December 10, 2005
MGMT250 and 251
Throughout the whole semester, I have learned many concepts and useful techniques for me to build some of management knowledge and skills. I think the learning plan was a good way to understand myself better and to release my potential. I am looking forward to the MGMT 251 class to learn more knowledge about how to manage people because it is usually an important component and a difficult practice within a company. I had some experiences which I got the chances to experience some real practice with my father that I could sit next to him in the meeting with the employees. Because of this great opportunity, it made me want to learn more knowledge in the field of management.
Learning Plan feedback
I submitted my learning plan part II on December 1st to our teaching assistance Tracey Messer and I got her feedback on Thursday and met with her after class to discuss more details. She gave me some useful feedback that I was not clear sometimes how my sub-goals were related to my goals, and she also told me that I needed to read the handout carefully because there were many things that I missed in the paper. However, she said my overall structure was not bad and I just needed to improve some detailed things.
December 08, 2005
Last day
We had our last management 250 class today, and everyone got to express their feelings of this class. Just I mentioned in the class, my high points in the semester are Resume workshop, Mock Interview, and HR Simulation. Resume workshop and Mock Interview made me start to think about my future career, and I think it is a good time to start at sophomore year because that way we will have more time to prepare. Moreover, I also like the HR Simulation because we got to have some actual experiences about how to manage people before we go out to the real world. I would like to recognize my team that we always work together and share our opinions and thoughts together. It had been a great experience to work with all of them. Also I would like to specially recognize Jen, our team leader, because she always came prepared, and I would not know what was going without her. She was doing a really good job as being a team leader. In addition, I would also like to thank Professor Powley, Piderit and Tracey. I think this is a great class overall.
HR Simulation Second Year Performance
Our second year performance turned out to be good, although there were still some difficulties existed. I believe it was the sixth quarter that we faced to have to deal with the negative vacancy number for the seventh quarter. Our team did not face this situation before, so we decided to eliminiate some employees but not all of them. However, our morale and productivity went down dramatically in the next quarter's report, and it was also the first time for our team to have the morale below the average industry. We were discussing that at least we did not eliminate all of them; otherwise, we could not imagine how bad would the morale be. Therefore, when it came to decide for the eight quarter that had negative vacancy number as well, we decide not to fire any of the employees, and it turned out that our morale was still well above the average. One thing that I learned from this HR Simulation was that we had to work together as a team that could get different feedbacks from every of the team members, and also to improve or find a beeter way from the past experiences.
December 06, 2005
Tom Mendola Case
Today in the class we discussed about the Tom Mendola case in which the company should keep Tom or not. I personally think we should keep him and just to give him one more chance. He is still young, and may not realize the responsibility he has upon his family. However, the manager and supervisor should warn him that this is his last chance so that he will not take adventage of it. The machine shop foreman should be the one who tells him company's decision on him, because he was the one who noticed he had the problems that he was tardy and absent from doing his job, so he would understand the whole situation better.
November 03, 2005
HR Simulation Annual Report
We found out that everything was going well upon meeting our goals. We basically used the same strategy throughout the year to reach the goals that we set at the beginning of the first quarter. Also we compared our result with the average industry, and the result came out great. We then progressed to discuss about the annual report, and we talked about the questions together and everyone gave their opinions. It was a great team work that everyone did a good job.
November 02, 2005
Jonah Creighton Case
After reading Jonah Creighton case, I personally felt that Jonah did not use a proper way to bring this potential discrimination up. He set a meeting with Gordon instead of meeting with Diane Ford, because she was the one who was in charge with contacting international units. Moreover, he also went up to talk to Garret, director of stratefic planning and the highest ranking black person in the company, and was satisfied with his reply and support. In my opinion, I think he should contact the managers or directors of British unit directly instead of sitting there and trying to ask someone in the company. He also think that he wanted to find our what Coulding-Henson's competitors were doing in regard to minority placement, because he could then have ideas of competitors would do if the company does not hire Martin Bank. For example, the competitors might asked Martin Bank to work for their companies if we did not hire him, and if he actually had a good ability, then we might lose profits and let our competitors took this opportunity and helped them to gain thier profits. These were just few questions that came to my mind after I read though the case, but I also comment few ways on solving the problems