Temp. Overview. Service Design. Architecture Elements. Culture. Management. Organisation. Leadership. Capabilities and Competitive Advantage. Process. Platform. How Management Innovation Happens. Old habits die hard, new habits die easy. "Imagine a warm summer day at the beach, a pile of sand, and a bucket of sea water.
Pour some water on the top of the pile, and watch how it finds its way down. The first wave seems undecided, constructing a winding path to ground level. Later waves, however, follow this path, and flow downwards in a seemingly effortless fashion: a habit has been born. " How much of what you do each day is the result of habit? Final Exam: Design the Ideal Organization. Use Course Concepts to Defend Your Answer. That is the final exam question that I've been using for about a decade in my graduate class "Organizational Behavior:An Evidence-Based Approach" in our Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford.
Students get 3000 words to answer the question. I put in on the course outline so they can see it the first day of class. I do so because I want propsective students to decide if they can deal with a class with so much ambiguity and pressure to write well and because I want students to start thinking about their paper from the first day of class. I encourage and reward them for being as creative as possible, while at the same time, weaving together concepts related to major themes in the class such as leadership, employee selection and socialization, motivation and rewards, interpersonal influence, group dynamics, organizational change, innovation, and organizational culture.
As I tell the students, this is a really hard question.