...Running head: BMW'S DREAM FACTORY AND CULTURE BMW's Dream Factory and Culture BUS/520 BMW's Dream Factory and Culture BMW, with more than $60 billion in sales, is much smaller than its American rivals. However, the U.S. auto giants could still learn some things from BMW (Reh, n.d., para.1). BMW’s culture could be considered one driven highly by teamwork. BMW’s 106,000 employees have become a network of committed associates with few hierarchical barriers to hinder innovations. Individuals from all levels of BMW work side by side. Which creates informal networks where even the most unorthodox ideas for making better Bimmers or boosting profits can be voiced? The difference at BMW is that managers don’t think they have all the right answers, their jobs are to ask the right questions (Reh, n.d., para. 2). Leadership is the process of developing ideas and a vision, living by values that support those ideas and that vision, influencing other to embrace them in their own behaviors, and making hard decisions about human and other resources. The model of leadership used at BMW would be one of delegate style where the leader permits the team to make the decisions within prescribed limits (Hellriegel, & Slocum, 2010). A good example of this model/style being used would be when the demand for the 1 Series compact soared, plant manager Peter Claussen volunteered to temporarily use the brand new factory in Leipzig, Germany which had be designed for the 3...
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...Running head 1 BMW's Dream Factory & Culture Christian Chenard Strayer University Dr. Theresa J. Bowen Leadership and Organizational Behavior - BUS 520 April 2010 BMW's Dream Factory & Culture 2 How would you describe the culture at BMW? Entrepreneurial culture is rarely the norm in German corporations. Employees at BMW are innovative because management has learned from experience that listening to assembly workers' ideas and customers likes make for a very creative culture. The employees at the plant, to include engineers, assembly line employees and management are known to brainstorm when a problem arises with a car model in production. The task force concept is a powerful tool BMW has learned to use when it needs to either solve a problem or create a new concept of operation for a project. (Hellriegel, D. & /Slocum J, 2007, pp.522-524). Managers came to realize that they don't necessarily have all the right answers. Audi and Toyota are BMW's closest market rivals in Germany and this keeps everyone at BMW thinking from top to bottom. No sooner does an innovation hit the market, people at BMW stay on their toes to see if that is something their clientele might go for in a "Bimmer" or not. Norbert Reithofer, the current CEO at BMW stated "we push change through the organization to ensure its strength. There are always better solutions". (Hellriegel, D, 2007, p522)....
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...Assignment #2: BMW’s Dream Factory & Culture By: Henry Avery Instructor: Dorothy A. Sliben BUS520 The Culture at BMW At BMW much of its success stem from an entrepreneurial culture. In an entrepreneurial culture, work is more than a job, it's a lifestyle. Employees are more like a team than in most companies, and in some cases, they're even like a family. At BMW the following characteristics are used to describe the culture. Treat people with respect: This is a very simple premise, which threads through each and every complicated issue which arise within the company. Respect and trust provide the necessary base for a vibrant and sustainable corporate culture. At BMW everyone’s views or ideas are respected. Individual from all levels of BMW work side by side to develop new ideas. At BMW treating employees with respect helps enable them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. If you challenge people to raise their bars, provide fun activities, keep people informed and humanize your management, you will get the same culture at BMW. According to the article BMW 10600 employees experience a sense of place, history and mission from the moment they set foot inside the company. Open doors to communication: At BMW there exist an environment where people can interact with each other, support each other and recognize each other's efforts and achievements. At BMW they provide positive rewards for positive behavior. Information is share so that employees...
