A New Journey

I never knew my grandmother. She died from a terminal illness when I was 4 months old.  My mother tells me she cried when I was born because she knew she would not live to know me. I never felt her hugs or heard her laugh, yet I feel an indescribable bond with her and she is my hero. Her life is an amazing story and I have always wanted to write it. I am embarking on a new journey - the journey of my grandmother's life from my perspective.

There are parts of her past that I must become educated about. Specifically, Romanian culture in the early 1900's. It is my hope that there are some readers out there that can provide me with insight about Romania as I write my research notes about my grandmother's story. Ciao!

Great crock pot recipes

For those of you who've asked me to share some great slow cooker recipes from the Fix It and Forget It cook book, here are a few of my favorites:

Easy Stroganoff (pg 14)
Serves 4

1 can of cream of mushroom soup

1 14oz can of beef broth

1 lb beef stew meat cut into 1 inch pieces

1 cup sour cream

2 cups of cooked egg noodles

chopped, fresh parsley (optional)

Combine soup and broth in slow cooker and add meat

Cover and cook on high for 3-4 hours

then low for 3-4 hours

Stir in sour cream

cook on high 20 minutes more

Serve over cooked noodles, garnish with parsley

Spanish Stuffed Peppers (pg 64)

Serves 6

1 lb ground pork

6.8 oz pkg Spanish rice mix

1 egg

1/4 chopped onion

3 med size green bell peppers halved lengthwise and seeded

28 oz can chopped tomatoes

1 cup water

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

combine beef, rice mix (reserving seasoning packet), egg, and onion in a bowl

divide meat mixture evenly and stuff into pepper halves

Pour tomatoes intio slow cooker, arrange pepper halves over tomatoes

Combine tomato soup, rice-mix seasoning packet and 1 cup water in a bowl. Pour over peppers

Cover and cook on high 1 hour and then on low 6-8 hours; twenty minutes before end of cooking time, top stuffed peppers with cheese.


Chicken with Bacon, Swiss and mushrooms (pg. 77)
Serves 6

3 slices bacon

6 boneless skinless chicken breast halves

4.5 oz jar sliced mushrooms - drained

1 can cream of chicken soup

1/2 cup shredded swiss cheese

Cook bacon until crisp, drain, reserving drippings. Crumble bacon

Cook 3 chicken breasts in bacon drippings until light brown, then place in slow cooker

Repeat with remaining chicken breasts. 

Top with mushrooms

Heat soup in skillet until creamy and pour over  chicken and mushrooms

Cover and cook on high 1 hour and then on low 2 hours or until chicken is tender.

Top chicken with shredded cheese and sprinklel with bacon

Cover and cook 15 minutes or until cheese melts.

Serve over wild rice.

Asparagus and Wild rice are great sides with this.

Are Schools Missing An Opportunity To Reduce Costs and Promote Environmental Stewardship?

As a parent, I welcome the beginning of the school year but dread the pile of forms that come home with each of my children. As I sit at the kitchen table completing an average of four forms for each child, I cannot help but think about how many levels of waste this method of data collection creates.

Every form requests much of the same information but because they are distributed to different individuals, everyone of them must be completed. I wonder why the schools don't make better use of technology to streamline this process for everyone involved.

I wonder how much money is spent on photocopying and printing all of these forms, flyers, and memos that are sent home with my kids - not to mention the environmental cost of diminishing our forests. Finally, there is the labor cost associated with staff redundantly entering data from the form into a database or filing and storing all of that paper into file cabinets.

I do not understand why the schools don't leverage the technology that is available to them. All of this information could be entered into an online form located on the school or district website. Once the data is electronically submitted into a database, appropriate district personnel would have access to the data. More importantly, the data would not need to be gathered every year unless there were changes. An annual report could be emailed to each family asking for verification of data accuracy. Parents could then submit changes through the online form. All school communications should be delivered electronically to reduce printing and copying costs, and to set an example for environmental stewardship.

Everytime I receive a request asking for school supply donations, I can't help but wonder if the money saved from more streamlined operations wouldn't allocate more funds for supplies. I also wonder if the reasons for not implementing an electronic process is because of budget constraints and/or district employees lack of technological skills. Wouldn't an investment in technology and training provide more long-term cost savings?

Employee Personality Characteristics and Business Resiliency

Highly Resilient Organizations (HRO’s) are mindful. They are aware of unexpected events happening in the present, act quickly to stop them, and restore the organization’s system of functioning (Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K., 2007). Successful companies are highly resilient – they are not disabled or destroyed by unexpected events. They strive to prevent and contain unexpected events through increased awareness of small failures, reluctance to simplify problems, sensitivity to operations, practice of resilience, and taking advantage of local expertise. Part of what makes an organization resilient is the personality traits of its employees and their relationships with each other.
Lounsbury, J., Smith, R., Levy, J., Leong, F., & Gibson, L. (2009), present research that examines the relationship between personality traits and successful careers. The study compared the personality traits between undergraduate students studying business and non-business majors to determine if personality traits have a correlation to vocation success.

