Connecting the Dots and Reflection

After reading through my previous posts, I think the underlying connection between these posts is that they are all a part of the question that how can organizations work more effectively.

In the organization experience & transaction cost post I wrote about my experience in an organization as an intern and also examples of transaction cost in an organization. By writing this post I thought about my past experience carefully and started to think about the bigger picture of how an organization is structured.

In the opportunism post I wrote about scenarios that people acting or not acting opportunistically in a film I watched before. I think opportunistic behavior is something organizations need to deal with, and organizations would always try to find out ways to avoid their competitor’s opportunistic behaviors. This post helped me to think about opportunistic behaviors and the reason behind from the individual level. This post also connects with the moral hazard problem and the efficient principle at the organization level. I think the ultimate purpose to deal with opportunistic behavior is for organizations to reach an efficient outcome.

Then in the team structure post I discussed the team structure during my internship. An effective team structure is critical for team success, and therefore the goal of discussing team structure is also to make organizations work more efficiently. I have always been interested in human capital consulting and organization design, so I found this part about team/organization structure particularly interesting. I’ve also learned about the importance of motivation and coordination. For a team structure to be effective, we have to motivate each team member. At an organization level, to have the organization produce efficiently, management will also have to motivate and coordinate different team and functions. Coordinating the interest of different people and also motivating different people towards the common goals is what management need to do. I think this connects to last week’s class discussion about management, and this is more obvious to me than the time I wrote the post.   

In the transfer pricing post about “illinibucks” I imagined if there is a “illinibucks” system where would I use it, and also possible problems about the pricing of campus services. I thought about this from a supply and demand perspective. I believe that “illinibucks” should be used in areas where there is excess demand and shortage in supply, this can somehow reduce the gap and better allocate resources to people most in need. This post connects to the idea of how should organizations deal with internal transaction and set the most efficient transfer prices. This post, together with the excel homework on transfer pricing give me a better idea about internal transactions in organizations.

My approach to respond the posts changed a lot. At first I didn’t have a clear idea about the course, so I was just responding to the prompts and wrote pretty randomly about my experience. As the course processed I started to become clear about the course theme and also the main ideas discussed in class. So I tried to link my answer to the prompt to the course theme and also approach from an economic perspective. My thinking changed, but the process of writing didn’t change much. I usually will look at the prompt at the beginning of the week, so that I get an idea and start thinking what to write. If I come up with a good idea I’ll take a note, usually just a few word. And then I will collect all my notes, structure my post and write the post at the end of the week. I sometimes also start writing in the middle of the week if I think I have good thoughts, and finish or make changes to it at the end of the week. It’s much easier to write and takes much less time if I have the right experience for the prompt or if I have a lot of thoughts on that prompt. The writing process for the organization experience post and the transfer pricing post went much smoother than the opportunism post. I couldn’t find a very appropriate example for the opportunism post, so I ended up writing a scene in a movie I watched.

If I’m writing the prompt, I would be very interested in writing how economic principles are applied to company cases. For example, the General Motors and Northwest Company examples we discussed at the beginning of the semester. Providing the background info and reading material and ask us to write about our understanding of the companies’ decisions, how economics principles worked in the company cases, and the connection with the class. It would be challenging and a lot of work will need to be done to write this kind of post, but I think the gaining from this kind of analysis would be very practical and help us better know how economics principles work in real world cases.