So Far So Good
September 6th, 2006One week down, two classes complete, and I’m still doing okay. We haven’t had too much homework so far and I haven’t had to use my fancy new laptop (bummer!).
The class is called “Organizational Behavior” and it isn’t at all what I expected. Someone called it an experiential class. I guess that means we discuss in class and don’t do a ton of work outside. Hey, suits me for the first class. I’ve got almost two years left, a gentle introduction isn’t all bad.
We’ve been covering what seems to be very un-businesslike topics. We’ve talked about different states of mind: frantic, distracted, calm, and inspired. There have been discussions about love, spirituality, and family. We watched an excerpt from The Andy Griffith Show and the 1957 classic, “12 Angry Men”.
So what the heck does this have to do with business?
It took me a while, but I think I get it. To be successful in business, you need to be successful with people. At its root, business (as used in “Master of Business Administration”) is commerce or exchange. It’s deals and agreements and negotiation and management, all of which require a deep, fundamental understanding of people and how they work.
I stink at this. That’s why I’m in software engineering.
The class is concerned with the behavior of organizations. Organizations are made of people. People have needs and drives and desires and baggage. The states of mind above have an impact on productivity, among other things. Businesses and their managers care about productivity. I think the point of the exercise so far is two-fold: (1) an organization’s behavior is defined by the behavior of the people involved, and (2) the culture of the organization has a strong impact on the state of mind of the employees which feeds directly into the employee’s productivity and the organization’s behavior.
So, are these graduate-level thoughts? Am I learning anything? If anybody actually reads this, sign in and add your thoughts.
As an aside, human behavior is so fundamental, so global, so unchanging across cultures [1], that I wonder what will happen when we meet a different intelligence (”space aliens”)[2].
1 Basic human needs and drives seem quite universal, although tactics and taboos vary widely. For example, the need for food is universal. Some groups meet this with teamwork, some with competition. The need to reproduce is also universal, but the rules and customs and mores differ greatly. I’m not an anthropologist, so I could be missing something. This is an interest of mine, though, so I read about it and think about it.
2 So, now you know I’m a flake, eh? I’m just playing the odds with this comment. The universe is really, really big. There are a lot of places life could flourish and many more where life could exist, if uncomfortably. If there’s someone (something) out there, it may be as smart as or smarter than us. There could be a way to travel interstellar distances quickly. Maybe not, but our pitiful human minds keep finding faster ways to do things. It seems inevitable to me that, someday, we’ll encounter something.