College Assignments Archive

MB 349 Write-up of Chapters 1&2 of Strategy: A View from the Top

Chapter one discusses what business strategy is and what it does. Decisions in strategy include what industries to participate in, the products and services, and the allocation of corporate resources. The primary objective is to gain a competitive advantage that customers respond to, which in turn creates value for shareholders and other stakeholders. History has shown that strategy changes to respond to globalization, technology, and other major forces in the world of business. Currently, human and intellectual capital is highly sought after to create innovation. While tactics focus on doing things better than competitors, strategy involves doing things differently than the competition. Strategy involves long-term vision, yet must be flexible to adapt to changes that constantly surface in the business world.

A strategy is developed by asking the questions “Where are we now?”, “Where do we go?”, and “How do we get there?”. After a strategy is developed and executed, it must be evaluated to see its performance and any changes that should be made. Future competitiveness is assessed and the shareholder value approach is often the preferred method of evaluation.

Chapter two discusses strategy and performance. Jim Collins has written about the qualities that turn a good company into a great one. Qualities of great companies involve top leadership, nature of the leadership team, and doing one thing better than anyone else.

A study showed that the best companies had superior strategy, execution, culture, and structure. The best companies also excelled at two secondary practices that included talent, innovation, leadership, and mergers and partnerships. Purpose, strategy, and leadership are all interrelated and lead to a second layer that includes structure, systems, people, processes, and culture. All of these factors interplay with one another and ultimately determine a company’s performance.

A board of directors is important for instilling a high performance culture. Priorities of the board include conveying integrity, setting a company culture, strategizing with management, and conveying shareholder expectations to management.

Maintaining value in a product or service is an important concept that I took away from the first chapter. The recent surge in globalization and technology has changed the business landscape and a company must keep up with the times. I agree that human and intellectual capital is critical to the creation and maintenance of value in modern times. In an era where companies are fiercely competitive, the most innovative company has a good chance of being victorious. I remember hearing on an educational television program that in this new century, technology is supposed to increase about a thousand-fold from the 20^th century. That number is staggering when considering the leaps in technology that came from the previous century such as the television, internet, and other modern marvels. The competition between companies to gain a competitive advantage is what fuels the technological advancements and talent and innovation are necessary for that to happen.

The 4+2 formula discussed in chapter two incorporates talent and innovation as secondary management practices. The other two are leadership and mergers and partnerships. I feel that if a business specializes in technology, it can’t get away by having only leadership and mergers and partnerships to constitute the +2. A company such as Apple must have talented employees and innovation if it wants to remain atop in terms of providing customer value.

Date Written: 1/21/2009
Reading: Chapter 1 and 2 of Strategy: A View from the Top, Third Edition

About the MB 349 Write-up blog posts: One of my favorite courses from college was Business Strategy, which was a capstone course for all business majors. The class emphasized critical analysis and the refinement of strategic thinking skills for business settings. Write-ups of reading assignments were an important component of the class and in these posts are the ones I wrote, which I hope they can be of value to readers of this blog.

Cartoon Physics || AR-358 Reading Response

Here’s another reading response from the motion graphics/animation class I took last fall. It discusses the article, Some Observations on Cartoon Physics, or The Cartoon Cat in the Machine, by Scott Bukatman.

A line in Scott Bukatman’s article that I feel relates closely to this motion graphics class is the description of cartoon physics as “freedom from traditional causality, freedom from natural law, and freedom from consequence”. I interpret this as permission to bend traditional reality to enhance the artwork that we produce.

By not adhering to the physics that we’ve grown accustomed to and by embracing cartoon physics, we can emphasize the messages we’re trying to get across through the use of the animation principles explained in The Illusion of Life such as squash and stretch, follow through and overlapping action, secondary action, and exaggeration.

The image of a magician popped into my mind on numerous occasions while reading both the chapter that was recently assigned from the Illusion of Life and the Bukatman article. While I haven’t done much magic work, I do know that it’s critical for a magician to direct the attention to a specific spot while performing a trick. By incorporating cartoon physics, we can direct the attention of the audience to specific areas of the screen. Also, while it may not be reality that “any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation”, classic cartoons have shown us that the audience is willing to accept and embrace it.

Another key takeaway from what Bukatman writes about is the point he touches on towards the end of the article, where he compares the replication of real-world physics in modern digital animation to the prevalence of over-scheduling activities, teaching to the test, and the abundance of achievement awards in modern childhood. In contrast, cartoon physics can be likened to unregulated free play that opens up the imagination which can ultimately lead to the creation of thought provoking pieces of art.

I interpret unleashing the cartoon cat as not just the application of cartoon physics to our pieces of art, but also the process we take to get there. Through curiosity, imagination, and plenty of trial and error, we have the power to create something special. I feel that this same process of unleashing the cartoon cat can be directly applied to our learning the program After Effects. With enough playful exploration of the program, we will gain more proficiency with it, which will ultimately aid us in telling our story as artists.

Time || AR-358 Reading Response

The other year I enrolled in a motion graphics and animation course (AR-358) at my alma mater for the fall semester. I entered the course hoping to gain more proficiency in Adobe After Effects, and ended up gaining more in the process. The critiques, in-class discussions, readings, artist presentations, and writing assignments all played a role in helping how I think about, appreciate, and see art, and in turn, existence. I feel grateful for having had the opportunity to take the class, and this blog I’d like to share my reading response assignments.

