Mitten Shaped Flights

The train dilemma exercise sucks! Understanding that the dilemma is a test, a moral test to see what people would do in no-win situations. I could channel my best Captain Kirk and say that I don’t believe in no-win scenarios, but I’d fail that this specific test because I need to explain myself in what I would do in these tests. Test #1 I’m a train switchperson and a train is about to hit five children. I could throw the switch and kill one child or take no action and let the train kill five children. What to do? We know from this test that if I do nothing, one child lives. If I do nothing, five children die. If I take action and throw the switch, one child dies because of me. If I take no action and don’t throw the switch, five children die because of me. Looking at it from this vantagepoint, and because both my action and inaction would cause death, I would choose to save the five children. Philosophers have maintained that the intuitive position is that it is acceptable to fli...

  I watched the videos by McChrystal (2011) and VitalSmarts (2012) and then evaluated their approaches compared to the textbook by Brown (2011). First, there is a stark difference between the type of leadership that was used in these situations. In the video by VitalSmarts (2012), Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale used transformational leadership to lead his team through change while the company he oversees was implementing new employee training. I’ve learned about so many different types of leadership since I started by graduate degree program and it has been a fun and interesting experience seeing many new forms of leadership. The latest has been transformational leadership, which gives more attention to the charismatic and affective elements of leadership (Northouse, 2018, p. 161). In the video by McChrystal (2011), he used prime examples from his experience in the military, which uses a traditional approach to leadership with a top-down reporting structure. Having come from a mil...