Saturday, January 15, 2011

Re: You get out what you put in to BE teaching.

Cross cultural management behaviour was one of my favourite courses and I have kept reading on it and it will be interesting to discuss this topic.

"there's no way to "fake" business knowledge and no way to really substitute it": That has been my experience especially in slogging through operations management and/or financial management accounting (a couple of my weaker topics). For example I need to review new Incoterms 2010 to get up to speed for next semester's lessons. It's a challenge to balance communicative capacities practice with minimal "need to knows" among students whom for a majority have not even held a part-time job and where maybe 10% of them may actually use English in their future career.

Re Hertzberg: I think in many ways my current position has allowed a lot of these self-actualization benefits to take place in my work and continued study. Especially in terms of autonomy there's never been anyone micro-managing me here. When I feel a need to learn more about something I just take a course and try to refine what I deliver to the students.

I've always felt the mind can be so actively under-challenged by work we must make new tasks for ourselves to measure our own progress. I don't like being bored. And if we believe in improving quality of our workers or students we must begin with ourselves. My pet peeve with my students is that they seem to think the only important thing about a job is how much money they make or that money buys happiness. I think many cultures in the world have had their core values hijacked by this theme paradoxically the profits of globalization help to generate a myth.

I think these hygiene factors have a lot of similarities with Maslow's Higher Needs. And Deming always said to get your workers to do a good job you must show them what you want them to do first. In short, "I am a responsible idiot." http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/

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