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July 6800 Condensed Course
July 6800 Condensed Course
Class 1
Summary of Readings
The readings discuss various issues ranging from organizational culture, change, accountability, executive level turnover, and growth mindset.
Palmquist (2020) looks at how boycotts unsettle boards, noting that boycotts are a type of corporate crisis that often leads to increased turnover at the board level.
Members of the board who fall on either end of the political spectrum are aware of the impact of boycotts. According to Palmquist (2020), conservative directors are more steadfast in their convictions than their liberal counterparts.
It is just as probable that conservative board members will resign in the aftermath of a right-backed boycott as it is that liberal board members would do so in the face of a similarly aligned boycott.
The Colombia Accident Investigation Board (2003) highlights the role of organizational culture in the way crisis are managed and addressed.
The report dwells on how the history and culture at the Space Shuttle Program contribute to some of the events, mistakes, occurrences, and issues at the employment level.
PwC (2019) highlights how recent developments have led to disruptions in the process of internal auditing. Global megatrends have gained momentum as seen in the way new and disruptive technologies are changing the way organizations operate and organize. Internal audit leaders are confronted by the disruptive forces that are introducing new requirements and doing away with traditional functions and processes.
Raffoni (2020) discusses accountability issues in teams, noting that there is a need to hold people more accountable in the confines of the workplace. Next-level leaders confronted by the issue of accountability will need to clearly define roles and responsibilities, have a scorecard to measure outcomes, conduct regular feedback and progress check-ins, track performance, stay aligned via regular meetings, stay organized, and outline future goals.
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) (2018), in its effort to introduce new best practices, has established new mandatory governance reporting and record keeping requirements. The OEB intends to institute a culture of quality and robustness in decision making in the utility business. Best practices include director independence, director skills, board and committee structures and functions, and supporting documentation and practices.
In the HBR Spacial Issue, Dweck (2019) shares on the issues surrounding a growth mindset finding that a growth mindset is possessed by those who feel that their skills may be improved by exerting effort, using sound techniques, and soliciting feedback from others.
Personal Reflection
My main takeaway from the readings is that the modern workplace is experiencing changes as more disruptive forces emerge influencing growth, culture, management, and best practices at every level from management to the employee, and how these stakeholders relate to other components of society. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of a company’s culture. Companies that either put no importance on their internal culture or let a poisonous culture to flourish and expand throughout the firm will surely face a variety of issues. It is now widely understood that a company’s culture, which is defined as the set of ideas and patterns of behavior that impact how individuals behave inside an organization, is a crucial component in determining that company’s success. As a result, an increasing number of firms are focusing on the influence of their culture. This provides HR professionals with a really unique leadership opportunity to choose how to implement cultural change inside an organization. It is easier to comprehend a company’s culture than to attempt to quantify it.
From the readings, I now have a new understanding of how and why culture is important to organizations, and why it must factor in disruptive forces like a common place in modern life. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered how organizations relate with their customers. The core of an organization’s culture is its members’ common knowledge of “how things are done.” This view may or may not align with the stated goals, values, or standards. Because they have a pulse on how their workers feel, effective HR departments are in a unique position to be at the forefront of managing and shaping culture. However, as firms that struggle with their internal cultures can attest, corporate culture management may be difficult. In addition, it may be particularly challenging when a situational shift is necessary. This is largely due to the fact that a company’s culture consists of a number of interrelated and mutually influential elements. These elements include attitudes, roles, procedures, communication strategies, roles, and objectives. Changing a culture requires significant effort, and thorough planning and strategy are important. The process must begin at the highest levels of the business and be a company-wide initiative. But first, I feel that organizations must establish when it is okay to alter the culture and then they will be able to select how to most successfully impact the cultural transformation.
In my assessment, recent disruptive technologies such as the growth of the e-commerce sector in North America has and will continue to change how organizations are run from the bard management to executive management, and interactions between employees and customers. Businesses that aspire to become more adaptable and innovative must regularly undergo a cultural makeover. Nevertheless, the most challenging component of transformation is generally the process of implementing and sustaining the long-term adjustments required to prosper in the new environment. Especially if a firm has long placed a premium on operational stability and efficacy, the demands of innovation and agility may first seem to be in contradiction with established corporate culture norms.
