Lindsay's London Flummery: My Fourth Week in London

Things are progressing nicely with my business projects.

In Project Management we decided to focus on the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics. This was not my first choice, but it is coming along nicely. We are focusing on the phases of the project life cycle such as concept, development, implementation and closeout; picking out project stakeholders and recognizing their importance; developing a project charter; researching the structure of organization during the process of early development; aligning the stages of team development into groups of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning; and analyzing risk management, mitigating those risks and developing contingency plans. We have two weeks to complete this project. On February 15 we will be presenting our findings via Power Point presentation.

The project for People and Organizations is due this Friday and we are working overtime to make it perfect. We have to create an academic poster analyzing the motivation of a company of our choice. My brother works at a company called Parker Hannifin. He has mentioned more than once the perks of working there so I suggested we do our project about them. The other students loved the idea and off we went with research. In our academic poster we have to include why we think motivation is important for this company, what motivation strategies they adopted and the strengths and weaknesses of these motivation strategies, and decide which motivation theory is most relevant. We also have to write a 600 word summary report about our academic poster. This has to be done in Harvard style, which I am not familiar with at all. I’ll need to do some additional research on that.

I have almost finished reading The Zong for my history class. It’s a book about a slave ship that had an inept crew, was plagued by illness, and suffered from terrible management. When the crew learned their water supply was low, they decided to throw approximately 132 slaves overboard to die a terrible death. When the owners of the slave ship, the Gregson Syndicate, found out what happened, they wanted to cash in on their insurance money to cover the loss of cargo, aka: slaves. This case went to trial and was presided over by Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield. The Gregson Syndicate treated the case as business and those in the anti-slave movement treated the case as murder.

Our history professor took us on a field trip to Kenwood House in Hampstead and we were able to tour the home of Lord Mansfield. We were able to put a face with a name and see paintings by Rembrandt, JMW Turner, and Vermeer. His library was spectacular!

With my theater class we went to the Bush Theater to see Pink Mist. It was a performance about three British kids who joined the Army and the trauma they suffered. Because my husband is in the U.S. Army and has been to war four times, I have many opinions about this play. Too many opinions to list in this blog, so I will just say on my scale of 1 – 10, I give this play a 5. I am excited to get to class on Thursday and discuss it with my instructor and classmates.

Let the next exciting week of my amazing time in London begin…