Try to Take Over the World

Pinky always turned to Brain and asked "What are we going to do tomorrow night?" Brain would always respond "Same thing we do every night Pinky...Try to take over the world!!" Brain's vision was clear...world domination. The comedy of this cartoon hindered our ability to appreciate the resilience of the two mice who aimed high and never settled for low. As absurd as it may seem, they probably felt fulfilled trying to attain their dream.

It is hard for me to express my vision for the future for a couple of reasons. First, I always change my vision and who is to say that the list below will not change. Second, I feel my vision is personal and I cringe at the thought of sharing it.

Like Pinky and the Brain, I feel satisfaction isn't only in accomplishing your vision but more satisfaction lies in trying to attain it. So even though I might not accomplish these goals at least I will have the satisfaction of trying my best to try to achieve them.

1. Write a sitcom. Aside from being enormously intelligent, gifted, good-looking, caring, generous AND humble, I'm funny too (That was an attempt at humor). It has alway been a dream of mine to write a sitcom because I feel my life is one. I'm always concerned that it would be to Seinfeld-like so coming up with dialogue isn't hard but coming up with a situation is extremely difficult. The action I would take to accomplish this would be to watch more sitcoms and live more of my life so I can stumble upon a muse. I should also probably take a creative writing class to help me become a better writer.

2. Host SNL. I think the previous idea kind of plays into this. If I do become a successful sitcom writer, maybe I can one day host SNL and parody the Guantanamo situation. The action I would take here would be to become famous quickly before they shut Guantanamo down.

3. Build a Car (that works). I don't plan to make a Rolls-Royce or even come close to it for that matter. I just want to build a car from start to finish just for the heck of it. To me it would be like solving a puzzle or an elaborate math problem but instead of only mental satisfaction, you would get to go 0-60mph in hopefully at least 2o seconds. I don't hope to mass produce these cars but hey if I stumble upon gold...maybe I will. The action that I am taking to one day possibly fulfill this vision is learning more about cars and its parts. Also I need to keep checking the latest developments in alternative fuels so the car is relevant in the future.

These goals make me wonder why am I here at Baruch? Maybe the first thing to do is get out of Baruch. But these aren't my only visions. There are too many that coincide. Some of my goals have a lot to do with me being here at Baruch. But no matter what happens I know one thing for certain that hard work doesn't guarantee you will reach you goals but without hard work you don't have a chance.

Making Group Decisions

When we started this particular class activity, I knew exactly what the professor was trying to accomplish. He was putting us in a chaotic situation which would show us the difficulties of management. So when the floor opened for discussion, I sat back and let it be resolved on its own. I knew that the input I would provide would be thought by other members and would be rejected.

The proposal I thought of was that of the two tests we would take, one would count less in terms of percentage. For example, the lower score would count for 5% and the higher score would count for 35%. I felt, as some other classmates did, that there should be some degree of responsibility that the individual should take when they aren't successful. So if you did get a bad score, you should take responsibility, either of taking the test too lightly or not studying properly. Evidence that other people did well shows that it wasn't an unfair exam even though it was unorthodox.

But that is just my view which would've been shot down because I understand that people would like to leave class with nice letter grade and a bad score counting against you would hinder it. So when the opportunity of dropping and curving came up, I knew people would jump at it. Since it was the most lenient and it benefited those who didn't do so well and didn't take way from those who did do well, it was the best option in the utilitarian sense.

I feel I used the "avoidance" method but not to its strict definition. I expected there would be a resolution but that my input wouldn't really affect the decision and would just take up time. If I had time to make a proposal and had time to think about how to present the importance of individual responsibility in this case, maybe I would've spoken up. But I understand that in the future we will need to make decisions with time constraints similar to the one we encountered so maybe I need to be more vocal and assertive in the future. Even though my ideas won't be accepted, it is another proposal to consider and maybe it will get people thinking about future decisions that they might make.

