Review: BADM508 Leadership and Teams

This course covers some of the common themes that are important in leadership and teams in organizations. For example, it covers the importance of diversity and inclusion and doing our part to foster a sense of psychological safety in the workplace, which is essential to create an environment where people can easily voice their concerns.

The course also examines the importance of self-development and the relationships between the self and other individuals and between the self and the organization. It asserts that while pursuing our goals, we have to watch out for signs of burnout and take care of our well-being because our effectiveness at work indirectly or directly affects the rest of our team.

I was particularly intrigued by the team Everest Simulation Exercise, which simulated a team effort to reach the top of the Everest mountain. After the exercise, the takeaway was that instead of overthinking about reaching the top as a whole team, we should have analyzed the underlying goals behind each character to optimize better how many people should have reached the top together versus how many people should have stayed at a base camp; forcing all characters to reach the top together turned out to not only be hazardous to some characters but also cause us to miss out on points derived from meeting individual goals. This is applicable at work. While it is important to inspire our team members to work towards a shared goal, it is also essential to examine what each of us is motivated by to organize our efforts better.

Review: BADM509 Managing Organizations

The Managing Organizations course has two parts: designing the organization, which involves creating the team's mission, vision, and culture, and managing the organization, which consists of maintaining a good culture, managing change, etc. Learning how to look at an organization from an organizational perspective was helpful. Reading the different case studies about how real-life organizations managed to change and implement cultures was also handy.

I was quite surprised that I liked the matrix organizational structure, which combines the functional and the divisional organizational structure; i.e., it combines groupings of employees based on domain specialty and grouping based on service departments. It is because while I liked to be able to find the knowledge I needed from the functional structure at work, I appreciated the divisional way of organizing resources to achieve goals at the workplace.

For our team project, we analyzed Visa as a company and its response to potential disruptors from the rational, natural, and open-system perspectives. The rational perspective is all about how to best organize resources to achieve a goal. The natural perspective is all about the interactions between humans in the organization. The open system perspective is all about the interactions between the organizations and outside forces. Overall, the project was a good recap of the course material.

Review: MBA597 Program Foundations

This was a mandatory course that ensured all students were aware of the various resources available. It served as a helpful reminder.

Personal Project: Learning NextJS

To keep my skills relevant, I am finding time here and there to work on my next NextJS project. The skills will be transferable to my work and help me keep up to date with public cloud engineering and web development.