Tag Archives: George Mason University

Appreciative Inquiry and George Mason University’s Strategic Vision

This morning I was fortunate to be part of an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) event at George Mason University. If you’re not familiar with AI, from Wiki: “Appreciative Inquiry is primarily an organizational development method which focuses on increasing what an organization does well rather than on eliminating what it does badly.” The whole purpose of today’s AI was, “to help shape aspects of the new Vision related to Mason’s mission, values and the Mason Graduate (the attributes we wish all of our students have in common by the time they graduate).” Currently, George Mason University is creating a new strategic vision.

During my time as the student body president of Saginaw Valley State University, I contributed to the university’s strategic planning process. I was fortunate that during my time as the president coincided with when the university was in the process of redoing its 5-year plan. I say this because at the AI event today was George Mason University’s student government president. It made me a bit nostalgic about my time in that role.

Getting back to AI: I really like this method. By focusing on the positives of an organization, it certainly feels like there’s a better energy about the process. I could be demonstrating one of my biases, but even the faculty facilitator (who was there at the birth of this method in 1987!) spoke about the importance of steering clear of falling into a trap of opining the things that an organization lacks. Why? Simply stated: that list is never-ending.

The group of folks that I spent morning with really came up with some great ideas. This process gave me a new appreciation for some of the positives of George Mason University. In fact, I even joked with the group that it made me want to forget about moving back to Canada and get a job here at Mason.

Lastly, I wanted to say that today’s event reinforced my enjoyment of being part of strategic planning. While there wasn’t any actual “strategic planning” that happened today, I knew that the things that the larger group (of about 100 people) talked about today would be a data point that could be used by those folks who are doing the strategic planning. So, in a larger sense, today’s event was about strategic planning. And strategic planning is something that I can get really excited about.

Oh, one last thing. There was a really great line that was said during the meeting that the room seemed to love. I captured it in a tweet:

Ethics: A Jagged Line

Earlier this calendar year, I had an ethics class. It was only a half-semester course, but I rather liked it. That’s probably because I really enjoy morality and ethics. In fact, some of the research I worked on during my undergraduate degree required me to read one of George Lakoff‘s books, Moral Politics. Even now, I really enjoy reading the work of researchers like Dan Ariely, who often write about ethics. Anyway, back to the ethics class from earlier this year.

Towards the end of the course, the class was having a discussion about something that I don’t remember. In the course of the discussion, it was clear that there were valid reasons (on both sides) of the dilemma. As the discussion was wrapping up, the professor drew a jagged line on the white board (much like the jagged line in the picture at the beginning of this post). I don’t quite remember the “exact” phrase that the professor said, but that’s not important. The important thing is that I remember the takeaway — ethics are not black and white.

Conveniently, the jagged line picture also has ‘black and white,’ but the metaphor I like to think of is the straight line (vs. the jagged line). Some might think that there’s a clear right and a clear wrong — in every situation (a straight line, if you will). However, I think that life is much more nuanced, much more complex than that — a jagged line. Sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be ethical, and sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be unethical. It’s important to understand the context to understand the ethicality of a situation. That’s certainly an important takeaway, if you watch Professor Sandel’s Justice course.

Before I end this post, I wanted to touch share something from the current President of George Mason University, Angel Cabrera. He’s only the 6th President in the school’s history and his most recent position was as the President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. He recently wrote a post for the World Economic Forum. An excerpt:

No matter how high the legal penalties may be, an opportunistic, self-interested manager within a large corporation can always find a way to make the pay-off of a bribe a no-brainer. This is so because the personal benefits of earning a contract can be significant and the probability of getting caught can be easily minimized. The very same factors that make the modern corporation so productive – specialization and localization of knowledge – also make it extremely difficult to control the decisions of each individual manager. The delegation of authority to managers with specialized knowledge makes the corporation vulnerable to decisions by those managers because they are often the only ones who understand the full complexity of a given contract (technical details of the products being sold, personal circumstances of the individuals involved in the transaction, dynamics of the social and institutional context in which the transaction takes place, etc).

When the golden opportunity presents itself to bribe, benefit from it and not get caught, the only thing that can stop him or her is a deeply engrained belief that the action is morally wrong.

How The Heck Does The Economy Work, Anyway?

A few months ago, I wrote a post about an online video series I’ve been following by John Green on world history. A few days ago, I learned that two economics professors at George Mason University were starting an online course in the same vein as Stanford. As they’re economics professors, naturally, you’d expect that the course is on economics (it is). In fact, the two professors (Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen) describe the course as:

This course covers theory and empirics and history for the economic growth of developing nations.

I have to say, I’m really excited for this course and I think you should be, too. Similar to my comment about our need to understand the implications of history and the past, I believe we also should have an understanding some of the basic underlying theory of the economy.

There are a few differences between John Green’s crash course and the course being offered by Prof. Tabarrok and Prof. Cowen. First, as I referred to earlier, the economics course is more in the same vein of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Second, there aren’t any fun animations from the Thought Bubble (at least I haven’t seen any, yet). Third, there are multiple videos per lesson. With John Green’s course, there was only one video per week on a given topic. With this course from Marginal Revolution University, there are usually multiple videos for a given lesson. For instance, for the lesson on People (as in, leading thinkers on the economy), there are over 30 videos. Finally, there are practice questions. Practice questions? Yes, practice questions. Meaning, the professors have included practice questions along with the videos to help the viewer interact with the material.

I’ve included the introduction video below.

Drops from the Fire Hose – The Mason MBA Student Association

It’s only been about a week since my last post here at Genuine Thriving, but it seems like a lot longer. I think that’s partly because I have been blogging, but just not for Genuine Thriving. Lately, I’ve been trying to drum up interest/traffic for a student organization I’m part of: The Mason MBA Student Association.

One of my key roles with this organization is running the website. As part of running the website, I thought it would be a good idea to have a daily post of some of the business news/information from around the web. I’ve called this series, “Drops from the Fire Hose.” Why? Well, there is a plethora of business information written everyday, countless books that are published each year, and a number of ways to consume new business information. These daily posts are meant to curate some of the articles/information that Mason MBA students may find useful.

Why am I telling you all about this? Well, for one, I thought some of you might find this useful, too. I usually post a few articles along with a few excerpts of those articles. If you like some of the “business” posts I’ve written here, you’d probably like some of the business articles that I include in the daily “drops.”

I have a list of 6 or 7 things I want to write about and I’m hoping to get them all written by the end of the week. If not, I may have to do one of those posts where I wrote about a bunch of ideas in one post.