Self-Reflection/ ZHANG Kangmin
Time flies pretty quickly, 13 weeks learning of High Performance Collaboration has come to an end. During that past 13 week, what I have learned about collaboration is quite important for me now and in future. Before engaged to this course, what I knew about collaboration are vague concepts. I thought collaboration was kind of team work, bring some people together and get the job done. This course have changed my opinion towards it, I have realized that team work has conflict and obstacles. To deal with conflict, we need appropriate skills of negotiation. To get obstacles overcome, we need to be creativity and innovative, so that we would be able to find out a new way to solve it. Professor Frank is very good at lecturing these knowledge and skills to us in class, he taught us with his daily experience, which made those complicated theories easier for understanding. Besides of lecturing, he also assigned us to build up a blog with creativity thoughts of company, which has brought me a lot of experience of how to become creative. In order to make us understand what we learned from the class and implement those knowledge and skills, he helped us to contact with evening class and ask us to corporate with them. This experience is special and impressive to me. So, I decided to write down what I have experienced from this teamwork and what I have learned from it, I hope my experience will help you guys, and let’s learn collaboration together.
How to use negotiation to get conflict done
Experience of first team work
Honestly speaking, at the first beginning when I heard this assignment, I was very surprised. Facebook, Twitter, Renren, Micro Blog, these social network are extremely familiar to me, they are my daily life. Open Facebook and Micro Blog is the first thing I will do when I switch on my laptop and
cellphone. Look at my friend’s new events and reply their message just like a
routine in my every day. Now, I have to make a blog myself, I had no idea what
this assignment was. With hell lots of questions and fare in my mind, I started
to build up this blog with my teammates, Leo and Isaac. Learn how to open up a
blog on Google and post our individual introduction to it, these are actually
easy to do.However, how to make an original logo that represent collaboration were difficult to all of us, and we had been stuck on this problem. In order our logo to be creative and include the meaning of collaboration, we spent lots of time and efforts on it. Leo, Isaac ad I, none of us has designing or art background, working out a logo sounded independently sounded crazy to us. After many hours of complaining and struggling together, we forced each other to engage to work. We were decided to work alone and share our prototype together, and chose the best one. At the first beginning, we did expect conflict will arise. When came to the timeline, we hold a meeting in library’s lounge and shared our outcome with each other. Unexpectedly, we denied everyone’s outcome, each one insisted on his own idea and against to accept other’s design as our logo. Concerning the next day’s deadline, we were all very worried about it. Fortunately, we had learned some knowledge and skills of how to get a win-win negotiation, Leo and Isaac had grouped with me in the last semester, so we quickly got started to make a win-win-win negotiation after come up with this idea. From the class of negotiation and the reading that delivered to us by Professor Frank, we know some strategy that work for a win-win negotiation:
1) Perspective-Taking
By
taking the perspective of the other party, negotiators attempt to see the world
through the counterparty’s eyes.
2) Ask Questions About Interests and
Priorities
A
negotiator could ask the other party in a negotiation questions about
underlying interest and questions about priorities.
3) Provide Information About Your Interest
and Priorities
Negotiators
who provide information to the other party about their priorities are more
likely to each integrative agreement than negotiators who do not provide this
information.
As you can see the logo on the right,
that is our logo.
Experience of the corporation with evening team
After the first experience of team conflict,
we all have learned a lot and our team work had been conducting effectively
until the time of corporation with evening team. Getting the conflict done
within our team were easy because Leo, Isaac and I have similar background,
same age and know each other well, but dealing with evening team was a tough
challenge, they were completely stranger to us at the first beginning. Besides
of the social problems, we did have a huge time gap when doing cross-team
discussion. We are from the morning class and usually not free in the day time,
on the contrary, evening team had class at night and always free at the night. Consequently,
the time conflict was firstly occurred. Except of the time conflict, how to
combined the ideas of two groups and together and make them novel, are also
very difficult.
According to Professor Frank’s
requirements, the virtual team consists of one morning team and one evening
team; each team represents a company from a different industry (the company may
be local or multinational). Our team is interested in interested in expanding
its products, services, production, markets, virtual community, etc via
building virtualXXX.com with another team in another industry (you must pick
carefully pick two different industries that would allow us to creatively
combine resources and talents in this entrepreneurial adventure through
building VirtualXXX.com.) Please pick an innovative company name that captures
the essence of your entrepreneurship.
Based on the former experience of team
discussion, during that time, we learned our lesson from last work. We brought
us together to think together. With a good strategy of negotiation, we finally
come up with a great and novel idea of our company. We decided to start an
online education company that working on deliver online education to campus
student. What you can see as below is our project.
