Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail Essay Example for Free

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail Essay Those who fail to plan, plan to fail, or at least plan not to improve, according to the management literature. Look at school improvement, and there’s similar agreement pretty much across the literature that the schools that improve are the ones that plan. They establish a clear educational vision and consequent shared mission; identify goals or objectives that enable them to achieve that mission and thereby realise that vision; audit themselves, thereby identifying areas for improvement; and develop and implement educational programs on the basis of leadership 57 that audit that address areas for improvement n ways that help them achieve the mission. That process, much of the literature suggests, is recursive or cyclical. The key in the school improvement literature seems to be that there’s a first step, identifying your vision and shared mission, that then informs the next step, the planning process of identifying goals or objectives aligned with the vision and mission. Whether you look at the management literature or the school improvement literature, at its simplest, goal setting is a way of asking what do we want, do we have what we need so that we can develop and implement what we plan, do our various goals elate to one another or are any in conflict, and is there anything we’ve overlooked, including internal and external blockers? There, in 200 or so words, you have the whole easy-peasy school improvement planning story, and can stop reading and go and get that coffee right now. Or not. The problem, if you’re still reading, is that planning and goal setting can sometimes lead to fragmented, uncoordinated programs with conflicting objectives that actually work against one another. Yes, setting specific, challenging goals, and developing and implementing educational programs to meet them can drive school mprovement, but as Adam Galinsky, author with Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer and Max Bazerman of ‘Goals gone wild,’ in the 58 teacher june/july 2009 Journal of the Academy of Management Perspectives, told the Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett, goal setting ‘can lead to crazy behaviours to get people to achieve them. ’ ‘We contend,’ write Ordonez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman in ‘Goals gone wild,’ ‘that goal setting has been over- prescribed. In particular, we argue that goal setting has powerful and predictable side effects. Rather than being offered as an â€Å"over-the-counter† salve for boosting performance, oal setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label and closely monitored. ’ Tunnel vision To be fair, Ordonez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman have their eyes set on performance management, and its tendency to an outcome orientation like a defined sales target, say, or reduced time spent on a process, rather than school improvement, and its tendency to the systemic development and implementation of programs. Nonetheless, people in a school who want to improve it will end up setting, or having set for them, some kind of performanceoriented goal. The message from Ordonez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman is that they should pursue that goal with care. Let’s consider why goals, as Ordonez and colleagues put it, go wild. The first reason, they argue, is that a goal might be inappropriate or so specific that in pursuing it, people ignore important elements of their behaviour, and maybe even their attitudes and values, that are not specified by the goal. ‘Suppose that a university department bases tenure decisions primarily on the number of articles that (academics) publish,’ they write. ‘This goal will motivate (the academics) to accomplish the narrow objective of publishing articles. Other important objectives, however, such as research impact, teaching and service, may suffer. ’ Worse, say Ordonez and colleagues, referring to Barry Staw and Richard Boettger’s ‘Task revision: A neglected form of work performance’ in the Academy of Management Journal, goals can give us tunnel vision. In their study on the effects of goals, Staw and Boettger asked students to proofread a paragraph that contained both grammatical and content errors. They found that those asked simply to ‘do your best’ corrected both grammatical and content errors, while those who were asked specifically to correct grammar gnored content, and those who were asked specifically to correct content ignored grammar. The reason? Goals ‘inform the individual about what behaviour is valued and appropriate,’ argue Staw and Boettger. The goal-setting problem, Ordonez and colleagues add, is that when we plan we tend to latch on to specific, measurable standards rather than complex sets of behaviours, and the attitudes and values that underlie them, precisely because specific