takes up so much time that as students we never have the opportunity to think why we are doing all of this and to truly reflect. We don’t have time.