In Class Case Analysis

For this post, I would like to provide feedback on the racing case we worked on in class.  I also found this analysis very beneficial and interesting.  I found it interesting because it related to a sport, which motivated me to go into the deepest form of analysis I could.  I also found it interesting because I thought it related in a way to gambling, in the sense that if they raced they put their reputation and sponsorships on the line, and if they did not race they chose not to gamble and had very little risk.  I can relate personally to this article because I am an avid Texas Hold Em poker player, and find myself going through the same analysis very often throughout the course of the game.  Every time I get dealt a hand, I have to decide whether I want to play my cards, or fold my hand.  Before I do so, I go through a cost/benefit analysis very similar to what we did in class for this assignment.  I take into account how much money I could make, and how much money I could lose if things should not go my way.  I evaluate the variables that can have an effect on my outcome, just like we did for those that could have had a possible effect on the racing teams' outcome. 

I found this article beneficial because it gave me the opportunity to sharpen my decision making skills.  With sharper decision-making skills, I can benefit at the poker tables, in the class room, and in the business world.  Also, I feel that this exercise helped us to become a better and stronger team.  We had to consider everyone's opinion when making decisions, which again I feel will be very beneficial when working on the major group project.

Analyzing the Case Assignment

For this blog, I would like to briefly comment on the case analysis project that we had to complete.  The article was about a corporate CEO who came into a new company with the intent of rejuvenating its sub-par operations.  To do so, he developed a super team, which brought him and the company success for a few years.  Eventually, however, this success ended and his team was in shambles.  At this point, he had to make the executive decision of whether to pick up the pieces and put his team back together, or jump ship completely and search for a new team.  This dilemma was the subject of our paper, and we chose that he should attempt to save his team.

I do not want to copy my essay for this post, so I decided to talk about my opinion of the assignment instead.  I thought the assignment was very interesting and beneficial.  I found it interesting because it highlighted key issues we heard about in the classroom and presented them in a real life scenario that we all may relate to at one point or another in our future business careers.  I also found the assignment because we had to incorporate ideas as a team, which was the subject of the article.  I found the assignment beneficial because after reading about the problems within Peter's team, we had to think critically and devise solutions that we think will mend his broken team.  If we were able to think of solutions for his teams' problems, we will have no trouble handling the solving of problems within our own final project teams.  In my mind, this will make working with my team, and the project in general, much easier to manage and complete.  These problem solving skills that we utilized in this assignment will also be very beneficial when we enter the corporate world, and make us that much more valuable to our employers.

Real team(work)

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After reading the article that discussed the team performance curve, I totally agree with the characteristic of the different types of teams that were described on the curve, and I thought it would be interesting to relate the curve to the spaghetti and gum drop project we did in class.  After reading the part of the article that described the different types of teams, I wanted to categorize the team I was on into one of the teams on the curve.  I knew we were more than a working group because we all shared a common goal or objective, and that was to receive extra credit for the class.  Similarly, we shared another goal of developing a structure that would hold a decent amount of weight, and looked aesthetically pleasing.  We were not really concerned about the height of the structure.  After carefully analyzing the characteristics of each type of team in the article, I came to the conclusion that our team from class fit the "real team" classification.  This type of team is a small group of individuals committed to a common purpose and working approach, and holds themselves mutually accountable for the result.  In our team, the goal was to get extra credit.  Also, we all had a very similar working approach in that we needed to build some form of square object that had as many crossing sections as possible so it could hold the most weight.  Also, each member took acceptedaccountability if something did not turn out right.  For example, we wanted to put a steeple type design on the top of our structure, but unfortunately it did not stay attached and that portion crumbled.  Once this happened, no one pointed the finger at anyone.  The person who designed the piece held themselves accountable because they felt they could have built the piece better.  The rest of the group held themselves accountable for reasons such as: I should have given the person building the piece a pile of materials to use to make it easier for them, or I should have helped more in attaching the piece, or I should have switched chairs with the person making the steeple so they could have been closer to the main project.

Although we did not win the competition, signs of positive teamwork were prevalent.  I think these signs are more important than the extra credit because if we worked well as a team for this first assignment, I'm convinced that the same will occur when we work on the real project.  Who knows, maybe our team will even climb the ranks to the level of "high-performance team" by the time the final project is complete

rethinking groupthink

So for this post I am going to briefly comment on the article entitled "Groupthink."  This article describes this term as a type of conformity in which members of the group abandon their own beliefs and ideas to conform to those of their leader or colleagues.  The author states that the main reason the members of the group do this is to avoid being too harsh in their judgments of others' ideas.  The author then gives a laundry-list of examples in which he takes a decision that went wrong in the past, and credits the negative outcome to groupthink.  Once I read one of his examples, I began to disagree with the remainder of what he had to say in the article.

