Wednesday's Presentation

We have been doing presentations about our research paper since Tuesday, and I am really enjoying my classmates' presentations! Listening to LILTDYs presentation, I feel that I am lucky because I can not only get valuable information from those who researched about the topics so deeply, but also get the tips to give a good presentation :) I did my presentation on Tuesday, but I was so nervous that I dropped some points I planned to talk about, and I also changed the slides at the wrong timing...

For Today's blog, I want to write about the Wednesday's presenters.
Miku: Thank you for the nice cupcake :P I liked the way she started her presentation. The first slide, thumbs up, make excited. She drew my attention from the very beginning!
Chisato: Since I read her final draft, I noticed that on what part of her paper she focused on. Since I tend to put so many points in a presentation, I learned a lot from her.
Maya: Fist of all, her topic was so interesting. She was also good at using effective visuals, which made me understand the concept of her point immediately.
Ayaka: Because I am a woman, I listened to her presentation with great interest. It was so amazing to know that 4 of 5 women had children! Her speech was clear, and she spoke at the best speed.
Shiori: Listening to her presentation, I understand one of the reasons why Tokyo Disney Land's casts performed the great leadership on 3/11. After her presentation, I thought "I'll definitely go to Disney Land" during spring vacation.
Xiaotian: I liked the way he presented with great  passion. It made me fascinated. He looked so confident! What I learned is that it is good to have a conclusion slide to sum up the talk. 

Thank you for the nice presentations!

Mr. Kitashiro's Lecture

On Monday we had our second guest speaker, Mr. Rakutaro Kitashiro. Thank you Mr. Kitashiro to giving  an inspiring lecture, and thank you to Ken for inviting him :) Listening to his lecture, I imagined how great it is to have him as a boss.

As Chisato said, I also expected that he is powerful. But he was calm and broad-minded, thoughtful... After the lecture, I was just curious and asked him when he gets angry. He answered, "About three times a year. I don't get angry. But I sometimes have to pretend to be angry if the staffs didn't try to understand customers' needs.
He also gave some good tips for leaders: Pick the best people and put them to the right position. He had a lot in common with Shackleton, because putting the best people in the right position requires the leader to pay close attention to the workers. 

Let me write some tips I received in order not to forget the lecture.

• do your best at current job
• don't take the easy job(in the difficult job, you can learn more and more)
• try to do what is right for the customers
• 3 is the magic number!
• be capable of making decisions
• don't forget that employees are always watching their leader
• set the goal, how to achieve
• don't get angry with people who delivered
• decide what is important and not
• be yourself!

I hope to meet him again!

Chapter 10: Tenacious Creativity

Today I am focusing on chapter two, whose strategy is "Never give up-- there's always another move," which means that we are done with the first part of the book. Hurray! In this chapter, the author writes about the problems occurred during the expenditure, and how Shackleton and his crews solved them by being creative.

I like the story about Shackleton, Crean and Worsley "shooting down the side of an almost precipitous mountain at nearly a mile a minute" (147). This seemed a little crazy for me, even though this was the only hope for the trio to rescue their fellows, considering the severe situation where they would have frozen to death.

Reading this chapter, I was marveled at the crews creativeness. I sometimes feel that I am lacking creativity, and this is  why I always respect people who offered creative solutions/opinions in wherever situations (group discussion etc). However, I personally believe that we are all born with creativity, and small children are all wonderful inventors.

Then why do I sometimes feel that I am lacking it? Because of the education? Hmm... I don't think so...

I watched a video which is dealing with creativity: "Do schools kill creativity". In this video, the speaker said the same thing as the author of Leading at the Edge. Since this is too long(about 20min,) I'll write about it. He said, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." Similary, Perkins says "rather than expecting things to go right, successful leaders under these conditions should be prepared for things to go wrong." (148)

The speaker follows, "What we do know is the kids would take the chance. If they don't know they'll go." I try not to be too afraid of making mistakes and not to decide easier and safer ways! I'll take a chance!

A Small Preparation for Mr. Kitashiro's Lecture

Hi :) Since I am looking forward to meeting Mr. Kitashiro, I think I'll do a brief preparation for the coming lecture on Monday by looking the two handouts we received on Friday. Looking at the last slide, the word "ATM" caught my eyes. Hmm... I know this... but why am I familiar with this word? I was like the man in the picture above.

