Sunday, January 19, 2014

Welcome to MACARON's Blog!

Part One: Group Member Information

 
Name: LIN Xingyue (Natalie).
I try my best to live and enjoy in the moment especially the precious time studying with my classmates. However, staying and enjoying are obviously not enough, I hope to somehow make a positive different in myself and the world every day.

Name: FEI Zekun (McGrady).

I believe that changing means challenging, challenging means chance. I will try my best to change myself to get the chance in my future life.

Name: SUN Yiran(MORLY).

I think life is about falling in love with the right person, living in different places and traveling a lot.


Part Two Group Information

Group Name: MACARON
 
Brief Introduction of Our Group Name
Macaron is a sweet meringue-based confection made with eggs, sugar, almond powder, and food colouring. The raw materials, apparently, are relatively simple and easy to find in the market, however, it is very difficult to make one because, for example, the ingredients must be perfect (e.g. the eggs have to be a minimum of two weeks old in the fridge and the egg whites need to be set out for 24-hours at room temperature before you use them), and the proportion the each ingredient is very rigid when mixing them, besides, the timing and temperature of cooking it is also strict demanded.
We consider the process of making a Macaron is just like collaboration. The ingredients of a successful collaboration may seem not that complicated which need only people, necessary facilities, goals, etc. But obviously, collaboration tasks are easy to fail in our real world maybe due to a lack of members’ abilities and sense of team work spirit, or difficulties in reaching agreement.
Our group project is also like making the Macaron. We need work on collaboration a lot to finally produce our perfect products. We need carefully ingredient-mixing, coloring to present delicious Macarons to customers. But we will strive for it and believe we can do it to share our Macarons to you.


Team Photo: 


Logo


We select these three beautiful cakes as the logo of our team---“MACARON”. The different color represents different member in our team. Orange stands for Natalie, pink stands for Morly, and green stands for McGrady. Just as each macaron cake, each of us is ordinary, but we have our own features. We will try our best to work as a team, but not just a group. Three kinds of macaron cakes will give people fantastic tastes, three members in our team will be the collaboration with high performance.

Group goals
Nowadays, it requires us to do the work together, we should perform as a team. As the members in the team, we want to learn the concepts and put them into practice, then we can understand more about “collaboration”, using what we learn to make all the members more energetic, proactive and productive. In our future life, we could adapt whatever roles in our company teams.

Topics: week 3
We are most interested about how to build trust among diverse individual. The three of us are going to work together as a team, one of the most importing thing is to build trust among each other so that we will be able to work more cohesively as a team.

Additional topics:
Maximizing individual capabilities in collaboration.
 

Part Three Myth

 
Is collaboration always less time-consuming?
It is a common sense that working by oneself is always much more time-consuming comparing with working in a team because of that a team can work on a specific task by using individuals’ specialty, so one needs not learn all the knowledge related to the task, and consequently, it makes it possible for a person to complete something in a relatively shorter time. One obvious example to support the view is that workers can save more time to complete an item after the Industrial Revolution because they can work in the form of team as a result of division of work.
However, is the view always true? Is team, this kind of form, applicable in all situations? Our group believes that things are not that easy. In the following situations, working by oneself may be better and more time-saving. Firstly, the simple work is more suitable for an individual to complete because one can do his/her work smoothly without transition when the work is simple, while working in a team would definitely make it more time-consuming as a consequent of unnecessary work transition. Secondly, we recommend that the decision maker should not spend too much time on team when the market is rapidly changing. As we all have known, team work, sometimes means persuading each other and persuading, basically, is time consuming. When a talented leader has some great idea, “just go for it” is our recommendation. Third, in the case like that almost all the team members have totally different background and have little knowledge about each other’s fields, we believe team work may not be a good choice because communication becomes difficult which will then lead to a time-consuming result.
So, we believe that the statement, collaboration is always less time-consuming, is only a myth. If we should working in a team, is always depends.