Looking for Trouble

Building on our success!

You have achieved much during these past weeks, and now we are positioned to make one last, big step forward as you learn how to deepen your understanding of your topic and do so collaboratively.

The justification for this approach is rather straight-forward: your “textbook knowledge” typically takes the form of generalizations, idealizations, and case studies of successful practices over the past years — something many of you have become expert in summarizing, and so we are indeed ready to move forward.

But as an employee, your problem will be to address NEW SITUATIONS, NEW TECHNOLOGIES, and the NEW OPPORTUNITIES which rapidly changing circumstances present and which firms must address successfully if they are to survive in highly competitive business environments.

That is, for every benefit you will want to look for and discuss COSTS, COMPLICATIONS, and CONSIDERATIONS, for the simple reason that, “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (For example, There Are No Simple Businesses Anymore).

COLLABORATIVE work means responding to each member’s new blog posts creatively and imaginatively: since you are heading out into unknown territory, recognizing every little step made by your classmates will help you know better what you might do, and receiving supportive comments for your own achievements is absolutely necessary if you are not to be held back by uncertainty. With a little practice, your work will become coherent, mutually-supportive, and recognizeably the work of a group: you will achieve “knowledge transfer”.

Using Google

Searching for “rfid chips problems” on Google will serve you Problems with RFID. Asking Google for “facility layout problems” will give you Factors in Determining Layout and Design.

“Technology automation problems” will serve you articles like Justifying Office Automation: benefits and problems.

“Inventory management problems” will produce articles like Common Inventory Management Problems“.

IT Impact on Management” will give you an excellent Wikipedia article as well as Supply Chain Management Six Issues That Impact Its Effectiveness.

And so on … These may get you started, but the true adventure will be using Google Blog Search.

Using Google Blog Search

Once you have explored problems on Google, explore how differently thse problems appear on Google Blog Search. For example, on Google Blog Search, “Common Inventory Management Problems” will give you:

A very timely, short, compelling blog post called Be Prepared, which suggests how businesses ought to consider immediately some of the lessons of the BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico (soon to be renamed “The Black Sea”).

A post on Anger Management Classes, because just about any change in plans (such as a new homework assignment) will face questions and resistance.

Variation and Its Impact on Safety Management, which will be of particular interest to students of Head First Data Analysis for its example of how to examine data more critically.

The Assignment

Your assignment for these last three weeks is to prepare at least THREE main blog posts and THREE secondary, totalling SIX posts altogether, plus offer at least THREE comments suggesting where you see your group project going and where you think it might best go next.   

These new posts should be designed to significantly deepen the NORMATIVE DESCRIPTIONS most of you have offered of your topic thus far (“textbook understanding”) by exploring PROBLEMS, including case studies and discussions of the relevant issues.

These three MAIN blog posts should be organized to appear daily, one after another: make a publication schedule and keep to it. Respond to each other’s posts on a regular basis. Use Twitter to notify all of your posts.

A note on knowledge transfer

Here is the highest standard for knowledge transfer and group work packages that my colleague Marcus Birkenkrahe has developed for Business Application Systems (our course in the next semester).

Knowledge transfer between members on the same team working on different subtopics is expressed in overall coherence of results. Whole expresses visibly more than the sum of the parts. Quality homogeneous.

Every team member has a specific task both relating to content and project; work packages are balanced, well defined and collectively cover the project topic.