Hi,
While finishing my essay I was still wondering if I should explicit answer the question why study management, just manage stupid or that my quest already proves it is. At this moment I have dedicated my last chapter to this question. In this section I describe the reason why I think it is valuable to study management and that I have proven that with my quest.
I was wondering what you guys are doing??
Good luck with writing and studying
Chantal
Tomorrow I’m going to start writing the essay. I’m going to use less definitions than I planned to do. Performance and strategy are obviously two variables that has to be explained. Mister Wolters explained in the final confrontation that focussing on one industry maybe can reveal more precious information in this case than focussing on different industries. Luckily I don’t have to do more industries and I can focus on the information I collected from the two interviews. The next step is ordering the articles, blogs, challenges I want to use.
Adios,
Robert
Finaly the last post!
I did an interview with an employee of defietsfabriek.nl and an interview with a small custom made bike store near my house in amsterdam. It was interesting to see the differences.
The local store had the mission to survive and defietsfabriek.nl had the mission to grow.
defietsfabriek.nl has a strategy of productleadership, and a differentiation strategy. The sell there own bikes and have service points you can bring your bike to for repair.
The custom store is trying to survive in the competing market. They sell custom made bikes and try to gain customers with their close customer relationships. Here you have influence on how your bike is going to look. The difference is that they dont have standardized product.
In the interviews some things were mentioned. The influence of the marketing of the brand is of influence. The price of the bikes. And the market that it reaches is different. defietsfabriek.nl reaches a bigger market and in that way can sell more bikes.
I will try to encorporate these things and more in my report. I also decided to write it in such a style the I will just start with a introduction of a layman asking me the question and I will anwser: there are different theories about that.
Personaly I dont see the use of this blog, it keeps me from writing my actual report. Posting the thinking proces isnt possible, because you always post a small conclusion.
In the future it can be a possibility to just post the final report and then maby the comments why you changed something.
good luck writing the last bits of your reports!
As Robert has posted I think I have to make also a few little adjustments. I think I have started off quite good, I was really telling a story: for instance I have begun by telling what a firm is. I used very practical examples, with that I integrated some academic literature which in the end defines what I think a firm is. After that I want to explain more about strategy and performance, this part I have to develop more. Last week I concentrated more on explaining what the generic strategies of Porter (1980) are. I think also a few adjustments have to made here. I used a lot of practical examples in which I integrated a lot of companies that people know and in this way people can visualize it more so it becomes more clear. In the end I think I don’t have to make really use of chapters, in one way I have to structure it of course but I think it limits me to much.
I pretty much enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you. Since this is the last blog I like to thank everybody who contributed to my essay.
Kind regards,
Matthijs
Hi all,
First I would like to thank you all for the interesting meeting of yesterday. This I my final post on this weblog. As skeptic as I was in the beginning about this course and blogging. I must say, I did enjoy and learn from it. Not only in finding answer to my question, but also from all your different insights in studying, and how to handle “academic” sources.
This weekend I will start with my final essay, and I hope that everything will come together in end.
I wish you all good luck, not only with this assignment, but also with your final year!
Cheers,
Christian
Yesterday, my group and I had our final confrontation lecture which gave me a lot of answers, ideas and new perspectives. I would like to use this blog to discuss the new ideas for my final essay.
After discussing our four questions about, laypersons language, structure, comparing organizations and on how to incorporate the question ‘why study management’ it became clear how we have to write our final essay.
Most important in my opinion is to be convincing in our argumentation. When there is not only one good answer to our quest it is very important to convince laypersons of your answer.
Secondly, our focus is very important, whether we chose to focus on only one industry or we chose to try to answer the quest completely we all have to focus on the why of our quest and we should avoid getting too occupied with finding the best definitions of performance and strategy. At last I would like to stress the fact that we have to tell a story. We are telling a story to laypersons who have to be able to reproduce our line of argumentation. In discussing the theories we are using in our quest, we have to write about the theories and not explain every single detail, only the key factors of the models and theories are important. We shouldn’t loose the attention of our readers when we are discussing the theories.
I am not going to follow my previous given structure. I am going to tell a story in a way that will keep the interest of the readers and can convince them of my answer. I would like to start my essay with writing about our interesting but difficult quest followed by my answer to the quest. In the middle part I am going to lay out the argumentation to my answer. My empirical findings will support and illustrate my argumentation. I am going to end my essay with my answer to the quest and to the question “Why study management?”. By answering all the why questions I am writing an academic essay.
Good luck!
Hi everybody,
After five weeks of blogging, making challenges and working on our individual quest we were tested this week by challenge 4. Even though there were a lot of complaints I have seen multiple movies of my fellow students and I’m impressed. Business Administration students can also be creative!! For editing my movie I have used the edit rooms of the vu. Here they use the editing program of adobe. After a lot of frustrations and a lot of questions I finally found out how to edit my movie. Unfortunately, I was not able to put the results on this blog because with uploading my movie on youtube and google I received a failed message.
Shooting the movie ended up being a nice experience. Filming is not going to be my new hobby but I am pleased to know a little bit more about how to shoot a movie.
In order to improve this course, I would like to suggest (as mentioned in our final confrontation lecture) that this last challenge would have been of more use when you had to film about your own quest-ion. When challenges are meant to be supporting assignments for our quest, it has to be useful for all quest-ions. I would also like to see more information before hand on how to hire equipment, edit programs, and how to upload to movie on you blog. The new media experience on the first floor looks fantastic, but how to use all the facilities is still a clue…
Chantal Buné
| This is my final blog. I hope that everyone will do fine in writing the paper. I want to stress out that this blog still can and I think must be used for answering and helping with our paper. I know that some will not use this opportunity but I think it’s easy to still use it because all the 7 of us have the same subject and (should) know more than anybody else about the subject. I hope that when I have a question I can still use the blog and hope to get some comments.
One thing. The slogan. Why study management just manage. During this course we did just that by doing all those stuff. Some with a deadline of a view hours and with all the blogging. We had to manage ourselves to get things done. this only in a large story will and can be useful in aswering the ques-ion. Ciao Michael |
| During my last blog I have had a lot of good comments from the most. My blog was about the structure. How to do it. When is it too empirical and when the opposite. During the confrontation lessons today we get to learn that there is not ‘one’ good way to come op with an answer or write this final assignment but many and that depends on how you motivate your path. My whole story will be a true quest with all the assignments etc merged in the paper. And we could use the blogs in our paper to refer to right? I wish you all the luck. |
Today at the final confrontation, I discovered I have to change my the structure of my essay. The structure I had in mind was that of a thesis. Mister Wolters suggested that it should more of story, where you combine practical en theoretical examples to show that you can explain why a firm can outperform the other. The most important part of the essay is convincing your readers that you have found the answer on the question. I’m going to use my blogs, challenges, interviews, comments and the theory to write an interesting story.
Later some more about the final confrontation,
Robert
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