John Roberts Econ 490 fall 2014

Organization Structure and High Function My most familiar organization is ICDI (Intercultural Community Development Initiative) . It is an RSO on campus and our mission is to promote communication between domestic and international students on campus so that our community could be more inclusive. But carrying a bigger dream to ultimately eliminate barriers between individuals from different backgrounds in the world, we have the plan to become an official Nonprofit Organization. In my own experience in ICDI, our structure is more like dual authority system, or actually I should say "triple authority". Because besides president, there are three people given authority in three different specific areas and lead three different groups: Industrial Development, Public Relations and Financial Affairs. Thus, as mentioned in the textbook, the information flows from general members to the individuals who are in the authority in each division first. But I'll say that the communic...

Opportunism The first impression of "opportunism" for me is taking opportunity as it is possible to improve one's situation, which might bring negative outcomes for others, or might bring benefits for oneself without hurting others. But people sometimes act irrationally. They sometimes let opportunity go away regardless of the potential benefits. The reasons are various. Some are driven by morality and education of being a good citizen. And others might have an expectation for the future: they believe better opportunity would show up, thus giving up the current chances and wait for the "one". I remembered that a few years ago, probably in 2008, there was a huge catastrophic earthquake in China, in which about 70,000 people died. It was totally a disaster. Since the location that the earthquake occurs is around by mountains, adding that it occurred during midnight, many people didn't get a chance to escape to a safe place. Hundreds of thousands of relief ...

Organization Structure I have a personal experience working in the organization called  Intercultural Community Development Initiative( ICDI).  Since we started our organization at the end of last semester, we're still on the process of applying for RSO position currently. Our organization has this mission to promote intercultural communications and eliminate barriers between people on campus. Thus what we do is building up workshops for both domestic students and internationals students to get involved in communication with each other. The workshops can be half-day or one day during weekends. And the content includes different activities such as stereotype awareness, community sense building, etc. The structure in our organization is simple. There are three divisions: Industrial Development(ID), Public Relations(PR), and Financial Affairs(FA). The board members are the core of the organization, with three divisions differing in responsibilities and engaging in collabo...

John Roberts is a professor of Economics, Strategic Management at Stanford University. He is interested in international business, organization of the firm and connection between strategy and organization. He has published enormous articles and paper, mainly focusing on the reason that organizations take different strategies. According to him, the information differences are the main cause. Also he contributed in techniques to make conclusions from economic models. John Roberts teaches mainly about strategy and organization, with strong attention in multinational business. He wrote two books, The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth; and Economics, Organization, and Management. He is honored as Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award, Stanford GSB in 2005 and Fundacion BBVA IESE Prize for Contributions of Economics to Management in 2009. Source: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/john-roberts