Final Review - Ted Talk

Porter, M. (2013, January). Michael Porter: Why business can be good at solving social problems. Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_porter_why_business_can_be_good_at_solving_social_problems

            For my review, I decided to review a Ted talk.  Since whatever we reviewed had to relate to our major while also relating to problem solving or creativity, I chose to review a talk called, “Why business can be good at solving social problems”, given by Michael Porter, since I am an accounting major.  Michael Porter is a professor at Harvard who has written ‘the books’ on modern competitive strategy for business.  In “Why business can be good at solving social problems”, Porter discusses the stereotypical gap that is assumed to be between the world of business and solving social problems.  However, he proposes that businesses are not the problem, but the solution.  His audience is intended to be those in the business world, but also is the public in general.  Porter’s overall purpose for the talk is to inform the audience that the stereotype people have of business is false, and instead offers solutions to jumpstart new thinking and implementing his given solutions.

            In the past, the stereotypical view that the average person has of the world of business might bring up images of large office buildings, factories, and of course, making money.  The ultimate goal of a business is to make money.  Porter acknowledges the fact that business is tied to social problems because it is widely assumed that businesses are the main cause of social problems. For example, some of these problems include pollution, climate change, and deforestation, and people automatically point the finger at businesses.  Other social problems could include poor world nutrition, limited access to water, and not enough health care.  Unlike in the past, awareness of these problems today is high.  Yet, Porter poses the question, “Why are we having so much of a problem dealing with these social problems?”  So far, our ‘solutions’ have included NGO’s, government help, and philanthropy.  Porter agrees that these things do help, but not on a large enough scale.  There simply is not enough money and resources to fix all social problems.  However, what is one thing that does in fact have money and resources? Business.  Resources are found in business because business creates wealth, which in turn creates a profit, which helps businesses make the resources that they do.  Porter states, “The conventional wisdom is that there is a trade-off between social performance and economic performance”, but this doesn’t have to be the case.  Businesses can profit from solving social problems.  For example, reducing pollution and emissions generates profit because it saves money, making businesses more productive and efficient.  Another example is the fact that having a safe work environment is actually a good thing because accidents can be expensive.  The solutions that Porter suggests will work in the long-run.  He suggests that in order for business to help solve social problems, businesses need to change the way they look at themselves and change the way that others see business.  Without these stereotypes, businesses could help change the world.

            Porter accomplished his goal of his talk.  He was vague at times, but this was the best approach when introducing a new way of thinking.  Just implementing his idea in the brains of the audience accomplishes something, which was exactly what he was trying to do.  The new ways of societal thinking suggested in the talk could very well have an impact on the world.  If people stopped labeling and stereotyping so easily and actually took a moment to analyze things as they are, the world could be a different and better place.  Porter did not leave any information out of the talk since he was just introducing a basic idea.  He could have gone more in depth on how the people could help or make a difference by themselves, but then that might take away from his main points of the talk.

            As I said earlier, I chose to review this talk because it relates to business, and I am a business major.  The fact that it was called, “Why business can be good at solving social problems” stuck out to me.  When I enter the work force, I really do want to make a positive impact on the lives of others.  I love helping people.  The reinforcing idea that business can make the world a better place is comforting to me because I feel as if I am on track to do something worthwhile in life.  In my opinion, if you go throughout life and never positively affect another individual’s life, you have not truly lived. 

            Michael Porter’s lecture on how business can solve social problems introduces new ways of societal thinking.  It reinforces the fact that people need to stop stereotyping business as harmful and instead view business as the solution to world problems.  Business has the money to produce resources, and then to pass those resources on to those in need.  Businesses need to change the way they look at themselves and change the way that others see business.  With everyone working together, the world could truly be a better place.

Week 7 Personal Reflection

With finals coming up, I've been struggling to find enough time to accomplish everything that needs to be done.  Not only do I have school to think about, but also organizing everything for my trip to Germany from May 10 to May 31, getting materials for summer classes, and getting a 2nd job for the summer.  With all of these thoughts it my head, it sometimes gets hard to concentrate.  However, I have found that writing out a bunch of lists helps to clear my head and motivates me to get tasks done.  It's a great feeling to slowly but surely cross each item off of my list.

Week 7 Class Reflection

This week's class was by far one of my favorites.  It was fun working with my team to solve a problem that another team had created for us. At first we were a little stumped, but (with some hints), we figured it out. Everyone in the group contributed to our success, and we even ended up "winning" because we had the most points at the end! I thoroughly enjoyed working with and getting to know the members of my group.

