Decision making, making a Decision, Decision a making, confused?

Why is is so hard to make a decision? These are questions I asked myself through out the "decision processes", if that is what you want to call what we did. However, I must be real what did I really thnk was going to happen if you put 60 kids in a class to make a very vague decision. That is why the name of my blog this week is "decision making, making a decision, decision a making,confused?". Because a lot of people in our class were confused as to how we should approach this problem.

As you all know we all received our test grades back for the first exam, and lets just say we did great with the curve :) However, we were given the opportunity to change our grade around, given very limited instructions as to what we could do and what we couldn't do. We had to make a decision of how to make our next test, and what we can do to improve this test. After hearing the professor give this task I immediately knew the outcome of this proposition, "not good". I took the approach of "Accommodation" given in our slides, or seeing the issue as more important to others than yourself, allowing others to decide when your interests are not critical to you. I knew looking from the test scores that there had to be a curve for the exam, so as long as that was agreed on I knew my grade would be substantial enough. Therefore, as soon as the curve was agreed on I completely withdrew myself from the conversation and let the group take care of it. I chose this because when given that 60 people are in a class room debating, trying to get something done is nearly impossible from my point of view. Though I regret not speaking up a little more, I don't regret that partaking and getting a headache. Other methods I observed were

"Compete to win"- lots of people wanting there own ways, ignoring others ideas

Avoidance- Some people withdrew from the conversation, and joined the next day when we met again.

Compromise- Some people who got in front of the classroom and worked as a mediator aka FABIO

In order to get better results we should have took the persons original idea of breaking into groups, and coming up with separate ideas, then we could have took this decision from many approaches. We could have doubled the amount of ideas that were given, and we could have reached out to the most people this way. It is too bad we didn't listen to him when he said that, because even though our ideas were good, there is always room for improvement :)

This was a great class one of the most memorable, if you have any comments on my blog please feel free, I love the feed back. Thanks

Cheers,-Marco

Scrambled Eggs: Management Style

As you all know from a very memorable class the other day, our professor assigned us the duty of protecting an egg for survival from a 10 foot drop. Along with this egg we all had to intuitively use our natural innate skills as managers to implement a protection plan that could possible save this egg from being scrambled. Though this was an interesting task to up take,  something as simple as saving an egg can transpire in to real issues that we as aspiring managers can uptake in our careers. That is why the name of my blog this week is Scrambled Eggs: Management Style. Our professor assigned us a task under a certain time frame, were we all had to come together as a group and figure out a way to save an egg, which one day can transparent into millions of dollars. Along with egg project we had to perform 5 steps in the planning process to make sure we can achieve a unbroken egg. Below I will explain what my group utilized in these 5 steps, and also what we didn't manage to perform which could have affected our outcome.

Step 1 : Define your goal and objectives

•  Our group performed this task very well. We defined our goals and understood our 25 and 15 minute deadlines for each process. We quickly brainstormed as to what we had to work with and where we wanted to be by the end of the time session. That is why we were standing up front at the end :) 

Step2: Determine Current Status Compared to Objectives

• We performed this task as well, however we didn't completely perform them out. We all talked and knew our resources that they were limited so that we had to work with what we had. Our strengths that we had to work with was our communication skills towards each other, we were open to all ideas and were not narrow minded or stubborn as to what would work the best. However, our weakness was that we started to begin to talk science, however we felt that we were getting to technical so we decided to exclude any physics or science.

Step 3 : Develop premises and several alternative strategies

• In our group we developed 3 different types of scenarios with the given resources. We chose the one that we felt was best suitable for the time frame and what we felt would work the best. However, during this time we didn't really overlook the other topics, and unfortunately stuck with the initial plan. By doing this we limited our chances to a better outcome, and we didn't calculate the outcomes that could have come from others.

Step 4: Analyize Alternatives and make a tactical plan

• Due to the fact that our egg broke it can pretty much on it face say that we didn't perform this task in the planning process. We were not time efficient, and we were really only worried about our first idea rather then trying other scenarios that could have been achieved. However, we did make a tactical plan as to what we were implementing which I thought would make us successful.  

Step 5: Implement the plan and evaluate the results

• Like I said in some of the previous steps we were not time efficient. We did however take a planned action, and attempted to measure the progress. If that includes make the egg protection totally off from what we first sought out to do. We took to many corrective actions, and revised the plan way to many times which I felt hindered our results in the end.