Document 6510252

© 2012
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
Australia
Master of Business & Technology
Tel:
+61 2 9385 6660
Fax: +61 2 9385 6661
www.asb.unsw.edu.au/mbt
This guide was originally developed by the FCE Education Development Unit
at UNSW in conjunction with the Master of Business and Technology
Program.
Author
Editors
2003 Revisions
2006 Revisions
2008 Revisions
2009–11 Revisions
Elizabeth Craven
Michele Potter, Bill Twyman
Maria Spies
Linda Newcomb, Maria Spies
Ruth Laxton, Michele Potter
Andrew Chambers
The original material prepared for this guide is covered by copyright. Apart from fair
dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted
under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written
permission. Enquiries should be addressed to Master of Business & Technology
Program, UNSW.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE ........................................................................................ 1
New to postgraduate study? ............................................................................................. 1
SUPPLEMENT: INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY............................ 2
CHALLENGES IN BEGINNING OR RETURNING TO ACADEMIC STUDY ........................ 2
Workload expectations .................................................................................................... 3
Looking for synergies between MBT study and work .................................................... 4
Understanding your learning style ................................................................................... 4
Managing your time......................................................................................................... 5
Organising your environment for study ........................................................................... 9
MBT LEARNING MODEL ....................................................................................... 10
LEARNING IN WEB-SUPPORTED DISTANCE MODE .................................................. 11
Self-motivation – the key to distance learning .............................................................. 11
MBT’s online learning management systems (LMS) .................................................... 11
email digests .................................................................................................................. 12
Online discussions – the importance of interaction ....................................................... 12
Strategies for effective online discussions ..................................................................... 12
Undertaking small group tasks online ........................................................................... 16
NEGOTIATING THE COURSE MATERIALS ............................................................... 18
Course Overview – summary document........................................................................ 18
Structure of the study guide ........................................................................................... 19
STUDY STRATEGIES .............................................................................................. 19
Effective reading – key to successful study................................................................... 20
Study guide unit exercises ............................................................................................. 22
Taking notes .................................................................................................................. 22
UNSW LIBRARY – WHY USE IT?........................................................................... 25
Accessing UNSW library resources .............................................................................. 25
ELISE – Enabling Library and Information Skills for Everyone .................................. 26
UNSW library subject guides ........................................................................................ 27
THINKING CRITICALLY – ESSENTIAL TO YOUR SUCCESS ....................................... 28
What is critical thinking? ............................................................................................... 28
IPSO – critical reading/thinking strategy ...................................................................... 30
De Bono’s Six Hats of Critical Thinking ...................................................................... 30
Critical thinking at postgraduate level ........................................................................... 31
ANALYSING ASSESSMENT TASKS.......................................................................... 34
Start with analysing the question ................................................................................... 34
11.
WRITING IN ACADEMIC STYLE ............................................................................. 38
12.
STRUCTURING YOUR WRITING.............................................................................. 41
Academic essays ............................................................................................................ 41
Critical reviews .............................................................................................................. 45
Reports as assignments .................................................................................................. 46
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
ACKNOWLEDGING YOUR SOURCES ....................................................................... 53
Different types of referencing........................................................................................ 53
How to cite different sources ......................................................................................... 55
DRAFTING AND EDITING YOUR ASSIGNMENTS ...................................................... 64
Getting help with assignment writing ............................................................................ 64
First draft ....................................................................................................................... 64
Structural editing ........................................................................................................... 65
Editing for expression .................................................................................................... 65
Proofreading .................................................................................................................. 66
Computer editing tools .................................................................................................. 66
PREPARING FOR AND SITTING EXAMS ................................................................... 68
Types of exams .............................................................................................................. 68
Reviewing course content for exams ............................................................................. 69
Practising handwriting ................................................................................................... 69
Getting organised for open book exams ........................................................................ 70
Anticipating the questions ............................................................................................. 70
Just before the exam ...................................................................................................... 71
During the exam ............................................................................................................ 72
ACCESSING FURTHER INFORMATION ON STUDY SKILLS ........................................ 73
Education Development Unit ........................................................................................ 73
UNSW Learning Centre ................................................................................................ 74
ANSWERS TO ACTIVITIES ..................................................................................... 75
APPENDIX 1: WEEKLY PLANNER .................................................................................. 79
APPENDIX 2: SEMESTER PLANNER ............................................................................... 81
APPENDIX 3: NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES ...................................................................... 83
APPENDIX 4: UNSW LIBRARY ..................................................................................... 96
APPENDIX 5: BEGINNING THE ACADEMIC ESSAY ...................................................... 100
APPENDIX 6: ESSAY WRITING CHECKLIST ................................................................. 103
APPENDIX 7: WRITING A CASE ANALYSIS REPORT .................................................... 105
SUPPLEMENT: An Introduction to Business and Technology
1. HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE
This learning guide has been developed with the aim of providing you, as an MBT
student, with advice, information and tools to assist you in developing the necessary
skills and good study practices to successfully complete your MBT.
Dealing with many different sources of information will be one of the challenges you
encounter throughout your MBT studies and this guide is one of a number of
information sources available to you. You should carefully read the current
Participant Information Guide as it is updated every year and contains important
information on administrative aspects of the program as well as detailed information
on MBT policies, procedures and processes.
NEW TO POSTGRADUATE STUDY?
For some of you, studying at university will not be new and you may need little
guidance about postgraduate learning issues. Others may be returning to study after
many years and some of you will not have undertaken any previous academic study.
While relevant work experience is the most essential aspect of successful participation
in your MBT classes, many students are apprehensive about how they will be able to
integrate postgraduate study into their busy lives.
One of the primary concerns is what will be expected in the assessment tasks,
particularly for assignments. This guide has been written to explain some of these
issues and to help allay your fears. It is strongly recommended that you read through
this booklet before your first semester of study and return to it frequently throughout
your studies as the need arises. You will find it particularly useful when you are
completing assignments.
Throughout this guide you will find suggested activities for you to complete or ideas
for you to reflect on – do take the time to complete these activities. In all your MBT
courses, you will be asked to complete exercises relating to course content, so it’s
wise to start getting into the habit of reading, reflecting – and doing.
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2. SUPPLEMENT: INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY
For an introduction to how and why the MBT Program focuses on business and
technology please see the supplement entitled An Introduction to Business and
Technology located at the end of this booklet. This document has been prepared by
Craig Tapper, Course Coordinator of GBAT9113 Strategic Management of Business
and Technology and GBAT9126 Development of New Products and Services. Its aim
is to provide a conceptual entry point for new MBT students into the key theories,
models and management thinkers in contemporary business, including:
•
why business and technology are integrated in the MBT
•
the broad nature of technology (technology is not just IT)
•
key principles of corporate strategy and brief introduction to the theories and
models of Michael Porter
•
how the rapid rate of technological change impacts on business
•
the increasing importance of good corporate governance to achieve a sustainable
organisation.
This overview will provide you with a basic understanding of the key concepts that
underpin all MBT learning and assist you in grasping the higher-level material in the
courses themselves.
3. CHALLENGES IN BEGINNING OR RETURNING TO ACADEMIC STUDY
During your MBT studies, you should expect hard work, challenges to your thinking
and some major changes to your lifestyle. Some of these things will not be easy.
However, as you complete each course, you can expect to gain a wider and deeper
understanding of this challenging environment and to increase your confidence to
manage within it.

Remember: the MBT is designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge to be
effective in a business environment driven by technology!
In your classes, you can expect to meet and network with people from a variety of
backgrounds and whose business experiences and knowledge will enrich your own.
Because the MBT is an applied Master’s program, the ability to learn from the
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experience of your classmates from different organisations and diverse industries is a
key benefit of the MBT learning model.
WORKLOAD EXPECTATIONS
For each course, you should expect to spend between 8 and 10 hours per week
completing the required reading, working through study guide Unit exercises and
participating in discussions in either your online or face-to-face class. When
assignments are due or you are preparing for an exam, the number of hours will be
higher. You should expect that each assignment will demand on average 10–15 hours
to complete; with at least two assignments in each course this totals 20–30 hours.
Strategies for managing your workload
A return to study will demand significant lifestyle changes for most students. The first
task you should undertake involves reflecting on how you usually allocate your time
during a typical week. You should then decide:
•
what things you currently do that are important and cannot be dropped
•
what can be done less frequently but still needs to be done
•
what you will need to temporarily give up while you are enrolled in the MBT.
You should also discuss these reflections with your family and other important people
in your life so they know what to expect. The following activity will guide you
through this task.
Activity 1
1.
Rule a sheet of paper into three columns.
2.
Write at the top of one column: Things that are important to keep
doing. At the next: Things I can easily give up for a while. And the
last one: Things I’m not sure whether I can give up.
3.
Note down your current activities in the appropriate columns.
4.
Keep your lists and reflect on them before you start your study
program.
5.
Talk to your family or other important people in your life about your
reflections and alert them to the expected workload of the program.
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LOOKING FOR SYNERGIES BETWEEN MBT STUDY AND WORK
Many of your MBT assignments will ask you to apply your learning to your own
professional context or workplace. For instance, you may be asked to write a proposal
for a change or improvement in your organisation, to evaluate current practice, or
benchmark processes against other organisations.
This will provide you with a great opportunity to contribute in an authoritative way to
your organisation while fulfilling the assessment requirements of your MBT courses.
Accordingly, you should always be on the lookout for work contexts for use in your
assignments.
However, a word of caution! Be mindful of your colleagues’ sense of ownership of
practices, systems, processes, before you throw your new proposal on the table.
You’ll need to use your people management and change management skills to obtain
engagement with and support for your ideas.
If you are successful in initiating an improvement at work, you will enjoy the parallel
benefits of contributing not only to your own professional development, but also to
the continuous improvement of your organisation.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR LEARNING STYLE
Some aspects of your study program may be very easy for you, and others much more
difficult. Some advice in this guide may seem obvious and simple to apply, while
other material may seem difficult, or not even helpful. Learning is a very complex
process involving many different modes of ‘doing’ and ‘being’.
It will be very helpful if you can determine what kind of learner you are – and what
your strengths and weaknesses as a learner are – so that you can adjust your approach
accordingly.
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Educational psychologists talk about different learning styles:
•
some people are more active, others are more reflective
•
some people rely mostly on what they can experience with their senses, others
rely more on intuition
•
some people like to see things before they understand them, others prefer to hear
discussion and various points of view
•
some people learn things step by step, others like to get the big picture first.
Take some time now to reflect on how you learn best.
Activity 2
Take the following online quiz to discover your learning style and to
develop some study strategies that are right for you.
The quiz consists of 44 questions and takes approximately 10 minutes
to complete.
The website to visit is:
www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html
Detailed descriptions of each learning style and its corresponding
strategy are given only after you have completed the quiz.
Optional task:
Visit: www.jcu.edu.au/tldinfo/learningskills/learningst/ and download
brain.exe and take this simple test.
Being aware of your learning style (as well as the styles of others) can be very useful
when it comes to taking part in group work. Facilitators may use learning styles to
assist them in grouping students into teams.
MANAGING YOUR TIME
Just as it is important to understand your individual learning style, it also helps to
understand your daily physiological rhythms. There is no point forcing yourself to
stay up late at night if you don’t function well in the evening, or setting your alarm to
get up early if you don’t thrive on early morning rising.
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Some people are neither morning nor night people and prefer to use the weekends for
study rather than make changes to their weekday schedules.