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...movie “UP”. Perseverance is when troubles come your way you push past and keep moving through life. One example of this in UP is when Mr. Carl Fredrickson’s wife Ellie dies he keeps working towards his and Ellie’s dream of going to Paradise Falls. Another example of this is when Carl and Russell get to Paradise Falls and they have to walk Mr. Frederickson’s house around the cliffs of Paradise Falls to the falls. In the following paragraphs I will explain how Carl persevered and followed his dreams despite the troubles he faced along the way. When Mrs. Ellie Fredrickson dies Mr. Carl Fredrickson doesn’t give up his and Ellie’s dream of going to Paradise Falls. Carl knew that he would be sent to a retirement house soon and he was running out of time to go to Paradise Falls. On the day Carl is going to go to the Shady Oaks retirement house he comes up with an idea. Mr. Fredrickson ties thousands of balloons to his house and away he goes to Paradise Falls to follow his dreams. When Carl hears a knock on his door he opens it to find Russell, a young explorer scout looking to get his assisting the elderly badge, Carl know he has no other options but to let Russell come on the trip with him. Carl persevered through the loss of his wife and continued to follow his dreams. When Carl Fredrickson and Russell get to Paradise Falls they know that they have to walk the floating house around the cliffs to get it next to the falls. Carl knows that the trip will take a long time and the...
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...Diabetic. My senior year started like it was going to be the best year of my life. I had planned out my future to one day reach my dreams. Varsity cheerleading was working its way to the top. I was so excited about all the things I had accomplished. But on August 22, 2013 my life changed forever. As I was diagnosed I realized I would be changing my lifestyle, adapting to all new things. I saw that my future was not going to be easy, at all. But with my family and friends I knew anything was possible. Beginning of senior year I was ready to conquer the world it seemed like. I was ready to go out and fight for all my dreams. I wanted to make them reality. As a varsity cheerleader I was planning on continuing what I love in college. I was planning on continuing on into college to eventually become a veterinarian. But on that day, the day I was diagnosed I realized everything would be put into a different view now. Everything I had planned now came with the question, “but what if…” Cheerleading is my one love and being diagnosed really impacted it for me. My first practice back was the hardest. I lost most of tumbling because my body grew weak. As the practices continue on though, I will work my hardest at all I do. It is my senior year and a dream of mine used to be to go on to cheer in college. As I look at it now though, it seems as if my dreams were taken from me. High school cheerleading is one thing, college is another. As a senior, working my hardest and being a role model...
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...medication. However Parkinson’s disease would be easier to control if it could be diagnosed earlier. By the time Parkinson’s disease is diagnosed, a person has already lost 80% of their dopamine neurons. In order to diagnose Parkinson’s disease earlier on doctors and patients need to see the sign and symptoms beforehand. Researchers have come upon the fact that an earlier way of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease might be through watching the patients sleeping patterns. Researchers are saying that REM sleep behavior disorder might share a common cause with Parkinson’s disease. REM sleep behavior disorder is a disorder in which there is rapid eye movement while a person is sleeping. It is a type of parasomnia in which vivid dreams are associated with the enactment of dreams. This disorder is a “dysfunction in REM sleep and the motor control circuitry in the pontomedullary structures” (2) which causes the loss of control over movement, especially of the eyes. Within this new discovery the REM sleep behavior disorder being associated with Parkinson’s disease, researchers gave two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the degeneration of certain region of the brain stem cause REM sleep behavior disorder and play a role in Parkinson’s and some of it’s symptoms like depression and anxiety. The second hypothesis is that REM sleep behavior disorder is an early form of Parkinson’s...
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...Dreams can be fascinating, exciting, terrifying or just plain weird. Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Chances are that you’ve often found yourself puzzling over the mysterious content of a dream, or perhaps you’ve wondered why you dream at all. Dreams can be mysterious, but understanding the meaning of our dreams can be downright baffling. The content of our dreams can shift suddenly, feature bizarre elements or frighten us with terrifying imagery. The fact that dreams can be so rich and compelling is what causes many to believe that there must be some meaning to our dreams. Why do we dream? Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Although there is not much agreement on why we dream there are some interesting theories around. One possibility is that our minds are running us through the worst-case scenario during sleep. Disaster preparation you could say. For example if a new mother was to dream of losing her baby she is rehearsing what it would feel like for that to actually happen. So our dreams are just fire drills? Another possibility is that dreaming is actually aiding learning. Some researchers have found that performance on physical tasks is actually enhanced by dreaming about it. Whatever the reason for why...
