Management class musings

After almost fifty years of teaching about leadership and management -- and clearly understanding the differences and similarities of the two key business skills -- my notes for my final semester in the spring 2019 provided me with a change to curate some key elements from my lectures, lectures that demonstrate just how far I have come from when I taught my first organizational behavior course using notes from Jack Duffy's afternoon lectures the previous week to assemble a miserable "reverse engineered" set of lecture s for my night class the following week. I have often said I need to find those students in that first class and refund their tuition for such a poorly delivered class. Then again, maybe it was not so bad and perhaps they did not even notice.

Here is a Word file of my curated "best of brief notes" from that class, covering everything from climate change and the environment and values of business, to important behaviors and skills, the importance of wealth creation, and the elements of a "good" career.

Musings from Management Classes.docx

Download DOCX • 763KB

Early parts of the class concerned the way we evaluate a country, well beyond using GDP or income per capita to "score points" in global comparisons and competitions. Progress, human development and measurements of "good" or "best" countries showed the variety of methods beyond traditional economic unidimensional factors like GDP. Here is one example of the multiple ways of ranking countries for their "effectiveness" in empowering people, developing and maintaining prosperity, and having a positive overall impact on people and the planet. Combing the multiple criteria and scores should have convinced that "all in all" the United States scores very well, especially best among the large populations and economies, i.e., small economies and populations score well, e.g., Denmark, New Zealnad, Norway, Canada, primarily due to their lack of diversity, creating a greater sense of community, egalitarian, and shared outcomes than do large, diverse countries.

Here is how they scored countries for their level of being a "good" country:

Here is my method for describing the behaviors that constitute effective goal setting, well beyond the simplistic idea of a supervisor telling a subordinate how many widgets the subordinate needs to produce.

A lot of the class included critical lessons in critical thinking, which usually required presenting two contrasting points of view on a topic. This was not to necessarily prove one side right and the other wrong. Rather it was demonstration of how people -- including college students -- can fall for glib, simplistic, virtue-signaling rhetoric, a problem that has only grown markedly over the past ten years of woke and cancel culture from the "progressive" left.

This included misconceptions about capitalism, the "sharing economy, the role of choice, the importance of wealth creation, the need for personal responsibility and prosocial behaviors and more.

Sorry that you missed the class? Well, I am sorry, but this is as far as I plan to go in getting back to teaching. So, as I told any of those who missed a class and asked, "Did I miss anything?" start with my lecture notes from the class/course you missed. Today's cancel culture classroom is not for capitalists, critical thinking, conversation or coming up with a clear, constructive path forward.