Uni bits – setting goals

It can be argued that everyday we set a goal, to be happy at the end of the day or to do some study for an exam. Most of those are quite easy to manage. However particularly at university, goals starts to be more significant, difficult to manage and particularly to set. In this blog post I will discuss some methods that may help you to keep on track with all your dreams, but also to know which they are.

Step 1 How to set a goal?

There are many types of goals, during university life we may divide them in: careers, study and life, for example. An example of the former may be becoming a marketing manager.

Step 2 Goal characteristics

As written on this blackboard it is very important that our goals are:

Specific and Measurable: so using the previous example, just saying that we want to be a marketing manager can be too general. We may ask to ourselves: do we want to work for an international company or a smaller one? Which are the #top 3 company we want to work for? Which are the specific roles in the marketing department of this companies? Narrowing down can really help us to fully achieve our goal and focus our effort.

Attainable: can we, aim to be a marketing manager considering our background, maybe studies etc. Are we considering only big companies in which we want to work for, is it possible for us to really work there?

Relevant: is our goal relevant with what we are doing?

Time-bound: very important aspect when talking about setting goals is to decide when we aim to achieve that goal, this will help as particularly with the tracking of our efforts and knowing how to divide it, and how much time we need to spend on it.

Step 3 – success, achieving our aim

As the quote states, success is a journey, this may also mean that if we plan everything to achieve our goal we have done the most important part, and we have learned from it. It is significantly important to plan, in fact as Benjamin Franklin states ‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.’ When setting and trying to achieve goals, it is fundamental to keep in mind our priorities and work the most on what comes first, instead of losing our focus and aim, by working on too many things, not as equally important, at the same time.

 

 

 

Uni bits – Time management

I have always considered myself very good at organising my life, studies and extra curricular activities. However many things have changed when I arrived at university. In this blog post I would like to talk about time management shift between high school and university, giving you some, hopefully useful tips.

Let’s start from the begging, as a said my high school life was very organised this because I had very fixed timetable: 5 or 6 hours of lessons everyday (apart from Sunday), every week I had the same subjects, on the same day at the same time. The free time that I had left was very little and mainly used for study and sport.

As soon as I arrived at university I quickly realised that the free time was much more, in fact I only have 8 hours a week of lectures/seminars. Moreover every week at university is different, of course the lectures are usually at the same time, but the extracurricular activities, workshops and work is may vary. During the first week I have met a friend from Norway and together we have planned every hour of the week, gym included. However we very soon realised that we did not have a fixed timetable. The first period was though, because I had to completely change my organisation method, and if I have to be honest, during the first weeks of my first semester, I felt that I had that much free time that I could do any activities. Very soon I realised we had weekly reading for every module, exercises and assignments.

So which are my #top tips for time management at university?

#1 Listen to the lecturer and mature student advices! One of the biggest mistake I have made during the first weeks was to think that I already knew everything about how to study.  Lecturer and mature students have experienced themselves the university life and will for sure give you great advice, so listen to them!

#2 As every week is different, spend some time every Sunday to organise your week, trying to use the free time you have to do some study, maybe work and some sport.

#3 Remember to be flexible! You may need to change your timetable daily sometimes. This because university offers every week many opportunities and you may decided to take them last minutes! So you really need to feel fine knowing that maybe that afternoon you won’t do any study, so this study needs to be done on another day.

So what do think? What has been your experience of time management at university, so far? Do agree on my #top tips, do you have any other you want to share with us?

Uni bits – Group working

Welcome again, to the series of Uni bits. Today I am going to write about another big issue/opportunity that we have at university. Group work!!

Yes, I know, it sounds quite scary and in some ways it really is, or least at the beginning. Most of us come from different experiences and backgrounds, for example during my high school as I ready said in one of my previous blog post https://wordpress.com/view/eibmtinalife16.wordpress.com I have been always supported and encourage to work individually. This meant being very uncomfortable when it comes to work in groups. Now I am going to write the pros and cons of group working, this helped me significantly to understand the meaning of it and trying to put all myself in the various tasks.

 Cons:

-you have to SHARE and of course not everyone put the same effort when it comes to assignments, this is the hard bit for me as I am a very ambitious person that tries always to do her best.

