So years from now, when people ask me where I was when the most powerful country in the world, military and economically, elected the first black person to be their president, I'll remember that I was up until 3:30am writing a paper for Strategic Implementation and Change for Tina Dacin.
Her course is actually pretty awesome. She teaches about all the stuff managers will need to do to turn companies around from failing to successful...how to develop and implement strategies for change. It's difficult to describe the course content here because it isn't quantitative or qualitative. It's about situational awareness, psychology, problem solving, motivation, and leadership. There are two books referenced in the course. The first is "The Heart of Change" by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen. You can get a sense of the book here. The other book is "Execution" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. You can go to your nearest library or bookstore to check out the content.
The paper we had to write was about the Tar Products division at Allied Signal circa 1994. The division was suffering from declining negative profits, increased raw material costs, and was the only losing division within a successful large conglomerate. Chuck Griffith (I tried to find some good info online about him but no luck) was hired to turn the company around. Our paper was about how we would go about turning the company around. The class after we turned in our papers was awesome. We did a live simulation exercise of the initial meeting of Mr. Griffith and the Tar Products senior managers. It was amazing how quickly the situation can go bad. Body language, word selection, and general attitudes came into play...and we were just simulating it! I can imagine how tense the actual situation might have been. In any case, Mr. Griffith's approach was shear genius...I don't really want to tell the whole story here because it will ruin the case for potential students. A few of us sat around after class discussing the issue...really cool.
Anyways, I'm really enjoying this class. Professor Dacin is awesome with a neat sense of humour. Really gets the class going in some interesting discussions.
Now about Obama...great to see him get elected. It's a weird parallel that we're studying how to implement change and Obama won on a platform of change. His speeches are incredible (the best part starts at minute 9)...I wish we had a leader here in Canada that can inspire people like that. How does he do it? You think this is inspiring ? How about this? or this? This?
The US had one of their highest voter turnouts in their history, we had our lowest...both in the same year and within a month of each other. Any idea why? Where are our new leaders going to come from? What does that mean for our future?
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