standards are easy to measure and complex sets of behaviours are not. Command performance The goal-setting problem, essentially, depends n whether a goal is set by command or by consultation, negotiation or – horror – genuine collaboration. Goals set by command are, by definition, set by those with the power, whether you like it or not, to set them. The risk of such goal setting is that, first, it may lead to goals that are inappropriate or overly specific and, second, that leaders and their followers can be prone to what could be called target fixation or what Christopher Kayes, calls ‘destructive goal pursuit’ in Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mount Everest disaster, to which Ordonez and colleagues also refer. As they note, ‘Kayes identifies warning signs of leaders who have become excessively fixated on goals. These occur in leaders who express narrowly- defined goals, associate goals with destiny, express an idealised future, offer goal-driven justifications, face public expectations and attempt to engage in face-saving behaviour. ’ It’s a useful checklist to use to audit yourself or a leader in your institution, but remember, we tend to latch on to specific measurable things rather than complex sets of behaviours, and the attitudes and values that underlie them, precisely The goal-setting problem s that when we plan we tend to latch on to specific, measurable standards because specific standards are easy to measure. leadership 59 because the specifics are easy to measure and complex sets of behaviours are not. Performance anxiety Of course, one of the main planks of the education policy of this and the previous Commonwealth government is the standards agenda – the benchmarking of student achievement outcomes, which educators and schools then strive to achieve, and which at their worst could end up as ‘league tables. ’ Whether you’re a fan of the standards agenda or not, it’s clearly the mother of all oals in Australian education, and worth considering in terms of goal setting. Ordonez and colleagues have some interesting observations to make, particularly about what they call the serious side-effects of setting challenging or so-called stretch goals. These, they argue, can lead people to choose riskier strategies and to cheat, and can create a culture of competition that erodes cooperation. On ethics, they argue, ‘The interplay between organisational culture and goal setting is particularly important. An ethical organisational culture can rein in the harmful effects of goal setting, but at the same ime, the use of goals can influence organisational culture. Specifically, the use of goal setting, like â€Å"management by objectives,† creates a focus on ends rather than means. Goal setting impedes ethical decision making by making it harder for employees to recognise ethical issues and easier for them to rationalise unethical behaviour. Given that small actions within an organisation can have broad implications for organisational culture, we postulate that aggressive goal setting within an organisation will foster an organisational climate ripe for unethical behaviour. That is, not only does goal setting irectly motivate unethical behaviour, but its introduction may also motivate unethical behaviour indirectly by subtly altering an organisation’s culture. ’ Handle with care If the bad news of the government-mandated standards agenda is that there’s a risk of a form of goal setting that creates a focus on ends rather than means, the good news for schools is that the school-improvement literature puts a premium on one thing that’s evident in the first 200 words of this story: collegiality. With any luck, your school- improvement planning process and the goals that you consequently set are the result of onsultation, negotiation and collaboration, not command and, if they are, chances are yours are learning goals, not performance targets. As Ordonez and colleagues observe, performance goals inhibit learning. ‘When individuals face a complex task, specific, challenging goals may inhibit learning from experience and degrade performance compared to exhortations to â€Å"do your best. † An individual who is narrowly focused on a performance goal will be less likely to try alternative methods that could help her learn how to perform a task. Overall, the narrow focus of specific goals can inspire erformance, but prevent learning. ’ As Edwin Locke and Gary Latham recommend in ‘Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey’ in American Psychologist, we should be setting ‘learning goals’ in complex situations rather than ‘performance goals. ’ The problem, as Ordonez and colleagues note, is that, ‘In practice, however, managers may have trouble determining when a task is complex enough to warrant a learning, rather than a performance, goal. The goal of setting the right goals is itself a challenging affair. ’ Perhaps it’s time for a new axiom: those ho fail to plan carefully, plan at their peril.