Are you an owl or a lark – a night or morning person?
Weekly planner
You’ll find it extremely helpful if you use a weekly planner where you pencil in the
times you will allocate to your MBT study, as well as the times you will allocate to
other activities (a sample template is included as Appendix 1).
•
You will probably have enrolled in the MBT because your work is important to
you, so you cannot allow work commitments to suffer.
•
Your family and other people in your life are also very important, so you need
to make sure you are still able to spend some time with them.
•
And you are especially important – your health and well-being cannot be
neglected, so exercise and leisure activities should be added into your weekly
planner wherever possible.
Establish a pattern of study
Like so many other activities, studying is easier if it becomes a habit. You should aim
to establish a pattern of completing your MBT work at the same times each week. If
you are to work effectively, you will need to allocate blocks of time of no less than
two hours, two or three times per week.
Reading for postgraduate learning requires deep concentration, so any study blocks of
less than two hours may not be very productive. Reviewing the content and
participating in your online class could be for shorter amounts of time.
When it comes to assignments, you’ll probably find that after four hours of study in
any one day it’s not possible to produce your best work. For this reason, it’s a good
idea to start working on your assignments as early as possible in the semester.
Plan each study session
Before starting each block of time that you have set aside for study, plan what you
intend to achieve in that time. This may include notes such as: ‘Skim through the
Unit’, ‘Go back and re-read sections of the Unit in depth’, ‘Read and summarise two
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articles’. Having a plan enables you to structure your time more effectively – and
lessens the risk of feeling overwhelmed when faced with a large amount of reading.

At the end of each study session, devise a plan for the next session so you know where
to start when you come back to your study place.
Plan the entire 12–week semester
As well as planning each week within each semester, you will need to think about
planning over the whole semester (see semester planner in Appendix 2).
The beginning of each semester is a time to get organised. In the first few weeks, the
focus will be on reading and adjusting to the interactive nature of MBT classes. If you
are studying by distance, you will need to become involved in your online class and
become familiar with the various sections of the Learning Management System
(LMS) that provides your online learning environment. You will be provided with full
details of how to use the LMS in the materials provided for the course.
It will soon be time to start reading, researching and then writing your first
assignment. Please keep in mind that it is generally not possible to be granted an
extension for lodging an assignment (except in the most extreme situations, of which
‘very busy at work’ is definitely not one!). The MBT policy is that 10% of the
assignment weighting will be deducted for each day late, so obviously the earlier you
make a start, the better!
As each semester consists of 12 teaching weeks only, after submitting your first
assignment you should start preparing for the next one – while still participating in
your weekly classes, of course. Finally, you will need to prepare well for your exam.
Start with the important dates
Each semester you should check the assignment lodgement dates and the examination
date for the course in which you propose to enrol. This information can be found in
the respective course overview for the upcoming semester, available for download
from the MBT student website.
Add all these dates to your semester planner, and then work out when you should
undertake each stage of preparation for each assignment.
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
Examination dates are fixed and cannot be varied: before you enrol in a course, check
that you will be able to sit the examination on the specified date.
Activity 3
Before you begin your course each semester, you should add as much
information as possible to your weekly and semester planners
1. Make a copy or use the sample weekly and semester planners in
Appendices 1 and 2 respectively and mark up anticipated study
commitments as well as family, work and other activities.
2. You might like to highlight the different types of activities with
different colours so that you can see at a glance how you plan to
balance your life during each MBT semester.
What if you fall behind?
No matter how well you plan, it is always possible that some unforeseen events in
your work or personal life will occur and, as a result, you may fall behind in your
studies.
If this should happen to you, the first thing you should do is to let your Class
Facilitator know. He or she can usually suggest an appropriate way of catching up and
offer advice and encouragement to help you get through a rough patch.
In general, when you are ready to get back on track again, the best approach is to
apply yourself to the current Unit of the course – this will enable you to resume
participating in class discussions straight away. Then, with advice from your Class
Facilitator, work out a plan for catching up on the work you have missed.

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Don’t let a temporary setback stop you achieving your long-term goal.
MBT Learning Guide
ORGANISING YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR STUDY
Just as you need to organise your time, you also need to organise your personal space
to study most effectively. This includes your computer and work area as well as the
broader study environment.
•
For those who have stable work locations, always try to use the same place to
study so that your body and mind associate that location with your MBT work.
•
You will need a desk and some bookshelf space for your MBT study guide,
textbooks and notes. It may help if you use different coloured folders to store
your notes, any reference lists or copies of readings and assignment materials,
perhaps sorted by course or semester of study. It is helpful to keep things in the
same place so that you can easily locate them when you need them.
•
Regardless of whether your designated study place is at home, work or another
location, it is ideal if you can have a space that can be closed off from other
activities that may be going on around you. This may be a spare room or a study
in your home, your office, or a meeting room at your workplace.
•
It is important that your study location is quiet, well ventilated and well lit. It
would be worthwhile investing in a reading lamp and a chair with good lumbar
support. Most of all, your study place needs to be free of distractions.
•
If there is no suitable study area at home or in your workplace, you might
consider dedicating regular time at your local public or university library to
work on your MBT studies. Although this requires extra organisation in getting
the relevant study materials and texts together for each study session, the
benefits of productive blocks of time will pay off in the long run.
When you travel
Some of you may have to travel for work from time to time, and so will be studying in
different physical spaces at different times. This requires extra planning and
organisation: you will need to determine what you will be reading or needing to work
on during this time, and pack all the relevant materials.

Remember: MBT courses come on CD-ROM so there’s no need to carry bulky folders.
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Get into the mood
Some people find it useful to have a regular routine associated with each study
session. This could be taking a shower, putting on some quiet background music,
doing a few stretches or making a coffee. You will develop your own preferences, but
it’s helpful to recognise that these activities can be useful if they prepare you to settle
down to study.

Remember: You will need to take regular short breaks to refresh your eyes – and your
brain!
4. MBT LEARNING MODEL
As the MBT is designed for working professional people seeking to develop their
knowledge and skills in the management of business and technology, reflection is the
central point of reference in our model. While studying in the MBT, you are
encouraged to adopt a reflective practice approach to evaluate and improve your
knowledge and skills in the workplace.
Via the activities of reading, self-assessment, interaction with colleagues, fellow
participants and facilitators, application to the workplace and formal assessment, you
undertake a learning process designed to develop MBT graduate attributes and
achieve individual course learning outcomes.
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5. LEARNING IN WEB-SUPPORTED DISTANCE MODE
A number of you will take some MBT courses in face-to-face mode, where your time
management issues will be partly imposed. You will need to come to the Kensington
campus at a prescribed time each week, and will need to have done the necessary
reading before each class in order to participate effectively. Your classmates will
assist in energising you and help in motivating you to stay on track with your studies.
SELF-MOTIVATION – THE KEY TO DISTANCE LEARNING
The majority of MBT participants study mostly in distance mode in the online class
environment. Here, self-motivation is crucial. It will be up to you to stay motivated
and keep up to date with your reading and class preparation. However, the interactive
nature of the MBT online classes and the diversity of your classmates will engage you
and encourage you to participate regularly.
It is worth highlighting here the many advantages to learning in distance mode in an
interactive online class environment.
•
You are able to study at a time that is most suitable to you – perhaps not at the
end of a busy work day.
•
You can take your course materials with you on CD-ROM when you travel and
attend your online class as usual, regardless of where you log in.
•
By necessity, you are required to find your own motivation to study – which in
fact can often mean engaging more deeply with the course content.
•
In the online class, you have the opportunity to really work through some of the
issues and make your point of view or experience heard by the whole class –
something that can sometimes be more difficult in a face-to-face situation.
MBT’S ONLINE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (LMS)
One of the first things you will need to do – regardless of which study mode you will
be undertaking – is to make sure you can log into the LMS used for your class. All
MBT classes have an online class containing a Noticeboard, informal Coffee Shop for
general discussions and Gallery or Profile page. Distance mode classes also have a
formal Seminar Room – face-to-face classes do not have this component.

Remember: ALL MBT classes have an online class – not just distance mode!
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Instructions on how to log into your online class are provided in the appropriate LMS
User Manual, available for download from the guides section of the MBT student
website: www.student.mbt.unsw.edu.au/Forms_Guides.html. If you would like a
printed copy, please request this from the MBT office.
EMAIL DIGESTS
In the LMS you can subscribe to each weekly discussion to be kept up to date on new
postings made. Details on how to do this are contained in the appropriate Participant
Manual.
ONLINE DISCUSSIONS – THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERACTION
We reiterate that interaction with your Class Facilitator and fellow participants is the
key to effective learning in the MBT. Whether you study face to face or online, you
are required to participate actively in class activities. For distance students, this
includes regularly reviewing new postings in the online Noticeboard or Seminar
Room, participating in the various class activities (quizzes, debates, discussions, small
group work) as well as responding to specific questions posed by the Class Facilitator.
STRATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE ONLINE DISCUSSIONS
The following section has been adapted from Online Discussions: Tips for Students at the
University of Waterloo, Canada:
http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/online_discussions_tips_for_students.html
and
Online Discussions: Tips for Students at Carleton University, Canada:
http://www2.carleton.ca/edc/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/TT-Online-Discussions-Tipsfor-Students.pdf
To gain the most from learning online, you need to translate your discussion skills
into the interactive online environment. The following tips highlight key features of
effective online discussion strategies.
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Making a contribution in the seminar room
Be strategic
Online discussion can generate a number of different messages, so you need to
consider efficient ways of making your contributions. For example, after you’ve
completed the required reading or task, you need to determine your position and how
to support it, read the other postings in the class, see how they support or contradict
your idea, and then write your own perspective and upload it.
You can also turn your thoughts into questions, or play devil’s advocate. Remember
however, that opinions are not arguments – be sure to support what you say with
reference to the course content or outside sources, such as readings or examples from
your workplace experience.
If you’re the first to contribute, strive to encourage discussion
Get others thinking (and writing): make bold statements or include open-ended
questions in your message. And remember, those who post early in the discussion are
most often responded to and cited by others – check back and see if and how others
have responded to your ideas.
Make your contribution short and purposeful
In general, you should limit each contribution to approximately 25 or 30 lines of text
– you will find that long posts are difficult to read online. Another suggestion is to
make only one main point in each posting, supported by evidence and/or an example.

Remember: online discussions are first and foremost dialogues – not writing
assignments!
Your stance need not be forever
It may be intimidating to take a stand on a particular issue, especially when you put it
in writing, which is associated with permanence. However, you are allowed to change
your mind! If this happens to occur during discussion of a topic, simply indicate that
after taking on board new information learned as the discussion has developed, you
have changed your stance.
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
Remember: learning is all about change!
Responding to contributions from others
Make the context clear
When responding online, consider including a quotation from the original message
that is relevant to your response. If the posting you are referring to has a number of
paragraphs, you may want to copy and paste, and place specific comments underneath
the relevant paragraph to clearly indicate the context for your ideas.
Add value to the conversation
As you would readily acknowledge, just saying ‘I agree’ does not move a discussion
forward. Ask yourself why you might agree with a proposition – or not – and explain
your rationale so that others have something else to respond to.
Ask probing questions
When trying to extend a discussion, consider the following questions.
•
What reasons do you have for saying that?
•
Why do you agree (or disagree) on that point?
•
How are you defining the term that you just used?
•
What do you mean by that expression?
•
Could you clarify that remark?
•
What follows from what you just said?
•
What alternatives are there to such a formulation?
Be prepared to disagree with your classmates
In order to reveal different perspectives or to help others clarify their thinking, you
sometimes may need to contradict a classmate. Remember to disagree respectfully,
and support your point with evidence, but do not be reluctant to offer a different
interpretation. Your contribution should help to make the discussion more productive
for all involved.
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Work to create group cohesion
Again, interaction is the basis for learning in the MBT. When a class functions well as
a group, the benefits that this type of learning can offer become very apparent. So,
you are encouraged to do the following wherever possible:
•
give positive feedback to one another
•
make use of light humour
•
avoid comments that could be taken as insulting
•
use first names
•
respond promptly to each other
•
offer assistance where appropriate
Lack of body language
Be aware of the lack of non-verbal or vocal cues in the online environment. Where
appropriate, you’ll need to include statements that express your emotions (I’m
confused about this proposal; I feel strongly about this issue). Otherwise, it’s unlikely
that others will be able to pick up on this.
If you feel quite emotional about something, wait before responding
It’s easy to write a forceful comment as an immediate response to something that you
feel strongly about – and then wish you could retract it! In these situations, it is wise
to give yourself a cooling-off period, and be able to respond in a calm and
professional manner.
Developing a positive perspective
Be open to new ideas
The word ‘discussion’ implies considering what others have to say and re-shaping
your own thoughts and perspective, and then responding. Different perspectives
provide greater opportunities for learning, and can further your understanding of the
issue or concept.
Feel free to change your mind. Take a stand at first, but realise that your ideas aren’t
permanent. Let the new information from the discussion modify your stand and say so
when it does.
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15
Feel free to disagree. Disagree with points, not people. Support your contradicting
point with evidence.
Debate makes for a very productive and meaningful discussion.
Enjoy yourself!
The online environment comes with many benefits, including learning from your
peers as well as your facilitator. Use the time productively to hone your management
skills and refine your ideas about the course concepts and content.
UNDERTAKING SMALL GROUP TASKS ONLINE
In addition to participating in discussions or quizzes, you may be required to
undertake class activities in small groups. It is important that you regularly check both
the Noticeboard and Seminar Room for new tasks that may be assigned.