Week 6: Personal Reflection

This past week has been pretty stressful with having to work on final projects, studying for tests, and having to take them. This weekend, me and my friends wanted to do something creative to get our minds off of the schoolwork and we decided to watch a bunch of horror movies and make fun of them. Normally, I don't find these types of movies very exciting, but it was fun to watch them when all of us were cracking jokes during them.

Week 6: Class Reflection

This week's class was a little bit different than normal. Instead of solving puzzles, we had to create our own. It was fun using the different skills we learned in the class and flip them around so we are looking on the opposite side of it all. Our group worked good together and we all had our own little assignment for the project.

Week 6 Personal Reflection

This week because we worked on the problem creating process. I had a bio 212 test this week. This time I did something a bit different to study for it. Instead of just reading the chapter and looking over notes, I thought of questions that could be on the test. I actually wrote questions with trick answers. This way I not only understood the topics better,  but I also thought of ways that the professor could trick us. I actually did a little bit better than my other tests so I think this process might have been helpful. 

Week 6 Class Reflection

This week was interesting because instead of solving puzzles, the class was focused on making them instead. This was difficult for me because I like to have clear, concrete directions to do things and we were basically given no limitations. But others in my group worked well with this. So it was good to see the different dynamics. This project in particular was useful because now we had experience in the problem creating along with problem solving process. 

Week 6 Personal Reflection

This week has been hard.  As the semester winds to a close, it there is more work to be done and less and less time in which to do it.  The traditional saying is sleep, grades, and social life, choose two.  The creative part is how do you choose all three? I can't say that I've been able to master that skill yet, but this semester has been good practice.

Week 6 Class Reflection

This week, we were designing puzzles for a different team to solve.  It was really difficult to decide on the balance between too hard to figure out in the given time span, and so easy that it is not even fun.  Our team spent more time deciding what to do than we actually spent creating the puzzles.  I hope we got it right.

Week 6 Personal Reflection

This past weekend I went home to spend time with my family for Easter.  On Sunday when a few dozen of my family members got together, we had an Easter egg hunt for the younger children.  I was in charge of hiding the eggs in simple, yet still a bit challenging places for a few five-year-olds.  I came up with some pretty creative hiding spots, yet in the end, the children were still able to find all of the eggs.

Week 6 Class Reflection

This week, we planned our final projects in class.  It was surprising how quickly my group was able to come up with ideas for our project.  Everyone contributed something that we thought was original and would be challenging for the team that had to figure out our problem. 

Week 5: Personal Reflection

Today was Easter and I went home to celebrate it with my family. As I was eating, I noticed that I was using the lesson from our class about food and how we should try to make creative combinations. Whenever there is buns and pickles, I end up cutting open the buns and putting pickles in it to eat. I began doing this because my older cousin always did it and I thought I would try it. As I did it today, it made me think about our class about food.

Week 5: Class Reflection

I really liked the flow chart that was made in class the compared skill to level of difficulty. I never really thought the about how low skill level and high difficulty leads to anxiety and high skill level and low difficulty leads to boredom. I began thinking of past puzzles and activities that I have done and that concept was definitely true in all the circumstances.

Week 5 Personal Reflection

This week I got to design a part in a flow system.  Seeing as how we were constantly changing the overall design, the part that I walked in with was no longer an acceptable part.  The fun thing is that the part I was making had no real design restrictions other than working and working correctly.  Without restrictions like that, design is all about having the creativity when optimizing the design.  Sometimes the best idea is a few clicks away.

Week 5 Class Reflection

This week was interesting.  We got to do a lot of puzzles and even learned a little bit about how puzzles need to be created to be fun.  I was a little disappointed in the fact that we were only able to solve one, but that is how it goes.  They wouldn't be puzzles if they were easy.

Week 5 Personal Reflection

This past week, I've been busier than usual.  With all that I had going on, I wasn't sure if I had enough hours in the day to get everything accomplished.  In order to be productive, I went and locked myself in the library for 8 hours one day. I then had a "rule" that I could only check my phone once an hour, and for 5 minutes tops. This really helped to eliminate distractions and put me ahead on my homework.

