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For me, this blog assignment did not work as well as a communication tool, but as it did as a tool that helped me thinking about the course subjects. I think that the reason that it did not work as a communication for me is that there were just too many topics, too many blogs to check, and too many entries to write. For me, the longest continuous exchange was twice. I think it could have been better to exchange our opinions many times about one topic.

My suggestion for this blog assignment is to make a blog-team whose members check other members blogs every entry and post some comments. In addition, everybody is free to read any blog they like and leave their comments besides blogs by their team members. Moreover, the number of entries could be less but the number of comments could be more. In this way, people can exchange comments several times for one topic within the blog-team. Students could communicate more and the quality of communication may improve.

Come to think of it, though, the way teams often turn out, the student(s) who care(s) most about their grades are left holding the stick…

It was tough leaving comments to professor’s blog, because the topics required me to think hard in order to send meaningful comments. However, I appreciate the opportunity to think about management, career, visions, and life.

For me, this was the first time to create a blog. Since this blog was a class assignment, I felt that I was writing a paper to get a good grade. So, that was pretty tough even though writing articles for this blog helped me to understand and think about important subjects. However, after this class, I can post whatever I like without due date or grades. That sounds like fun!!

If you enjoy your life, it will become easier to manage tough moments.

When people talk about a better life, they mean a more enjoyable life. I have my own tips to enjoy my life.

Be Honest to Myself and Act Honestly to Myself
Being honest to myself is sometime hard. Being honest to my hopes, visions, and dreams can make people who are important to me sad or disappointed, or requires a lot of effort. However, being honest gives me strength and makes me happier.

Take Responsibility for my Life.
My life is mine. I follow myself and make decisions for my life. I can blame nobody about my life. To do so, I have to be strong enough to take all responsibilities for what I did, am doing, and will do. This reduces so much conflict with people and myself.

Love Myself, and Respect Others Values.
I believe that the first step to enjoy my life is to love myself. Respecting other’s values is the first step to grown up.

For me, these three principles are very useful to manage difficult and tough moments, such as when I was about to loose my goals, or when I had a big conflict with a colleague in my office.

POEM: Management

Management is
to find a nice reason
about your being late for a 9:30 meeting
when you wake up 9:00.

Management is
to stay committed to hard study
after the professor said to you,
“You did not submit somebody’s paper, didn’t you?”
during class,
after you spent two weeks drafting and visited the writhing center two times
for a paper about the impeachment of Bush.

Management is
to get the information that you need
when an academic counselor suddenly yells at you
“WHY DID YOU NEED TO COME BACK HERE? WHY? WHY?”
on the fifth floor.

Management is
to do your best for your clients
when your boss says,
“Your mistakes are too stupid. I don’t know why I am paying to you”
for the mistakes he made.

Management is
to keep smiling
when you are in the NY Department of Motor Vehicles office in Manhattan.

Management is
to write a poem
about something, you think, is the opposite of art or can not be a poem
for your management class
at 1:20 AM Monday morning.

D high C

I am a Dominance, high-Conscientiousness type. I have taken several Personal Profile Tests and tend to get results which rank either Conscientiousness or Dominance as high and I agree with these results. As far as Dominance is concerned, I like challenges, do not mind to manage trouble, and want freedom. As far as Conscientiousness is concerned, I think things through in detail and try to give my best in completing tasks.

On the other hand I tend to find myself ranking low in Influence. Since I want to do tasks in my pace and following my own way, I do not prefer team projects, especially with people who have goals that differ from mine. In fact, school team projects often are hard for me, because for some students a grade of B is good enough, while I strive for As. At the same time, though, I consider school team projects an excellent (and low-risk) practice. I think it is not necessary to change myself, but I need to learn the skills on how to get my own views heard and, hopefully, adopted by other people.

I strongly believe that although it is convenient to determine people by types, we need to see each individual’s personality to establish good relationships. It is important to try to find out the reason for people’s action, especially of superiors. Why did the manager say such a thing? Because of personality or because of something else? How serious should I take a manager’s words? I think this kind of thinking helps to establish an efficient work environment and reduce unnecessary conflict.