Remember: You receive a daily email digest alerting you to new activity in your online
class.
Your Class Facilitator will provide clear guidance for any group interaction, including
clarification of the particular task and a timeline for completion. The facility for
private activity groups within the LMS can be used for this purpose. Someone from
the group will normally be asked to report back to the whole class in the Seminar
Room.
The challenges of group work
One of the important learning outcomes of a group activity is for each participant to
have confronted and effectively dealt with the inevitable challenges of teamwork.
How you deal with the process itself will be of as much interest to your Class
Facilitator as your final team submission. As you would appreciate, the overall result
for all team members depends on each person fulfilling their responsibilities, working
to timelines and meeting deadlines.
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Strategies for small group work
The following team strategies and procedures are taken from The Virtual Team, by
Tony Munos, one of the course authors and Class Facilitators of the MBT’s Project
Management course. While developed with virtual teams in mind, these strategies are
relevant to all group work situations.
•
Establish interdependency among team members.
•
Agree not only on what, when, and how information will be shared, but also on
how team members will respond to it.
•
Establish clear norms and protocols for understanding assumptions and
discussing conflicts.
•
Make explicit the need for virtual team members to actively build the team and
create relationships.
•
Recognise and honour diversity.
In addition to the above, the following strategies developed by the University of
Guelph address a number of common group work issues.
•
How can we develop good group dynamics quickly?
•
How can we deal with group conflict?
•
What do we do if one group member is not contributing?
•
What do we do if a group member is domineering?
www.lib.uoguelph.ca/assistance/learning_services/handouts/group_work.cfm
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17
6. NEGOTIATING THE COURSE MATERIALS
When you first receive your study guide, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the
amount of reading it contains. Rest assured you do not have to read everything at
once! One of the keys to success is taking one step at a time, and in the case of your
MBT work, this means using each resource as it is intended.
Before the semester starts, you are advised to read through:
•
this Learning Guide
•
current Participant Information Guide
•
Course Overview for each course you are undertaking
•
LMS Participant Manual.
During the semester, aim to complete one Unit from your study guide each week, or
as directed by your Class Facilitator (note that Summer Term is compressed into six
teaching weeks, with two Units covered per week).
COURSE OVERVIEW – SUMMARY DOCUMENT
You may have already looked through several course overviews while deciding which
course to enrol in. Once you have enrolled in a particular course, you should actively
read its course overview with the following in mind.
•
Review the course aims, Unit summaries and expected learning outcomes.
•
Check the list of components of the study package to ensure that you have
everything you need.
•
Confirm whether you will need to purchase a prescribed textbook.
•
Acquire a detailed understanding of the assessment tasks, including:





18
the criteria on which you will be assessed
how you will be expected to self-assess via Unit exercises
assignment details and lodgement dates
date, type and duration of the examination.
The course overview is a very useful document: make sure you read it carefully!
MBT Learning Guide
STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY GUIDE
The study guide is designed to assist you in planning and pacing your study workload.
It is divided into 12 Units, each one corresponding to a week of the academic
semester (note again that in Summer Term, two Units are covered each week).
Each Unit contains an introduction to the topics to be covered in each section of that
Unit, and lists the learning outcomes. Self-paced exercises are included at appropriate
points throughout the Unit to help you process what you are reading and apply the
learning to your own experience, or perhaps to a scenario outlined in a Unit reading.
When working through the study guide of a course that has a prescribed textbook, you
will be asked to read or refer to certain sections of the text throughout the Unit.
Each course also includes supplementary readings at the end of most Units, which are
aimed at broadening the approach to the topic. You will be directed to read these at
appropriate points, and they will often have an associated Unit exercise.
7. STUDY STRATEGIES
It is important to establish a specific goal for each block of study, and to use your time
effectively. Most of your weekly study time will consist of reading the current Unit
and associated readings and/or textbook sections, perusing recommended websites,
completing the assigned activities (online, in class or self-directed), note-taking and
summarising readings, and preparing for or writing assignments.
In this section, we shall summarise some strategies for effective study, including:
•
effective reading
•
SQ3R Approach
•
study guide Unit exercises
•
taking notes
•
summarising.
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19
EFFECTIVE READING – KEY TO SUCCESSFUL STUDY
Each Unit in your study guide will contain a significant amount of reading material,
which may at first appear daunting given the limited time you may have. While
working through each Unit, you’ll need to discern the purpose of the different
resources you are asked to read. Some items may be able to be skimmed so you can
grasp the general idea, while newspaper and magazine articles, for example, might be
included for stimulus and to alert you to the currency of the issues to be discussed in
class. Other journal articles will be more academic in nature and will require more
concentrated reading.
Aim to be an active reader
The main point to emphasise is that reading is a very active process. You will read
most effectively if you first review what you already know about a topic, and consider
what you are about to read. If you first skim an article or textbook extract to identify
the main issues, you will be able to start predicting the content. This strategy will help
you engage with the content more deeply when you read it in detail.

Remember: If you are active in your reading you will gain more from it!
Being active in your reading includes:
•
taking notes as you read
•
questioning and commenting on what you are reading
•
writing a summary, or explaining the reading to another person.
The SQ3R approach
This approach is one that many students find helpful; it contains five steps:
•
Survey/Scan
•
Question
•
Read
•
Recall (take notes)
•
Review
Following is a summary of the activities at each stage of the SQ3R approach.
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MBT Learning Guide
Survey/Scan
•
title, headings and subheadings
•
non-verbal information (graphs, illustrations etc.)
•
abstract (summary at the beginning, where provided)
•
introduction
•
conclusion
•
reference list (to see what company the author keeps)
Question
•
turn the title and subheadings into questions
•
ask yourself:

What else do I know about this topic?

What is unclear to me at this stage?

What more do I want to know about this topic?
Read
•
look for answers to your questions
•
note all the underlined, italicised and bold words or phrases
•
reduce your speed for difficult questions
•
NB: speed-reading is not the key to effective reading; sometimes you need to
read slowly in order to digest what you are reading – selective reading is the
key
•
stop and re-read parts that are not clear
•
read one short article or one section of a longer article at a time, and then ….
Recall (take notes)
•
summarise in your own words what you have read
•
take notes in your own words
•
effective learning is a combination of seeing, saying, hearing and writing
Review
•
look through your notes
•
ask yourself questions based on your notes
•
try to answer your own questions
•
decide what you think about the writer’s position
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21
STUDY GUIDE UNIT EXERCISES
Each study guide has set exercises throughout the Units to help you process what you
are reading and, most importantly, they often ask you to apply the learning to your
own work situation and experience. These exercises help you undertake the last two
steps of the SQ3R approach to reading – recall and review – and help prepare you to
respond appropriately to your assignment and exam questions.
While you don’t need to formally submit your answers to Unit exercises, they can
sometimes form the basis of class discussion. Further, just thinking about your
answers is usually not very productive – by articulating your thoughts you can really
assess your understanding. Many people acknowledge they really know what they
think only when they write down their thoughts or discuss them with others.
TAKING NOTES
Because you are provided with a printed study guide and copies of all essential
reading, you might wonder whether note-taking is still necessary. The answer is yes, it
is definitely necessary, but for reasons other than just recording information.
Why take notes?
The most important reason is to allow you to engage with what you are reading.
Effective note-taking facilitates your comprehension and memorisation, which can
assist you when you want to incorporate material you’ve read into an assignment –
often without needing to go back to the original text.
Different note-taking strategies
The way you take notes will depend on why you are taking notes, and which strategy
you feel most comfortable using. Note-taking is an individual activity, and the number
and type of notes you make will depend on how much you already know about a
topic. The less you know, the more notes you will need to take – but always take care
not to just reproduce what you are reading. Each person will develop their own
preferred way of abbreviating information, and decide on the note-taking strategy that
suits them best.
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MBT Learning Guide
Common note-taking strategies include:
•
linear notes
•
mind maps
•
notes with commentary.
Examples of these different strategies are provided in Appendix 3.
Activity 4
Practise some different note-taking strategies now:

1.
Consider the various common types of note-taking strategies
illustrated in Appendix 3. Write some notes on the section of this
learning guide that you have just read – i.e. the section on ‘Different
note-taking strategies’.
2.
First, create a mind map.
3.
Then, take notes in linear form.
4.
Reflect on which method you found easier.
Ensure that you will understand your abbreviations when you look back at your notes!
Summarising – different purposes
Summarising is a useful strategy when taking notes while reading, but you might also
write a summary as part of an assignment, or you might want to summarise certain
sections of a number of different articles to incorporate into an assignment that calls
for an essay format. The specific purpose of summarising will determine and guide
the type of summary you write.
Here are some steps to keep in mind when summarising.
1.
Make sure that you accurately record the full reference details of the source text
(see ‘Acknowledging your sources’ in this guide).
2.
To begin, read through the entire text quickly so you can obtain an overall
impression of the content and locate the sections that are relevant to your
purpose.
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23
3.
Go back and read the relevant sections more carefully.
4.
Identify the main idea in each section, write it down in note form, and then try
to express it in your own words in one sentence.
5.
Take a note of any words and expressions that clearly indicate the author’s
attitude.
6.
Make a list of technical terms that you will need to use, or special phrases that
the author uses that you will need to put in quotation marks if you cite them
(don’t forget to record the page number of all these, which is required for direct
quotes).
7.
Put the text aside and write the first draft of your summary.
8.
Compare your summary with the key parts of the text to check that you:
9.
24
•
haven’t changed the meaning
•
have paraphrased (expressed the meaning in different words), not just
copied the original wording.
Put the text and your first draft aside and write a second draft.
MBT Learning Guide
8. UNSW LIBRARY – WHY USE IT?
Postgraduate study, in general, requires students to read widely on a topic and to draw
on multiple sources, particularly when writing assignments. Some of this work has
already been done for MBT participants through the preparation of the study guides,
which contain a wide variety of readings, appendices and references.
However, when researching for an assignment, you are expected to look outside the
course notes, readings and any textbook, and seek information, research and examples
from other sources.
The UNSW library is an excellent starting point for these resources, where you can
access information such as:
•
current research and academic papers relevant to your topic
•
industry reports, data and trends
•
statistical information on your topic area
•
relevant government policy.
Many MBT participants have commented that they discovered the full extent of the
resources available via the library some time after beginning their studies, and they
wished they’d investigated them much earlier.

Don’t wait – get to know what is available via the UNSW library now!
ACCESSING UNSW LIBRARY RESOURCES
As an MBT participant, you have access to all physical and online collections of the
UNSW library at the Kensington campus.
You can request to borrow hard copy library items via a number of methods,
including internet, email, phone, fax, ‘snail mail’ or in person. Contact information
and details of services available to MBT participants are located in Appendix 4 of this
guide.
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25
ELISE – ENABLING LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SKILLS FOR EVERYONE
To perform your best at UNSW, learning how to find, use and evaluate the mass of
information out there is important. You’ll also need to know how to use information
ethically. Plagiarism or not adequately acknowledging where your information or
ideas come from is a serious offence.
ELISE online tutorials teach you how to access and use library resources to locate
research information relevant to your studies.
The basic tutorial (ELISE) is primarily aimed at undergraduates and those who have
not studied in higher education previously.
The more advanced tutorial (ELISE Plus) is aimed at all students including
postgraduates who hold an undergraduate qualification or have completed the basic
tutorial.
The ELISE tutorials are available from the main library homepage under the title
“Support”. Additional help is available in finding a range of resources such as journal
articles, course items, books/e-books and using the university databases under the
heading “How do I find”.
UNSW Library: www.library.unsw.edu.au/
Access the tutorials at any time to brush up on the library and information literacy
skills you will need throughout your MBT studies.

