I was truly surprised when I walked into our management class on Monday. I knew our class was not like any other but when Professor Kruger told us the egg experiment I was confident that this will probably be one of the most interesting classes that I’ve taken and will be taking in Baruch.
Planning is never easy, working in groups is even harder. Everyone has their own opinion and quite often when someone is feeling very strong about their idea it is hard to convince them of anything else. Working in our group was actually fine. We all started thinking what would be the best way to do this. We had a pretty set idea of how we will construct the protection for an egg within 10 minutes, and we truly wondering why is Professor giving us so long to plan. However, when we got the materials we understand that perhaps we needed to think a bit harder and longer. At first we didn’t even know how to approach the egg and how to connect it with the straws. In the end we finished on time and the bravest person in our group went up to throw the egg J. I had strong doubts about our egg surviving. I guess I did not prove my point better, because I had a little different idea of how to protect an egg. I guess I should really be more striving to talk out and explain my opinion.
When looking at the five steps of the management process, I cannot say that we completed them all. We did define our goals and objectives. I think we completed step 2 as well. However, we did not come up with an alternative plan, so step 3 was bypassed. I think we bypassed step 4 as well. Of course we implemented the plan to the best of our ability, we did not discuss what was done in our group. I think next time we should be more cautious in following the 5 steps of the planning process much more carefully.
