Put a Fork in It; It's Done!

Well, it's over. Our team just completed our final presentation for our three professors and our 55 colleagues in class. It still seems like a blur, and my pulse is still coming back down to earth, but initial impressions are that our team did not, in fact, crash and burn. In fact I think we did pretty well. We'll see how the peer evaluations come back, and I'm sure our professors will have more than a few nasty things to say, but hey, we're outta here, baby. Hasta la vista.

The punchline from this day of torment and suffering?

They gave us the books for our second semester classes in a giant black bag, along with our first homework assignment which is due at the start of our first class on January 11. So much for having time to kick back over the holidays-- time to get ramped up on Marketing Strategy and Managerial Accounting.

Just thinking about those classes fills me with dread, but right now it all seems like a lifetime away. For now, it's one more team presentation and then it's on to the bar for a class celebration!

Day of Reckoning

So, here we are, the last day of class in my first semester of graduate school. So many hours of pain, suffering, sleep deprivation, learning, and stretching my mind to get to this place.

Today's schedule: 10 straight presentations for eight hours. My group is #9 out of 10 so people will likely be in a coma by the time our group goes. I feel good about our content and it's wonderful to know that, either way, today it will be over!

On Language

Today in our OB class, the professor used the word "irregardless." I really don't think that's a word. Do you think I'm entitled to a refund for a portion of my tuition? Shouldn't we have the right to expect that our professors will at least use proper English?

As dictionary.com says:

Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.

Kinda makes you wonder, huh?

Burning the Oil, Back in the Zone

Here I am, once again, the night before class and I'm up late writing a paper. I'm absolutely exhausted, I haven't spent a night with my family in almost a week, and I know I'll be even more tired tomorrow for class (when I'll need the energy the most). Writing this particular paper for Organizational Behavior has been difficult, but since I'm down to the wire, there is a certain clarity in knowing that, come hell or high water, this thing needs to be complete in about two hours.

Although I'm not proud of it, secretly this is how I work best. In college I always did my best work at the last minute, usually late at night, sometimes under the influence of fruity alcoholic drinks (I could go for one of those now, actually). I find that deadlines produce a clarity and focus you just can't get anywhere else. Again, not sure that is a good thing, but hey, whatever works!

I Like People More Than Numbers

Back again for Day 2 of Organizational Behavior. I find this topic fascinating. Maybe it's just because there is almost no math in the class, maybe it's because most of the work consists of writing and essays (which I love and which are challenging me to rediscover my academic writing side), or maybe it's just because I believe people influence the organizations they work for more than the rules those organizations try to enforce on people.

I've always been fascinated by the unseen elements that make organizations tick-- not the rules, not the HR values, but the people. The messy, political people-- to me an organization is nothing without its people. And things don't get interesting until you really start unpacking the baggage people carry with them into meetings, interactions, relationships, and work effort. The best organizational plan can be subverted by people who don't buy into the vision.

One of the exercises I completed last night was an assessment of my own company's values, and it was surprising. I've long taken pride in working for a company that makes a big deal about its values, and I really thought my company's values were differentiators, but after comparing them to some objective cultural analysis, I was surprised and disappointed to learn that many of my company's values are "permission to play" values or "aspirational" values. P2P values are values almost every company has-- they don't provide market differentiation and any company would be foolish to hire someone who didn't have the P2P values. These are values like integrity and honesty-- they look great on a boardroom wall but at the end of the day, what do they really mean? Aspirational values are those a company believes it espouses, but that on further examination are lacking or have yet to be fully implemented. I was dismayed to find how many of my company's values fall into this category.

One of the most interesting comments has been the fact that to have true meaning, values need to inflict pain on an organization. They can't be platitudes. How many of us can say that our companies are actually willing to tolerate an amount of pain to live their values? I was surprised to find that most of the pain in my company flows down to the employees-- that's not where the pain should reside. To transform the aspirational values into core values, my company would need to change and be willing to "own" a lot more of the pain at the corporate level that it currently lets flow downstream to its employees.

So, very interesting conversations today. This is the kind of class that can get me up on a Saturday morning.

OB Rocks

We had our first Organizational Behavior class today-- now THIS is a class I can finally sink my teeth into. It's like an institutional soap opera, reviewing all the case studies and discussing all the messy details about why teams are dysfunctional, why companies go wrong, and how they could have been saved. It had been getting pretty bleak there for awhile with stats and accounting-- I was wondering if I was ever going to find a subject I actually felt I could get an intuitive grasp on. Good to see there really will be a mix of classes in this program, and a chance for each one of us to bring their unique talents to bear.