Wed

I don't know what we are exactly supposed to blog about. The presentations went well. The group that gave out cookies was my personal favorite due to obvious reasons.

Presentation on Monday

I felt that our presentation went well. The only thing I would do different is stand in a different spot. After i gave my part in the presentation i got stuck in the corner and I could not get out. That was a tight spot. 

Power

Last class we talked about what gives a person power and what types of power someone can wield. When we were discussing it, i thought back to last summer when I was a camp counselor. I started to think what kind of power I had over the young kids I was put in charge of. I definitely had legitimate power over the kids due to my position but some of the  kids usually did not notice that. So i had to rely on Coercive power. If a kid continued to misbehave, I had the power to apply punishment (it usually was a timeout, a talk with my boss, decrease in pool time, or no seconds for lunch). Thinking back i had to really on this power a lot for some of them.  I also had a co-counselor. It was his first year and he generally followed my lead because I had more experience working there. I held expert power power over him even though by the third week of so he became used to the way things were run, so by then my expert power became almost obsolete.

Simulation revisited

On Monday we discussed what had a occurred during the exercise. During the class everyone played the blame game and other people had no idea what had happened. The top group was mad at everyone else and thought they did a pretty good job. Being from the bottom group, their management skills were not that good. They probably did an equal amount of work as everybody else but they had a lot more time to work while the bottom had a limited amout of time to do work plus they were not very clear with their proposal on pay. And I did not realize that they got a stack of goat bucks at the beginning, I wonder how many were in the stack?

Dr. Goates's theory of why some student go against the system was interesting. Students who get good grades will go with the flow while students with worse grades will stray from the path.

Made to Stick: Booke report 5

In the last Section of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors take all the parts in the last chapters and put it all together for the reader. They take the main idea of each chapter tell the reader how to use all of these together to make an idea stick. These five things are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story. These five things are very important in creating an idea, without one of these elements the whole idea could fail in some way.

            In this section the authors talk about “villains” that can destroy an idea. One villain is focusing on the speaker more than the message. Know that it is still beneficial to be a good charismatic speaker but the listener has to forget about how well the speaker is doing and needs to focus on the message. The next villain is the Curse of knowledge. When someone tries to speak they tend to communicate as if the audience is themselves. Getting past the curse of knowledge is important in all aspects of organizational behavior. If a manager is trying to communicate with one of the people he/she is in charge of and the manager has several more years of experience, he/she is going to have to put themselves in the shoes of the listener. If the manager does not do this than the message he or she is conveying will be lost and the problem will be right back to square one. Another example is if a CEO tells the company’s employees that their job is to “maximize shareholder value”. Now to the CEO that makes perfect sense but to a simple employee that idea is way too abstract. It is important to observe the world around you because it holds more sticky ideas than a single creative person. The next villain is decision paralysis. This can affect anyone in almost all aspects of organizational behavior. When giving information it important to make your idea more precise by stressing a couple main ideas instead of touching on several ideas. A lawyer will do this during the closing arguments. Instead of stressing ten arguments, the lawyer needs to only focus on the strongest couple of ones.

            It takes time to master these five things so you can avoid the “villains”. Using this SUCCES strategy will make ideas stickier. Keeping idea simple and to the core will make the idea more understandable. Making your presentation of the idea unexpected will keep the audience’s attention.  Making your idea concrete will allow the listener to easily picture what you are saying and it keeps an idea from being abstract. You may be an expert but the people in your audience are not. Make sure your information to support your idea comes from a credible source or your audience will be less inclined to believe and accept your idea. Keep your message emotional; make the audience care about your idea. Finally surround your idea in a story; it will keep your listeners attention and will be easier to convey your idea. Using these five ways to make idea sticky can be used in all aspects of a person’s daily life.

Class and Goat Bucks

So class on Monday was more or lees confusing and annoying. I was in one of the bottom groups and for the first half hour we just sat in the dark basement waiting to be contacted. My group and another group were tired of waiting so we sought out our middle level adviser. When we eventually found her she was waiting for the level above her to give her information so we left without learning anything.

When we eventually got the information we needed which was about 20 mins before the end of class we felt rushed frustrated and confused and when we finally finished with ten minutes left the top level had all the slogans they needed and were on there way to meet with the other group (I don't remember their name but they were the ones in charge of giving out the goat bucks). I was a little agitated but my one member in my team was furious so he decided take the several slogans we had made and decided to bypass the upper levels and sell to the other group directly.

We sold our slogans at a cheaper price than the top level slogans and mad out with seven bucks total we split it up as evenly as we could with our middle level supervisor then we left. I ended making two goat bucks and i hope everyone in the class got at least one, if you did not get one I will happily give you one.

Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. report 4

            In the next two chapters of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors explain two more aspects to making your ideas stickier. These two aspects are emotion and stories. Adding these two things two the rest of the book can help your ideas to stick.

            The authors go to explain what the word “emotion” means in the context of making one’s ideas more likely to stick: it means getting people to care for your idea or cause. The authors use a test done on several people to elaborate their message. The test subjects were separated into two groups and were given an irrelevant test and for their participation they were given five dollars in one dollar bills. Before they were able to leave they were given a brown envelope from a charity organization. Each group’s envelope was from the same charity but the way the message was delivered differed from the two groups. Group one’s message was presented with a lot of facts and statistics while the second group was given a picture of a little girl and an explanation how their money can help little children like her get food. The testers then averaged out each group’s own average of donations. Groups one’s average was $1.18 but group two’s average was $2.48. Once you get emotions involved in your message than your idea is more likely to stick and you’re more likely to get a better response from your audience. The authors then reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how this can help with getting people to care. He then uses an example to show how to use Maslow’s triangle to motivate or get people to care about something. A company wants to tell its employees that is offering a one thousand dollar bonus if they meet performance targets. In doing this the company hopes that this will increase worker productivity. There are three ways the company can present this; the first two involve spending that extra thousand dollars on some material object and saving it for future use. The third way is to tell its employees that this $1000 means that the company values you as an asset to the company and recognizes your job performance. Most people who answered this question picked the third way. By doing this a company positively affects the employee’s self-esteem which is higher on Maslow’s triangle than the physical reward promised in the first two ways.  But when asked the question in reverse; what do you think someone else would prefer to hear? Most people chose the first way. Many people feel that they are motivate by self-esteem while others are motivated by down payments. The third way invokes emotion into the employee while the other two are analytical and invoke little to no emotion (plus they are also pretty obvious) into the person which cause them to care less.

            The next aspect the authors talked about is using stories to get an idea to stick. The authors used examples to explain how stories surround a central idea that is easily sticks to the mind of the listener. In class we read an article about the nacirema people which talked about their strange culture with plenty of descriptive examples. Then after you read it you find out that this article is actually critiquing American culture (nacirema spelled backwards in American). The main idea of the article is that American culture is very strange once you take a step back from it and look at it from the outside.  The author covered his main idea in a story that stuck in the readers mind. This is a prime example that shows how an idea embedded in a story is a great way to transmit and idea.

            The authors show how these two stratagies can make people care about an idea and how to make an idea easy to listen to. Using emotion and stories and help make your ideas stick.