Mike's "Vision" Statement

Besides attending Baruch full-time, I work full-time and am married with no kids.
I have 3 goals for after my graduation:

• To move up within my own company. I will do this by using the extra time in my day that I now use for school to take on more work responsibilities and job-related training.

• To gain higher-level experience that I can use to get a job at a smaller company than the one at which I currently work. I am interested in leveraging my experiences to create new IT Operations systems and procedures for a growing company.

• I want to start a family with my wife.

The ultimate goal for me is for my wife and I to be able to raise a family. Everything else I do will comes from and is motivated by this desire and once I graduate, I will finally have the time to be a Dad. I can't wait...

There are many different ways to handle conflict situations like the one we were placed in last Monday. Listed below are 5 ways people handle conflict:
Compete to win
Assertiveness to get one’s own way.
Avoidance
Withdrawal; used when there’s “no chance of winning.”
Compromise
Used with decision making under pressure; all members are equal.
Accommodation
Seeing issue as more important to others than self.
Collaborating
Requires bargaining and negotiation among group.
Multiple group insights required.

Thinking back truthfully, I feel that the way I handled it was Avoidance. It was frustrating when I wanted to let my opinion be known because there were so many other opinions being shouted out by everyone at the same time that I felt like I would be wasting my breath. I felt my own voice would just add more noise and not do anything to further our progress.
When our classmate tried to leave and our professor urged him to stay, he said he wanted to leave because he felt this whole thing was pointless and we weren getting anywhere. In that moment he voiced the exact frustration I was feeling up to that point: there were so many people in the class who were being totally unreasonable with their demands and others who were shouting down classmates who 'dared' to disagree and the whole thing seemed like it was going nowhere. When the professor told him he should stay, a classmate and I suddenly had an "A-ha!" moment and figured out that this was a decision-making exercise and the whole situation was set up to test how we go about handling the conflict.
Thankfully we were led very ably by the two students who got up in front of the class to lead the discussions and we got the job done. There were many students shouting that someone else should go up to the whiteboard to take over and urging each other to go up to the front but luckily the guys who were up there were able to keep the group on the right track and prevent chaos from taking over.

In the future, I would choose to use collaboration to come up with the answer. I would maybe break the room up into smaller groups to come up with suggested solutions and then put them up on the board and eliminate the ones that won't work while working to improve the ones we think will work. I would also choose leaders similar to the ones we had who are strong and fair and work not by telling people what to do but by reminding them of the task and keeping them organized and on the right track.

"Shelden the Egg" Gets Dropped

Recently in class we were asked to form teams and design a container that will stop an egg from breaking when it's dropped from about six feet. Our rules were that we could only use 8 straws and about 3 feet of masking tape and had to leave more than 50% of the egg visible.

Our team named our egg "Shelden" and created a container to protect him. Unfortunately, when we dropped our egg he cracked.
Now I want to review my group's methods and “Steps in the Planning Process” to see if I can find what went wrong.

Here are the steps:

Step 1. Define your goals and objectives
Know where you want to go; understand your deadlines. Be specific enough so that you will know you have arrived when you get there and/or how far off you are along the way.
Step 2. Determine your resources and current status vis-á-vis objectives
Know where you stand in reaching the objectives from the start; identify resources, group strengths that work in your favor and group weaknesses that can hold you back.
Step 3. Develop several alternative strategies
Generate alternative scenarios for what may happen; identify for each scenario things that may help or hinder progress toward your objectives. Evaluate alternatives to assess strengths and weaknesses of each.
Step 4. Make a tactical plan
Choose the action alternative most likely to accomplish your objectives; describe what specifically must be done to implement this course of action; allocate jobs/roles throughout the team.
Step 5. Implement the plan and evaluate results
Take the planned action; measure progress toward objectives as implementation proceeds; take corrective actions and revise plan as needed.

• Which of the “Steps in the Planning Process” listed above did your team actually go through?

Step 1-Yes, our goals and objectives were very clear.
Step 2-Yes, we were clear on our resources and status.
Step 3-Yes, we formulated several strategies, evaluated them and eventually came up with a design that incorporated the best of each and reduced or removed the weaknesses.
Step 4-Yes, we created a tactical plan.
Step 5-Yes, we implemented the plan and evaluated the results. Our egg cracked only slightly, so I think we were all confident that we were on the right track and would be able to make changes that would greatly increase the chance that our egg would emerge from the drop unscathed.

• Which did you bypass? Why?

We did not bypass any of the steps.

• How do your evaluate your team’s ultimate performance given the effectiveness of your planning?

I was happy with our overall performance considering it was our first time working together but I imagine we would have done much better in subsequent exercises.

• How could you have been more effective as a group in the planning of your task?

I believe we could have been even more effective in our planning if we were more efficient in our development of alternative strategies. There was a lot of time wasted by many in our group going over unrealistic designs or designs that violated the rules. Many people were advocating their designs even after most of the group agreed the design would not work.
I'm wondering: Did other groups experience the same thing?