In a few minutes I was reminded of our entrance ceremony here at ICU. Do you remember him giving a congratulatory speech(shukuji in Japanese) there? He talked about his motto ATM, which stands for "Akaruku(Cheerfully), Tanoshiku(Enjoyably), Maemukini(Positively)."
His tips for a global leader relates to Shakleton's strategies. For example, the second one "Set a goal and focus on short-term execution" is similar to Leading at the Edge's first strategy, "Never lose sight of the ultimate goal, and focus energy on short-term objectives." There seems to be a connection between Mr. Kitashiro and Shackleton, both as one of the greatest leaders.

The articles about him tell that he keenly feels university should train and cultivate "leaders." So far I am looking at the handouts and the web pages about him, but I am going to see him on Monday :) I'm sure we can get great tips to be a future leader during his lecture! So excited!!

Chapter 8: Lighten Up!

In this post I'm going to write about chapter 8, whose strategy is "Find something to celebrate and something to laugh about." Even though we are not under the survival conditions in our everyday life, I think lighten up is some kind of commodity, something reaaaaally important to us. I need to be lighten up right now because the submission of my paper(Chemical Basis of Nature) is due in about 3 days, and I just started... :'(

In this chapter, Shakleton and his crew of the Endurance celebrated the day of December 5, 1995, which surprised me. A year had passed since they started their expedition, and they were supposed to be on their way home then. The situation was quite hard for them. However, Shakleton(I suppose he did feel disappointment like other members) did not forget to cheer his crews up. His word "If you can't fix it, feature it (Perkins 115)," seems so true. The condition won't change so easily, but the way of seeing it is varies. So, if you were one of the members of the expediton, facing up to the hard situation and look for something to celebrate will definitely contribute to keep your faith and endurance.

Yet, if I were in the hard situation, my head would know that but my heart would not. I think I need to practice this in my daily life. Perkins states in his book that "Shackleton's ability to use celebration and ceremony to boost team morale seemed to come naturally (116)." Maybe I can start celebrating and cheering up just by remembering the sweet things happend to me during the day before I go to bed!

Our Last Negotiation Class

Wednesday was our last negotiation class! I'm sad because I really enjoyed all of the negotiation role plays. My favorite is the one we dealt with snake eggs :P In addition to the interesting case studies, I was happy that I got to know more about my LILTDY classmates. I'm so lucky to be one of the members of this class.

By the way, we cannot always meet win-win solutions in negotiation. In the handout(Behaviors vs. Tactics), we learned eights tactics to "win" the negotiation. 

The eight tactics

1. Exaggerated First Offer   2. Speed Ups

3. Delays   4. Drawing Lines   5. Creating Competition

6. Concessions   7. Investment   8. Authority Limits

The one I thought most interesting is the third tactic, Delays. While it was not so difficult to imagine the positive effect of using Speed Ups, I have never regarded Delays as one of the tactics used for negotiation. Come to think of it, the two tactics seem to be two sides of the same coin. If your negotiation partner is in a hurry, you can use Delay not only to win, but also to speed up your negotiation. What tactic did you find most interesting/useful?

We also answered Negotiation Preferences Questionnaire, and shared the results within groups.

My score of each section was that...

Competing 17/ Accommodating 21/ Collaborating 31/ Avoiding 13/ Compromising 18

The result was kind of a nice surprise to me because I thought I would have higher scores for Avoiding and Compromising. I hope I can switch to the right negotiation style depending on situations!

Chapter 7:Conflict

In this post, I will write about chapter 7, whose strategy is, "Master conflictーdeal with anger in small doses, engage dissidents, and avoid needless power struggles (98)." When people get together, especially when they are at The Edge, it seems something natural that conflicts occur, because different people have different opinions, backgrounds, and situations.

Reading this book and being introduced to some of the Endurance crew members, I noticed how unique each of them was, and how creative Shackleton had been to make a good relationship with them. For example, he expressed his empathy by earning Hurley a place in Shackleton's tent, and consulting him on key decisions (108).
I can see from the book that Shackleton respected his fellow crew, and put himself in their shoes.

I'll try to answer one of the questions(Q2. What changes can you make that will allow anger to be dealt with productivity and in small doses?) from expedition log, which is at the end of each chapter.