The theme of the reading response below was “time” and the selected readings for it were: The Shape of Time by George Kubler and A Time Apart by Paul Chan. The selected pieces of art were: Felix in Exile by William Kentridge, The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, and Grosse Fatigue by Camille Henrot.

The readings indicate that Kubler and Chan share similar perspectives about time. I interpret the concepts of biological and historical time that Kubler references to be very similar to the chronos and kairos time that Chan discusses.

Biological time is “uninterrupted durations of statistically predictable lengths”, and chronos time is “without content or meaning beyond its own linear progressing”; and both can be likened to viewing time in an absolute and quantitative sense.

Historical time “is more intermittent than it is continuous, and the intervals between the actions are infinitely variable in duration and content”, and similarly, kairos time is “neither uniform or predictable”. Both Kubler and Chan see historical and kairos time as more appealing and relevant to producing powerful pieces of art compared to biological and chronos time.

I see the theories of time presented in the articles as being applicable to virtually any part of life; which includes film, history, and art. One of the topics discussed in the Bordwell and Thompson reading on narrative as a formal system is “screen duration”, which I liken to Kubler’s description of biological time, where time is measured in an absolute manner. I see historical time and kairos time being similar to the “story duration” of a film, where unimportant or irrelevant moments in time can be skipped over, making way for only the parts that push the story forward. The Bordwell and Thompson reading had me thinking about how commonplace it is for the “story durations” of films to span much longer than the actual “screen durations”, and found it perplexing how easily the mind of the viewer accepts large chunks of time being skipped over throughout a film. However, these recent readings on the theories of time have helped me see that when the human mind recalls information, it naturally skips over the uneventful moments (chronos time); so in essence, the time remapping that’s commonplace in films is actually how the mind naturally operates.

These theories of time have changed how I view history by giving me a clearer perspective on how only the events that are deemed important (historical/kairos time) get passed down to future generations and that the uneventful moments (chronos time) vanish from existence. This makes me think of the of the classic paradigm of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make sound?”, in that in order for something to be remembered, there must be someone to perceive it. If something isn’t perceived as significant, then it won’t be stored in anyone’s mind, and it will cease to be; which is humbling to think about.

I found Chan’s reference to platonic aesthetics insightful for understanding kairos time, and it made me think about how I perceive art. Chan describes platonic aesthetics as being “based on the principles of harmony, symmetry, and measure”. To me, a good example of art that fits the platonic aesthetics criteria is a well-composed orchestral score that comes together so flawlessly, that it provokes a very powerful feeling within the audience, and for me, a feeling of awe at what humans are capable of creating.

That being said, Chan makes an interesting point in stating that “art that works best does so by making a mockery of meaning”. When I see art that fits this model, it makes me feel an emotion that I can’t quite describe, but would say that it’s a mixture of melancholy and unease. Chan describes this kairological art as being “mortal”, in that it makes us realize “how little time there is left”, which would explain why I feel a sense of unrest when viewing art that fits this category.

While Chan may heavily favor art that goes against platonic aesthetics, I see importance in the creation of an assortment of art where some of it follows the platonic aesthetics and some deliberately goes against it. I find pieces of art that follow platonic aesthetics offer a sense of harmony, while pieces that go against the mold to evoke contemplation, which I see as being similar to the concept of the yin and yang.

For my own time based work, I’ve always strived to create pieces of art that attain a “unity-in-plurality” that characterize platonic aesthetics. While I certainly appreciate art that “makes a mockery of meaning”, I would prefer to attempt to create something that flows together and has unity.

Another way that the theories of time have made me think about my own time based work is that they have reinforced my belief in the importance of skipping over unimportant events (chronos time) and only include moments that are relevant to strengthening the cohesiveness of the piece.

After watching the Felix in Exile piece, I wasn’t quite sure what was being portrayed, so I did some online research on it. One source states that it “could be read as an attempt to construct a new national identity through the preservation, rather than erasure, of brutal and racist colonial memory” (tate.org.uk) of South African history. The preservation of the events would be a perfect example of historical time that Kubler makes reference to, where specific events get remembered as opposed being completely erased from the history books and blocked from the minds of future generations. If those events had been erased from history, that period of time could be likened to chronos time, where it’s as if those dark events never existed at all, and in effect, completely disregard the people that endured insufferable pain. The clips of the murdered bodies transforming and disappearing into the future landscape at the 6:25-6:38 marks are particularly telling of how easy those who died could have been forgotten if there was a complete erasure of that period of time.

It was interesting to think about the vastness of both the universe and human body when viewing the Powers of Ten video, and a line in it that closely relates to the readings is “notice the alternation between great activity and relative inactivity. A rhythm that will continue all the way into our next goal” (5:16-5:22). The relative inactivity found in space can be seen as chronos time and the moments of high activity can be likened to both historical time and kairos time.

While I wasn’t able to find a full version of the Grosse Fatigue piece, it appears that Henrot attempts to feature all of the major events in the creation of the universe from both a scientific and anthropological viewpoint. Grosse Fatigue relates to the theories of time because the creation of the universe was a lengthly process with long biological timespans of chronos time, and only the moments that created “a profound change or rupture of some kind” (historical/kairos time) are represented.

Date Written: 12/6/2016

Powers of Ten (one of the videos from the reading response):