26
Current information about ELISE can be found on the MBT student website and in
course overviews.
MBT Learning Guide
Activity 5
1.
Access the library web site: www.library.unsw.edu.au/
2.
The ELISE tutorials are available from the main library homepage
under the title “Support”.
3.
Take either the basic or advanced tutorial and work through its
activities systematically.
UNSW LIBRARY SUBJECT GUIDES
The library has developed a range of subject guides that cover most of the disciplines
you are likely to study during your time with the MBT Program. These can be
accessed at:
http://subjectguides.library.unsw.edu.au
Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the program relevant guides include:
Business
Law
Engineering
Technology
Science
Environment
Activity 6
Open the library’s subject guide:
http://subjectguides.library.unsw.edu.au
1.
Take note of the general resources available under each of the
suggested discipline areas.
2.
In the section ‘Need Help?’ work through at least two of the ELISE
tutorials.
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27
9.
THINKING CRITICALLY – ESSENTIAL TO YOUR SUCCESS
In your MBT coursework you will need to show evidence of critical thinking,
particularly in assignments and exams.
WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?
Use of the word ‘critical’ in an academic sense has a specific meaning – it doesn’t
mean ‘finding fault’. In academic work, the meaning is far broader than simply
looking for negative points: it generally means involving or exercising careful or
skilful judgement.
When you are thinking critically, you are thinking actively – asking questions about
what you observe or read, challenging assertions, categorising, finding relationships
and evaluating information. Although you may sometimes find fault when exercising
skilful judgement, you may also find much to praise.

Critical thinking means not passively accepting everything that you read or hear!
All the following activities are aspects of critical thinking that you will need to use in
your MBT work:
•
asking questions
•
categorising
•
analysing
•
synthesising
•
establishing cause and effect
•
making links between ideas
•
evaluating
•
predicting
•
relating theory to practice
•
making a claim and supporting it
•
using appropriate evidence
•
interpreting according to a framework
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MBT Learning Guide
As all MBT courses have a focus on the practical application of concepts to the
workplace, you will be required to demonstrate your ability to relate theory to
practice. This will involve many of the basic critical thinking skills, which include:
•
interpreting according to a framework
•
analysing complex situations into component parts
•
making comparisons and contrasts
•
identifying problems and solutions.
Remember too, that you are no doubt already thinking critically every day. When you
make decisions at work, this requires you to assess situations using certain types of
information, to evaluate that information, predict outcomes and draw conclusions.
Having engaged in this critical process, it is much easier to write a report, present a
recommendation or to justify your business decisions.
There are a number of books available that cover skills in critical thinking. One of the
cheapest available electronically is: The Little Blue Reasoning Book:
www.amazon.com/Little-Blue-Reasoning-Book-Principles/dp/1897393601
You will find the skills taught in this book useful in your work, study and personal
life.
Activity 7
1.
Think about a decision your company/department made recently;
e.g. investing in a new IT product/system, deciding on a new
supplier/contractor, opening an out-of-state/offshore office,
advertising through TV rather than print media, etc.
2.
Was this decision made on the spur of the moment or was a critical
thinking process undertaken?
3.
Which of the aspects of critical thinking listed above do you think
were used before this decision was made?
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29
IPSO – CRITICAL READING/THINKING STRATEGY
As noted earlier, when you are reading for postgraduate study, you need to adopt an
active approach and to question the text.
IPSO is a very useful approach = Issue/Position/Support/Outcome
Issue
What is the problem or question being addressed?
Position
What is (are) the major position(s) put forward in this argument?
Support
What evidence, reasoning or other persuasive means back up the
position?
Outcome
What is likely to happen if the argument is accepted?
(UNSW Learning Centre) www.lc.unsw.edu.au/
DE BONO’S SIX HATS OF CRITICAL THINKING
Another useful critical thinking strategy is Edward De Bono’s Six Hats. The six hats
method of parallel thinking is one well-know strategy of De Bono’s that allows you to
step outside your usual thinking by donning a coloured hat. Each hat allows you to
question a problem or issue. This is a great strategy to use when thinking critically as
you challenge your own views – it is also great in groups to help you brainstorm ideas
and produces more effective and efficient results than a disorganised discussion. The
outline of six hats is below.
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MBT Learning Guide
Six Hats at a Glance
Re d Hat:
Feelings
Ye llow Hat: Strengths
Black Hat:
Weaknesses
Gre e n Hat: New Ideas
What are my feelings about this?
What are the good points?
What is wrong with this?
What is possible?
White Hat:
Information
What are the facts?
Blue Hat:
Thinking about Thinking
What thinking is needed?
CRITICAL THINKING AT POSTGRADUATE LEVEL
As a postgraduate student, you will be expected to present a critical argument when
writing your assignments. That is, you will be asked to assess a situation or answer a
question and, using information contained in the course and through your own
research, draw some conclusions and make recommendations.
The persuasiveness of your ideas/recommendations will depend on the coherence of
your argument and on the strength of your evidence.
You will be expected to go beyond the level of understanding the concepts and ideas
presented in the course materials, and you will be expected to go beyond the
application of theory/frameworks to practice.
The following diagram provides a useful way of thinking about different levels of
cognitive development. Postgraduate students should be aiming to work at the highest
levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
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31
Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain
Evaluation
Highest level of
cognitive development
Shows ability to judge the value of material for
a given purpose based on definite criteria and
rationale; includes decision making and
selection; is the highest level in the cognitive
domain. It contains elements of all the other
categories; eg, synthesis is critical to
evaluation.
Evidence: assessments, critiques and evaluations.
Synthesis
Recombines the parts created during analysis
to form a new entity, different from the original
one.
Evidence: creative behaviors such as development
of a research proposal or a scheme for classifying
information, and the creation of new patterns or
structures.
Analysis
Breaks down material into its constituent parts so
that its organizational structure may be
understood.
Evidence: breaking down, categorizing, classifying,
differentiating,; requires understanding of the material,
its content and its structure.
Application
Uses data, principles, theory learned to answer a
question in a new environment; shows one can
apply what was learned and understood.
Evidence:conceptual activities such as application,
classification, development, modification, organization
and prediction.
Comprehension
Is an awareness of what the material means; allows
one to demonstrate understanding of a work based
on one’s knowledge of it.
Evidence: activities that indicate comprehension might
include comparison and contrast, paraphrasing, extension
and summary.
Knowledge
Is the recall of previously learned material; of
specific facts or of complete theories; all that is
required is the bringing to mind of the appropriate
information; the lowest level of learning outcomes
in the cognitive domain.
Evidence: definitions, outlines, recall exercises and
requests to reproduce knowledge acquisition..
Athanassiou N, McNett J and Harvey C, 2003,
‘Critical thinking in the management classroom: Bloom’s taxonomy as a learning tool’,
Journal of Management Education, vol. 27, no. 5, p. 536.
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MBT Learning Guide
Referring to Bloom’s taxonomy is a useful way to ensure you are thinking about your
studies at the appropriate level. Later in this guide, we will see how it can also be used
to ensure you are answering your assignment questions at the required cognitive level.
It should be noted that course coordinators and class facilitators use Bloom’s
taxonomy when setting assignments, exams and activities.
You can also consider the taxonomy as you interact with your class. To get the most
out of your classes, you need to contribute at the higher levels of application, analysis
and synthesis, as well as contributing knowledge and comprehension.
You can assess the value of your contributions using the following table:
1. When a colleague offers her or his view on aspects of cases
discussed in class, I expand the class discussion by elaborating on
his or her perspective.
2. When the instructor offers a view on aspects of a case discussed in
class, I expand the class discussion by elaborating on this view.
Evaluation
3. My assessments and critiques of colleagues’ and the instructor’s
views on cases and on current events indicate evaluation.
4. I successfully offer ways to recombine the views created during
class discussion of cases and of current events to form new
perspectives or new ideas, different from those offered by the
original views.
Synthesis
5. I help the class to break down case or current events material into
its constituent parts so that its structure may be understood and its
important issues may be emphasised.
Analysis
6. I steer class discussion toward the use of data, principles, and
theory learned to answer a question or shed light on an issue in a
new context.
Application
7. I share my understanding of what the class material means.
8. I offer my collection of previously learned material to my colleagues
in class to enhance class discussion. This may involve recall of
specific facts or of complete theories.
Comprehension
Knowledge
Adapted from Athanassiou N, McNett J and Harvey C, 2003,
‘Critical thinking in the management classroom: Bloom’s taxonomy as a learning tool’,
Journal of Management Education, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 533–555

The person marking your assignments will also be engaging in a process of critical
reading!
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33
10. ANALYSING ASSESSMENT TASKS
You will encounter many different types of assignments in the different MBT courses
you undertake. When you receive your study guide each semester, you should
carefully read the Assessment Details section and make sure you understand what you
are required to do for each assignment.

