Connecting the Dots

 A brief review to recap what I wrote previously. My first post is “Boot Camp Organization”, which is about my experience in Army and how Army could be related to organization operations. The second post, “Discussion About Opportunism”, is about how selfish person act to maximize their own profits regardless others, which may cause reduction on community’s welfare. “Knock Knock Housekeeping” is the third post talking about my experience as a crew leader in housekeeping department. The fourth post is about a hypothetical scenario which illustrates how the Illinibucks Program works.

After reviewing those posts, I found it is quite easy to follow the logic. All posts have some relationships with organizations and discuss few critical components which companies should have. These components are goals, rules, and participants. I will explain them respectively below.

Firstly, a good organization must have clear goals which are known by all managers or employees. In my first post, the goal of squad leaders in the boot camp was to train privates well. Goals in my second post are ambiguous since too many examples were given. Though, we can still tell that either an individual or an organization wants to higher their own interests. The housekeeping department I mentioned in the third post has rather clear goals: finish the assigned missions fast and efficiently. In the fourth post about the Illinibucks Program, I assumed that the school’s goals are eliminate unfairness and improve academic qualities. The importance of setting goals is to give employees or individuals some objects to work toward. Most of time, an organization wants to maximize profits and minimize costs. The company could ask employees to work to death and try to lower supervision costs. However, things do not usually go the way that an organization expected. That is the reason companies need rules.

Rules are as vital as goals. Once organizations set up goals, rules must be set up as well to make sure employees are working on the same goals as the company. I mentioned the importance of rules in almost every post except the second one. Rewards and punishments should be included in rules, so people can expect what they will get when following rules or breaking rules. My first post about boot camp discussed some topics of rules and how privates act according to the rules. Also, I emphasized how rules motivated my crew to work in the third post.

 It does not necessarily mean that organizations will operate well after having clear goals and strict rules, participants are an uncertainty that companies cannot control easily. Like in the first post, some privates didn’t feel like following rules even though that they knew there were punishments. I especially talked a lot about those people who jeopardize others’ welfare in my third post. In that post, we call those guys opportunists and they do not really care about companies’ goals or rules instead of their own interests.

Consider all components I mentioned, that is why management is important to a company. Good management can set up feasible goals and reasonable or motivated rules. Even more, good management should make employees feel that they are part of the team, and they do not want to deviate from company’s goals or rules.

In the beginning I didn’t really see how my posts are connected to each other. We wrote about transaction costs, opportunism, and team works which all seem unrelated. Then I started notice that few key words kept showing in my posts, like “goals”, “rules”, etc. Some connections became more and more clear to me. All posts we wrote have something to do with organizations’ management. A company could enlarge its profits by reducing its cost, such as transaction costs. Moreover, the existence of opportunism in a company could ruin company’s plans; sometimes, teamwork could be a method of solving opportunistic problems. For example, team members could motivate each other to work on the same goal of the team instead of only caring self-profits.

Through those posts, I got chance to practice how to structure an essay. I used to just sit in front of my laptop and type in all stuff in my head, which is not efficient and lack of logics. Furthermore, it was painful when you have no ideas inside your head and have to keep sitting in front of the laptop for hours. Now, I’d rather give myself few days to think about the prompt, and jot down some ideas on paper before I start writing. I also changed the way that I gave examples. I found it is better to just focus on an example and try to depict it as detailed as I can. Compare to a single example, few examples are easier to mislead readers and make them confused.

My opinion about the prompts is that few examples about how to connect questions will be great. Sometimes it took me time to think about how should I compose my essays. For example, should I write a consecutive essay or just answer each question separately? Except from my struggle to struct an assay which answers every question, I think writing is a good way to connect old knowledge or experience with new knowledge.