Brand Course for International Students
By this time in your life, each of you has had to work with individuals in managerial positions (or maybe you were the manager), either through work experiences or through other organizational experiences (social, hobby/interest, religious, and so forth). What do you think makes some managers better than others? Are these certain characteristics that distinguish good managers?
Form small groups (three or four people per group) with other class members. Discuss your experiences with managers——good and bad. Draw up a list of characteristics of those individuals you felt were good managers. Then for each characteristic, identify which management function you think it falls under. As a group, be prepared to share your list with the class and to explain your choice of management function.
Building a base of knowledge that others in an organization can tap into and use to help do their jobs better is a bottom-line goal of knowledge management. Form groups of three or four class members. Your task is to do some preliminary work on creating a knowledge base for your particular institution. Think about what organizational members could learn from each other in this organization. What common tasks might they perform that they could learn from each other about how best to do those tasks? What unique tasks do they perform from which others might learn something?
After discussing these issues, come up with an outline of major areas of important knowledge for this organization. (Here are a couple of hits that might help you get started: using technology in classrooms, keeping in touch with former students and alumni.) As a group, be prepared to share your outline with the class and to explain your choice.
Although all organizations face environmental constraints, the forces in their specific and general environments differ. Get into a small group with three to four other class members and choose one organization from two different industries. Describe the specific and general external factors for each organization. How are your descriptions different for the two organizations? How are they similar?
Now, using the same two organizations, see if you can identify the important stakeholders for these organizations. Also indicate whether these stakeholders are critical for the organization and why they are and are not. As a group, be prepared to share your information with the class and to explain your choice.
Hits: the following are some companies from different industries you can select two of them.
Aerospace：(1)Boeing—www.boeing.com (2)Lockheed Martin—www.lockheedmartin.com/
Automotive:(1)Ford—www.ford.com (2)General Motors—www.gm.com
Athletic Wear:(1)Nike—www.nike.com (2)Reebok—www.reebok.com
Beverages:(1)Coca-Cola—www.cocacola.com (2)PepsiCo—www.pepsico.com
Electronics:(1)Panasonic—www.panasonic.com (2)Sony—www.sony.com
Golf Equipment:(1)Maxfli—www.maxfli.com (2)Titleist—www.titleist.com
Mail, Package, and Freight Delivery:(1)Federal Express—www.fedex.com (2)United Parcel Service—www.ups.com (3)United States Postal Service—www.usps.com
Being effective in decision making is something that managers obviously want. What is involved with being a good decision maker? Form groups of three to four students. Discuss your experiences making decisions——for example, buying a car or some other major purchase, choosing classes and professors, making summer or spring break plans, and so forth. Each of you should share times when you felt you made good decisions. Analyze what happened during that decision-making process that contributed to it being a good decision. Then consider some decisions that you felt were bad. What happened to make them bad? What common characteristics, if any, did you identify among the good decisions? The bad decisions? Come up with a bulleted list of practical suggestions for making good decisions. As a group, be prepared to share your list with the class.
People Power, a training company that markets its human resource program to corporations around the globe, has had several requests to design a training program to teach employees how to use the Internet for researching information. The training program will then be marketed to potential corporate customers. Your team is spearheading this important project. There are three stages to the project: (1) researching corporate customer needs, (2) researching the Internet for specific information sources and techniques that could be used in the training module, and (3) designing and writing specific training modules.
The first thing your team has to do is identify at least three goals for each stage. As you proceed with this task, you don’t need to come up with specifics about “how” to proceed with these activities; just think about “what” you want to accomplish in each stage.
Form small groups of three or four individuals, and complete your assigned work. Be sure that your goals are well designed. Be prepared to share your team’s goals with the rest of the class.
Form small groups of three to four students. In your small group, discuss study habits that each of you has found to be effective from your years of being in school. Each group is to develop a bulleted list of at least eight suggestions in the time allowed by the instructor. When the instructor indicates, each group should combine with one other group and share ideas. Each small group needs to be sure to understand the techniques of the other group; asking questions could increase this understanding, because each small group will present and explain the study habit suggestions of the other small group to the class. After all groups have presented, the class will come up with what it feels are the “best” study habits of all the ideas presented.
In relatively decentralized organizations, managers must delegate (assign or turn over) authority to another person to carry out specific duties.
Form groups of three to four students and assign groups to either “effective delegating” or “ineffective delegating.” After reading the Skills Module on Delegating, students are to develop role-playing situations that illustrate what their group was assigned (effective or ineffective delegating) and present them in class. Be prepared to explain how your situation was an example of effective or ineffective delegating.
Form groups of five or six individuals. Each group should choose one person to remain in the room while the other members of each group leave the room. Your instructor will give you instructions on what happens next.
Find a picture that has a variety of detail, such as one of buildings, active people, or cars. Show the picture to the remaining students, and give them two or three minutes to study it in detail. Tell these people that they will be responsible for describing the picture in detail, to another group member who in turn will describe it to another group member, until all group members have had the picture described to them. The final group member will describe the picture to the entire class. The class should take several minutes to analyze where mistakes and listening errors occurred, when major additions or deletions were made in the descriptions, and how close the end product resembled the original.
After the exercise is over, each group should discuss where communication errors (both in sending and receiving information) occurred. You should also discuss what you learned about managerial communication from this exercise. Be prepared to share your important ideas with the class.
Stress is something that all of us face, and college students, particularly, may have extremely stressful lives. How do you recognize when you are under a lot of stress? What do you do to deal with that stress?
Form groups of three or four students. Each person in the group should describe how he or she knows when he or she is under a lot of stress. What symptoms does each person show?
(Hits: Some situations might be a job interview, finals week, midterm week, the week right before or after spring break when they have many exams and/or projects due.)
When the students have brainstormed their stress lists in their groups, they will make a list of five symptoms to class (identifying their “Top 5”). Also each group should make a list of these stress-handling techniques they have found to be particularly effective in dealing with stress. Be prepared to share these with the class.
List five criteria (for example: pay, recognition, challenging work, friendships, status, the opportunity to do new things, the opportunity to travel, and so forth) that would be most important to you in a job. Rank them by order of importance. Break into small groups (three or four other class members) and compare your responses for patterns.
Form small groups of four or five students, each group is asked to develop role-playing situations to illustrate how they would provide a work group they lead with bad news about making production goals. It’s your job to tell them the bad news. How will you do it?
Other role-playing scenarios might also be suggested:
(1)How would you follow a very successful leader who has retired? What would the script be for the first staff meeting?
(2)How would you inform your followers that a significant layoff is being predicted?
(3)How would you encourage your followers to step up production in order to avoid a layoff?
Discuss above situations and how you would handle it. Be ready to do your role-play in front of the class. Also, be prepared to provide the rest of the class with the specific steps that your group suggested be used in these situations.
Form teams of three or four students. Each team is asked to discuss what suggestions they have for eliminating student cheating in college courses. Teams are to write a bulleted list of suggestions for controlling cheating before it happens, while in-class exams or assignments are being completed, and after the cheating has happened.
Please keep the report brief (no more than two pages). Be prepared to present your suggestions before the rest of the class.