I think that taking a Personal Profile Test is useful for me because it gives me an opportunity to think about myself. Even though I do not think the results show my character in great detail, they may point out some important things that I may have overlooked without taking such a test. If I feel that a result is correct, I can determine what kind of new skills I may need to learn. I feel this is more important than the test results by themselves.

VISIONS

The visions for my future include running my own CPA office, working in a first class company as an internal auditor, and working in one of the Big Four Accounting Firms. So far, I worked in both, a first class company and a small CPA office, and found both work environments attractive. However, one thing I definitely need to achieve is to become licensed as a CPA.

To become licensed, I do not need to graduate from college again, since I already have a bachelor degree from Japan. Therefore, I have two options to complete the coursework required for the CPA exam:
1) To take the classes in an under graduate program and go to the 5 years program at Baruch.
2) To take the classes in a graduate school.
For both options I need a GMAT score of at least 570. The other issue is tuition. Since I am an international student, I am paying more than $14,000 per year for tuition at Baruch College, while following Option 1) above. As a solution to the tuition issue, I am seeking a paid internship; otherwise I have no idea how to pay tuition. For this I need to keep my GPA at 3.5 or above… and luck. Please wish my luck!

I think another big challenge will come after passing the CPA exam. I need one to two years of work experience after passing the CPA exam to become a licensed CPA. To do so, I need to find a employer who sponsors a work permit visa for me. Although everybody says it will be easy if I pass the CPA exam, I do not want to be a too optimistic and have already started to look for a respective position.

So now all I can do to work toward fulfilling my vision is to study for the GMAT, keeping a good GPA and continuing to look for a paid internship. And all that, while still bringing my English language skills up to speed. Sounds hard, huh?

Get A!!

First of all, I was very surprised about what the professor offered to us. For a second, I even did not recognize what he was offering there… We could decide how to treat our results for the exam?

After I recognized what we were exactly talking about, I was so surprised about everybody’s suggestions, such as making a curve and dropping the lowest grade for the exam. I thought, “That is too much. He will not let us do that.” However, he did say that he would accept our decisions as long as all students accepted it!! Finally, we came to a good resolution. Honestly, I was so surprised about what was going on.

The method I used to contribute to our decision was “Avoidance” since I thought “It seems like most people have the same interest as myself, and I should not make this chaos bigger.” We had a very limited time to reach our goal. Under these circumstances, “Avoidance” seemed to be one of the best ways, especially when your personal interest is the same as the majority’s interest.

I think that we could have more respected minority interests, and I especially admired what Joey did. Not everybody can show disagreement under these circumstances and not every word was respectful for minority ideas.

I believe that controlling one’s emotion or display more emotional intelligence and maturity is very important during meetings like that. Especially in business meetings, if one cannot control emotions and/or concentrate to achieve a goal, one most likely looses. Moreover, someone who lost emotional control tends to show a disrespectful attitude toward others. I loose my respect for anyone who does not respect other people.

Mission :PROTECT THE EGG

I was member of Team TAMAGO and had a lot of fun with this project.

I think we went all of the planning steps but then, had a rough time planning. We thought that 25 minutes were all time including building up the protection for the egg. Because of this misunderstanding, we planned in a rush. After we noticed that we actually had another 15 minutes to plan, we could not think calmly anymore. We came up with one nice plan which we, at least I, thought might work. However, we gave up this plan because of our resource limitations and tried to find a new one instead of improving the previous plan. Finally we came up with a plan, but we had doubt it would work. Then, it did indeed not work….

In the project, I was concentrated on how we could make it happen as much as most of you, even though I had a sense that we were somewhat wrong about time. I believe that in team projects especially those with a short due time, we should avoid any confusion and misunderstandings. It is better to use our time to solve the problems than going forward with confusion. It would have taken me one minute or less to ask somebody about time.

My Management Problem

I actually have two management problems: one in the office, the other in school.