The example I am pertaining to is under the "morality" section, where he criticizes the members of President Johnson's cabinet of ignoring their own individual ethical and moral values in order to adhere to those of the group when selecting targets for bombing in Vietnam.  Johnson's cabinet had a protocol for selecting the targets, in which they considered the military advantage, the risk to aircraft and pilots, the danger of forcing other countries into fighting, and the danger of heavy Vietnamese civilian casualties.  The author claims groupthink is present in this situation because everyone followed this procedure, instead of individually deciding based on their own morals.  Let me first start by saying that this is probably the biggest stretch of an argument I've read so far this semester.  Later in the paragraph, the author admits that the evidence supporting his claim is "scant", so even he knows his argument is not legitimate.  Next, let me say that since this article was written in the early 1970's, it is easy to point the finger and place the blame on his cabinet because the article is written in hind-sight.  If the author was sitting in the room making the bombing target decisions, his groupthink theory would not have even crossed his mind because he would agree to follow the procedure.  However, since Vietnam was, and still is a very controversial topic, he saw the overall failure of the war and any decisions made during the war as supposed support to his groupthink theory .  It was a good attempt, but personally I did not buy it.  Finally, the four step procedure Johnson's cabinet used to select bomb targets seemed pretty legitimate to me.  They considered the safety of their own troops, the inhabitants of other countries, and the civilians in Vietnam.  I'm not sure about you, but this sounds pretty moral to me.  If individual members were to follow their own morals in making decisions, I'm pretty sure these four factors would have been their main concerns anyway, so I do not see why it was a big deal that the group as a whole felt the same way.  If you ask me, I think the author was immoral for trying to use Johnson's cabinet as a scapegoat for his theory when he even admits there was very little evidence to support his groupthink claim.

Dealing with Failure

So for this blog, I decided to discuss the Harvard Business Review article about handling failure in the workplace.  In today’s fast-paced world, failure is bound to happen to everyone at some point.  I don't know about you, but I have never met a perfect person who has never failed at anything.  In summary, this article breaks humans down into three main categories, based on how they handle failure.  The first category is extrapunitive, where individuals can be found blaming others for their failure.  For example, if a partner of an accounting firm takes a vacation during busy season, and does not complete his client's audit on time, he may blame his staff accountants for the failure.  The second category is those who are intropunitive, who blame themselves for their failures.  The final category is impunitive, who just denies the blame all together.  The three categories are then broken down into subcategories, but I won't bore you with those details as you have most likely already read the article and are perfectly aware of what they are.

Let me first start off by saying that I like how the article gives tips on how to better cope with failure.  I think they are very useful in helping an individual improve their personality.  I also like how they developed the categories of how people react (which I mentioned in the first paragraph).  Also, I think it is important that individuals be aware of which category they fall into, because it might not be the one they think they should be in.

I chose to blog about this article because I wanted to quickly relate it to my psychology class from last semester.  Last spring, we took a personality test that identified what kind of locust of control we possessed.  With this test, one could receive either an internal locust of control, meaning they take responsibility for their own actions, or an external locust, meaning  they do not take responsibility for the outcome of their actions.  I took this test, and my results showed I had an internal locust of control, which I found very accurate because I do not usually blame others for my own failures.  I think this relates to the failure article we had to read because how individuals react to failure, as represented by the three categories in the article, is a direct representation of their locust of control.   The extrapunitive and impunitive categories would have external locusts of control, because they either blame others, or deny blame completely.  The intropunitive category would have an internal locust of control, because they end up blaming themselves for their failures.

Well that's it for this blog.  Once again, I hope you enjoyed it.  If you were in the honors psychology with me last spring, I hope I didn't bring up any bad memories!

Is a high G.P.A the only way to get hired?

As a freshman accounting major, one of my ultimate goals is to go into my senior year already have a confirmed job as a result of an internship from the summer of my junior year.  Now that I am actually a junior, it is time to turn my dream into reality.  If I want to land an internship for the summer of my junior year, resumes, recruitment, and interviews are three areas that will become repeated themes of my junior year.  With that being said, two of the readings really sparked my attention. 

