Connecting the dots

During the first half of this semester, I’ve written about my experiences of college life in Amsterdam and team structure in my soccer team back in The Netherlands. Furthermore, I’ve written about opportunism in the DJ scene in Cambridge and the Illlinibucks option at UIUC. Most of them were written because of a prompt, however I always try to give my own touch to my posts. I believe that all posts connect to each other in the area of organizations, but also do they overlap other than the prompts.

First of all, I wrote about my college life in Amsterdam and I addressed here the case of exam trainings and transaction costs. A later post about opportunism reminds me that I could connect this with the exam trainings. I could act opportunism in this case, because I could have asked my money back after the training while the instructor already had spent his time on the training. Moreover, the structure posts can tie into the opportunism in the DJ scene post. As a DJ I was part of a structure which made the best international students nights in the clubs in Cambridge. George would be the chairman of the structure and in case he wasn’t around a manager would run the club. Lower in the structure you would find the bartenders, security and DJ’s.

Beside the connections of the posts to each other, I can more easily fit some important topics into my older posts. An example is transaction costs in the team structure posts. I believe that transaction costs are much higher in complex structures. When an employee want to give information to the CEO, this information has to go through a lot of different people at positions in a company. This takes time and often the information has changed during this process. In the structure post it wasn’t about transaction costs, however I can see now how it could have fit in there.

As a third, I started writing about too many things instead of going deeper into one topic in my first post. I also had to get used to writing blogs in a non-native language and I’m still learning how to write better. At this point I’m satisfied with my posts evolving, however there is always opportunity for improvement. I’m most satisfied that I can write an entire blog on one topic, instead of writing about some random things without connecting them; as I did in my first post.

Furthermore I enjoy writing these blogs more and more and I don’t find it hard yet to write about my experiences in organizations, however I hope we don’t get to a point where I can’t fit a prompt into my own experiences, because my experiences with organizations aren’t that great. So for further prompts, we could for example do a fictional post where we (students) can be the boss of something and have to create the best structure. Moreover, making a connection with the homework would be good too. We could write about the prisoner dilemma in real-life situations instead of seeing it as a game with numbers. Nevertheless, I’m happy with the prompts we got and I hope to write more blogs to be proud of in the further.