Mitten Shaped Flights

  Storytelling isn’t worth a penny if the people you’re speaking to don’t believe you. You may be the most eloquent speaker of all-time and a master at pontificating your position, but if someone thinks you’re full of it, you’re going nowhere. For me, it isn’t about credibility or trustworthiness, because I have those attributes with my coworkers. Instead, it’s really about knowing what I’m talking about and having the expertise to do my job well. Currently, as Director of Business Development & Real Estate, I have the expertise to command the business development side of the house, but I lack the knowledge in real estate. Expertise takes time to build (Whalen, 2007, p. 124). Although I don’t intend to get my real estate license or become a broker, I know I need to step up my game and take a deeper dive into the subject. Here is how I intend to do that and improve my expertise. I need to take the time to focus and study the subject of real estate a lot more closely than I h...

The YouTube video by Chimamanda Adichie (2009) discusses her life as a storyteller and the danger of the single story. My interpretation of what Adichie means by the danger of the single story is that you cannot and should not make assumptions based on only what you see, hear or read. Growing up in Nigeria, Adichie would make assumptions from literature she read at a very early age and it wasn’t until she grew older when she realized that there was much more to the story. Thus, the danger of the single story. As I reflect on the video by Adichie (2009), I think about how she courageously stood in front of an audience and told her story. She did a fantastic job of expressing herself to an audience of strangers, peers and friends. For her to convey her story in a compelling way, she needed to use expressions in her speech. Your communication to other people can be broken down into four categories: observations, thoughts, feelings and needs (McKay, Davis & Fanning, 2009, p. 36). A...

The story I’ve chosen for this week’s blog assignment was told to me by Lenny, a former supervisor from the airport. I won’t say which airport, but I’ve only worked at three of them. Lenny was always very open with me about the office politics at the airport and the hurdles or barriers people placed in your way when you were simply trying to get things done. In this particular story, Lenny tells me about the time he was trying to procure a transmission for one of the airport maintenance vehicles. He tells me that it would be easiest to just use the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Ford contract we have in place with a local dealership, but that would eat up dollars we could use towards other important repairs. Instead, he wanted to use our company credit card, as the purchase was under the $3,000 threshold for one-time purchases using the credit card. When Lenny checked with Joan in our Procurement Department about doing this, Lenny was first met with silence on the other end ...