The Resource Associates’ Adolescent Personal Style Inventory for College Students (APSI) scale was used to measure the personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, openness, assertiveness, optimism, tough-mindedness, and work drive. Data from a total of 2,599 undergraduate students was collected. The demographics of the student sample consisted of 832 men and 1,767 women. Ethnic make-up of this sample was 2,131 White, 312 Black, 53 Hispanic, 52 Asian, and 51 identified as Other. Ages ranged from 18 to over 30. 347 of the total students studied were business majors (Lounsbury, J., et al, 2009).

Lounsbury et al used the following personality trait definitions:
Agreeableness – being pleasant, equable, participative, cooperative, and inclined to interact with others;
conscientiousness – being reliable, trustworthy, orderly, dependable, organized, and rule following;
emotional stability – overall level of adjustment and emotional resilience in the face of stress and pressure;
extraversion – having a tendency to be sociable, outgoing, gregarious, warmhearted, expressive, and talkative;
openness – receptivity to learning, new experiences, novelty, and change; assertiveness – speaking up on matters of importance, expressing one’s position, seizing initiative, being forceful, and exerting influence in social settings; optimism – having an upbeat, hopeful outlook, especially concerning plans, prospects, people, and the future, even in the face of difficulty and adversity, a tendency to minimize problems and persist in the face of setbacks;
tough-mindedness – appraising information and making decisions on the basis of logic, facts, and data rather than feelings, sentiments, values, and intuition; and work drive – being hard-working, industrious, inclined to put in long hours and effort to make good grades and achieve at a high level in school.

The results of this study show that business majors had significantly higher scores than non-business majors for conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, assertiveness, and tough-mindedness, but lower scores on agreeableness and openness. These findings seem to be consistent with business success factors, as they correlate with the traits of highly resilient organizations.

Business environments produce both expected and unexpected events that require employees to interact. The way employees react to each other and to events, impact the success of a business. Therefore, personality traits of an organization’s employees will impact how they interact with each other and ultimately impact the organization’s ability to be resilient to unexpected events.

Corporate culture determines how an organization reacts to events. Corporate culture is defined by the personality traits and the actions of its employees. Conscientious employees excel at activities such as goal setting, organizing, managing time, paying attention to detail, adhering to rules, and meeting expectations. Emotional stability is essential for dealing effectively with the stress and pressure of the business world – decisions must be made intellectually not based on emotion. Employees with traits of strong extraversion, assertiveness, and tough-mindedness are more likely to speak up about matters and influence organizational change. An organization that hires employees with these traits is likely have more mindful infrastructure that is able to recover from unexpected events. This is because an organization is a complex system whose parts affect all other parts. The actions of an organizations employees can affect all other parts of the organization.

A single action by one part can cause unexpected events among other parts (Ollhoff, J. & Walcheski, M., 2002). In an effort to avoid unexpected events, a highly resilient organization continually tracks small failures; resists oversimplification; remains sensitive to operations; maintains capabilities for resilience; and takes advantage of shifting locations of expertise (Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K., 2007). Since employees are a part of an organization’s culture and system, their personality traits impact the organization’s overall resiliency.

Lounsbury’s article, Personality Characteristics of Business Majors as Defined by the Big Five and Narrow Personality Traits, indicates that business majors seem to have personality traits that drive their success in business careers. Those same personality traits can help establish an environment of mindfulness within an organization because they are the same traits that identify well-differentiated people.

Differentiation is important to a resilient organization because it affects how employees react to each other. Differentiation is a healthy balance between autonomy and relationships, and the perception of the boundaries that define that balance. A well-differentiated person has the ability to be autonomous yet still maintain healthy relationships. Ollhoff states that well differentiated people are: not controlled by emotion – decisions are made intellectually; are less influenced by praise or criticism – they know where they stand on an issue; are autonomous; and are governed by intentional principles and goals, not emotional reactivity.

The research conducted by Lounsbury et al shows a correlation between mindful personality traits and students that major in business. Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. suggest a correlation between mindfulness and highly resilient organizations. A mindful infrastructure begins with the smallest part of the organizational system – the individual employee and his or her personality.

Is there a correlation between highly resilient organizations and the percentage of its employees with business degrees? Further research is needed to answer that question, but perhaps an organization striving for mindfulness should consider hiring a considerable percentage of college graduates with business majors.

References
Lounsbury, J., Smith, R., Levy, J., Leong, F., & Gibson, L. (2009). Personality characteristics of business majors as defined by the big five and narrow personality traits. Journal of Education for Business, 84.4, 200-204.
Ollhoff, J. & Walcheski, M. (2002). Stepping in wholes: Introduction to complex systems. Eden Prairie: Sparrow Media Group, Inc.
Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2007). Second edition. Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass