First of all, I am thankful for the teaching and feedback given by Professor Arvan! I enjoyed the class and the format.
As for the lessons learned, I think the principle-agent problem and the transaction cost in bidding situations are the two topics that I have the most interests. The example of the conflict between customer's need and company's need from a valet parker is the most memorable one, because it is a very simple and easy to understand example but it actually reflects a lot of conflicts in organizations that are in similar nature. As for the transaction cost in bidding topic, I simply never thought too deep into the matter. I always thought that the bidder with the lowest price wins the project and get to sell their products. But the truth is that price is only one factor, and we also need to consider the long term development of the product, the stability of the product, etc.
Posting blog is a very interesting way to communicate actually. Maybe it's because I've never done it before in any of my classes taken in the past three years of college. But I think what's better might be real time online discussion where everybody log on a instant-message discussion page and starts to talk about certain subjects. I think it is a whole lot faster to get feedback than commenting on blog. But it's just a personal opinion. As for Excel homework, I usually go over the slides or Excel sheets that are related to the materials in the homework, which speed things up when I do the homework.
I have learn some very interesting topics from this class. I think it help to to better build and keep human capital since I have a better understanding of the reason and solution to some of the conflicts in organization.
Trying to understand prompts, writing blogs according to prompts and commenting definitely improved my writing skills. I think it is really beneficial for my future career since I hope to land a consulting position, which require great communication skills and clear logic structure for presentation.
Thank you for your comments. The real time session that you suggested "might" work for office hours on the Excel homework, better than as a substitute for the blogging. I really did want you to reflect on what you'd write for a while before you typed out your posts. That reflection time is not encouraged with instant messaging, which wants you to be spontaneous. There is also the scheduling of something like that. If it happened at other than regularly scheduled class time, when would that be?
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you have some take away ideas from the course. It is perhaps unfortunate that organizations don't always work in a harmonious manner, but it is a good lesson to be aware of that reality and to have some ideas on how to cope with it.