Write a response to 2 of your peers Original Post. Write your response in academic voice. Write a 2-3-paragraph response to 2 of your peers by restating, interpreting, extending, or applying one of the key points from their post.

RESPONSE POST: Write a response to 2 of your peers Original Post. Write your response in academic voice. Write a 2-3-paragraph response to 2 of your peers by restating, interpreting, extending, or applying one of the key points from their post.

ONLINE DISCUSSION FORUM GUIDELINES
Relate content to your own personal experiences, professional experiences or current events.
Critically analyze the content, be grammatically correct and proofread for spelling errors. It counts in the real world, so it counts here too.
Initial postings and responses need to extend discussions already taking place, or pose new possibilities or opinions not previously stated comments.
Demonstrate evidence of graduate-level thinking about the topics and professional interactions with other participants.
Demonstrate that you have interesting and provocative things to contribute to the discussion.

FIRST STUDENT POST: Noland, Goodstein, and Pfeiffer (1993) delineate the way a beehive operates as 85 percent of the bees follow the crowd to go directly to the newly found pollen, while the other 15 percent would not follow but go wandering off in other directions. Imagine if the courageous 15 percent say, Instead, why dont we boldly go where no bee has gone before? What difference would it make? Taking a risk-doing something new and different and looking into other areas none in the group have explored-will help expand the horizon and identify opportunities for future growth. This type of behavior should be promoted and rewarded for any organization to survive and be effective. Unfortunately, resistance to change is not uncommon. Noland et al. define resistance to change as an effort to maintain homeostasis, or the status quo (p. 58); they also identified 22 reasons for resistance to change (p. 59-60). Among which, I associate most with the following reasons:

People fear the unknown
People fear failure in a new situation
People see the proposed change as an attack on their performance and react defensively
People fear having to learn a new job or having to work harder
People perceive loss of status, rights, or privileges because of the change
People resist change simply because it is change
Additionally, Noland et al. argue that employees would often wait for enough trust in the organization to take risks; however, the truth is that successful, productive risk taking results in trust (p. 67). They also introduced the connection between encouraging risk-taking and empowering employees. The authors state that when employees feel that they can take risks to move the organization forward, they feel having more ownership in the decision-making process and the ability to make a difference to the organization. Hence, employees are empowered in the process and more likely to feel motivated to contribute to the development of the organization (p.71).

SECOND STUDENT POST: One of the key things I learned from the Plan or Die book was the section on innovation. It describes organizations needing to innovate and foster creativity in order to be successful. Especially, when facing problems, creativity can help foster solutions that are “outside of the box”. I like how the book also describes how organizations recruit and train employees to be more creative. I believe the public sector can do more to encourage their employees to be more innovative by opening communication between management and employees. Innovation also can play a big role in strategic planning by developing vision that can be adopted throughout the organization.

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