You won’t get good marks for work that does not respond appropriately to the question!
You will need to consider the format in which you are required to prepare your
answer. You might be expected to write a report or an essay, use a case study, or
apply some of the course concepts to your own workplace.
If you are required to write a report, you will need to determine what kind of report is
required; some different formats are outlined in the next section.
START WITH ANALYSING THE QUESTION
You will need to carefully consider the following.
1.
What is the topic you are required to write about?
2.
What aspect of the topic should you concentrate on?
3.
How you are meant to deal with it?
The assignment question will normally be written in such a way as to give you a clear
indication of these three different aspects of the task.
Different words in the question will alert you to each aspect. Assignment questions
will have:
•
content words (the topic)
•
limiting words (narrowing the topic to a specific aspect)
•
task or direction words (what you are actually asked to do with the topic).
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MBT Learning Guide
The following table lists some of the task or direction words that are commonly used
in assignment questions. All the words require some level of analysis.
Analyse
Examine the different elements relevant to the topic and determine
their relationship to each other.
Compare
Find similarities or differences between ideas, events or
interpretations.
Contrast
This is similar to ‘compare’, but requires more focus on the
differences.
Criticise
Discuss both strong and weak points in order to arrive at a reasoned
evaluation.
Define
Provide a clear, concise and authoritative statement of the meaning of
a term.
Discuss
Analyse the main features of the topic and present a reasoned point of
view in relation to it.
Evaluate
Consider a range of arguments and reach a judgment about the
strengths and weaknesses of each.
Other task/direction words that do not necessarily involve a high level of analysis may
also be used, but they are usually asked in combination with one or other of the
direction words.
Describe
Outline the main features of a phenomenon.
Illustrate
Give examples.
Summarise
Outline the main points of theory or event.
For a more comprehensive list of task words refer to the UNSW Learning Centre at:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/taskanal.html#equest2
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35
Example
The following is an analysis of a typical assignment question.
Question:
Choose any country. Assume that you are asked to contribute to advice for a
business enterprise that is considering international expansion. You are
required to write a report on the macroeconomic conditions and prospects of
the country of your choice.
Your answer should include:
1.
A general discussion of the main goals of macroeconomic policy, why these
goals are important, and the extent to which the goals of macroeconomic policy
can be simultaneously achieved.
2.
A specific discussion of the main macroeconomic indicators in the country of
your choice.
3.
An assessment of the extent to which the macroeconomic goals are being
achieved in the country of your choice.
The question states that the format for the answer must be a report.
Here is an analysis of the above question:
Content words
Limiting words
Task words
Comment
Overall
purpose
Macroeconomic
conditions
One country
Provide advice for
business enterprise
Application of
theory
(a)
General goals of
macroeconomic
policy
Importance
Extent to which
can be achieved
simultaneously
Discuss (explain,
analyse, indicate
relationship,
comment)
Theory (secondary
sources)
(b)
Main macroeconomic
indicators
Country of choice
(as above)
Discuss (describe,
explain, indicate
relationship,
comment)
Primary research
(c)
Extent to which goals
achieved
Country of choice
(as above)
Assess (evaluate)
level of
achievement
Making
connections
between research
and theory
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MBT Learning Guide
Activity 8
Here is a practice question. Please identify the topic, limiting words and task words
and write them in the respective columns below.
For your organisation, write a report identifying the issues arising from an e-business
application.
Compare and contrast the e-business functionality in your organisation with that
offered by similar organisations.
•
Using a model such as Porter or Weill and Vitale, provide a detailed analysis as
to how the current e-business strategy adds value to your organisation.
•
Using a model such as Porter or Weill & Vitale, examine two new or additional
e-business opportunities for your organisation. NB: these opportunities must not
be currently implemented by your organisation. Please consider each
opportunity in depth and justify the opportunity, remembering to take account of
the benefits as well as the associated costs and risks to the organisation.
Your answer should make use of relevant theory where appropriate.
(Answers in the ‘Answers to activities’ section)
Format required
Topic
MBT Learning Guide
Limiting Words
Task Words
37
11. WRITING IN ACADEMIC STYLE
If most of the writing you normally do at work is transactional (e.g. field notes,
briefing notes, business correspondence and work-related reports), then you may be
unfamiliar with the academic style in which you will be required to write most of your
assignments.
Unlike most writing in the workplace, academic writing involves showing evidence of
an engagement with theory and the ideas of experts in the respective discipline or
field, together with – importantly – evidence of your own critical reflection. As the
purpose of academic writing is different from that of the workplace, some aspects of
its form are different as well. Some distinct features are that it:
•
is concise – uses as few words as possible to express as much meaning as
possible
•
is clearly structured, indicating that the writer has thought through what to write
before commencing writing
•
has fewer verbs per sentence than informal or spoken English
•
has more nouns per sentence than informal or spoken English and many of these
nouns are abstract in meaning
•
often has a complex noun phrase as the subject of a sentence, e.g. The recent
dramatic increase in commercial failures of SMEs in industries formerly known
for their blue chip companies has led to … (it may take several sentences to
explain to someone what the phrase actually means)
•
makes limited use of grammatical conjunctions (and, but) to link ideas
•
frequently uses subordination to link ideas together (while, however, in
particular)
•
is usually in the grammatical third person (he, she, it, they); first person (I, we)
rarely used, and second person (you) is never used
•
does not use contractions (does not instead of doesn’t)
•
avoids colloquial and slang vocabulary (dollars instead of bucks)
•
avoids words with emotional or attitudinal connotations (disastrous, exciting,
tremendous)
•
uses one-word verbs in preference to phrasal verbs (destroy vs. get rid of)
•
makes greater use of the passive voice in order to make it possible to begin
sentences with actions, things or ideas (They avoided risks by …’ might be
expressed as ‘Risks were avoided by …’)
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•
avoids expressions that exaggerate the truth (everyone knows/it is obvious)
•
uses tentative language or ‘hedges’ to avoid making unsupported generalisations
(A possible cause of the company collapse may have been vs. The company
collapsed because)
•
Academic writing example:
A number of different tools can be applied to help identify the potential for
error, but in addition, a good understanding of human motivation and cognitive
limitations is needed.
•
Informal example:
You can help to identify a likely error by using different tools but you should
also have a good understanding of what motivates humans and how their
cognitive ability might limit them.
You will become more familiar with academic style as you read some of the academic
articles included in your course materials.
However, remember that not all readings in MBT courses are written in academic
style. As the MBT is an applied masters, you will often be required to read business
journals or newspaper and magazine articles that are written in a more informal,
colloquial style.
You will note too that while this learning guide has been written to help you with
academic study, it isn’t written in academic style. Note in the last sentence, for
example, the use of ‘you’ and the contraction ‘isn’t’. The informal style typical of
manuals such as this is designed to more easily guide readers through the content.
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Activity 9
Below are some short extracts from typical MBT course readings.
1. Which ones would you say are written in academic style, and which
are written in a more informal, colloquial style?
2. Can you guess the type of text the extracts come from? (newspapers,
magazines, academic articles, etc)
Extract 1
Global health-care group CSL has delivered another record half-year profit,
adding to the spectacular rewards to investors who lined up to take what has
proved to be the most profitable government sell-off.
Extract 2
So at this early point we need to understand the different levels of strategy
development. Whilst the processes for developing strategy will be the same no
matter what level of the organisation you are planning strategy for, the focus and
the outcomes will be different.
Extract 3
Let’s admit it. Corporations around the world are reaching the limits of
incrementalism. Squeezing another penny out of costs, getting a product to
market a few weeks earlier, responding to customers’ inquiries a little bit faster,
ratcheting quality up one more notch, capturing another point of market share –
those are the obsessions of marketing today. But pursuing incremental
improvements while rivals reinvent the industry is like fiddling while Rome burns.
Extract 4
During the course of a product development project, the major design-build-test
cycles involve the creation of prototypes or the testing of the production process
in a pilot plant. Carrying out prototype or pilot production cycles well can have a
decisive impact on the overall development effort.
(Answers in the ‘Answers to activities’ section)
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12. STRUCTURING YOUR WRITING
Once you are confident that you have clearly analysed an assignment question, you
will need to start planning your answer. The instructions will normally state the
specific form your answer should take – usually an essay or a report. If the required
format is not stated, check with your Class Facilitator about what will be acceptable.
Following is some information about the most common assignment formats that you
will use in your MBT work, and what is usually required for each.
For more detail, you can download brochures on these different assignment types
from the Learning and Teaching Portfolio unit.
http://www.asb.unsw.edu.au/Learningandteaching/Pages/default.aspx
or the UNSW Learning Centre: http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/
ACADEMIC ESSAYS
Essays allow your facilitator to assess your ability to:
•
understand the purpose of questions important in your field of study
•
carry out research
•
think critically about what you read
•
distinguish between sources relevant and irrelevant to answering a question
•
distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources
•
organise your ideas into a sound argument
•
use evidence from your sources as support for your argument
•
express your argument in coherent and cohesive text, and
•
acknowledge the sources you have used appropriately in your text.
Your Class Facilitator will be interested to see how well you construct a convincing
argument based on sound reasoning and appropriate use of evidence.
•
The development of your argument should be made clear by the way you
organise your writing into paragraphs – each one should deal with a different
aspect or new stage of your argument.
•
The connection between these stages should be clearly marked by transition
sentences – they should summarise what came before in order to introduce the
next stage of the argument. The challenge for you as a writer is to make this
transition as smooth and seamless as possible.
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•
In an essay, the writer’s argument flows through the whole paper – the reader
must complete the essay to understand the argument or point of view.
An essay is the presentation of a critical argument (see Section 8). There are four
stages in the presentation of a critical argument:
1.
clear outline of issues or problems
2.
presentation of relevant evidence
3.
evaluation of evidence: positive, negative and mixed
4.
linking evaluation to one’s overall argument clearly and repeatedly.
Structure of an essay
An essay must have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.
Introduction
In the introduction, you should orient your reader to the question (IPSO Issue),
explain the significance of the question or provide a context. You should then outline
your overall response to the question, and indicate your main theme or argument so
that the reader is able to anticipate what will follow (IPSO Position).
In addition, you should give some indication of the order in which you will present
your ideas, any limitations to the scope of your essay, and define any terms, if
necessary. Note that the first attempt at an introduction is usually only a draft – it is
only after you have completed the body and conclusion of an essay that you can
confirm the introduction indicates what you have actually written!

An essay’s introduction is best written when the body and conclusion are complete!
Body of the essay
The body of an essay contains the development of ideas that you outlined in the
introduction. The body should comprise about three-quarters of the overall length of
your essay, and consist of a number of paragraphs, each dealing with one aspect or
stage of your answer. Always group related ideas together in paragraphs, and use
linking words or phrases within the paragraph as well as between paragraphs.
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The first sentence of each paragraph should indicate the main topic of that paragraph.
Paragraphs are composed of a number of sentences, the ideas you are discussing will
be complex and need to be substantiated by facts, evidence and researched opinion.
The supporting sentences in the paragraph should elaborate on the topic highlighted in
the opening sentence (IPSO Support). At the end of each paragraph, you may clarify
your argument and provide a link to the next paragraph or set of related ideas.
Linking words or phrases indicate the flow of the argument or ideas you are
developing. Make sure that what you write is consistent with the points you have
made in your introduction – and they are in the order you indicate they will be
discussed.
If your essay is clearly organised and flows logically, the reader can concentrate on
your argument and will not be distracted or confused by information that is repetitious
or doesn’t seem to fit the stated intention.
When writing the body of an essay, you will often use facts, ideas and opinions based
on your research. You may use direct quotes when the actual words of the source are
highly relevant to your argument. However, you are more likely to paraphrase the
ideas of others to substantiate your argument.

Remember, you must always correctly cite your sources in academic essays and
reports!
The reader must be able to readily understand your use of and interpretation of cited
information, and should not have to interpret what you are trying to present or
question the relevance of information to your argument.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, you need to briefly summarise the main points or themes discussed
in the body of the essay, and the implications of these ideas. This should be consistent
with what the introduction states the essay will argue or present. New ideas must not
be introduced in the conclusion. However, when discussing implications of your
arguments, it would be acceptable to suggest, for example, that certain areas may need
to be further explored or anticipated (IPSO Outcome).
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A good resource for further information on essays is Beginning the Academic Essay,
by Patricia Kain, written for The Writing Center at Harvard University (Appendix 5).
Steps in writing an assignment essay
You can’t write an essay well if you try to do it all at once. You should begin early, as
essay writing is a cyclical process. The steps are listed here one after the other, but in
reality you will find that you usually need to go back a few steps and repeat them.
•
Make sure you understand the question you are asked to answer.
•
Do some preliminary reading.
•
Take notes from your reading and systematically record the bibliographical
details of your sources.
•
Identify the main themes relevant to the question asked.
•
Decide on your position in relation to the question asked.
•
Develop a rough outline for your answer.
•
Select more sources to read making sure that they are relevant to your proposed
answer.
•
Order your notes from your sources according to the rough outline.
•
Review your notes and refine your outline to take account of your greater
understanding of the issues involved.
•
Write a first draft of an answer to help you clarify your response.
•
Read your draft and note areas that need changing to make your response more
powerful and more consistent.
•
Write a second draft this time with the reader of the essay in mind.
•
Edit for grammar and spelling.
•
Write a final draft in accordance with the guidelines in the task.
The following university websites have useful information about writing essays:
•
University of NSW, ASB, Educational Development Unit:
www.asb.unsw.edu.au/learningandteaching/Documents/writinganessay.pdf
•
Curtin University
http://learningsupport.curtin.edu.au/skills/writing_skills.cfm
Unlike a report, which is typically divided into sections, essays usually do not have
headings and subheadings. If you are unsure, check with your Class Facilitator and
note carefully any allowed variation to the standard essay structure. If you are asked
to use headings and subheadings, use them sparingly and do not number them. You
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should not rely on headings to make sense of your essay: ensure final sentences link
each subsection with the next.
Refer to Appendix 5 Beginning the Academic Essay for some helpful tips and
Appendix 6 for a useful checklist to consult when developing your essays.
Activity 10
The following online tutorial takes you through each stage of the essay
writing process and has links to some useful academic writing
resources.
Undertake this ‘essay writing’ tutorial, developed by the learning support
unit at Monash University:
www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/general/essay/index.xml
CRITICAL REVIEWS
A critical review is a type of essay in which you summarise and give your evaluation
of an article or a number of articles you have read. As in other types of essay, a
critical review has an introduction, a body and a conclusion.
The introduction should provide a context for the article, give the title of the article
and name of the author (and background of the author if appropriate), identify the
main purpose of the article and give an indication of your overall impression.
The body of your review should summarise the article(s) and give your evaluation. It
is particularly important that you make frequent references to the authors of the
articles in order to distinguish their ideas from your own ideas.
In the conclusion you should summarise your discussion and make a final judgement
on the value of the article.
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REPORTS AS ASSIGNMENTS
Reports are different from essays in that their primary purpose is to present
information rather than to make an argument. In contrast to an essay, it should be
possible in a report to read just some sections to find the information being sought.
The structure of the report should be clearly indicated by the use of headings and
subheadings. It should be possible for a reader to scan the table of contents and find
information easily. Each section and sub-section may be numbered.
The paragraphs in a report are usually shorter and more concise than those in an
essay, and may make use of bullet points. Also, information can be presented in the
form of tables, graphs and illustrations.
Report writing is an essential skill for professionals in their business life, and you may
already have a lot of experience in this area. However, you will find that there are
some differences in writing reports for your MBT assignments compared to what
you’re used to in the workplace.
You may be asked to apply specific theoretical frameworks, to include literature
reviews or to give greater evidence of research than is the case with reports you may
write at work.

