Life at SFSU: Community College Better?

It has been interesting to re-integrate into back into USA and attend SFSU (San Francisco State University), especially after the budget cuts.  SFSU has restricted double majors and minors, so that all business students can no longer double major or take a minor.  There is a scramble for students desperately trying to get in their courses with many students unable to graduate.

I am still learning about the college of business and the university.  In my transition from community college to a state college, I am finding that the community college seem to be better than the state.  Yes that is strange.

Overall, the resources at the community college seem more efficient and well organized with modern labs and new computers.  At state, we have 15 year old computers that are constantly being scavenged, and this was before the budget cuts. Resources for disability, tutoring, language labs, math labs, etc, are more robust at the community college level, and seem non-existent or limited at the state level.  And the quality of the courses available at the community college just seems better, especially with more range of teachers to select from and smaller classes.  The content of some elective courses, at least within Information Systems, is rather limited or introductory.  At SFSU, the College of Business does not have even a systems administration course for Information Systems.  The community colleges have more robust advance courses, where students can learn skills that are directly applicable to a job.

Spoken Languages of the World

So in my IBUS 330 course (International Business) at SFSU, this one book¹ lists the top languages as of 2000: Chinese, Mandarin (874 mil), Hindi (365 mil), English (341 mil), Spanish (322 mil), Bengali (207 mil), Arabic (198 mil), Portuguese (176 mil), Russian (167 mil), Japanese (125 mil), and German (100 mil).

I went ahead and check the source², and found the following: Chinese, Mandarin (845 mil), Spanish (329 mil), English (328 mil), Arabic Languages (16 different languages) (221 mil), Hindi (182 mil), Bengali (181 mil), Portuguese (178 mil), Russian (144 mil), Japanese (122 mil), and German (90 mil).

Interesting thing how many in the USA, including the authors of the text book¹, treat Arabic as one standard spoken language, when in reality there are various indigenous languages that are related to Arabic.  I heard through other students, that standard Arabic is learned as a second language.  This seems similar to how Latin is related to Romance languages of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and many others languages spoken in Europe.

References

• Cavusgil, Tamer, Gary Knight, and John Risenberger. “The Cultural Environment of International Business”. International Business: Strategy, Management, and the New Realities. Prentice Hall, 2007
• Etnologue: Languages of the World by SIL INternational: http://www.ethnologue.com

Universal Rights and Individualism come from Christianity?

This is probably pretty much obvious to many, but this part about western culture I never realized.  I will quote from Francis Fukuyama:

Westerners sometimes forget the importance of the transcendent monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to their political and social lives.  The idea that there is an eternal realm of divine law superior to all positive law gives the individual with access to that higher law potential grounds for revolt against all forms of secular authority.  It promotes both individualism and the concept of universalism.  The universalism is the ground not only for the Western concept of human rights that are transferable from one culture to another but for abstraction in the observation of nature and human behavior that is the basis for both the natural and social sciences (308).

Thus if I understand correctly, regardless of the one's religion in the West, there's a residue by-product  religious tradition that forms the basis of Western culture.  This is why we have the concept of rights and individualism.

If this is the case, then I would imagine Western cultures that have Judaeo-Christian traditional roots would be against collectivism, such as socialism or communism, but this is not necessarily the case (thinking of parts of Latin America, Russia, and parts of Europe).  Thus I imagine the explanation is rather more complex than connecting individualism to Christianity.

References

• Fukuyama, Francis. "Asian Values, Korean Values, and Democratic Consolidation".  Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in Korea. Ed. L. Diamond and D.C. Shin. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000.

Korea as a Low Trust Society

In my ISM2107 Politics and Business in Korea class at Yonsei, the instructor often talked about high trust and low trust societies, referring to Francis Fukuyama's book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

I recall reading some snippets about it, where a low trust society like Korea and China, tend to favor family run businesses, and that in high trust societies, such as Japan and USA, large conglomerates can form.

Korea had these large conglomerates, called chaebol, artificially engineered upon the society, which is more of an unique and rare exception as the culture is a low trust society.

Anyhow, I think this book is required reading for anyone into international business, economics, sociology or related fields, and it is especially intriguing for those studying topics related to East Asia.

Applied Outcome Thinking

Recently I have become absorbed with the idea of defining a life mission and then making strategies.  Everyone is capable and have great potential, but are they successful at doing what they want or getting what they want out of life.  After coming across people that are phenomenally successful at accomplishing their goals in life at a young age, I starting picking their brain and adapting my perspective in life to become more successful.

One book that I picked up but never read is this popular book on productivity called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.  I am trying to synthesize areas of strategy planning, project management, and personal productivity.  One chapter I chose was called Outcome Thinking where one defines specific projects and next actions.

In a sub-section called Applied Outcome Thinking, he noted two problems in life: (1) know what you want, but don't know how to get it, (2) don't know what you want.  And he said the solutions are (1) make it up, and (2) make it happen.

I think in this section he was trying to get the readers to visualize the ultimate outcome of their efforts.  He notes that you cannot define the right action until you know the outcome and also that the outcome is disconnected from reality if it is not clear about what you need to do to physically (tangibly) make it happen.

The last thing he mentioned is that when the operational behavior is grooved by everything the comes our way at all levels wondrous things happen.  This seems to connect back to material in the beginning in the book, where to be productive, it is important to know how to absorb and organize information, rather than throwing in the wastebasket in our head to sort and later organize when we get around to it as  is the normal mode of operational behavior.

Goals in Personal Management

Many people have plans or goals.  A lot of these goals have no relationship to each other, or in other words there is no overarching objective to tie them together, a mission per say.

In my past personally, I had strong interests all over the map, with hobbies and goals, and I never had any strong objective to tie them together.  Slowly I am discovering this, and pulling my interests between Asian culture and languages toward computer technology through developing business skills.  I think as I continue, my objective will come into fruition. 

Last bit of wisdom: If you don't have a sense of mission, you aren't going anywhere in life.

The Strategy of Goals

After some thought and reading the next section on strategy, I summarized what I understood from the text book as the following: Strategy is specific actions needed to accomplish goals (measurable steps) that are directed toward and required to achieve an objective, vision, or mission.

It is hard for me to separate objective and goal as they seem synonymous.  The free online dictionary defines an objective to be "something worked toward or striven for" and a goal to be "the purpose toward which an endeavor is directed".  This is all somewhat confusing.

The text book states as much, and goes on further define objective as "a compelling business need that an organization must meet to achieve its vision and mission" (Reynolds 38) and a goal as "a specific result that must be achieved to reach an objective" (Reynolds 39).

The text book seems to present an objective as something rather abstract, where as goals are something that can be measured to achieve that goal.

References

• Reynolds, George W. Information Technology for Managers. Boston: Cengage Learning, Inc., 2009.