At the end of Sec 3 term 2, the students in the BSP programme were given a choice to choose between Cultural Differentiation Elective (CDE) and AACS. Although I had a hard time making a decision, I finally settled on CDE and I never regretted my choice.
On the first lesson, we did a case study on "The Google Way". The lesson was mainly about how Google functions and how they treat their workers. The lesson focused on the Google's unique way of giving workers lots of freedom so as to allow them to be as creative as possible, and how this unique way has benefited the company in helping to recruit talents and encourage the talents to remain faithful and loyal to Google and remain at the company for a long period. I have learnt that how employers treat their workers actually makes a very big difference, and by showing employees that the company trusts and believes them, and give employess more time to interact with one another, employers will be able to think more creatively and be more innovative, and also more productive. Mr. Karplus also showed us a video about the Google Life, and I felt that the video was really meaningful and helpful. From the video, I further understood how things work at Google from not only the perspective of the company, but also from the opinions of the workers there.
Comparing Google's Way with Apple's, I personally feel that if I were a worker, I would be much more attracted to Google than Apple. Google allows freedom and interaction between workers of all sections, thus allowing workers to share their ideas with one another. As the saying goes ' two brains are better than one' . Discussion between workers will result in more and better ideas coming up, thus resulting in greater inventions. However at Apple, workers are very 'secretive'. People from different sections do not brainstorm and share their ideas or the product they are developing with people from the other sections. Life at Google would certainly be more interesting and less stressful than life at Apple. After the first lesson, we were all given an assignment to complete a worksheet on the Google Way.
On the second lesson, we spent the time discussing our answers on the worksheet given to complete, and I feel that this is a fun and meaningful exercise as we were able to get many positive and negative views on how others felt about the Google Way. At the end of the lesson, I felt that while we might see things from one perspective, others might not have the same perspective. However, this does not mean that we are always right and others are wrong. There are actually many things which others say that are also true and we have yet to consider. Only if we can accept others' views on the issue, will we then be able to gain knowledge.
The third lesson was held at the computer lab. We did a survey on cultural intelligence, and I felt that it was quite challenging for me as I have not really questioned my cultural intelligence before. We also chose the topic of our presentation which would be graded for the term.
I missed the rest of the lessons until today, because I was in China for competition. However, I really enjoyed the previous lessons and I look forward to the upcoming lessons.