July 6800 Condensed Course Class 1
July 6800 Condensed Course Class 1
Summary of the Readings
In The CEO of Canada Goose on Creating a Homegrown Luxury Brand, Reiss (2019) shares some insight from the CEO of Canada Goose regarding creating a homegrown luxury brand. Canada Goose’s CEO believes that attainment of mass distribution by competing on price alone is not necessarily a way to succeed in business but rather a way to just build on commodity pricing. Creating a sustainable global business requires growing from a foundation of core values that prioritize quality above quantity. The CEO points out that being a “Made in Canada” brand was an effective way to compete, especially as other companies were fleeing the country.
In How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward by Walter Frick (2019), the Great Recession was studied via research and case studies, which shed light on four major themes: debt, decision-making, labor management, and digital revolution. Amazon.com enhanced its financial position at the start of the year 2000 by selling convertible bonds worth $672 million. One month later, the dot-com bubble exploded. More than half of all digital start-ups failed in the years that followed, including a considerable number of firms that competed with Amazon in the industry of online commerce at the time. If the bubble had burst a few weeks sooner, one of the world’s most successful companies would have been badly harmed by the recession.
Smith (2013) article “Insight into Board Role in Strategy Making” notes that the role of a board is to participate in the strategic assessment stage, the strategic options stage, and the strategic plan stage. A Portfolio of initiatives is also expected including immediate, short term, and long-term plans. A focus on the current fiscal year, on the next, and 2-3 years in the future earns the right to grow and defend a core business, build on growth initiatives, and create viable options.
KPMG (2010) discusses strategic planning looking at the key questions of a strategy as what to sell, the target customers, and how to avoid/beat the competition. In the why question, KPMG (2010) found that managers must understand that businesses are fluid and change is a must. In the how question, it is recommended that managers extend and defend the current business. A good team is essential for both short and long term growth.
Prahalad and Hamel (1990) address the Core competence of the Corporation noting that many companies are finding it difficult to prevail in global competition. The authors recommend the following for corporations: clarify core competencies, articulate a strategic intent that defines your company and its markets, build core competencies, invest in needed technologies, and cultivating a core competency mind-set.
KPMG’s (2012) article Thoughts on What is Strategy provides 2 key takeaways; that strategy defines where to compete and how to win and that it is the placing of scarce resources at critical points to achieve continuous improvisation. The end game is to create competitive advantage. Ultimately, enduring competitive advantage means offering greater value at less cost compared to the competition.
Whitler (2019) advices marketers to focus on content as opposed to channels and advertising in the article What Western Marketers Can Learn from China. New marketing tenets are evolving as consumer tastes change in the ways they connect with firms. Emerging huge consumer markets like China, which have developed creative methods to economically reach and attract consumers at scale, are the originators of these new marketing approaches.
Personal Reflection
What stood out for me in all of the assigned readings is the value, role, and position of strategy in defining success. There is no such thing as business that has solely isolated functions. They are a component of a more complex scenario that also consists of the social, political, economic, and competitive environments. A company’s strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how it intends to accomplish its objectives in light of the existing circumstances. How successful a business will be over the long term will depend on its plan. Because it involves a significant time and financial commitment and is difficult and costly to modify once it is in place, strategy is a choice that management should take very seriously. If a corporation does certain jobs better than its rivals, it may have an advantage over those rivals. For example, Chinese businesses are showcasing how alternative approaches to marketing, pace, and content will influence business success in the future. All of these elements are hidden within the function of strategy, and I found them very interesting in how they intertwine to create a wining plan.
A business strategy, from my personal point of view, is a written plan that shows how a company plans to reach its goals. A business plan is a written document that describes the organization’s long-term goals and a set of rules that will be used to reach those goals. For example, it will explain how to deal with competitors, evaluate customer needs and expectations, and think about the organization’s potential for long-term growth and sustainability. When a company has a plan, it can look at how well it is doing, what its strengths are, and whether or not these strengths can help it grow. This is why it’s so important to have a plan. This is why having a plan is so important. Few businesses get the job done right the first time. Every organization has flaws that can be traced back to many different things. Business strategies try to deal with these problems so that companies don’t fall prey to them and suffer a lot of damage because of it. These possible dangers are looked at, and the team is helped to find answers to the problems that have been brought up.
Language,
July 29, 1979
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
By JAMES BALDWIN
left000t. Paul de Vence, France–The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other–and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.
People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal–although the “common” language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this “common” language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control.
What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one’s temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Proven�al, which resists being described as a “dialect.” And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.
It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one’s antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: The range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to “put your business in the street”: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.
Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black’s most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing–we were funky, baby, like funkwas going out of style.
Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.
I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other’s language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world’s history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible–or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.
There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.
Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) “sheer intelligence,” this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by “history”–to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place–if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.
A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a “dialect.” We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie.
The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.
And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets–it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.
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