-it can be hard to share your ideas and at the same time listen to other people ideas

-you don’t and can’t have control over everything that is happening as you usually do when working individually

Pros

-group-working play a significant role in ideas development, which is very important, particularly when it comes to debate and presentation

-you can divide the task and make your life easier, but as the same time in the end deliver a big project, that you would not be able to do on your own

-you can help each other. Everyone has his strength and weaknesses which will mean that there will always be someone you can talk with. In case no one know the ‘right answer’ then you can work together to find it

-it is a great way of meeting new people. I can’t even count how many people I have met through seminars, but particularly group meeting, and that is great to make the most from your time at university

-particularly talking about Business, this is how real world and work is going to be (you won’t choose you colleagues)

Answering to the possible Cons:

-university regulations, usually module leaders are very happy to talk and discuss if any of the group member do not contribute to the group work

-usually most of the group-work are around 20/30 % of the total mark of the module

So as you can see overall, group working is a ‘must’ experience, which is better to do at university (where you can make mistakes) than directly in the real world.

 

Uni bits – D.Y.O.R.

No, I have not spell it wrong, DYOR is the acronym that our lecturer gives to the sentence: Do your own research.

This is one of the first ‘lessons’ I have learned as soon as I arrived at university. In fact it is essential throughout all our course to do our own research if we don’t understand something, but also when we need to write an essay which definitely need to have evidence.

For many of us, before coming to university research meant: google. Anything you need, there is google, maybe you can’t remember how to pronounce a word, google it, or maybe you don’t remember the capital of a country, well google it.

Google is some kind of motto for the millennial and it is also the answer to any of our questions/problems.

Well at university this motto need to change. In fact included in our tuition fee here at Brookes, we have all kind of databases we can use as our research tools. For example BusinessSourceComplete is very useful to find journals, whereas Mintel is used to know more about consumer lifestyle information and general marketing research. Moreover we also have Warc, World Research Centre and Passport, international markets, economic reports and so on.

I found this picture on Google (I should not be saying that after writing this blog post, however for images it is still allowed). I really think this can summarise the importance of doing our own research in a university environment:

oppoRtunity: research is an opportunity to discover something new.

idEa: during our researches most of our ideas develop, for example the one used to write an essay, but also the ideas that we cite from others writers.

earningS: well, in the university we don’t talk about money, but marks. In fact a good evidence, in text and reference list can definitely allows your mark to rise.

devElopment and growtH: when researching we develop new ideas and different point of view, this mean we do not only develop from an academic point of view, but also from a personal one. In fact, in my opinion, since I started the university I am more critical when giving information and when listening.

innovAtion: we need to know what has already happened to innovate or build something new.

expeRience: reasearching is all about getting experience in a particular field.

Curiosity: I personally found it hard to start searching at the begging, because it was not something I was used to, but now I am feel that I am starting to be more and more curious about new topics.

Have you find this blog post interesting? What about your personal experience with DYOR?

 

Disruptive innovation

In the first lecture of the second semester we have talked about an important and interesting issue: Business and technology. One of the biggest innovation can be considered the internet in 1991, the impact was and is significant and it involves many industries. The phrase Disruptive innovation was introduced by C.M. Christensen in her book The Innovator’s dilemma. We have analysed two example in class, which shows how technology can be disruptive: Kodak and Blackberry.

If you are curios and you would like to know more about the book wtach this you tube video created by Book video club:

We have analysed two example in class, which shows how technology can be disruptive: Kodak and Blackberry. Both Kodak and Blackberry were convinced of their way of doing business and the feature of their product that they have not seen the innovation which will afterwards let them fail, as you can see in this graph:

I feel I have had a personal experience about disruptive innovation. Two years ago I started a community project called The Right Choice, it main aim was to give more information for the university orientation through a series of conferences. However after two years we have seen a decrease in participation. At that moment we realised there were two possibility: 1) trying to keep going with the conferences and not looking at why people were not participating anymore 2) analysing the reason for this change and trying to adapt to the new technology era where people prefer online community to conferences.

The biggest disruptive technology of our lecturer generation were the PC from 1997 onward. What about us? What do you think has been the biggest disruptive technology for our generation?

Organisation culture and Cultural web Starbucks

During one of our Exploring international business management lecture we have talked about organisation culture, in within we have also consider cultural web. In this blog post I would like to analysis Starbucks coffee company using it.

Firstly culture can be consider the system of norms, beliefs and assumptions, and values that determine how people in the organization act (Schein 1985).

Organisational culture can be considered the “personality” of the organization that sets it apart from other organizations. It provides a sense of identity to its members, it helps legitimize the management system of the organization and finally it clarifies and reinforces standards of behaviour.

The cultural web is a representation of the paradigm of an organisation and the physical manifestations of its culture. As the analysis is quite long I will mainly focus on some aspects of Starbucks. The cultural web is divided in:

The routine includes internal and external behavior of the members of the organisation. Starbucks routine have a particular importance for the company, in fact the they invest a lot in their employee because they strongly believe that if they are going to feel cared they will take care of customers. Moreover the working environment is particularly nice as they call HR called them partners instead of employee, no one order to do something, they ask for favours and finally enhance the importance of a diverse background staff to welcome a diverse background customers.

