Business & Organizational Communication Portfolio

The creations I have chosen for my portfolio are:    The pitch video   Taking stress out of stressful conversations   Telling a tale   Modern organization   How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings    You can find these by going to the left-hand column , go to the labels tab, and click the portfolio button to see all the creations in my portfolio.     This class has been extremely helpful for my future. I am currently trying to start my own photography business and understanding what we have discussed in this class will be very useful in how I operate it and how I will interact with others. It has also taught me things about how to communicate with others in an organization. This coming school year, I will be helping with the CMU Athletic department’s social media team as part of my practicum, and I hope that what I have learned in this class will be helpful with that. Thank you for a great class, I hope to take ...

What: This chapter from HBR:10 Must-Reads on Communication discusses how we can work on making a stressful conversation easier to have. These conversations range “from firing a subordinate to, … receiving praise.” (HBR, 165) This chapter discusses how one can prepare for stressful conversations. The techniques given are identify , know how to react, and rehearse.   Who: The people involved in these conversations are often people of higher positions in a company or organization that must have a hard or stressful conversation with one or more of their employees. People, however, don’t necessarily need to be in power to have these conversations. It can occur between two employees where one of them either isn’t doing something properly or if they conflict with each other and do not want to bring it to their supervisor or manager yet, as they may want to try to resolve the issues themselves. These techniques are meant for those who are giving stressful conversation rather than the pe...

    I was really glad that I said that James could show my pitch, as I learned a lot from the feedback. I learned that I am the only person in the class that was comfortable showing their video. Many people don't like watching what they make, or watching or listening to themselves, but thanks to my four years of being a communications student, I fine with it.      Some of the feedback that I received was that I used a lot of repetition. This allowed for the more important points to be emphasized. I did feel like I needed to emphasize the fact that it took me years to get to where I am and I am still learning.       I also learned that I would be presenting this pitch to photographers that are looking into getting into the sports side of photography rather than someone who is not a photographer as I discuss the technical side of photography by stating that you need to pay attention to the camera settings.      I really appreciat...

  For this free creation, I wanted to show that you shouldn’t hit the yes button on a meeting invite without having most if not all the information about the meeting beforehand. The speaker in the TedTalk video explains that by accepting the invitation, we are being polite to the point where we say yes and move on. This action has now become known as the term MAS or Mindless Acceptance Syndrome. MAS has created a new fundamental belief where people believe that they are “powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings to live another day” when, we are not. So don’t live in MAS, hit the maybe/interested button and get the information you need about the meeting before accepting or going to it.  

      I grew up in a school division where you went to school with the same people from Kindergarten through grade 12. By the time we were in high school, all of my friends and I started to drift apart, and the majority of my grade did not like each other. Once I got to grade 12, I was still friends with maybe 2 of my childhood friends, and I did not want to go to the same university as the people I wasn't friends with any more. Granted at the time I wanted to do something that no one else in my class wanted to do so I probably wouldn't have seen them much anyways. Fast forward a couple of months into grade 12, one of my mom's former coworkers told her to check out CMU's website, unknowingly one of my friends' older sister told me to check it out as well. From there we saw that CMU offered everything that I wanted to do, so we booked a tour and applied at the end of it. Fast forward to that following September to first year orientation. The only person I knew was a ...

This visual creation is from Chapter 3. This encompasses bureaucratic management form. This visual creation shows a manager welcoming and explaining the rules of the new person's job, and the new person saying they will follow them. This shows the rules and procedures of the position in the company, hierarchy of authority between two employees, and a description of what the new hire will be doing. Many organizations usually do this process either in the interview/hiring process or during the first day on the job. These are important aspects of this form of management as without them, you would have a different management style.