A little short story

Posted by martinjaja on January 29, 2011 · 1 Comment 

Introduction

Once upon a time it all started with a lightening moment in room 129 in Berlin – a group of three women and three guys came together in order to write about diversity management. In the beginning there was a strong focus on female issue with posts about female Leadership, women quota for supervisory boards, career obstacle in form of children or female stereotypes. I personally started with a piece called “Less risk with women” which highlights that the probability for loan default for women due to their characteristics.

 

Main part

Afterwards, I personally struggled to find interesting topics to write about. Thus I started to change my focus. I wanted to try different writing styles and discover different online research techniques and all the possibilities of the web for academic work. Thus I wrote a piece about the discrimination of boys in the German education system and the strange presentation of today’s music stars.
After this short excurse to other areas I came back to female issues with the article “Feel free to say the F…-word!” where I was wondering about the perception of the word feminism.

After several group exercises such as a Christmas party and a mind mapping session we tried to broaden the topic to general diversity management. The spectrum of topics became larger due to posts about Immigration and current Sarrazin debate, Entrepreneurship or even about Strategic Risk.

Firstly, I picked up a classic issue in business theory by writing about the relation of diversity management and the stakeholder value approach. And secondly, I wrote about social networks such as Facebook.

The End

Finally, the young fellows tried to focus stronger in strategic management issue after another group session. Thus I tried to classify diversity management into the internationalization process and applied it to the job search of young professionals. Other wrote about young professionals or the new look of Starbucks.

And what is the lesson of this story?

Over the three month I was able to learn and improve my writing style and the way you present facts and figures in a digital environment. I was able to get an insight into new technologies and ways to communicate and to discover different ways of academic research. Furthermore, I really got a overview about diversity management and what it can mean for companies and for individuals.

Last but not least, it was a great group experience where I could discover different group dynamics and ways to evaluate and improve our work. Sure it was sometimes hard to keep up with the pace of the group and other classes but in the end I think it helped us to improve us in many ways!

Thanks to a lot to all of you, I really enjoyed it!

Filed under Management and Leadership, Technique · Tagged with first steps, Isabel, Katrin, Maria Thaens, Martin, mindset, Saiid, Thomas