Monthly Archives: August 2004

Yippe and Taking a break

I’ve had had a let­ter from the “Gradu­ate Centre”:http://www.auckland.ac.nz/postgraduate/ that says I: bq. have sat­is­fact­or­ily com­pleted the goals approved when you were ini­tially registered. Accord­ingly your regis­tra­tion is con­firmed. Yip­pee. I’m fully registered at last. Now to com­plete the _damn thing_. How­ever, as I’ve said “elsewhere”:http://www.petersmith.org/blog/archives/2004/05/a-wake-up-call.html I need to ease back a little. As part

Is the class still improving

*Yes* Because of Rochelle’s bereave­ment, I had the class mark them­selves using a little table I’d pre­pared. I think the table did two things. Firstly, it helped to struc­ture peoples com­ments a little, and secondly, because it expli­cit allowed only four attempts, it caused people to be less forth­com­ing with ‘off the cuff’ remarks. In

Selected sound bites

A few Por­t­erian quotes taken from: *Har­field, T. (1997). Stra­tegic man­age­ment and Michael Porter: A post­mod­ern read­ing. _Electronic Journal of Rad­ical Oran­iz­a­tional The­ory, 4_(1).* bq. Com­pet­it­ive advant­age is hardly a new sub­ject. … mar­ket­ing, pro­duc­tion, con­trol, fin­ance, and many other activ­it­ies in a firm have a role in com­pet­it­ive advant­age. … Com­pet­it­ive advant­age can­not be

Crafting and executing strategy

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing: *Thompson, A. A., Strick­land III, A. J., & Gamble, J. E., (2004). _Crafting and execut­ing strategy: Text and readings_ (14th ed.). New York, McGraw-Hill.* The pre­face of this text books says it aimed at the senior-level or MBA stu­dent, and so I’m con­sid­er­ing it as a replace­ment for MGMT 302 —

What use is theory?

For me, a good the­ory is one that does one or more of the fol­low­ing: # It allows one to pre­dict what will hap­pen, or # It describes (explains) why some­thing has happened, or finally # It pre­scribes what one should do (this is a vari­ation on 1 above). In gen­eral, as a prac­ti­tioner, it

The class is improving

I thought it would be inter­est­ing to see the pro­gress that the class, as a whole, is mak­ing. The table below sum­mar­ises the 1s, 2s, and 3s awar­ded each week. {color:red}_||Week 2|Week 3|Week 4|Week 5| |>. 1s|=. 20|=. 11|=. 14|=. 8| |>. 2s|=. 12|=. 14|=. 13|=. 12| |>. 3s|=. 2|=. 6|=. 3|=. 10| {color:green}=|Total|=. 34|=.

Journal grades so far

I think it was Celeste who asked to see all the grades, so that she can com­pare her per­form­ance with the class aver­age. How­ever, since grades are, by nature, cat­egor­ical, I feel an aver­age is math­em­at­ic­ally unsound, so here are the (sorted)grades for the class so that you can com­pare your pos­i­tion with every­one else.

Tisdalls — shop of the year

I’ve been exchan­ging a few emails with Richard “Tisdall”:http://www.tisdalls.co.nz/ regard­ing the ‘unre­li­able’ step­meter, that I replaced. He has been con­cerned by the prob­lem and very help­ful in deal­ing with it. People some­times com­plain that Kiwi’s don’t know how to _do_ cus­tomer ser­vice, but I think my exper­i­ences with Tis­dalls shows that some Kiwis give out­stand­ing

Chatting with Chintaka

Imme­di­ately after class, Chin­taka and Howie star­ted talk­ing about the case together. I was impressed by the qual­ity of their con­ver­sa­tion, and said that it was a shame that it hadn’t happened like that in class ? and Howie poin­ted out that he did have his hand up when Chin­taka was speak­ing but wasn’t ‘picked’.

Vinnies

It’s the _glorious twelfth_, and that means it’s Lisa’s and mine wed­ding anniversary. So, we decided to have din­ner at “Vinnies”:http://www.menus.co.nz/vinnies/ To whet our appet­ites, we had a glass of Bollinger (non vin­tage), and the savoury cones. I par­tic­u­lar liked the ostrich carpac­cio with Japan­ese pickles, and the truffled hum­mus was a close second. For

Why do you blog?

I was talk­ing with “Amit”:http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/armi/ yes­ter­day, and he was say­ing that he keeps on journalling/blogging because it forces him to reflect on what he has done. I think, like me, he finds it hard to be reflect­ive in “the moment”. No doubt a psy­cho­dram­at­ist would refer to this a an example of the cul­tural con­serve

Self sealing behaviour

So, I say I *like* feed­back, and yet I have _comments_ dis­abled. Hmm. I have a lot of good _reasons_ not to enable com­ments, but what is really going on. Oh it sounds a bit like that I want to: bq. (a) be in uni­lat­eral con­trol; (b) strive to win and not lose; ==©== sup­press