My answer is that we can activate our empathy like Shackleton did, when we come into conflict with someone. When feeling anger, it may be difficult to look back on oneself/the situation objectively, but it is important not to be lost.

As for myself, I'll put my feelings in order: I sometimes use a piece of paper and a pen to do this. And then, I'll try to think about what others feel: Why did he/she got angry? How has he/she been recently? Think about what made us come into conflict. Lastly, I will say sorry to him/her if needed. By doing this, I sometimes find solutions, sometimes not. There are times both of us need a little more time, but what I think is important is that to do this(the picture below)!

Thank you for the great lecture, Michelle!

On Friday, we had a wonderful guest speaker in our class. Her lecture was exciting, and I also got some clues for my final project, so I'm hoping to incorporate those into my essay. 

Thank you for inviting her, Ken!

She fascinated me from beginning to end. She made me think, "What's going to happen next?" at every moment. What I learned from her is that self-awareness is a quite important idea to perform effective leadership. Since we all have different personalities, our strengths and weaknesses are different.

For instance, I belong to Architects and Analysis group. According to Michelle, some of the advantages of this group are, good at analysis and process observation, can come out with totally of the wall solutions that work. The weaknesses are, on the other hand, can happily leave most decisions to others and focus on only one decision, and can be slow in making decisions. Being aware of both my strengths and weaknesses, I can change my attitude for the next group work I will participate in.

In addition, I noticed that not only leadership, but also partnership is important. Every member in the group may perform different types of leadership, all of which are essential. Therefore, cooperation is necessary to do a good work!

http://www.nols.edu/enrolled/admissionforms/instructor_course_curriculum/2009LENCh1-2.pdf

As you can see in the picture above, self-awareness is related to so many things. It seems to be a starting point for leadership :)

Pleasures vs. Gratifications

Since I had never thought about the difference between pleasures and gratifications, it was fresh for me to think about my own current gratifications, and I enjoyed listening to Chisato and Atsuko's ones. Chisato's gratitude were to play the instrument in LAMBS and to deal with assignments, and Atsuko's was to solve mathematical problems. Sharing our current gratification is our life in the discussion, I though that maybe gratification requires not only thinking and skills but also efforts. We need to practice hard to play the instrument. We need to put our efforts to solve mathematical problems.

This has somthing to do with the little kids in the video below. Do you know the Marshmallow Experiment?
In the test, children were taken to the room where there are only table and chairs, and they were told, "I'll give you this (one) marshmallow to you. I have to go because I have some works to do, but if you can wait until I come back without eating the marshmallow, I'll give you another." The children were offered two choices. Satisfy desire(eat the marshmallow) right now or wait longer and get the rewards.
It is said that about one-third of the children could wait and got 2 marshmallows. I'm sure that these children put a lot of efforts not to eat the marshmallows!!


P.S.
My gratifications are, doing gymnastics and sewing.
I noticed that these activities help reduce my stress as well. Though we are busy dealing with a lot of tasks, we should make time to do something we can get gratification from!



 

Chapter 4: Stamina

Hello!

Today, I'll foucs on Chapter four, whose stategy is "Take care of youreself: Maintain your stamina and let go of guilt." Althogh I did know that leadership is now required to each of us, and it is something we can learn by efforts to some degree, my reading experience of this book has been creating my own image of Shackletom as someone like superman. However, this chapter changed my impression of him in a good way. I understand that he was not a superman but an ordinary human, even though what he did and he himself was so great! He suffered from his bad health condition. He had a lot of things to worry about etc.

I'll pick out some of the points I was interested in this chapter.

• Observe others physical and mental health carefully, and tell them to care about their own health.

      I like personally like the part Worsely describe about Shackleton that his care was on the verge of fussiness.



• Share your internal feelings with people around you/yourself

          Human beings cannot live alone. We have lived helping each other since antient times. We need to "find outlets to our own feelings."

I have friends who ask me "Are you OK?" when they think I am not cheerful. Sometimes I actually faced difficulties, and sometimes I was just tired or couldn't sleep well the previous night. Even though I hadn't been in trouble at that time, I was really happy that they cared about me and asked me whether I am OK. I hope to be the person like them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3: Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

Question:
If you are asked to describe this picture, how would you say?






What was your answer? Half full, or half empty? Maybe you might come up with other answers. Since this is a well-known test, you'll probably know what I'm talking about. Yes, today I am focusing on Chapter 3, whose strategy is "Instill optimism and self-confidence, but stay grounded in reality (Perkins 3)."

