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.
I was a member of the top group and so you know there was 13 goat bucks in our stack. We were going to give it out the groups at the end but when you guys came up and tried selling the slogans we kept them for ourselves because they were not a part of the profit and honestly we were kinda pissed. I will admit I was not a good manager nor is it my major thankfully because I should probably change it if it was. I think that anyone in that class that would have been in the same situation would have done no better given they had the same level of inexperience as we did. The exercise was to show how people are motivated and how even when we thought we were good managers we were definitely not according to our peers. It showed me a lot about my people skills and how hard it is to be a manager. I just hope everyone got the same amount of critique out of this exercise as I did.
ReplyDeleteIt was quite interesting that the exercise was designed to run horribly. I think its worked this way because we are all successful students. So is this the reason why corporations run better? Because they employ people who aren't very intelligent?
ReplyDeleteAlso being a member of the top group, I would have to agree with Savanna. At first, I thought we did a pretty good job at managing, however it was obvious there were other opinions. I would have to argue the point though, that we were very inexperience, as anyone else in class would have been also. I could probably agree that I may have felt the same as you, if I would have been in the bottom group. I think that it is very easy to play the blame game in a situation like this and that is one of the big problems we have. today. All in all, I think it is really hard to truly understand each level without being in that position. I wonder how other people would have done the top group any differently. I think this activity was actually one of my favorites because problems aside, it really helped me understand the concept of management.
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