It is important that we all get heard but with the time constraint and 80 people in the classroom, its hard to get input from every single individual. The reality is most people were looking for a way that they could individually benefit first, and then thought about it in the group context. It is not a bad thing...it is just human nature. But I feel after some convincing to those who opposed the final proposal, we came up with a solution that benefited everyone and that is the most important thing in my opinion. I similarly, even though had my own views, went along with the solution so everyone could benefit.

One more thing, multiple multiple choice is great. I don't know why people didn't like it. You lose less points missing a circle than getting the entire question wrong if there was only once choice. I am glad we decided to keep it!!

Do we have a Moral Instinct?

In class, we have talked about ethics and how crucial it is in a business setting. But how do we determine what we are doing is right. We must have an innate notion that we use to determine how we deal with dilemmas with a so called moral instinct. As we are thrown in the business world, we will use this moral instinct to guide our decisions.

There is a great article in January 13th edition of New York Times Magazine about this so called "moral instinct" which makes you question your own morals and how even though we are firm in our beliefs and believe that our morals come from reason; this article argues that it may not be "moral reason" but "moral rationalization" guiding your decisions.

Here is a scenario from the article you might want to consider and judge how sound your morals are:

"On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says 'yes.'

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don't see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second."

I found it to be a great read and thought it was relevant to the issues we have talked about in class in terms of our guiding ethics and morals. This article goes beyond the idea of the "Potter's boxes" and makes you question the very idea of your morality. But I have been wrong before!

You can find the rest of the huge article here if interested:

The Moral Instinct

Egging it On

This task was unique in the sense that it required out-of-the-box thinking. This is the first time I was involved in a task like this which seemed at first to have relevance only in a high school physics class. But now that I've had time to reflect on this activity, I have realized that this activity epitomizes the management experience. The planning and execution of this activity as elementary as it may seem requires the team to have a clear objective, promote teamwork, come up with strategies and evaluate them, and finally implement the best strategy.

Our team understood the task really well. The objective was to try not to break the egg from a height of 10 feet using 8 straws and 2 feet of tape. We conceptualized an idea really fast but we didn't take into consideration other possible strategies mainly because of time constraints. So skipped step 2. There seemed to be skepticism from some group members whether the proposed idea would work. But from the confidence of other members who came up with the idea, we seemed to ignore our doubts. In fact, once the model was drawn it seemed like the egg would withstand a drop from 10 feet. But we never discussed Step 2 of the planning process where we needed to evaluate group strengths that work in our favor and group weaknesses that could've held us back. We were vary of the small amount of time to conceptualize a design and hence we skipped those steps.

Once we were given the material to build a design, chaos ensued. The race was on and we had to bring the 2D model to life. As the building process went along, we all realized that it looked much prettier on paper than it did in the implementation. We seemed to stray away from the model that we drew because of difficulty trying to build it and the constraint that 50% of the egg shouldn't be covered. What resulted was a pretty bad model that was a mush of straws and tape attached to the egg. The problem was that we didn't evaluate possible setbacks associated with the design. We also didn't clearly evaluate the resources and how they would work together.

Once the model was built we also saw that the model wouldn't stay on its base and rollover to the side exposing the egg. We tried to fix it last minute...our last desperate attempt. Once the time allotted was ending, it seemed we were relying more on divine intervention than our confidence.

The result from the experiment is shown above : (
Humpty Dumpty (our egg's name) had a great fall.

We seemed to skip a couple of steps and didn't properly execute others. But our biggest problem was that we didn't consider or develop alternative strategies. A better way of saying it would be that when the bus was going down the ditch we didn't make an effort to try to stop it, we let it go down the ditch hoping that it wouldn't be damaged.

The biggest problem we faced was time constraints. We didn't have time to evaluate setbacks and in retrospect we should have done that. We also should have made plans to make an alternative model just in case the first model didn't look like it was going to work. We also should have taken into consideration other ideas and input from everyone.

Overall, I think in our haste to complete the task, we did a less than commendable job but I am sure with more time to conceptualize and implement, we would have come up with a better model.

Our egg had the loudest crack noise which fits my theory that if you do something bad...you should do it REALLY bad so people remember!

Song I'm Listening to: Good Morning by Kanye West