In academic reports, you must reference all source material in the same way as for an
essay.
Writing a report
The following university websites have useful information on writing academic
reports:
•
University of Canberra
www.canberra.edu.au/studyskills/writing/reports
•
Curtin University
http://learningsupport.curtin.edu.au/skills/writing_skills.cfm
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What is the typical structure of a report?
Reports have a clear structure signalled by subheadings. The following table shows
the purpose and usual content of each section.
Section
Contents
Notes
Title page
Title of the report, and date
Student’s name and ID
Course name
Class Facilitator’s name
A title page is almost always required but the
details of what you write might vary.
Table of contents
Lists the main sections of the
report, second- and third-level
headings, and page numbers
If you have used styles for your headings in
your Word document you can automatically
insert a table of contents.
Executive summary
Short summary of the report.
Summarises the report's purpose,
findings, conclusions and
recommendations. Similar to an
abstract or synopsis and should
not be more than a page.
Again, this will not be necessary with short
reports. Check the assignment requirements.
If you need to write an executive summary, do
so after you have finished your report.
Make sure it is on a separate page.
Introduction
Usually includes:
 brief background information
 purpose
 scope
 outline
 definition of terms
Provides an overview of the report. Some of
what is in the introduction will also be in the
executive summary. They are read separately
for separate purposes. It is important to make
the purpose of the report very clear in the
introduction.
Body
This is the main part of your
report. The sections will vary
according to the type of report.
 background information
 theoretical framework
 review of literature
 methodology
 findings
 discussion of findings
You will not necessarily have all these
subsections in the body of your MBT reports.
The assignment question will often indicate
which sections you should have. Use a
subheading and/or numbers for each section.
In your MBT assignment reports, the
theoretical framework is very important.
Present this framework, then your research
findings, then a discussion of your findings in
light of the theoretical framework. Findings are
facts, but your discussions are opinions: this
difference should be made clear.
Conclusion
Provides a summary and
evaluation of the report’s findings
with the key recommendations;
may also identify the report’s
limitations.
You will always need to write a conclusion. As
with discussion of your findings, the language
you use in your conclusion will be
appropriately qualified.
Recommendations
The recommendations are a
summary in point or numbered
form of solutions or courses of
action that follow logically from
your interpretation of your
findings.
You will not always be required to list
recommendations in a separate section.
Recommendations are usually ‘should’
statements. They are specific, indicating who
should do what, where, when, how, and
(sometimes) at what cost.
Appendix
For charts, tables and other
information that is too detailed for
the body of your report.
If tables or charts are important you may need
to include them in the body of the report.
References
List all the books, articles, web
sites, interviews, etc, that you
have referred to in your report.
Many reports in the workplace do not have
references, but all reports you write for MBT
assignments require you to refer to the
literature. You are required to use the Harvard
referencing system.
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Not all the above sections may be required in every MBT assignment report you
write. The notes column indicates which sections are always included and those that
may be included, depending on the requirements of the assignment.
What are appropriate headings and subheadings?
Each section and subsection of your report should have a clear heading. This allows
the reader to find information quickly and clearly see how each part of the report
relates to other sections. The headings and subheadings you choose are very important
and should be clear and consistent in style. They will appear in the table of contents
and are the reader’s first impression of what you are planning to say.
The styles tool in word processing software allows you to choose different font styles
and sizes for heading levels. There is nothing more confusing for readers than a report
in which the headings and subheadings look exactly the same. Note the different
heading levels and their purpose in this guide.
In some reports that might include some research, you may have some variation to the
section headings noted in the table above, including the following.
•
Literature review
•
Methodology
•
Findings
•
Discussion
You will have to determine appropriate headings for sections and subsections.
Following are some pointers for the wording of headings and subheadings:
•
Headings should be as concise as possible.
•
Do not include the article ‘The’ or ‘A/an’ in headings.
•
Use nouns or noun phrases for your headings, e.g. ‘Competitive advantages of
Company X’; ‘Macroeconomic indicators in China’.
•
Make your subheadings as parallel or consistent as possible; e.g. ‘Decrease in
costs’ would be parallel with ‘Increase in passenger numbers’ but not with
‘Increasing passenger numbers’.
•
Do not use questions as headings (such as used in this section on reports).
Questions are appropriate for informal documents such as this, in which the
writer addresses the reader directly. You are expected to be more formal in
reports you write for your MBT assignments.
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What makes a good report?
A good report:
•
makes the purpose of the report very clear in the introduction
•
does not assume in the introduction a prior reading of the executive summary
•
presents information that is both sufficient and accurate
•
explains clearly the methodology or theoretical framework used to analyse the
information
•
uses the theoretical framework well in order to illuminate the findings
•
uses qualifying expressions in discussion of the findings
•
has headings and subheadings that are clear and parallel in format
•
uses a format that is appropriate to the report type
•
summarises all sections of the report in the executive summary
•
states recommended actions in clear and concise statements and justifies these
in relation to the findings of the report
•
uses language appropriate to the assumed relationship between the writer and
the reader.
Case analysis reports
One type of report that you may be required to write in MBT assignments is a case
analysis report. These are often set for MBT courses because they enable you to
appreciate the complexities of real-world situations and to see how the theories,
models and research you are studying can be used in practice.
What is your role as a case analyst?
In analysing a case, your task is to do the following.
1.
Identify the problem(s) in the situation presented in the scenario.
2.
Analyse the key issues within the context of the theory presented in your case.
3.
Develop and compare alternative solutions to the problems.
4.
Consider the advantages and disadvantages of various possible solutions.
5.
Select the best solution and make recommendations for action.
6.
Write up your case analysis in appropriate case analysis report format.
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How are ideas presented in a case analysis report?
There may be some differences in the expectations of what you should do in case
analyses from course to course, but in general, you should move from gaining an
overview of the case towards establishing the key problems, determining the causes,
developing possible solutions, evaluating the solutions and, finally, formulating
recommendations.
Appendix 7, Writing A Case Analysis, covers questions such as:
1.
What are the stages in preparing a case analysis?
2.
What are the steps in identifying the core problems?
3.
What are the steps in analysing the issue?
Activity 11
1. Choose three recent reports written in relation to your workplace or
industry.
2. Look at the structure of these reports.
3. Do they follow the same or a similar structure as outlined above?
4. Are they easy to read quickly to find out just the information you
need?
5. What do you notice about the type of subheadings used?
6. Do they use a numbering system for the sections?
7. Which of the reports you have looked at do you find most
satisfactory?
8. Why?
The UNSW Learning Centre has a useful interactive website dealing with case studies
in the engineering discipline: www.lc.unsw.edu.au/case_study/index.htm You may
find this information useful for some MBT case analyses.
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Reflective writing
At some point during your studies, you may be assigned a reflective writing task. It
could be in the form of a weekly journal or log, or an assignment with a reflective
component such as a journal, peer review, log book or reflective essay. Generally, a
reflective writing assignment requires you to consider the connection between three
different aspects of the topic you are studying.
1.
The topic.
2.
How it connects to other aspects or concepts in this course.
3.
How it makes sense (or not!) to you.
Reflective writing is:
•
a response – your experiences, opinions or events - not other authors
•
where thinking about your learning takes place – self-knowledge
•
your response to thoughts, feelings, other forms of awareness and new
information
•
a way to achieve clarity and better understanding about your course materials.
Reflective writing is not:
•
a conveyance of information, instruction or argument
•
pure description, though there may be descriptive elements
•
a straightforward decision or judgement e.g. about whether something is right or
wrong, good or bad
•
simple problem solving
•
a ‘normal’ university essay.
How do I write reflectively?
Reflective writing is always subjective. Reflection is an activity that includes both
description (what, when) as well as analysis (how, why, what if).
•
Language used in a reflective task may require an academic style, or may be
more informal. This enables you to use two different modes of writing:
descriptive (outlining what something is) and explanatory (explaining why or
how it is like that).
•
Use full sentences and complete paragraphs.
•
You can usually use personal pronouns like ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘we’.
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•
Keep colloquial language to a minimum.
What can be discussed in reflective writing?
•
Your perceptions of the course and about what you are learning
•
Experiences, comparisons, connections, ideas and observations you have had,
and how they relate to the course
•
Questions you have and conclusions you draw
•
What you found confusing, inspiring, difficult, interesting and why
•
Problem solving - how you reached a conclusion, found an answer or reached a
point of understanding
•
Alternative interpretations or different perspectives on what you have read or
done in your course
•
How new ideas challenge what you already know.
The UNSW Learning Centre offers a guide to writing reflectively:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/pdf/reflective.pdf
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13. ACKNOWLEDGING YOUR SOURCES
It is imperative in academic writing that you acknowledge the sources of your
information, ideas and evidence in order to avoid plagiarism. No matter who or what
the source is, it needs to be referenced – and referenced correctly.
Sources include books, journal or magazine articles, newspapers, government or
institutional reports, theses, websites, electronic journals or conference presentations,
personal interviews, course study guide, words of your Class Facilitator and/or
classmates.
There are a number of academic reasons for acknowledging sources, including:
•
showing respect for the intellectual property of others
•
showing evidence of wide reading
•
providing the means by which people reading what you have written can refer to
your sources to read further if desired
DIFFERENT TYPES OF REFERENCING
There are some different methods of acknowledging or referencing your sources, but
they can be divided into two main types:
•
footnote or endnote referencing method
•
in-text citation method – the author-date style
The type of referencing used most commonly in Australian universities is Harvard
referencing – this is the style you are required to use in your MBT work and is used in
MBT study guides. There are a number of variations of the author-date style, and a
number of small variations within the Harvard style, which you will notice when you
read academic papers.
In the Harvard method, you are required to reference your sources at the end of your
assignment or report – reference list – and at the point in your assignment when the
work is referred to or quoted from – in-text citation.
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Reference list
At the end of your essay or report, you must include a list of references – which is a
list of all the sources you have used throughout your assignment. The reference list
must be sorted alphabetically by the author’s surname.
A reference to a book has different components to a journal article, website, or other
sources. If there is no author noted for a particular work, e.g. a company report, you
should list the item alphabetically using the organisation’s name that produced the
report. In the case of a web-based reference with no author, you should use the name
of the owner or sponsor of the website. When there is no author, organisation name or
website sponsor available, you should use the title of the report or article for your
alphabetical listing. Examples are provided below.