Week 5 Personal Reflection

This doesn't really have anything to do with creativity but it goes with procrastinating and being unmotivated to accomplish things. This weekend, I had a lot of homework and chores to do, which I really didn't want to start. And then we had great weather on Saturday, so I put everything off until Sunday. So when I reluctantly started working on assignments, I realized that I started doing homework instead of chores. And within homework, I did assignments in a particular order. In this way I put off doing other things (biology presentation & laundry) by doing homework that I found less horrible (Animal Science). In this way, my procrastination was beneficial, because in my effort to not have to do biology stuff, I got my other homework done. 

Week 5 Class Reflection

I liked this week's class as well. The puzzles were challenging and fun. But what I thought was most interesting was the "flow" chart. I hadn't thought of the concept of skill vs challenge. I think I could use this to my advantage. For example now that I know something that is challenging could be overcome by increasing skill level. Or if a less-challenging situation is boring me, I could add a component that makes it more challenging. 

Week 5 Class Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed the small activities we did at the beginning of class this week.  I love short, timed tasks because I usually perform well under pressure.  I also liked that the activities involved math and memory recall, which are two of my natural strongpoints.  It was fun to compare our results to the rest of the class because we got to learn that different people are better than others in different categories of problem solving.  Additionally, I liked the puzzles that we were given a great amount of class time to work on.  I worked on the origami and actually found it kind of relaxing to do.  I think this week's class was my favorite one so far.

Week 4: Personal Reflection

I haven't done anything too creative this week, but many ISU students did during this week after all the veishea events were cancelled. Even though all veishea events were cancelled, a lot of students organized events throughout the week to uplift spirits, promote school pride, and raise money for damages and for the student hurt on Tuesday. It's cool to see how students can make a positive out of a negative.

Week 4: Class Reflection

I liked the idea of trying different things with your food, but it didn't work out so well with brownies. The first three brownies I had weren't too bad, just a little different, but the oriental one was horrible. It had too many flavors that didn't work with the typical brownie ingredients. It was fun though trying to decide what were in them. I also thought it was a great idea to try and mix food at the dining center to make something that is ordinarily eaten there.

Week 4 Personal Reflection

With the schoolwork polling up, the only creative thing that I have been doing is coming up with creative reasons for why it's acceptable to be wasting my time.  Next project: come up with creative ways to force myself to actually get things done.

Week 4 Class Reflection

Class this week was interesting.  We got to sample some extremely high quality brownies, and the lesson learned was that peanut sauce does not work well on brownies. The lesson learned I'd the experimenting with food is fun, but be careful with what you are doing.

Week 4 Personal Reflection

So after the brownie activity, I thought I would give "creative cooking" a try. I made a mac and cheese burrito. And it wasn't bad! I think I'll still eat them separately, but it wasn't terrible! In fact, I am a big advocate of finger food and this allowed me to eat without utensils, so that was a plus. And just because I didn't like it, doesn't mean it wasn't good. Just like the resume editing, something that I liked would not necessarily be liked by the reader. It just depends on preferences. For now, I think I'll stick to eating mac and cheese separately from burritos. 

Week 4 Class Reflection

The brownie activity was interesting. I liked the concept of the same thing but adding a little bit of something can change it drastically. I also liked and thought the resume editing was very beneficial. The tie in of the brownie activity along with the resume editing was good. Sometimes it just helps to have an extra pair of eyes to make something better or get another perception. I think the exercise of answer questions with active thinking of what the interviewer is looking for will be extremely helpful in interviews. Not only that but when we take tests, we can format our answers to what the teacher is hopefully looking for.

Week 4 Personal Reflection

I have a huge passion for music.  I play three different instruments and I also love listening to music.  Whenever I hear a new song that I like, my brain feels the need to automatically memorize every single lyric.  In general, it usually takes a few days to a week to memorize a new song if you work hard towards it.  However, being the impatient person that I am, I want to know it instantly.  At first, I believed this to not be a possible task until I realized I have something that most people don't: a photographic memory.  I am able to take pictures of things in my mind and then mentally remember those pictures later.  For example, while studying for a test, I can "take pictures" of the pages of my notes in my head.  Later on during the test, I can recall these "pictures", the information on them, what information was highlighted, and what it said on different areas of the page.  This really helps cut down on the amount of hours I have to study.  Anyways, I used this technique of a photographic memory to "take pictures" of the lyrics as I learned them.  After utilizing my natural talents, I was able to learn a full, 3 minute song in just under 30 minutes.