Reading the book, I felt that Shackleton is choosing to look at the positive aspects of things. Hope and courage have always been with him, but I think he did have the worst scenario in him as well. He seemed to have watched the seamen and the situation carefully and prepared for the future.


Ken's blog gave me an opportunity to look back on myself and think about how I dealt with difficult situations. Recently, I have been "at the edge" dealing with Spring-term ELA. At the beginning of April, I was shocked because my section mates spoke English so fluently and explained their opinions logically. I couldn't understand what they're saying. I couldn't make myself understood. What I did was just asking for help. I used to be a person who rarely asked for help(maybe I didn't have a courage), but this time I had to because I couldn't catch up with classes. As a result, my sectionmates kindly helped me in discussions and essays, and I learned a lot from them.

When I am faced with difficulties, I always remember my high school(established based on Christian principle) teacher's words. She said, "remember, God will offer you the best way."

And, the most important thing for me is to have enough sleep and eat yummy food!

Class Review and Cross-cultural Negotiation

On Monday, we did our second negotiation role play about snake eggs. Though my group didn't reach a win-win solution in time, I really enjoyed figuring it out with Maya and Kengo. This time, the negotiation was harder because we had three stakeholders: the seller, buyer one and two.

However, I found out one thing. I used to think that "the more complicated the situation is, the harder the negotiation will be," but this wasn't always true. Moreover, in this case, we wouldn't have met a win-win solution if any of the three stakeholders hadn't joined the negotiation. I don't know how the negotiations are held in the real situation, but if one-by-one negotiation(composed of two stakeholders) is often the case, isn't it kind of mottainai? I mean, there might be a better solution if the negotiation is held with more than two stakeholders :)

By the way, the professor of the course I took in the autumn term told us an interesting story about cross-cultural negotiations. He said that when Japanese government have meetings with foreign governments outside Japan, government officials sometimes take the interpreter with them, even though the country they are visiting will offer them a local interpreter. The reason of this is to have a thinking time.

When the meeting is held in English, most of the Japanese officials not only understand other country officials' words, but also can tell their opinions in English. Therefore, if the local interpreter doesn't do a good job, they cannot help speaking English and have a direct conversation when negotiating. If this happens, they will have to give up their own pace, and the negotiation will be advantageous to other country. 

By taking the trustworthy interpreter from Japan, they are trying to do calm and constructive negotiations.

When it comes to cross-cultural negotiation, there are many things to think about. In addition to the problem of the language, non-verbal signs may influence the negotiation!

Chapter 1: My Long-term and Short-term goals

In this chapter, we were introduced to the first strategy, which is "Never lose sight of the ultimate goal, and foucus energy on short-term objectives (27)." The most thing I was surprised about this chapter was that Shackleton changed his long-term goal, to cross the Antarcitica, into go home with all members. Because of the severe situation, maybe he "had to" change his long-term vision. However, I would like to say that this decision was remakable considering his many years of efforts.

Today I would like to talk about my long-term and short-term goals as a member of this LILTDY class. (At the moment, I belong to three organizations. ICU Yearbook Committee, Campus Sustainable Committee, and this clas.)

My long-term goal for this course is to do my best.
I have four short-term goals for this. Litsten to other leaders carefully. Overcome my personality(shy) by speaking out in class and taking an active role in discussions. Finish blogging before due. Do some research something related to leadership class.

・Listen to other leaders carefully.
By doing this I will know more about each person. Thogh I am shy, I like to talk with friends and I always wish to know more about them. Also, by listening to other members' opinion carefully, I will be introduced to new ideas and ways of thinking because each member has various background.

・Overcome my personality(shy) by speaking out in class and taking an active role in discussions.
Since I am originally shy, it is sometimes difficult for me to speak in front of people. However, by achieving this short-term goal, I will be able to play a role as one of the leaders.

・Finish blogging and commenting on the blogs before due.
I have got behind in wrting a blog. Sorry! I will try to finish writing two blogs each week. But I love reading blogs.

・Do some research something related to leadership class.
One of the objective of this course is to write RW. If I get more information by my own research, I will not only have many sources for the paper but also understand much more about leadership.

My post is getting long... I think I'll stop here for today :)