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...Daydreaming With each breath I drew I took flight into a new fantasy. I indulged myself in a realm where dragons flew, knights galloped on steeds, and princesses needed rescuing. The next second I was staring up at an all too familiar tiled ceiling, the fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Tilton, explaining how to divide and where to put the remainders. Another breath later and I was off shooting down an alien swarm that looked like division marks. I would be awakened from my dream-like state quite frequently to answer a question that I did not know had been asked. Day after day of this led my teachers to the conclusion that I was mentally handicapped. I’m not actually, just not where I'm suppose to be. What I've spent most of my waking life doing is called daydreaming. It didn’t occur to me until recently that I knew very little of daydreaming, and what I do know was that people often look down on daydreaming as laziness. And I could see why many people would think that. But what is daydreaming really? Is the daydream a place where fantasies are made real, or perhaps something more entwined with reality where problems begin to solve themselves? With purpose and poise I set off on my research journey ready to find out my answers and a hope to find some way to claim my daydreaming frenzy as my own. "A time when the mind wanders" was the textbook definition that I got from the Teen's Guide to Psychology in our library. It was a nice place to start before I dove into the interwebs to...
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...of today. Dream Dreams are something we all experience every night, whether we remember them or not. 1/3 of your life is spent sleeping, and in an average life time you would have spent about 5 years of it dreaming and in that time, you all will experience thousands of dreams. In the next five or so minutes I'm going to tell you the most I can about dreams. . There are numerous theories about dreams, but whomever you are, where ever you live, you will dream. Whether it's a good dream or a nightmare is up to your mind, but there must be some reasoning behind dreams, right? Everyone may know the main idea of a dream, but few may know that the explanations behind dreams are far more intricate than it just being a simple random thought in your mind. Can you remember the last dream you had? Maybe you could fly or were falling down an endless dark tunnel. Perhaps you were awakened by a horrific dream in the middle of the night Sigmund Freud’s Theory 1 - Finding an unused room What it means: The rooms in a house represent different aspects of your character, so finding an unused room suggests that you’re discovering a talent that you were previously unaware of 2 - Out-of-control vehicle The vehicle represents your ability to make consistent progress toward a specific objective, so in waking life, you may feel that you don’t have enough control over your road to success. 3- Falling What it means: Feeling yourself falling in a dream indicates that...
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...Blinded Aristotle once said, “Poverty is the parent to revolution and crime”. Throughout time, poverty has always played its part in America’s history. For some people, they were never offered as many opportunities as the average person. This caused them to look at life in a much different way, because they had to fight for many things that a vast majority of people never had to fight for. For some of these people, being a criminal was the ultimate American Dream. It was not that they were bad people, but they knew that living the life of a felon would give them everything they had ever dreamt of. This gave these criminals the motivation to chase their dream, achieve their dream, and eventually be blinded by the dream itself. In America, there have always been classes among the people who live in it regardless of what time and age in history. When it comes to the American Dream, not everyone thinks of it in the same way. This is due to the fact that not everybody grows up in the same way at all. The life of an upper-class individual is commonly going to be much different than the life of a lower-class individual. This means that these people will usually have much different views on life. In the case of a lower-class individual, they usually grow up in a much more poor background. For the modern era, we could refer to this place as the “projects”. For people growing up in these areas, they will mostly likely always have it harder than others. In an essence, it is really clear...
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...1) Divide the stanzas: Stanzas 1-3 A request for making a mutual attempt at letting America live up to the dreams that were once dreamed about it – by the pioneers and in its Declaration of independence Stanza 4: An interlude – someone asking who the lyric speaker is Stanzas 5-7: An elaborate answer to the question above: The lyric speaker, the “I” is (a representative of) the black man, the Indian, the poor white man, the people Stanza 8: The same person as above, now described as the pioneer who left his home country because of a dream – but it remains a dream Stanzas 9-10: repetition of the request to make America what it was intended to be – a country for every man, including the lyric speaker (representative of the people) Stanza 11: The land must be redeemed by the people (we) and they (we) must “make America again) 2) The situation( who is telling us the poem, what is being told?: The poem is written by a person telling us about how he wants America to be as it used to be. How all us people should all be the same. How both the indian, the black man, and also the poor white man is innocent in this chancing of America. He says that he is all the persons in one. He is the poor white man searching for gold, he is the Indian disappearing in his own country and he is the black man being dragged to another country to serve white men. He even says that he is the man “who says grab the land, grab the gold, of owning everything for one’s own greed”. He is...