Albania Essay -- essays research papers

Albania: The Development of a Developing Country Albania, a small country located in Southeastern Europe, is a nation that does not have a true identity – its people are Muslim and Christian, it is a country that is both and poor, it is as much urban as it is rural, and has evolved from monarchy to socialism and now to fledgling democracy. In other words, Albania and its people have seen it all. The extremes of Albanian society are vivid, and underlying tensions are evident. But Albania is not â€Å"another Yugoslavia† – there is no doubt that the internal environment of Albania has been and somewhat continues to be tense, although the breaking point has never been fully reached. Albania is a country with a fervently tense past (especially during the Cold War era), yet many people do not know about it, and few would be able to find the country on the map. Despite its beautiful during, its plentiful natural resources, and its extraordinary tradition of hospitality, Albania has always been â€Å"the most isolate d country in Europe and from World War II until very recently, one of the most isolated countries on earth† (â€Å"Real Adventures – Albania† 1). Amongst the booming economies of Europe, Albania is markedly poor, and is trying to make the difficult transition to a more modern open-market economy. In addition, the government is taking steps to encourage economic growth as well as trade. Albania, according to 2003 estimates, â€Å"has a GDP of $16.13 billion, with a per capita GDP of $4,500† (â€Å"Albania – CIA Factbook† 2) This is an improvement over the Cold War era, in which Albania’s economy was a complete disaster – still, however, Albania’s economy is considerably weak compared to its European neighbors. The economy is helped by â€Å"remittances from people abroad of $400-$600 million annually, mostly from Greece and Italy, and this money helps lower the sizable trade deficit† (â€Å"Real Adventures – Albania† 1). Agriculture, which accounts for half of Albania’s GDP, is frequently stifled because of recurring drought and the burden of having to modern ize their equipment and trying to make use of sparse land. What also complicates economic matters is that there have been severe energy shortages, and old-fashioned and highly inadequate infrastructure makes it difficult to attract large-scale foreign investment, which accounts for 18.7 % of Albania’s GDP (according to 2003 estimates... ...r† (Clunies 133). Homelessness and hunger are higher now than under the Communists Communications. Meanwhile, protests in Albania continued, leading to the removal of several hard-line Communists from the government and party Politburo.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Despite its isolation for decades and its ruling by a repressive regime that denied them their most elementary rights, the Albanians have undergone significant cultural, social, and economic transformations; they are no longer â€Å"a largely uneducated peasant education, characterized by a clan mentality, as often portrayed by the Western media† (Clunies 149). The majority of the Albanians evidently recognize that national reconciliation, a major aspect of the program of the Democratic Party, is the best way for the successful revival of their poverty-stricken country. Albania is endowed with considerable mineral resources and has a young, dynamic population, eager to join the rest of the world. Now as it enters the post dictatorship phase, it desperately needs the assistance and friendship of the outside world. Without that assistance, Albania’s fledgling democracy may be doomed for failure before it even begins to grow.

Lyric

Originally a lyric signified a song sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Thus lyric still carries the sense of a poem written to be set to music. A lyric Is a common short poem uttered by a single speaker who is expressing his state of mind very often in solitude. In dramatic lyric the speaker is represented as addressing another person in a specific situation like the poem Connotation by John Done. The genre comprehends a great variety of utterances from say the Dramatic Monologues of Browning complex evolution of feeling in the long elegy and the meditative ode.The recess of observation, thought, memory and feelings may be organized in a variety of ways in deferent lyrical expressions. Lyric is a poem in which the poet writes about his thoughts and feelings. The basic type Is the song, but we use the term to cover all poems that present the poet's Immediate response to life, Including sonnets odes and elegies. Lyric poem deals with a range of experiences such as love, death, nature or religion or some domestic, social or political issue *Abstract Poem: It is a term used by Dame Edith Stilwell for verse that depends chiefly upon its auditory values for Its meaning.Such poetry Is analogous to abstract painting In which the arrangement of colors and shapes is significant though no physical objects are represented. Words are employed with little regard for their usual connotations, but rather for their aural effectiveness in a pattern of full and approximate rhymes and in the manipulation of rhythm. Stillwell own poems In the collection called Facade exemplify the type: These lines from her â€Å"Hornpipe† where, we hear, the dumb Sky rhinoceros-glum Watched the courses of the breakers' rocking-horses and with Glacis