MBT study guides use Harvard referencing and contain reference lists at the end of
Units.
In-text citation
When you include any information from another source in your written work, you
must signify this by including an in-text citation at the appropriate point in the
paragraph. The citation information must be in parentheses and include the author’s
name, the year of publication, and the page number(s) if including a direct quote, e.g.:
There are four possible sources of pay dissatisfaction that have been commonly
identified (Long 2002, pp. 72–80) …
If the author is part of the grammar of the sentence, then the parentheses are placed
around the year and page number(s) only.
There are good reasons for management to avoid employee dissatisfaction with base
pay. Long (2002, pp. 72–80) identifies four possible sources of pay dissatisfaction …
Direct quotes
Where you wish to include the cited author’s actual words, this is called a ‘direct
quote’ and must be signified as such by quotation marks at the beginning and end of
the actual words, and the page number(s) must be included. For example:
Research has found that a wide variety of factors “were identified as contributing to
job satisfaction or dissatisfaction” (Wright 1991, p. 56).
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Direct quotes longer than three lines
Where you are inserting a direct quote into your text that runs for more than three
lines, it needs to be introduced with a colon, and then separated into a new paragraph
as an extract – note that extracts do not include parentheses at the beginning or
end. An example follows.
Researchers have identified many possible sources of pay dissatisfaction:
Fourteen factors were identified as contributing to job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The
factors identified were: achievement, recognition, interpersonal relations, responsibility,
advancement, salary, job security, personal life, status, working conditions, policy and
administration, supervision, and the work itself. Herzberg believed these factors to be
universal in the workplace.
(Wright 1991, p. 56)
The corresponding entry in the reference list would be:
Wright M D, 1991, ‘Retaining teachers in technology education: Probable causes, possible
solutions’, Journal of Technology Education, vol. 3, no. 1, Fall, pp. 55–69,
HOW TO CITE DIFFERENT SOURCES
The following section provides a range of simple examples of how to cite a source intext, and how to correctly include it in a reference list. This is not a comprehensive list
as there are many variants and a plethora of resources now available via databases and
the internet. The provided examples cover the most common types of resources you
will routinely use. Please see the end of this section for details of other resources
providing details of how to cite more types of resources.
Referencing books
When referencing a book, provide the surname and initial(s) of the author/s, year of
publication, book title, publisher, and finally, place of publication (where available).
Author, year
Book title in italics
Long R, 2002, Strategic Compensation in Canada, 2nd edn, Thomson
Learning, Scarborough.
Publisher
Place of Publication
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Use a comma to separate each section of the reference. Note that if a publisher’s name
makes the place of publication obvious (e.g., Melbourne University Press) there is no
need to include the place in the reference. If no place of publication appears on the
title page or reverse, the expression ‘n.p.’ (no place) can be used.
Referencing a chapter from a book or an edited collection
When you reference a chapter from a book or an edited collection, the chapter or
article title should be in single quotes and in sentence case (first letter of first word is
in upper case only; first letter of second part of a two-part title is also in upper case).
The title of the book is italicised and in title case. In title case, the first letter of all
words is in upper case, except for articles and prepositions. However, upper case must
be used for articles where they are the first word of the book title, or the first word
after a colon that is included in a two-part title. Here are some examples:
Martin J and Siel C, 1983, ‘Organizational culture and counterculture: An
uneasy symbiosis’, Organizational Dynamics, vol. 12, no. 2, Autumn,
pp. 52–64.
Ogbonna E, 1992, ‘Organisational culture and human resource management:
Dilemmas and contradictions’, in Blyton P and Turnbull P eds, Reassessing
Human Resource Management, Sage, London.
White R, 1997, ‘Inventing new business in Australia’, in Whitlock G and
Carter D eds, 1998, Images of Australia: An Introductory Reader in Australian
Studies, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, ch. 8.
Referencing journal articles
As for book chapters, when referencing an article from a journal, the title must be in
single quotes and sentence case. Use title case for the journal title and italicise it, add
volume and issue number, and the page number/s of the article. Here’s an example:
Title of article in single quotes, sentence case
Crawford D and Henry E, 2000, ‘Budgeting and performance evaluation at the
Berkshire Toy Company’, Issues in Accounting Education, vol. 15, no. 2,
pp. 283–309.
Title of journal in italics, title case
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Note that for journals, the publisher and place of publication are never included.
Referencing MBT class discussions
Not all of your information sources or ideas will always come from published sources.
As the MBT draws on the workplace experience of its participants, there may be times
when you want to refer to what you have learned from other participants in your
online or face-to-face class.
If this is the case, you will first need to check if the person whose ideas and
information you wish to use is happy for you to do so. If they are, here is an example
of how you should acknowledge them:
Citizen A, 2008, MBT IT in Business, Class 204, Class discussion,
29 May.
Footnotes
If a situation arises when you are not using a specific idea of a classmate, but want to
acknowledge that you arrived at your own understanding as a result of questions
asked of you in your MBT class, or you want to acknowledge some other aspect of
your MBT class work, it is possible to use a footnote for this type of thing.
To insert a footnote, you should enter a superscript number at the end of the relevant
sentence. In the footnote area at the bottom of the page you can write something like
“Thanks to Sally Student whose questions motivated me to think about the importance
of this issue and come to this conclusion” (or whatever is appropriate).
Footnotes can be used for ancillary notes and for any other additional information you
might want to add that does not easily fit within the main text.
Referencing MBT course materials
Study guide
When you list the full reference for a course study guide, it is not necessary to cite the
author/s of the course. You should include the course name and course code, a
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description of the item, the name of the teaching institution, location and study period
(do not use italics or quotation marks).
The study guide should also be added in alphabetical order to your list of references.
Here’s an example of how to list an MBT study guide:
Business Economics, GBAT9122, 2008, Master of Business and Technology
Study Guide, The University of New South Wales, Semester 1 2008.
The in-text citation would be: (GBAT9122, 2008, Unit xx, p. xx)
Study guide readings
Readings in MBT study guides are provided with full reference details on the reading
cover. You may include these details in your reference list in the same way you would
if you had researched the information yourself.
Referencing a citation from a study guide
You may be reading a primary source (e.g., your study guide) in which the author
cites material from another publication (secondary source), and you may wish to use
some ideas, words or information from the secondary source in your writing. An
example of the in-text citation in this case is:
Fone and Young (2000 in GBAT 9122, 2008, Unit xx, p. xx) explain that …
In the reference list, you need details of the primary source only (the study guide).
Referencing websites or online sources
Web source with author:
Beckleheimer J, 1999, How Do You Cite URLs in a Bibliography?,
www.nrlssc.navy.mil/meta/bibliography.html
Web source with no author
Educating America for the 21st century: Developing a strategic plan for
educational leadership for Columbia University, 1993–2000, 1996,
www.ilt.columbia.edu/CONF/EdPlan.html
In-text citation for a website:
The American Psychological Association’s website (2004), …
For the reference list:
American Psychological Association, 2004, www.apa.org/
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
To cite a document from a website, follow the author-date format.
Other types of sources to reference
There are many other types of publications that you may need to reference in your
MBT work, including:
•
books with one, two, three or more authors
•
books with no authors
•
newspapers and magazines
•
minor citation from a secondary source
•
significant citation from a secondary source
•
unpublished material
•
unpublished conference, meeting, seminar papers, or unpublished reports
•
Australian Bureau of Statistics Bulletin
•
emails and discussion lists
•
publications written by an organisation, including brochures and pamphlets
•
all manner of online resources.
Further details on referencing styles
A comprehensive Harvard referencing guide is available from the EDU at:
wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/fce/EDU/harvard_ref_guide.pdf
The UNSW Learning Centre also offers a guide to Harvard referencing which contains
links to further resources:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/ref.html
You may notice a slight variation in the styles of Harvard referencing (both in-text
and reference lists) between your course study guide, textbooks and other research
material you read. Don’t worry too much about this, as slight variations to punctuation
etc. are acceptable. The important thing for you to focus on is to be consistent in the
way you reference your sources for your work.
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Activity 12
Choose one of your MBT courses and open to any page of the study
guide. Peruse the text until you find an in-text citation as shown above.
Consider the following questions:
60
1.
Is the reference at the end of the sentence (as in the first example
above) or embedded in the sentence (as in the second example
above)?
2.
In the example you find, what is the idea that the author of the
course materials is acknowledging?
3.
Go to the end of the Unit in which you found the in-text citation and
you will find the list of references used in that. Locate the reference
for the in-text citation that you found in the Unit.
4.
What type of publication is the reference you located? A book, a
journal article, a book chapter, an internet site, etc?
MBT Learning Guide
Avoiding plagiarism
If you present the work of others as your own – that is, if you fail to make it clear that
you are either directly quoting or paraphrasing from another source – then you are
plagiarising.
When you provide in-text citations for information or an idea that you take from
another source, you must indicate whether you are directly quoting someone else’s
words, or paraphrasing the material – see direct quotes section above. Consider the
following examples to see how to avoid this serious error.
The original source (Dabscheck 1996, p. 12) is 1:
Interactions take place in what will be described as orbits of interaction. A myriad of
different orbits can be distinguished; their membership, composition and type is only
limited by the imagination and ingenuity of interactors to find each other.
A plagiarised use of this material might look like this:
In this essay I will argue that interactions take place in what will be described as
orbits of interaction. A myriad of different orbits can be distinguished; their
membership, composition and type is only limited by the imagination and ingenuity of
interactors to find each other. (Dabscheck 1996, p.12)
You will see that the second paragraph contains a direct quote from the source, but no
quotation marks have been used. Adding the in-text citation does not avoid plagiarism
in this instance – the absence of quotation marks suggests to the reader that these are
the student’s own words, but in fact they are not.
1
This section has been adapted from the Essay and Assignment Guide compiled by the UNSW School of Organisation
and Management: wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/orgmanagement/EssayGuide.pdf
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Here’s another example that would be regarded as plagiarism:
Industrial relations can be explained using the model of an orbit made up of a myriad
or interactors.
This is plagiarism because it doesn’t acknowledge that Dabscheck developed orbit
theory.
The following example is also unacceptable.
Interactions happen in orbits of interaction. A lot of different orbits can be identified;
their membership, composition and type is only restrained by the dream and artifice
of interactors to come across one another (Dabscheck 1996, p.12).
Changing the original words around, or using a thesaurus to change the appearance of
a sentence, is still not your own work; and citing the source does not get you off the
hook – you must acknowledge other people’s thoughts and ideas regardless of how
you word them.
Now, here’s an acceptable way to discuss Dabscheck’s material.
Dabscheck (1996, p.12) has developed a model of industrial relations where he
describes various ‘interactions’ occurring within ‘orbits of interaction’. In this model, he
argues that an infinite number of ‘orbits’ exist within the system and can be identified
by the nature of the variety of ‘interactors’ that constitute each ‘orbit’.
More details about plagiarism are available from UNSW Learning Centre:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/plagiarism/index.html
Checking for plagiarism ahead of submitting assignments
Assignment submission in the LMS for the majority of written assignments is
performed via Turnitin, the similarity detection software used by UNSW students and
teaching staff to prevent plagiarism by ensuring referencing is correct and that work
has not been inadvertently copied from elsewhere.
You are able to submit a draft version of your assignment prior to the due date. This
enables you to view the Turnitin similarity report on your work and decide whether it
complies with the guidelines regarding referencing and plagiarism, before you submit
your final version for marking. Please see your course assessment documents for
further details of requirements and the appropriate LMS Participant Manual for
detailed steps.
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Activity 13
Here is some information about a book, an article and a website that you might
have referred to for an assignment. Make a reference list for these three
sources. Remember to put them in alphabetical order.
1.
You quoted from a textbook called Business and the Law, the second
edition that was published during 2002. The authors are A. Terry and D.
Giugni and the Sydney-based publisher is Harcourt Brace.
2.
On 5 March 2002 you accessed the website of the Australian Bureau of
Statistics and obtained some statistics from their 2001 report number
5676.0 entitled “Business Indicators: Australia”.
3.
You read an interesting article called ‘An approach to organising a
management accounting curriculum’ on pages 22–25 of an American
industry journal Issues in Accounting Education published in 2000. The
volume number was 15, and it was issue no. 2 for that year. The author
was Ms PC Brewer.
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
(Answers in the ‘Answers to activities’ section)
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14. DRAFTING AND EDITING YOUR ASSIGNMENTS
Once you have analysed the assignment question, carried out all the required research
and identified the appropriate format required, you are ready to begin writing. This is
a multi-step process.
You will need to write at least one draft – preferably more than one – and when you
have what you think is your final version, you will need to edit and proofread it before
it is ready to submit. Obviously, this cannot all be done in one day!
GETTING HELP WITH ASSIGNMENT WRITING
If you follow this guide and still have issues or concerns with your assignment then be
aware that the Australian School of Business Educational Development Unit (EDU)
offers online resources regarding a wide range of academic writing conventions such
as structure, argument, referencing, cohesion and even presentation structure. And yes
they can help with a specific assignment that you are working on. Contact the EDU
via email edu@unsw.edu.au or call (02) 9385 5584, and please remember to mention
that you are an MBT student.
Please see the web page:
www.asb.unsw.edu.au/learningandteaching/aboutlearningandteaching/Pages/contactu
s.aspx
FIRST DRAFT
Before you begin writing, you will need to develop an outline of how you intend to
structure your assignment – and what information and arguments you will include in
which sections.
As you write, your thinking about the issues is likely to become clearer, and you may
want to make substantial changes to your first draft. Perhaps you will discover that
you need to do more research on certain points, or that some of what you wanted to
include is actually irrelevant. You may decide that you need to rearrange the sequence
of some sections so that the flow of your writing is more logical.
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After you have written your first draft, you will need to carefully check that you
have actually answered the assignment question – not addressed some other aspect
of the topic that was of more interest to you.
The following checklist will help you confirm that you have answered the question at
the appropriate level (refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives p. 31)
Is your written work at the appropriate cognitive level? 2
1.
Did you summarise the concepts we have covered in class or in the text? If yes,
what may this indicate about the cognitive level of your work? (Knowledge)
2.
Did you demonstrate that you understood what this material was about by
comparing it or contrasting it with other material, current events, etc?
(Comprehension)
3.
Did you connect the ideas from this material to other readings, class discussions,
and your work or other experiences? (Application)
4.
Did you examine the reading or case so that you identified the author’s theories,
assumptions, fallacies, or ways of organising his or her ideas? (Analysis)
5.
Did you explore the material and use this exploration to build a new
understanding of the material or to formulate new ideas or solutions?
(Synthesis)
6.
Did your work clearly demonstrate a critique using course concepts, data, and
theories rather than personal opinion as a criterion for evaluation? (Evaluation)
STRUCTURAL EDITING
Once you are satisfied that you have answered the question to the best of your ability,
you will then need to edit for structure. This involves:
•
checking that you have a clear introduction to the whole assignment
•
if the assignment is in essay format, checking the topic sentences of paragraphs;
if a report, check that headings and subheadings will enable the reader to gain a
clear understanding of the development of the argument/information
•
ensuring that the connections between each section are readily apparent
EDITING FOR EXPRESSION
Next, you will need to edit your writing for expression. One way to do this is to read
your assignment out loud or, better still, get someone else to read it to you. If your
writing is difficult for someone to read aloud, it may be that there are problems with
2
Athanassiou N, McNett J and Harvey C, 2003, 'Critical thinking in the management classroom:
Bloom’s taxonomy as a learning tool', Journal of Management Education, vol. 27, no. 5, p. 553.
MBT Learning Guide
65
sentence structure: they may be incomplete or too long. When in doubt, it is always
advisable to shorten your sentences. Check, too, for common grammatical mistakes
such as lack of subject verb-agreement or inconsistency in the use of verb tenses.
PROOFREADING
Finally, you should proofread your writing for spelling and typographical mistakes. If
possible, ask someone else to do this for you, as you will have become so familiar
with your material that your mind may automatically ‘fill in’ missing words or you
will not see spelling mistakes.
In the absence of another person to proofread your work, you should try and complete
your assignment a day or two before the due date, put it to one side and not look at it
again for at least 24 hours. You will be surprised how differently you read your own
work after having a short break and coming back to it ‘fresh’.