Week 4 Class Reflection

The past few classes have made me realize that there are all different kinds of creativity.  From photography to baking, people express their personal creativity in many different ways.  I thought that the activity where we had to guess different ingredients in the brownies was very interesting.  It's definitely not something you'd think of, which is exactly what makes it creative! I thought it was cool how our professor incorporated aspects of his life that he liked into the different brownie mixes.  Even though I was not brave enough to try all of them, I still liked the idea all the same.

Week 3: Personal Reflection

During this week, I began thinking about the requirements I need to accomplish for graduation. For the engineering honors program, I have to fulfill three pillars that represent breadth, depth, and community and professional development. I began thinking that I might want to add a minor to my education that will fulfill the breadth pillar. To fulfill the pillar, it would have to be in a non STEM field. I began thinking of minors that would be fun, but at the same time look good on a resume. At first, I began thinking of a language such as French because employers like that, but I wouldn't have liked it a whole lot. So, I began thinking of classes that I took in high school that I really liked. This brought me to history, but I didn't think employers would care as much. I continued thinking about it and I realized that I could try religious studies. I always loved learning about different religions in history class and I could tell employers that it helped me gain a better prospective of different cultures around the world and I could connect with more people as a result. Through my creative thinking, I was able to decide on a minor that would fulfill that would be interesting and look good on a resume while fulfilling the breadth pillar for the honors program.

Week 3: Class Reflection

The puzzles at the beginning of class were fun, but very challenging. It was sad that we only completed one, but we can just try to do better next time. The video we watched was very interesting. I'm not that big of a photography person, so I couldn't connect with him to much on that side of it. But his philosophy about finding the next right answer can be applied to a lot of things in my life and in the world. I also liked looking at his different photographs because they were really cool.

Week 3: Personal Reflection

This week I got to go have a little fun with Adobe Illustrator.  It is fun to do something out of the ordinary once in a while.  Team PrISUm is laser cutting parts for our next car, and we had a little extra space on our acrylic sheet, so we decided to make some profiles of the next car.  The problem came in not having a vector (line) drawing of that profile.  I got to take Illustrator and trace a picture to get our profile.  I hadn't really used Illustrator since leaving high school.  Its amazing how much people can remember about a task, even a few years later.

Week 3: Class Relection

This week was a short week.  We did some puzzles, watched a video, and took some pictures.  The puzzles were interesting and took some heavy brainpower to complete.  It was a little disappointing to have not finished them, but that's how it goes.  The video subject matter was a different take on photography, although the narrator was extremely cheesy.  After taking pictures, it was nice to have a little extra time before my next class.

Week 3 Personal Reflection

This week I had a creative project idea due for Shakespeare class. I thought I had picked out the perfect project- rewriting a Shakespeare play scene but modernizing it by setting it in Harry Potter's world! I had already started working on it; planning it out and starting the rough draft. I had done something similar to it in high school so it was basically the same thing. But then I saw a piece of art that had beautifully portrayed two different perspectives on one canvas. This would fit perfectly with the creative project and I think it might even win me bonus points for being "different". So I thought this was kind of fitting with the whole "next right answer" theme of the week. Now I'm just stuck between doing something that will be soooo much fun (Harry Potter!) or something that would probably get me a higher grade. I've got time though, so maybe in the mean time...* dramatic pause*...you guessed it,  I'll find the next right answer ;)

Week 3 Class Reflection

Although the video was a bit cheesy, it brought about a new philosophy for me. I believe in only one right answer and maybe that's because of my background and interests. I'm more interested in science and math, where there is only one right answer (according to teachers). I may also be a mild perfectionist so I strive for the answer. But the photographer's take on how there is "always the next right answer" was kind of inspirational. His example of taking more pictures even when he thought he might taken the one, showed me that even though you might have found a right answer, there might be another better one if you put in a little bit for effort. 

Week 3 Personal Reflection

This week I interviewed for a position on SALC.  One of the questions they asked me was how I could make part of what they do better.  It was a tough question at first to think on the spot, but thanks to my imagination and creativity, I put a new perspective on a basic idea and quickly came up with a good answer.

Week 3 Class Reflection

I enjoyed the calm and relaxed atmosphere of this week's class.  It was fun solving the puzzles and talking about creative perspectives.  I also thought it was fun to venture out and find cool things to take pictures of.  Exploring led my group to the old Farmhouse, which was super interesting to explore.