Plan or fail

Planning is essential in any part in life, for it being helpful in planning on a trip with your friends, planning a business meeting or even planning to clean your room (Eventually).

Eunson (2012) claims, 'There is no denying that planning is one of essential prerequisites to individual assignments. With the aim of carrying out assignment effectively, we need to make detailed plans and take steps to put our goals in practice.'

But planning isn't all about the end result, you need to think of the errors that may occur, a good planner thinks ahead of the plan.

Planning often goes well with organization; to organize is to order things in a specific arrangement. for example, if you would plan to clean your room and organize it by what suits best to you. If someone is unplanned then they will have no idea how to do anything because that person didn't plan and is unprepared.

                                                 (Source: http://tinyurl.com/bbfene5)
                As said by Benjamin Franklin, 'By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.'


This is only a small example, imagine if it was a business meeting or as big as a convention! If you were unprepared the whole event would be in chaos. People not getting correct information, times getting mixed up and work never getting done. A good plan includes setting aims, goals, actions, evaluation strategies. You should never work on details first, like getting people to come to the event before setting a set location for the event.

When organizing your room for example, not only should it be clean; you should also know exactly where everything is, that's the whole point of planning and organizing, what good would organizing something and not knowing if you have or planned everything you need.





References:


Eunson, B 2012, Communicating in the 21st Century, 3rd edn, John Wiley & Son Australia, Milton, QLD

Costigan, L 2015, Lesson 5 – Planning, logic and organisation, COMM11003: Communicating in the 21st century, CQUniversity, Sydney, viewed 22 May 2015, https://moodle.cqu.edu.au/pluginfile.php/116704/mod_resource/content/1/Weekly%20lesson%205.pdf.

Echo360. 2015. Lynette Costigan [ONLINE] Available at: https://video.cqu.edu.au/ess/echo/presentation/0da8c002-5e9f-4667-b9b0-5a6c9bad8c43?showheading=false&instructor=true. [Accessed 22 May 2015].

Reviews save lives

We've all been there when were planning a trip to somewhere or buying an expensive item and you're having second guesses that you should buy it, you've gone through and checked everything 10 times over but still unsure about the seller or website. This is why we need more reviewers, to stop people worrying and get more satisfied customers.

There are many kinds of 'Review' based systems, these are only examples two of them.

The thing with businesses, they are always competitive to each other doing the same thing with the same item. E.g. selling the newest IPhone. This is called 'Price Matching', where two businesses will compete to have the lowest price by besting what the other competitor has matched that item to; This is very good if you want the lowest possible price.

Good businesses with high reviews will be more talked about and therefore be more heard. So if someone said that (insert business here) has a really good price for something you will go there first because you got a friend recommendation, if it's good for him then it must be good for me. This is called 'Word-of-Mouth; As Ellison and Fudenberg said, 'Word-of-mouth has long been recognized as an effective communication channel for reducing uncertainties regarding product quality (1995).

There is also one problem with this review based system, if website looks fishy and there are reviews; are they actually real? For some websites they know that people will buy from them if there are reviews because it gives them more confidence that other people are satisfied. So they might be tricky enough and put a FAKE comment/review system.These can be easily spotted by looking for a way to actually leave that comment/review, another way is to look at the comments/reviews, are the names phony looking, are there more then one different profile image (If possible). There are a lot of ways to spot a phony website reviews.

(Link: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/6002098) 

                                This short video shows the phony comment/review system

So for anyone looking to buy or go on a trip, please look and plan carefully or it could be your biggest mistake.


References:
What Is Price Matching? (with pictures). 2015. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-price-matching.htm. [Accessed 20 May 2015].

Jabr, W, & Zhiqiang, Z 2014, 'KNOW YOURSELF AND KNOW YOUR ENEMY: AN ANALYSIS OF FIRM RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONSUMER REVIEWS IN A COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT', MIS Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 635-A10.

[Vinesauce] Joel - Windows 7 Destruction - YouTube. 2015. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDpxx5UqrVU. [Accessed 20 May 2015].

3 Ways to Spot a Fake Review on Amazon - wikiHow. 2015.  [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wikihow.com/Spot-a-Fake-Review-on-Amazon. [Accessed 20 May 2015].

Are group work necessary?

Group work is one of the many annoying things that you will need to do in your school career. But fear not, this group work could be the best thing that you could do for yourself and your team members.

