Assignment Pt. 1
Reflection
To be honest, at first I just had AEM 1200 on my list of courses to take to fulfill the requirements for my business minor (my major being in electrical and computer engineering). However, this past summer I worked at Comcast
as a product management intern, where I was exposed to business concepts and the work that goes into running a successful company. I absolutely loved
the experience, and it was from there that I realized that the knowledge I would gain from this class would be useful as I continued through my journey
of product management. As an engineer, I know that I have the technical skills to back up a career in this field – I’ve learned Python, SQL, computer engineering, and more in my previous coursework. However, to be a successful product manager I know that I need to be equally well-versed in human resources, finance, strategy, and more. I hope to learn about these concepts in this class, in addition to getting to know how to utilize these ideas to run a profitable business in a team setting. As an intern, I loved getting to speak with people and considering their varying backgrounds and strengths for a project, and I hope
to do the same in this class. I’ve already met so many students from our icebreaker exercises with backgrounds in economics, veterinary sciences, human ecology, and more – and I’m so excited to see what everyone in my group will bring to the table as we run our simulated business.
And while I know it’s easy to say all that I’d like to learn in this class, I’d only know if I truly learned it all when I enter the workforce and utilize the perspective developed from this class to shape and inform my decisions. 5, 10, even 30 years down the road, I hope to find myself making an important choice in my work, seeing success as a result of it, and remembering that I learned it from my college management class.
Pt. 2
While Unilever was the one that initially proposed the organizational and governance structure between themselves and Ben and Jerry’s, they must have understood the risks of undertaking such a system. Knowing that Ben and Jerry’s were strongly opinionated, Unilever knew that they had to appeal to their passion for social causes to even have a chance of acquiring the company. This concession would set a precedent of what Ben and Jerry’s would expect out of their relationship with Unilever and could easily cause rifts, as we see in this case. Unilever easily benefited from this structure as Ben and Jerry’s consistently produced popular and novel ideas in the ice cream business, allowing for