The rituals of the organisation are special events or particular activities through which they emphasise what is particularly important and reinforces ‘the way we do things around here’. One of the main ritual of starbucks can be considered offering seasonal drinks.

The stories are the one told by members of the organisation to each other and to customer, it embed the present in its organisational history and also highlight important events and personalities.

Symbols may include logos, offices, cars and titles that represent the nature of the organisation. Starbucks have many symbols from the very famous logo that we see in instagram pictures to the exotic ambience in every shop.

Power structures are also likely to influence the key assumptions. The most powerful groupings are likely to be closely associated with the core assumptions and beliefs.

The control systems measurements and reward systems emphasise what is important to monitor in the organisation. Reward systems are important influences on behaviours.

Organisational structure is likely to reflect power and show important roles and relationships.

The paradigm of the organisation encapsulates and reinforces the behaviours observed in the other elements of the cultural web. Starbucks paradigm/culture can be summarized in their mission: “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”

We have been discussing during the seminar whether the culture of a particularly company will last forever and will never need to change, it can be argued that this is not possible as the environment, economy and business are continuously changing, as a result in order to take advantage on competitors organisation may need to re-shape their culture.

What do you thinks about it? Which do you think is the power structure at Starbucks?

Reference list:

Schein, E. H. (1985). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Starbucks (no date) ‘Homepage’ https://www.starbucks.com/

Change

In our last lecture of the term we have considered how change is related to business. We have divided external and internal influences, the former include social, economical, technological, market and political influences, whereas the latter can include a broader influences such as employee issues, customer complaints and supplier problems. It is interesting to consider change as a continuous process and not separate events, with this perspective businesses may change their approach in a positive way towards it.

We have been given an interesting article to reflect on this issue:

A possible solution to the furthcoming change considered is the example of Pacific Bell  which was a telephone company that in 1984 had to make a significant decision. In the previous years they were used to have a monopoly on telephone services in California, but in the late 90s the company had to face a tough competition. The managers were trying to cope with is using the most common managerial strategies such as downsizing, restructuring and rebranding, however the executive had soon realize that more needed to be done.

The company started collaborating with Charles Krone, an organisational development specialist, who set a management-training programme to transform the way people thought, talked and behaved. This program was closely linked with the ideas of the russian mystic George Gurdjieff, who stated that people were ‘waking sleep’ and that they should start thinking how to liberate their inner potential. The company have decided to undertake this course and spent 147$ m for their employee to do the program which become known as Kroning.

Overall there were employee who thought that they had improved and that the course was very useful, however there were also some unfortunate side effects such as the impossibility for people outside the company to understand the new language. Moreover the course led to the organisations of more meetings and as a consequence all the tasks took two times longer to be done. The executive came up we the thought that: ‘If the energy that had been put into Kroning had been put to the business at hand, we all would have gotten a lot more done’.

This lecturer was particularly interesting and stimulating as change can be linked to our everyday life decision and approaches. I strongly agree that the best way to get the most from it is changing the way we think of it. In fact, as said above, if we consider it as a process and not singular events we would be less scared of it and accept it in our life. Moreover it should be considered an opportunity rather than a threat.

Reference list:

Spicer, A. (2017) ‘From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over’ The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-to-thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over

Sì, Ja, Oui, Hai and Da

Getting to Sì, Ja, Oui, Hai and Da

During one of our Exploring International Business management seminar we have talked about international negotiation. We have been asked to read and article, which is written by Erin Meyer, a program director for Managing Global Virtual Teams in INSEAD.

In the article, 5 rules of thumb for negotiating with someone whose cultural style of communication differs from yours, has been identified:

1.Adapt the way you express disagreement

Very often individuals give for granted that the person they are talking with is going to understand a disagreement, despite the culture differences. However this is not the case when it comes to international negotiations, for instance in Russia it is completely normal and appreciated to say “I totally disagree”, whereas in Mexico this would be considered unrespectful.

2. Know when to bottle it up or let it all pour out

This is the second rule of international negotiations,in order to adapt your reaction accordingly, it is of a significant importance to recognise what an emotional outpouring signifies in another country. For instance, if in Sweden the negotiators do not enter in any debate and just sit calmly across the table, it is seen positively, while in Israel it might be a sign that the deal is about to die.

3.Learn how other culture build trust

According to Meyer, trust can be divided in: cognitive and affective. The former comes from the head, an example can be thinking that the other person is reliable and that she/he “knows her/his business”. The latter comes from the heart, which means sharing and feeling affection and empathy.  As a consequence in some countries you need to build an emotional connection, such as in China, where this process is quite long.