Lady Venus on he settee of the horsehair sea! Ambiguity: In ordinary usage the term ambiguity means a vague or equivocal expression. Since William Meson published his Seven types of Ambiguity (1930) the term has widely been used to refer to a poetic device: the use of a single word or expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse attitudes or feelings. Multiple meaning and popularization are alternative terms for the use of language. Egg: in the play Antonym and Cleopatra when Shakespeare makes Cleopatra say â€Å"Come thou mortal wretch.. He implies a double edge to the word â€Å"mortal. Here it Implies both that the asp Is â€Å"fatal† or â€Å"death- dealing† and at the same time It Is Itself subject to death. *oddball: The popular ballad also called the folk ballad is the song, transmitted orally which tells a story. Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate and are communicated orally among illiterate or partly literate people. In all probability the original version of a ballad is composed by a single author, but he or she Is unknown; and each singer who learns and repeats an oral ballad is apt to introduce changes in OTOH the t ext and the tune, it exists in many variant forms.Typically the popular ballad is dramatic, condensed and impersonal: the narrator begins with the climax and tells the story tersely by means of action and dialogues, sometimes by means of dialogue alone and tells It without self-reference or the expression of personal attitudes or feelings. The most common stanza form called the ballad stanza- is a 1 OFF lines rhyme. Egg: this ballad from â€Å"Sir Patrick Spend† The King sits in Dumpling town, Drinking the blued-red wine: â€Å"O what will I get a GUID sailor, To sail this ship of mine? *Fabian verse: Consists of unrushed iambic (v pentameter (five iambic verse) hence the term â€Å"blank. † Of all the English metrical forms it is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech and at the same time flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of poetic discourse and hence has been more frequently and widely used than any other type of versification. Shakespeare made wide use of the blank verse in his famous soliloquies. *Aegis: It denotes any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines).The term was used, however, to refer to the subject matter of change and loss. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the elegies were love poems that related to the sense of elegy as lament in that many of them emphasizes mutability and loss. It is in the latter part of the seventeenth century that the term elegy began to be limited to its most common present usage; a formal and sustained lament in verse on the death of a particular person usually ending in consolation. Examples are: W.H Addend's In Memory of W B Yeats', Alfred Lord Tennyson In Memoriam. The dirge is also a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a particular person's death but differs from the elegy in that it is short and is less formal and is meant as a text to be sung. An important variant of the elegy is the pastoral elegy which represents both th e poet and the one he mourns as shepherds. Million's Lucidly is a fine example of pastoral elegy. *Free Verse: It is also called â€Å"open form† or by the French term verse libber.Like traditional verse it is printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose. However it differs from regular erase in that its rhythmic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form?that is into feet, or recurrent units of weak and strong stressed syllables. Most free verse also has irregular line lengths, and either lacks rhyme or else is used only sporadically. The King James translation of the Biblical Psalms and Song of Solomon are examples of free verse.The following section from Longboats Hughes' free verse poem â€Å"Mother to Son† Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me anti been no crystal stair. It's had tacks in it, And splinters, ND boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor? Bare. *Sonnet: Sonnet is a lyric poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lin es linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. The Italian or Patriarchal sonnet falls into two main parts: an octave and a sestets. The octave is of eight lines rhyming baobab, this is followed by a asset a six line stanza rhyming CDC.The octave presents the theme in the first quatrain and develops it in the second. The sestets dwells on it and brings it to a logical conclusion in the final trace. The Patriarchal form was later used for a variety of subjects by English poets like Milton, Wordsmith Christina Rosette and so on. The the English sonnet or the Shakespearean sonnet after its greatest practitioner. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet with a rhyme scheme ABA CDC beef egg. These sonnets usually deal hopes of love and themes like pangs of separation.One notable variant of this form is the Spenserian sonnet in which Spencer linked each quatrain to the next by a continuing rhyme: ABA Bcc CDC e. The English form often repeats with variation a statement in e ach of the three quatrains, however in either of the case the final couplet usually imposes a final epigrammatic turn to the whole theme. *Epic: It is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi- divine figure on whose actions depend the fate of a whole tribe, a nation or as in John Million's Paradise Lost the human race.The epic was ranked by Aristotle as second only to tragedy and by many Renaissance critics as the highest of all genres. Literary epics are highly conventional compositions and usually share the following features. 