At the
same time, we were aware of that the evening team’s project is online E-book,
which is not related with our project. We decided to run our virtual website
company by lecture video. Lecture video is the thing to replace book. Therefore,
we got a second conflict, corporation conflict.
Get the conflict done by creativity and innovation
Experience of combining project
When those two problems rose, we had no
idea how to solve the conflict. Teammates from evening class are MBA students,
who are more knowledgeable and experienced than us. We tried to contact with
them and make a date for a meeting, but they did not responded with actively. It
was like that they were aware of the time dilemma and just waited for us to make
comprise that satisfy their time schedule.
As a virtual team, we thought
implementing what Professor Frank taught us in class about how to approach VO
might be work.
- Telecommuting– Work away from the usual workplace, but not necessarily at home. Computers and telecommunications equipment are used.
- Telecenters-- These satellite offices located in communities outside of major cities and provide space and equipment for employees
- Mobile working-- Mobile workers who require tools such as cell phones, e-mail wireless devices, pagers and laptops.
- Hot desking-- Staff members spend a significant amount of time on customer premises. When they arrive, they are assigned a computer workstation where they can access their documents, emails, etc.
- Virtual teams-- Employees collaborate from remote locations using e-mail, groupware, the Intranet and/or video conferencing.
Got those useful tips for starting a virtual
team, we communicated with the evening team with wechat, which is very
convenient instant chat mobile software. The implementing of wechat had enabled
us to share ideas everywhere and anytime. Besides of wechat, we had picked up
empty morning, and hold a video conference through Google hangout. It was
really an amazing experience, the first time in my life that I use a camera for
a formal meeting. I believe this experience must made me feel confident when I get
the same situation in future career. After the time conflict had been solved by
technology, the next step is to combined our business project with the evening
team.
In order
to combined the project, we had to be creative and innovation, so that we could
find a way to take advantage for both of our ideas. Furthermore, as a business
project, we had also to be sure that our project is not workable but also
profitable. At that time, we remembered what we learned from the class. According
to this picture of Professor Frank’s class. Under a changing business
environment, creative and innovative ideas could come from these perspectives: Economy,
Technology, customers, competitors, Maverick, Government regulations, Distribution
channels, management, Employees, Suppliers.
After analyze our company and the evening
team’s company, we have made a decision that to focus our business especially
on campus students. We have two reasons to do that. The first reason is that
campus students are more easily to assess to our website and because of their
study request; they need textbook to help their learning. For this point,
evening class could exactly offer E-textbook, plus with our online learning
video, it would be welcomed by campus students.
Having our customer targeted on campus students, we had to think about the next step, how to guarantee our profit ability by creative distribution channels. Actually, the current technologies are all available to support our products. It was impossible for us to invent or conceive a fictive technology, we had to think over about current technology and find the best one. In order to make this technical distribution creative and innovative, we tried to use the method of how to be creative and innovative from Professor Frank’s after class reading.
There is a Knowledge-Brokering Cycle that mentioned in the reading material of innovation factory. This reading has indicated a very useful way to get innovative idea:
1) Capturing good ideas.
2) Keeping ideas alive
3) Imagining new uses for old ideas
4) Putting promising concepts to the
test.
The third step in the cycle occurs when
people recognize new uses for the ideas they've captured and kept alive. Often those
applications are blindingly simple. When Edison's inventors were developing the
light bulb, the experimental bulbs kept falling out of their fixtures. One day,
a technician wondered whether the threaded cap that could he screwed down so
tightly on a kerosene bottle would hold light bulbs in their sockets. He tried
it, it worked, and the design hasn't changed since. Old ideas can become
powerful solutions to new problems if brokers are skilled at seeing such
analogies.
As we
can see on the chart, education category has the biggest amounts of
application. However, when we tried to find out how many applications are
offering online education like we do, we got 0 relevant results. This surprising
results has somehow proved that our idea is innovative. Using mobile
terminals as an education tool are not novel method in fact, but we use it to
deliver a new content that has no competitor in the market. I believe that our
virtual company must be very workable and successful in reality.
What I have learned
13 weeks past very quick, but what I have
experienced in these 13 weeks will definitely influence me in the rest of my
life. I learned how to conduct an effective and win-win negotiation, how to be
creative and innovative, how to work in a virtual organization and how to
manage conflicts. Most importantly, I experienced a real virtual team work
during this 13 weeks, it was not only a precious experience that would guide me
for future career, but also combined my knowledge with practice in time. I feel
that all of my learning are in my mind and ready for the future challenge.
Thanks for Professor Frank’s excellent
lecturing and dedicated designing of this course. Thanks for all my teammates corporation
and effort.
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