Decision Making

      All of us have to make decisions every day. Some decisions are relatively straightforward and simple, but some are difficult. On our March 7 class we had a crazy and drastic activity on decision making. In fact, I think I didn’t learn anything about how to make decision, but a negative example. First there was one “leader” tried to start voting and write down some opinions, then more and more “leader” pop up because they had very strong opinions and wanted to be heard. After all the class become chaos until we were told only 15 minutes remain. people act when they run into a decision making conflict; 1.Compete to Win, 2. Avoidance, 3. Compromise, 4. Accommodation, 5. Collaboration. I used the Avoidance method because at that time there were more enough compete to win already. Over all I believe the collaboration method would work the best in the situation. We all have equal power to say , so it was hard to pick a real leader that make the process in order, smooth and easy. We should we could have split into groups, then collect all opinions from each group. Write down some common opinions and vote for the rest.

An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

    In the last management class, everybody was split into groups to complete a group project “the egg protecting project.” The goal was with a condition that the egg must be 50% uncovered to build a contraption to protect the egg from cracking when dropped from a height of 10 feet. That was probably one of the most interesting classes I ever attended. However it wasn't an easy task to handle though; we were told that we would have about 2 feet of masking tape, 9 straws scissor (only one) and an egg. We were given 20 minutes of planning. Even though we started with a bit disorder, then we had done some brainstorming discussion and tried to think what our contraption should look like by using these materials. We drew up nearly 3 different types of designs to use the straws and masking tape, and spent most of the planning process arguing about which plan we would use. I think our group’s weakness was in this step, we spent much of the time in here, and as a result we didn’t have enough time to test or evaluate the result.

  Overall, I think our team’s performance was good, we did everything we want and so close to the goal. What did I learn from this project? I learned how to work more efficient when we are under pressure.

Culture Shock: Education Culture!!!

 

     I am an international student from China, lived in New York for about two years. New York is known as “The melting pot of the world”. That is truth, I can’t think of a city that you can see so many people from different countries and study together other than here.

      So here is a cultural difference I have seen in the US and China. In China, the relationships between teachers and students are severe and respect. Teachers are tellers and students are listeners, students can have interaction with classmates only the teacher asked them to. In contrary, the US education more value participation and interaction in class , Americans believe we can learn more in discussion. However I prefer the way that American do

INTRO

Hi, my name is YUMING CHEN, I'm glad i have the chance to share stories and thoughts about management or leadership in the BLOG.