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...Dreams Dreams have been objects of boundless fascination and mystery for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own personal identity, which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of `others' in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients thought that dreams were messages from the gods. The cornerstone of Sigmund Freud's infamous psychoanalysis is the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the via reggia, or the royal road to the unconscious, and it is his theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time over a period of more than seventy years (Many of Freud's other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud reportedly admired Aristotle's assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973). In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so radically from what we take...
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...a celebrity has fame and fortune but along on the other hand comes the negative aspects. Celebrities do have the status to motivate people, the money to look stunning, and the wealth to make change in the world. However, their lives are less then perfect, and this price of fame is shown through the stress, depression, substance abuse, rumors, continuos media scrutiny, and the inability to enjoy a normal, private life. Celebrity's lives show society that what... Most people dream of fame and fortune, at least when they are young. When we are chil¬dren, the sky is the limit to our dreams. We dream of becoming a famous athlete, a movie star, governor of our state, or maybe even President of the United States. There is nothing wrong with such dreams. All of today’s superstars were once small children with big dreams, and some of to¬day’s children who are having such dreams will eventually have their dreams come true. As we grow up and grow older, most of us begin to narrow down our range of dreams to things we feel are realistic for us, but we dare not underestimate our abilities or sell ourselves short. And whatever we ultimately become, we can aspire to be good at what we do. Most people do not want to end up just being an ordinary or common person but, in a sense, that is what most of us are, and we can be proud of what and who we are no matter what our station in life. I have always liked Lincoln’s quote about God loving the common man, because I believe that it...
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...The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber really caught my attention. I enjoyed this story because I can relate to it very well. I also seem to day dream a lot and lose myself in my own thoughts about great fantasies. The imagination that Mitty showed in the story was amazing and very detailed, helping to paint an excellent image of what Mitty was thinking of. This story was also funny in the sense that he was always getting into trouble for letting his mind wonder off. His wife continuing to nag him about making sure he knew what was needed at the grocery store. It also shows that even though Mitty is supposed to act like an adult and live a life free of imagination he still drifts off into his wondrous day dreams on a regular basis, and people often criticize him about it. The emotion that best describes how I felt reading this story was joy. I was able to relate to the main character because of what we have in common. His ability to get lost in his mind and create other places and times with such detail is excellent. It helped me to see the joyous side in having a vivid imagination and the different types and degrees you can go into with day dreaming. “He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye” is some of the descriptions that I could relate to because seeing this made me remember my time with the Air Force and seeing all the officers in charge in their dress uniforms. I cannot recall...
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...DREAMS Once you were a kid, have you ever thought Santa Claus was real? Haven’t u dreamed of someone you want to be when you grow up? But once you grow older it will all shutter. But indeed don’t be discouraged for some dreams have been achieved. Our dreams are like our goals, our futures! Without dreams our life will lead to no where and our imagination will be limited. First of all, what is a dream? Dreams are a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology. There is another meaning of dream. It is something you want to achieve like a goal in the future. What have you dreamed of? Most people have dreamt of living in a mansion and everything you want there, without working hard. But that won’t be possible unless you are born rich. If you have a dream never give up and you’ll surely achieve it. It is best if you had a dream since you were a child and until now so then it will be easier to achieve since you are familiar with it. Everyone can achieve their dream if they believe in it and work hard for it. But it will all pay off when you reach your dream. Some people dream of their life as a nightmare. Because they are now slacking off. It is never too late to start working hard for your near future. ...
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