The Twitter Effect on Writing Professional Papers: In writing professional papers you must quickly make your argument and attempt to extract the most meaning out of each sentence as possible to be effective. We discussed this in class and the professor openly admitted that he struggles with this as do most academics.

Twitter encourages us to make meaningful(often loaded) statements in a very small character limit. I have found that the longer a person is on twitter the more meaningful their 140 character statements become.  I would argue (with no proof currently) that regular twitter users have an easier time with, and write better professional papers. Maybe I will do a study on this some day, any volunteers?

Globalization and Systems theory: Systems theory of organizations says that(along with other things) outside influences must be factored in to create an effective organizational system. I believe with globalization today it is impossible to account for every influence and systems theory cannot work. We are so tied in to the world as a whole that sometimes even the smallest factor in cities and countries across the world can have a direct impact on a local manufacturing plant that absolutely cannot be accounted for and factored into any sort of equation or model for operation. Yet another nail in Systems theory.

Mindlessness and the Economy: One of the books we are reading in org comm is Mindfulness, which is a fantastic book, I would actually pick it up and read it even if it was not required. It made me reflect on the current economic situation and how it relates to Mindlessness. Many companies remained conservative in their values. They were simply doing fine, they had been for years, and they assumed they always would. When the downturn hit though since they had been so mindless to their company and the changing world they could not react quickly enough. Ultimately this caused many companies to fail.

On the flip side of this I look at a company like Netflix. They are a company constantly looking at the future to try to get a read on what their customers will be demanding 5-10 years down the road and adjusting today to meet those changes. Wired just did an excellent article about Netflix:”Even back when he formed Netflix in 1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.)”… maybe that is why Netflix’s stock seems to be the only one surging in a downturn.