MANAGEMENT ASSIGNMENT #7: Responses

Peer Response Assignment: DUE Oct. 17, 2018 at 23:30 military time!!!

Students are expected to actively participate in the in the forum discussion. A minimum  of 2 substantive participation posts (175-250 words) is required to earn full participation points.

Guidelines for student forum discussion/participation:

· -Select a fellow student's response and compare and contrast your thoughts with theirs;

· -Advance the conversation; provide a real-world application and experiential examples;

· -Conceptually discuss your key [most significant] learning insight or take-away from the selected forum topic comments.

· -Responses should be a minimum of 175-250 words, supported by at least one reference outside of the textbook, either supporting or refuting the position of the author of the forum topic response or peer response.

Discussion Forum Prompt: One way of thinking about our life and career is to consider the lessons learned along the way.  A great philosopher once said, we learn much more from our mistakes than we do when everything goes well. Since we were not able to truly implement our creative solutions from your design thinking project, we will reflect upon lessons you are learned from the process and how you will implement those into your life.  This week you have the chance to reflect on major takeaways and apply this learning to your career.

With these thought in mind:

Reflect on your learning over the past seven weeks.  Please provide at least three (3) major takeaways or major lessons learned from the class.  Finally, suggest at least two (2) ways you can apply this learning to your career and two (2) techniques you would like to develop further.  Justify your responses.

Response #1

   I came from a biology background so I have never taken any sort or business or management course before. I came in knowing nothing but what's great is I can truly see how much I have learned over the past seven weeks. Three things I learned were the importance of implementing both creative and critical thinking styles, the five steps in a design thinking process, and the numerous ways to generate the ideation process for a project. Of these I think I will definitely keep in mind to apply balancing thinking styles and the numerous idea generating techniques. My career goal is to operate and own my own veterinary clinic and in that environment you work very closely with a lot of different job titles. It is just as important to include your receptionist as it is your licensed DVM because at the end of the day you are all on the same team. When I was working on my ideation process I learned a lot of techniques that can be used to get an entire staff  feel that they were equally involved.

                Two things I hope to improve on as I continue through the masters program is writing a proposal letter and white paper report. I honestly never really thought about the appropriate steps needed to suggest that there is a problem and then how to go about solving it. I had never written either before this class and I think I did an okay job but it is something that I know will be very impertinent to success in my future career.  My goal is to write them in a more professional and detailed manner. Overall I found that this was a very helpful introduction class for me and I hope to be able to implement and expand on what I learned in future courses.

Response #2

To be critical is a way of living an informed life. To be critical in any aspect of our life, one must fully understand or if not, be as informed as possible. With that being said, you are required to go beyond the superficiality of things and go in depth most especially with social issues in our society at hand. I am glad to be part of this class because I am able to fully understand how to one could extend his/her knowledge on things that matter. In this class, one of the best way is to go with the structure of the class, see clearly and understand the requirements. It is not easy going to Week 7 but I guess the experience is worth it most especially that not all are given the opportunity to study once again to further his/her career and goals in life. To simply put, critical thinking is growth of one’s potential.

 

My takeaways from this course are:

 

1. Critical thinking is different from creative thinking – creativity is met by the art – an ability to play with elements that transcends the physical object or the tangibles. Art is an attitude, an emotion, and a sensation where one is able to mix these all together to form something that is unique and useful. On the other hand, critical thinking is skillset-based. This requires prior knowledge, and further knowledge as well. Critical thinking in this sense requires one to see at the bigger picture, but requires dissection of small details so as to produce what is valuable to stakeholders – the users of the product or output.

 

2. Optimized utility of resources – some things are meant to be optimized and that are the available resources. In any organization, leaders are fond of using the word strategy and competitive advantage. Latched with these management terminologies or concepts is resource. However, not everyone are aware of their full resources. To be able to optimize the utility of resources, one must undergo a rigorous process of Design thinking.

 

3. Innovation – if you think in a business perspective, you will end up concluding that it is almost impossible for a new innovation to take place. But as you become critical about the details of your organization, and if you are able to evaluate and filter the needs of your users, only that you can arrive to a new innovation. It may not be a product or service, but innovation with the organizational structure, the business processes, or anything that could respond to efficiency of the organization.

 

I think that the best way to apply these learnings to my career is to further my readings and to have an active role in my organization when it comes to development. It may be small and insignificant but, being an active participant puts you in a positive behavior and maintain the attitude towards your goal which in this case is learning and experience. I believe that being a critical thinker will never happen overnight. It means experiencing failure.