Group work is used for all means of learning in most educational systems, this group work can help the user and their team in many ways such as, better brainstorming, cooperative team work, better social skills and more. In a test, it was found that 97% responded that working in a group improved learning, academic knowledge and learned more or different things when in that said group then if they would worked alone (Linköping, 2014, pg6).

For groups there are two types of teams; High-performance Teams or Low-Performance Teams.
The High Performance Teams is a group of people who are working toward a common goal, a common purpose and an approach for which they hold themselves collectively responsible.
A Low-Performance Teams are the people who risk of "Social Loafing".
Social Loafing occurs when you have many team members and others can hide under the performance of others and therefore do less work.

As President FDR(2014) has said, 'People acting together as a group can accomplish things that no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about'. (I Hate Working In Groups, 2014)
With this said, working in a group is something where your team could create something that you could never imagined making. But this can only happen in a "high-performance team" because all members are in for the same purpose and same goal to achieve; and if that team has "Slackers" then the team wouldn't be achieving their best efforts.




References: 
I hate working in groups, 2014 (video file), Available from: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYscemhnf88>. [13 May 2015].

Hammar Chiriac, E, Williams, GJ, & Senior, C 2014, 'Group work as an incentive for learning -- students' experiences of group work', Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 5, pp. 1-10. Available from: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00558. [13 May 2015].

How to Create a High Performing Team. 2015. How to Create a High Performing Team. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.centerod.com/developing-high-performance-teams/. [Accessed 13 May 2015].

Why greed is the best and worst motivator

Greed is what the world goes around these days, it is often used to motivate someone to either, get something done, or as a reward for something they did good. But can this be a bad thing to do? We all know that everyone loves money, but are we relying on it too much to get people motivated?

Greed is defined as as, 'Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.' In this case it's wealth. People work for money, it’s as simple as that. But people can often misuse that power. People have been manipulated, swayed and even controlled by money.

Philippe Gigantes (2002a) believed that, “whatever the national culture, people have sought to acquire what it takes to satisfy five basic desires: security, shelter, sustenance, sex, and self-expression.”

Greed in the workplace is another thing to take into consideration. There are 3 types of employees in the workplace.

Firstly, we have the low-risk employees who have that strong work ethic who is reliable to help the company get their sales quota or promote a product. These people are usually the most sort after in businesses.

Next, we have the Medium-risk employees, these are more subtle or less obvious than the other behaviours. These employees have a tendency of “Lying about hours worked, misusing an expense account, accepting kickbacks, and covering up mistakes” (Robinson & Bennett, 1995).

And on the end of the list we have the High-risk employees, these will go to great lengths to get out of the work but still get paid. Examples of this include envy, power lust, exploitation, manipulation, deception, and a sense of entitlement.

These types of behaviours are only dependant on the employee. This is also why they conduct interviews with the future employee for these types of risk behaviours. But these behaviours aren’t only in the workplace, these types of behaviours are found everywhere.

There have been studies all around the world, as an example from Mrs Lisa Anderson, where they get random people from who they know or anyone off the street to participate in studies about a subject or use people to test new medicine or try drugs on to see the results (Lisa Anderson, 2015). The user knows that they can be seriously hurt but they will get paid in the end. These tests could last for a week or for more than 6 months. So they would rather run the risk of DYING in order to get some extra money. 

Just goes to show how far people will go for money.

References:

Eunson, B 2012, Communicating in the 21st century, John Wiley & Sons Australia, Milton, QLD.

THE GOOD AND BAD ABOUT GREED, John G. Bruhn Available at: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.cqu.edu.au/eds/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=3449bbd4-d6d4-4749-83b7-73d74a2b3e6d%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=pdh&AN=2012-18781-003&anchor=cpb-64-2-136-EDDA  [Accessed 08 April 2015].

greed - definition of greed by The Free Dictionary. 2015. greed - definition of greed by The Free Dictionary. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/greed. [Accessed 13 May 2015].

APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, text revision (DSM IV-TR), defines antisocial personality disorder (Cluster B).

Lisa Anderson, CQUniversity, 2015

Welcome to COMM11003

Hello everyone! I am a digital media student and I am in my 2nd year of studying.
This blog will be used for the weekly studies for Communication in Professional Contexts.
If anyone is super curious about me, here is my latest youtube video where it is about my hobby/sport called "Tricking" Here