1 . The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance. In ‘Iliad he is the Greek warrior Achilles, who is the son of the sea nymph Thesis and Virgin's Names is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. 2. The setting of the poem is ample in scale and could be the whole world or even vaster. . The actions involve superhuman deeds in battle, such as Achilles' feats in the T rojan War or the long arduous wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to his homeland. 4. An the great actions Gods and other supernatural beings take an interest and an active part. 5. An epic poem is a ceremonial performance and is narrated in a ceremonial style which is deliberately assistance from the ordinary speech and rendered in a language in keeping with the grandeur of the heroic subject.The epic conventions like beginning with an invocation to the muse to guide the narrator in the great undertaking are also very often observed. The term epic is also applied by extension, to narratives which differ in many aspects from this model but manifest the epic grandeur and spirit in the scale scope and the profound human importance of their subject. Herman Melville Mob Dick, Leo Tolstoy War and Peace both serve as examples of what is called epic ration. *Ode: A long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment elevated in style and elaborate in its stanza structure.The protot ype of an ode was established by the Greek poet Poniard whose odes were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama. The complex stanzas of an ode were patterned in sets of three: moving in dance rhythm to the left is chanted the strophe; moving to the right is chanted the antiheroes then standing still at the centre is the epode. The regular Pandemic ode in English is written in the Pandemic form with the strophe and intentions written in one stanza pattern and all the epode in a different stanza pattern.The Pandemic odes were written in necromantic style; that is they were written to praise and glorify someone. The Pandemic odes were written to celebrate and glorify the victorious athletes in the Olympic Games. The English odes true to its Greek prototype were songs that were written in praise of someone or something. They were written to eulogies something that aroused the poet's sensibility. Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn is a eulogy to the beauty etched on an Urn that the po et sees.

Essay on Frank Liszt - 701 Words

amp;#9;Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811 and lived until July 31, 1886. He was taught the piano by his father and then Czerny (Vienna, 1822-1823), making himself known as a remarkable concert artist by the age of 12. In Paris he studied theory and composition with Reicha and Paer; he wrote an opera and bravura piano pieces and went on tours in France, Switzerland and England before his bad health and religious doubt made him rethink his career. Intellectual growth came through literature, and the urge to create through hearing opera and especially Paganini, whose influence effected Liszt. He eagerly transferred to the piano in original works and operatic fantasias. Meanwhile he gave lessons and began his stormy relationship†¦show more content†¦He remained active as a teacher and performer to the end of his life. Liszts personality appears contradictory in its combination of romantic abstraction and otherworldliness with a cynical diabolism and elegant, worldly manners. But though he had a restless intellect, he also was ceaselessly creative, seeking the new in music. He helped others generously, as conductor, arranger, pianist or writer, and took artistic and personal risks in doing so. The greatest pianist of his time, he composed some of the most difficult piano music ever written (e.g. the Transcendental Studies) and had an extraordinarily broad repertory, from Scarlatti onwards; he invented the modern piano recital. Liszt had two personal touches to all of his compositions, experiment with large-scale structures, and thematic transformation. His transcendental piano technique was imaginative in the same way, coming from his desire to make the piano sound like an orchestra or as rich in scope as one. In harmony he ventured well beyond the use of augmented and diminished chords and the whole-tone scale; the late piano and choral works especially contain tonal dashes arising from independent contrapuntal strands, chords built from 4ths or 5ths, and a strikingly advanced chromatics, in non harmonic tones. Piano works naturally make up the greater part of LisztsShow MoreRelated HISTORY AND ORIGINATORS OF KEYBOARD Essay2138 Words   |  9 Pageshistorical instruments. Stimulated by the German-English builder Arnold Dolmetsch and exemplified by Martin Skowroneck, a German, this school relied on light stringing in a highly resonant case. American builders in this style include William Hyman, Frank Hubbard, and William Dowd. American instrument maker John Challis employed a different, more modern approach to construction of the instrument. Though he based the decorative scheme of his designs on Dolmetschs works, Challis experimented with new