First, my office problem: I am working in a small accounting office as a part time intern. After my manager quit, the president of the office tried to replace her position with me. To me, it seemed to be impossible, since I did not have enough experiences and time. However, he just said, “It’s not difficult. You can do it even though you are only part time.” I barely convinced him to hire at least one more person, and he hired another intern who had less experience than me and was my friend.
He literally said that inters are stupid four or five times a day – meaning us of course.

When we ask questions, he often answers like “That is too stupid to answer.” When we try to suggest new methods, he says “Do not complain. Just work hard. Your level is too low to complain.” However, he has us file taxes and make financial statements. Moreover, he prohibits us to tell our clients that we are inters. So the clients think we are accountants and expect professional service.

Since it is very hard for international students to get an internship, and also I still am learning a lot, I don’t want to quit this office. Can anybody give me some advice on how to deal with this boss?

My second problem relates to school. I and my friend have problems with Baruch’s administration. In the International Student Center, I was told different things at each visit from the receptionists. Each time I needed to bring different documents, many of which were unnecessary. In the Academic Advising Center, one counselor yelled at me asking why I came back to her even though I had a different question than at my previous visit. My friend was sent to get a document from a department and was told to go back to the previous department, that had sent him there on the first place. I transferred to Baruch from LaGuardia, but I had never experienced this bad service in LaGuardia. Do these things only happen to me?

Business Ethics

As we are learning Business Ethics in the class, I would like to share a stroy.

Yukijirushi is one of the best known milk and dairy companies in Japan. I love their products, and so do my friends.
However, in the 90’s, one employee of a company which did a lot of business with Yukijirushi informed the Health Department that Yukijirushi was recycling milk that had not been sold in stores. Investigating this claim, the Health Department found that Yukijirushi was reselling leftover milk after heat-treating it once again. Moreover, the Health Department discovered that Yukijirushi’s hygienic procedures were so sloppy that bacteria clumps the size of ping-pong balls had built up in the milk tubes in its processing plants. In the eyes of costumers, these findings shed a very bad light on Yukijirushi, and its sales numbers dropped significantly.

5 or 6 months after these problems had been made public, many people were still refusing to buy Yukijirushi products. I saw a TV documentary about the man who initially had informed the Health Department about Yukijirushi practices. His own company had not been able to pay salaries since the affair because Yukijirushi was its biggest business partner, and Youkijisushi's problems were about to push his own company into bankruptcy. He had also received many letters and phone calls that were blaming him for his report since many people, not even Yukijirushi employee but also Yykijirushi's business partner, had lost their jobs, especially older and weaker employees.
He said, “I do not regret what I did, but it is hard not to regret it. I know it was not my fault that so many people lost their jobs, but it is hard not to think that way.”

From this story, one can see how difficult ethical behavior can become for regular workers. I am sure that many workers had noticed that what they were doing was unethical and potentially illegal. However nobody took action for a long time. Who knows, maybe Yukijirushi would have stopped its practices long before they were made public, if only its own employees would have spoken up? But this would have been a difficult thing to do for people working in a business culture that demands that employees stick with their company – or are forced to leave.

I believe that in order to establish an ethical work environment in a company, it is very important that already top management acts ethically and treats its employees, collaborators and customers with respect.

HI EVERYONE!!

My name is Miho. I'm from Japan and have lived in New York for almost 5 years.In Japan, I worked at a radio station as a radio hostess and had 8 radio shows a week. That was a hard job; working 18 hours per day, no day off for 2 months, and very low salary. You would be surprised to know my salary. But I loved the job a lot.Then, why did I quit my job? I have a bunch of official reasons for job interviews. But, to be honest, I could not stand my managers. As I gather more experiences, I can see what went wrong on my side and what on their side.
However, if I did not have the conflicts, I would not leave Japan or come to NY. Coming NY by myself with poor English skills, no family, friends nor money was the bravest challenge in my life!!
Right now, I am preparing to be a CPA at Baruch College. I am planning to be a good accountant in 3 years!