4.Avoid Yes or No question

One of the main issue  individual are facing during international negotiations is understand the real meaning of “Yes”, it may sound strange, but for instance in Indonesia a positive answer can be given only in order to be respectful. In fact in their culture it is considered rude to say no to a request.

5.Be careful about putting it in writing

This is particularly true, when dealing with developing countries as in some of them, the legal system is traditionally less reliable and more importance is given to relationship, as a consequence written contracts are less frequent. Furthermore there is the need to remember that in emerging markets, as everything in these countries is very dynamic, no deal is ever 100% final.

I think this article was particularly interesting and it can lead you to deep reflections, such as the importance of cultural differences. In the globalised world we are living in, we often forget the differences between the various cultures, also as consequence of the equal campaigns and in Europe due to the Schengen agreement. This can often bring to misunderstanding in commercial agreements and negotiations.

From my personal experience when I decided to come to England I thought I was going to live in a cultural similar to mine, but I found out that it is completely different from many point of view. This made me reflect on the fact that it is important to be aware of the differences between your country and the one you are going to deal with, it should not be considered racist or having stereotypes, this will make people reflect on the their action and as they are aware of the differences they may be more respectful towards other people.

In conclusion in this blog post it has been underlined the importance of being aware of the differences of the various cultures in order to get the best result in negotiations, in general a universal rule that can be very useful in all negotiating deals is the need to persuade and react.

Reference list:

Meyer, E. (2015) ‘Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai and Da’ Harvard Business review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/12/getting-to-si-ja-oui-hai-and-da

Country comparison – individualism

During one of our Exploring international business lecture we have talked about: leading and managing team in an international environment. It can be considered an interesting isse for two reasons:

• The nowadays development of populism which increase racism and prejudices
• Globalisation, which is a process by which national and regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through the global network of trade, communication, immigration and transportation (Financial times lexicon, no date)

Through Hofstede Insight I decided to compare three different countries which I consider home, Italy, Slovenia and United Kingdom. Hofstede Insights aims to provide practical means to manage the impact culture has on work and life. Using three research based concepts, they have operationalised their approach to offer tangible and practical tips to create a unique competing zone for organisations.

The website compares the countries considering six dimensions:

• Power distance
• Individualism
• Masculinity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Long term orientation
• Indulgence

I will particularly focus on the one which is the most different in the countries I have chosen, this is individualism.

 

Individualism is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It has to do with whether people’s self-image is defined in terms of “I” or “We” (Hofstede Insight, no date).

 

Italy has a score of 76, which is quite high, it is true particularly in the bigger cities in the North where people may feel alone despite the fact they are surrounded by the crowd. However, the situation can be considered different in the South of Italy, where the family network and the group one belongs to are important social aspects, and rituals such as weddings or Sunday lunches with the family are occasions that one can’t miss (Hofstede Insight, no date).

Whereas in Slovenia, with its score of 27/200 has a completely different situation, it is therefore considered a collectivistic society. The society is characterised by strong relationships where everyone takes responsibility for fellow members of their group. In collectivist societies offence leads to shame and loss of face, employer/employee relationships are perceived in moral terms (like a family link), hiring and promotion decisions take account of the employee’s in-group, management is the management of groups (Hofstede Insight, no date).

At a score of 89 the UK is amongst the highest of the Individualist scores, beaten only by some of the commonwealth countries such as Australia and the USA (Hofstede Insight, no date). The British are a highly Individualist and private people, in fact children are taught from an early age to think for themselves and to find out what their unique purpose in life is and how they uniquely can contribute to society (Hofstede Insight, no date). In this country it is believed that the route to happiness is through personal fulfillment.

 

From my personal experience in all of this countries I can say that in my Slovenian middle school we were often asked to work in group and most of the sports where team sports. The situation was completely different in my Italian high school where I was always asked to work by myself and competitiveness was supported. However I would argue that according to my experience at Oxford Brookes university so far, group working is one of the main skills the university is trying to transfer to us.

 

In conclusion it needs to be underlined that the results does not imply that everyone in a given society is programmed in the same way; there are considerable differences between individuals, moreover it may well be that the differences among individuals in one country culture are bigger than the differences among all country cultures (Hofstede Insight, no date). Without comparison, a country score is meaningless (Hofstede Insight, no date).

 

You can find all the detailed comparison between the countries above at this link:

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/italy,slovenia,the-uk/

 

Reference list

Hofstede Insight (no date) Country comparison Available at: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/italy,slovenia,the-uk/

Financial times Lexicon (no date) Definition of globalisation Available at:

http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=globalisation