15 Minutes a Day

Today is the half way mark for this residency and I find myself asking “Are we done yet?” It’s not that I’m not having a good time or learning a lot, because I am. It’s just that this is hard work with a lot of loooonnnngggg days. I’m exhausted and still need to work on a 2000 word paper tonight along with yet another presentation. I’m also here alone and missing my husband and dogs very much right now.

My instructor and other University of Phoenix faculty keep telling us that the point of this residency is to a) teach us to think in a scholarly manner and b) get us out of our comfort zone and still be able to think in a scholarly manner. I think they are succeeding admirably! I’m definitely not comfortable right now!!! I’m feeling like they’re about to lose my ability to think in a scholarly manner however because my brain is quickly turning to mush. Ah well… on to a new day to see what it will hold.

Yeah, me neither!

Day 3 is going well. I feel like we did a much better job with our presentation on corporate sustainability. The difference in our thinking was demonstrable. Our presentation was much more thorough and detailed. Once more, another group did their presentation on Sustainable Development as well, but it was a completely different focus! They focused on environmental sustainability rather than corporate sustainability. They also used completely different models and suggested a different leadership theory.

Now I’m in a new group and we are doing a presentation tomorrow on Climate Change. We are focusing on the plight of penguins and why those of us in North America should care. I’m the team leader this time and have to come up with a leadership theory to fit the solutions we will present. We have decided to work separately since we will have time to pull things together in the morning. I have a good group and have faith in their abilities.

Sustainability Model: Demonstrates that the economy and society are dependent on the health of the environment.

I got an early start this morning, but am very tired this morning. I was working until about 11:00 p.m. last night on today’s presentation. However, there is a group of motorcyclists staying at my hotel and they were revving bikes and playing loud music until very late. Their partying makes concentration and sleeping more than a bit difficult.

My team is doing a presentation on Corporate Sustainability today. I’m presenting the sustainability and solution models. The first one is the Sustainability Model and the second is the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. The Sustainability Model demonstrates that the economy and society are dependent on the health of the environment. The literature shows that people tend to think that for corporations to be responsible they have to give away shareholders money. This model shows that doing business in a sustainable way insures that the organization will be able to continue making money for the shareholders.

What are your thoughts on this?

For this class I had to come up with a personal leadership style statement. Here is mine:

As a Servant Leader, I work to Empower those I work with to move beyond their current skill set and achieve greater things together than they could have achieved on their own.

Your thoughts and feedback on this are welcome…

We gave our presentation today and had a lot of fun doing it. Afterwards our instructor gave us our feedback – told us what we did well, where we screwed up (which we did really really well), and how to fix it going forward. We have all been trying to get into a scholarly thinking mode for the process of writing our dissertations. However, one of the things that we learned from this exercise is that we need to apply scholarly thinking to EVERYTHING.

Scholarly thinking requires inquiry in an in-depth manner without bias and preconceptions. One must open their mind to the possibilities and not make assumptions based on surface information. Scholars look for:

• The underlying theory of what they are reading
• A model and a plan for moving forward including a possible solution
• A way to evaluate the model or plan and make changes where necessary

My group had a model and the beginnings of a plan to move forward, but was not in-depth enough for what our instructor was looking for. However, when she was giving us our feedback, our instructor pointed out that she had not given us the assignment rubrics on purpose in order to evaluate where our thinking was and expected us to perform as we had. Now she expects us to improve. Now we get to find out what’s next…