Conducting Successful Retreats

{Excerpt} People look forward to retreats (or workshops) with excitement or dread. At best, it is a time for renewal, team building, and focusing work. At worst, it is a dull two days of lectures or extended meetings. A good retreat works in three dimensions—the practical, the ideal, and the political—ignore anyone and you are headed for trouble. There are as many reasons for conducting a retreat as there are issues and challenges facing an organization. Among the most common uses of retreats are • Helping set or change strategic direction. • Fostering a collective vision. • Creating a common framework and point of reference. • Developing annual goals, objectives, and budgets. • Discussing specific issues or challenges facing the organization. • Dealing with sources of conflict and confusion. • Generating creative solutions for entrenched problems. • Improving working relationships and increasing trust. • Encouraging honest and enlightened conversations. • Letting people be heard on issues that are important to them. • Orienting new staff

Conducting Peer Assists

{Excerpt} The experience that an organization has gained is its most important asset. Exit interviews are a way of capturing knowledge from leavers, but can only be relied upon once. Peer assists capture knowledge before employees leave, and in such ways that can repeatedly apply and strengthen good practiceas well as consistency across an organization. The formal use of peer assists as a management tool was pioneered by British Petroleum to help staff learn from the experiencesof others before they embark on an activity or project. Put simply, a peer assist is the process whereby a team working on an activity or project calls a meeting or workshop to seek knowledge and insights from a good mix of people in other teams. From the onset, the distinction between a peer assist and a peer review should be made explicit: without it participants will fall into the familiar patterns of peer reviews and little knowledge will be transferred

Conducting Effective Presentations

{Excerpt} From interviews and our own observations, the following scenario is common: the speaker at a seminar shares about 30 slides, skipping over many. Time goes on…and on. Some participants lose interest; others become distracted; some even slip out. Finally, the sponsor says, “Time has run out, but maybe we can have one or two questions.” Yet it looked as though the speaker had just reached the heart of the matter and it was over. What happened? In most organizations, staff are busy and they vote withtheir feet. If they are bored or not actively engaged, they will find excuses to leave. Some will never return to presentations conducted by the same speaker. The good news is that guidelines for conducting effective presentations are simple and do not depend on the speaking ability of the person sharing the message

Conducting Exit Interviews

{Excerpt} Together with staff engagement surveys, exit interviews are one of the most widely used methods of gathering employee feedback. The less tacit and explicit knowledge an organization captures from staff on a regular basis, the more it needs to capture when they exit. Exit interviews are a unique chance to survey and analyze the opinions of departing employees, who are generally more forthcoming and objective on such occasions. From an employer’s perspective, the purpose is to learn from the employee’s departure on the basis that feedback is a helpful driver of organizational performance improvement. More recently, the practice of exit interviews has been revisited as a knowledge management tool to capture and store knowledge from departing employees and minimize loss through staff turnover. This is especially relevant in roles where the employee embodies significant human capital that may be passed to appropriate employees remaining in the organization. Most departing employees are pleased to share knowledge, help asuccessor, or brief management, in so doing yield information that may be used to enhance all aspects of an organization’s working environment including culture, management, business processes, and intra- as well as inter-organizational relationships. Not withstanding, participation in exit interviews and responses to exit interview questionnaires must be voluntary

Conducting Performance Evaluations

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Conducting Effective Meetings

{Excerpt} Meetings are essential in any form of human enterprise. These days, they are so common that turning the resources they tie up into sustained results is a priority in high-performance organizations. This is because they are potential time wasters: the other persons present may not respect their own time as much as you have come to respect yours, and it is therefore unlikely that they will mind wasting your time. Generic actions before, during, and after can make meetings more effective

Honneger: King David

In 1920, French dramatist René Morax authored a four-hour biblical stage drama on the life of David. Inspired by structures of Hindu theatre, he wrote many short scenes that would be executed in rapid succession. Morax wanted incidental music between scenes throughout the play; however, he completed the play in December, 1920 with only six months until the work’s scheduled premiere. When several composers declined Morax’ request to compose the music because of the time constraints, he asked conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Igor Stravinsky for their recommendation. Both of them recommended then twenty-eight year old Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), a Swiss native composing in France.https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/somfaculty_books/1001/thumbnail.jp

Conducting critique : reconsidering Foucault’s engagement with the question of the subject

A common criticism of Michel Foucault’s works is that his writings on power relations over-emphasized the effects that technologies of power have upon the subjection of humans, rendering any attempt of resistance futile and reducing the subject to a mere passive effect of power. This criticism treats Foucault’s consideration of ethics in his later works as a break from his earlier views. In this paper, by reading Foucault’s books alongside his lectures and interviews, two ways will be proposed through which the question of the subject can be productively raised and located throughout Foucault’s works, even within his concerns with power relations. The first way is through the relation between assujettisement and critique, and the second way is through the notions of government and conduct.peer-reviewe

Conducting Truthful Surveys, Cheaply

We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be compensated for their participation and are strategic agents, and so the payment scheme must incentivize truthful behavior. We derive optimal truthful mechanisms for this problem for the two goals of minimizing the variance of the estimator given a fixed budget, and minimizing the expected cost of the survey given a fixed variance goal