The first was the New York Times article about the role one's G.P.A plays in the employment recruitment process.  In this article, Mr. Johnny C. Taylor, senior vice president of HR IAC/InterActiveCorp, claims that in his mind, a student's G.P.A. is the single-most important factor in evaluating job-seekers.  He also claims that an applicant's G.P.A will be the best indicator of that person's performance in his or her beginning stages with the organization.  Granted that not all companies are like this, the number of companies who are is steadily increasing as times passes on.  According to the article, among those in favor of Mr. Taylor's idea are public accounting firms.  As an accounting major, this immediately raised a red flag, and I gained an even deeper interest in what this article had to say.

To start off, I completely disagree with Mr. Taylor's belief that a student's G.P.A. is the most important factor when evaluating that individual for employment.  I also disagree with his claim that no factor will predict early job performance than one's G.P.A.  First off, while I do believe that G.P.A is important, it is not nearly as important as it is being made out to be in the beginning of this article.  A G.P.A., in my mind, tells very little about a person.  A person with a high G.P.A is thought-of as smart, which is not always the case.  The recruiter does not know how an individual's grade point average got that high.  For all the recruiter knows, the student could have cheated on his or her work to get their G.P.A. that high.  Also, while intelligence is a big part of employment, it is not everything.  This is especially true for the accounting industry.  This field is one where the accountants have to constantly interact with clients to perform their necessary duties.  In order to do so, a person needs to have social skills.  Also, the accounting profession requires top notch organizational and time management skills.  If an employer bases their decision solely on a student's G.P.A, they do not know how the student ranks in terms of communication, organization, and time management.  A brilliant individual who possesses no social skills will be useless in the world of public accounting.  Instead, if an employer took into account other factors such as campus involvement, previous work experience, and leadership, they will have a clearer picture of the employee they are hiring.  These areas will show employers who a person really is.  By looking at these areas, a recruiter could learn about a person's social skills based on campus involvement, or about one's leadership abilities based on leadership positions they held in college.  Also, I feel that if intelligence and grade point average were the main points in the recruitment process, why does every accounting firm send you to training for the first few weeks?  If a person has a high G.P.A, shouldn't they know how to do what they're supposed to?

For the reasons I just mentioned, I disagree with Mr. Taylor.  Instead, I feel as though a student's G.P.A is their way of "getting their foot in the door" with the company they are interested in, especially since it is near the top of a resume.  Regardless of what the G.P.A is, it should spark an interest with the recruiter.  If it is high, they will want to read on to see the other areas of your resume.  Also, if one has a low grade point average and chooses not to put it, an employer will be curious to discover why, just as the article says.  The latter part of that statement alone is evidence that G.P.A is not everything when it comes to recruitment.  If it was, and a resume had no G.P.A listed, why would the article mention individuals who got interviews without listing their G.P.A. because it was sub-par?

 Finally, the beginning of the second article I wread also supports my claim that G.P.A should not be the only factor a recruiter considers when evaluating potential employees.  This beginning of this article, entitled "Personality Plus," tells the story of Alexander Nininger, a member of the 57th Infantry of the United States Army in the Philippines during World War II.  He graduated at the top of his West Point Class (obviously a high G.P.A), and enjoyed sipping tea in front of a fireplace. The article then goes on to say that Alexander becomes a "Rambo" type figure on the battle field; killing many enemies while suffering from several different wounds.  The article then gives a hypothetical example about assembling a ferocious fighting team that I think is great support for my beliefs that I stated earlier in this post.  If a general wanted to have the best fighters together on a team, he would not be concerned about what their G.P.A was at West Point, which contradicts Mr. Taylor's beliefs.  Instead, he may consider Alexander's G.P.A, but ultimately he would look at his previous military experience.  Alex's G.P.A may get his recruiters attention, but it certainly does not say enough about him for the recruiting general to make a decision.

Now I realize the context of article two is completely different from the context of article 1, and the relationship I made between the two is kind of a stretch, but I feel that the concept is still the same.  G.P.A does not tell everything about a person that a recruiter needs to know.  Ergo, it is not the most important criteria in the recruitment process.

Ok, well that is it for this post.  I could ramble about this subject for hours, and occupy a portion of your life that you will never get back, but I'll be considerate and stop here (haha). This is my first blog ever, so I hope I nailed it.  More importantly, I hope you enjoyed reading it!