Try covering all but the line you are reading and read each line very slowly, word by
word.
COMPUTER EDITING TOOLS
Most of you will be writing your assignments using a program such as Microsoft
Word. It is useful to have both the spelling and the grammar check selected.
Make sure you choose English (Australia) or English (UK) as the default language,
not English (US). If you are using a networked computer this may not be possible, in
which case you will need to ignore some of the spelling corrections suggested as some
common words are spelt differently in the United States.
Note that no editing tools are completely reliable – but do make use of them and
consider things they pick up. Remember too, that you can misspell a word but the
spellchecker will not pick this up as the incorrect word does exist, although the
meaning is other than the one you intended.
The MS Word grammar check is even less reliable than the spellchecker. It accepts
sentences that are incorrect and sometimes tells you that you have made a mistake
when you haven’t. Nevertheless, it may prove helpful when reviewing what you’ve
written.
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MBT Learning Guide
Activity 14
Here is a typical student assignment reviewing a newspaper article.
There are 10 mistakes. Some are grammar mistakes, some are spelling mistakes
and some are ‘typos’ (typographical errors). Can you spot them?
This article is about how practitioners of knowledge management have been
trying to develop ways of capturing knowledge and, in particular, tacit knowledge.
However, as Long notes, that practitioners experience great difficulties of
capturing the wisdom of knowledge workers in data form. The article is interesting
because it address the challenges faced by a company in capturing tacit
knowledge. I think the transition to knowledge management is necessary and
therefore practitioners and management need to overcome the resistance to
change.
The tacit knowledge is the know-how that individuals acquire through years of
experience. Most organisations still treat this knowledge as a product, something
that can be acquired from a book. Long claims, however, that the best way to
acquire tacit knowledge is through sharing. It is acquire through the process of
socialisation – human interaction.
However, from my experience I can see that their is a lack of ‘real’ support for the
idea of ‘sharing tacit knowledge’, as not all professionals want to share this
knowledge with colleagues. Long argues that this is because knowledge
represents a kind of power that people have. Therefore, knowledge is an
important element that makes professionals distinguishable from each other. I
agree that this is the main reason for resistance to change.
In my opinion, encouraging more employees to to involve themselves in the
design and implementation processes of knowledge management is vital in the
promotion of it’s acceptance and effectiveness. Indeed, I feel that there is already
a momentum towards change, so more effort and communication is required by
practitioner of change management to help management and professionals
overcome resistance to change. I hope that it does not require a long time to see
the results of this effort and that the sharing of tacit knowledge will become
commonplace.
(Answers in the ‘Answers to activities’ section)
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15. PREPARING FOR AND SITTING EXAMS
Assessment for all MBT courses includes a final examination. The percentage that an
exam contributes to your overall course result varies among courses, but ranges from
25% to 50%. Whatever the actual percentage, the amount is substantial, so it is
worthwhile spending sufficient time to prepare well.
TYPES OF EXAMS
If you are a distance student, you may either sit the exam on campus at Kensington or
you must arrange for a suitable examination supervisor, normally at your workplace.
(Detailed information regarding the distance examination procedure is contained in
the MBT Participation Information Guide.)
Exams may be either supervised or unsupervised – most MBT exams are
supervised. Supervised exams can be either open or closed book and are two to three
hours in length. Most MBT exams are open book and run for two hours.
For open book exams, you may take into the examination room your study guide,
prescribed textbook (if any), reference books, personal notes, calculator (if applicable)
and other relevant material, unless specifically noted otherwise. No laptop computers
or other handheld electronic devices are permitted.
If an exam is closed book, you may take only pens, pencils and erasers into the
examination room (if a calculator is allowed, this will be specified in the Assessment
Details section of the study guide).
In the case of an unsupervised exam (sometimes referred to as a ‘take-home exam’),
you will receive the examination paper via email from the MBT office on a date
specified in the Assessment Details section of the study guide. The completed exam
will need to be emailed back approximately one week later. Note that answers to
unsupervised exam questions are treated like an assignment, with full referencing
required.
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REVIEWING COURSE CONTENT FOR EXAMS
Your success in any exam will largely depend on how effectively you have reviewed
your course material. It will certainly help if you have been systematically reviewing
each Unit and taking notes during each week of the course. In the weeks leading up to
the exam, you will benefit by planning your revision in a more detailed way. It’s a
good idea to note on your weekly planner the specific area of the course that you are
going to review, the time you allocate for each particular day, and keep a detailed
checklist of what you’ve covered and what you still have left to do.
Suggested steps for preparing for examinations
•
Make revision notes, relating details to the key concepts in the course.
•
Scrutinise the sample exam paper included in the study guide.
•
Practise answering the questions in the sample exam and time yourself
while completing them.
•
Make sure your practice answers are handwritten – you will need to be
able to write for about two hours non-stop in your examination.
•
If your course is based on problem solving, practise as many variations
of the basic problems as possible.
•
Practise recall of information by setting yourself problems to solve or
questions to answer.
•
Write plans for answers to possible essay questions.
•
Verbally explain a particular topic to someone.
•
Devise aids to help you remember, such as mnemonics and visual aids
(e.g. flow charts, diagrams, graphs)
•
Record important facts, key terms, or formulae on index cards – and
refer to them often.
PRACTISING HANDWRITING
These days we all use computers, and you will certainly be writing your MBT
assignments using a word processor. In exams, however, you will be required to write
your answers by hand. As your handwriting is probably no longer as fluent or legible
as when you were at school, prepare for this physical activity as you would for any
other physical exercise. Give your hand a ‘work-out’ – practise writing non-stop for a
couple of hours in the days leading up to the exam. Aim for speed along with style (or
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69
at least neatness). It would be a pity to do less well in an exam than you are capable of
because your hand becomes tired.
GETTING ORGANISED FOR OPEN BOOK EXAMS
Some people mistakenly believe that open book exams must be easier than closed
book exams. While you may not have to commit information to memory, as for a
closed book exam, you will need to be able to quickly locate relevant information in
your study guide or textbook, and use that information in an appropriate way.
A common mistake made by many students in open book exams is to take too many
materials into the exam room. The important thing to remember is not to go for
quantity of materials but for quality in organisation.
Points to help you in preparation for open book exams
•
Use post-it notes to mark important sections of your study guide or
textbook.
•
Write summaries on post-it notes or in margins.
•
Use different colour markers to indicate different types of information.
•
Prepare one page with key facts and definitions or formulae.
•
Use index cards to list key topics and relevant page numbers in each book
you will be taking into the exam room.

Three key words to guide your use of information in open book exams:
FIND

INTERPRET

APPLY
ANTICIPATING THE QUESTIONS
Keep in mind that the purpose of an exam is to assess your grasp of concepts and how
these concepts can be applied to the workplace. Take special note of topics that have
been emphasised and/or repeated, as these are more likely to be examined, and any
questions that your Class Facilitator has been posing in your online discussions or in
the classroom – these are questions that you should be prepared to answer in an exam.
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JUST BEFORE THE EXAM
The night before an exam, the temptation is to use every minute to study, but you will
be much better off if you get a good night’s sleep.

Lack of sleep can result in fuzzy thinking!
Pre-exam tips
•
Get a good night’s sleep so that you are alert on the day.
•
Make sure you have all exam materials well organised the night before
(including several pens in case one runs out of ink).
•
Take a watch or small clock with you to monitor the time allocated to each
answer.
•
Prepare to arrive at the exam room in plenty of time.
•
Practise any relaxation techniques you know. Slow, deep breathing is always
helpful.
•
Eat some easily digestible food so that you don’t get hungry during the
exam.
•
Don’t engage in ‘panic talk’ with other participants before the exam.
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DURING THE EXAM
It’s important to manage your time well during an exam. Keep the following in mind:
•
Skim read the entire exam paper to get an overall sense of what is required (all
exams have an allocated reading time of 10 minutes, during which no writing
is permitted).
•
Note if there are any choices: don’t get caught attempting to answer all
questions where you have been asked to choose just one or more from a set of
questions.
•
Note the marks allocated to questions and roughly estimate the time you’ll
spend on each question according to the marks it is worth.
•
Make sure you read each question carefully.
•
Identify the questions that will be easier for you to answer. Do these first.
•
For exam questions requiring essay-type answers:




pay careful attention to the instruction words that tell you what aspect of
the topic you should be considering and for what purpose you should be
considering it – be careful not to just write all that you may know
take some time to plan the basic structure before you start writing
begin with a short, sharp introduction that directly answers the question:
you won’t have time for the longer introductions that you write for
assignments
if you are given a choice of topics, make sure you write the number of
the question you have chosen at the top of your answer
•
Keep an eye on the time. Don’t write too much for any one question. It’s better
to write something for all the questions you need to answer than to answer one
brilliantly and not attempt the others.
•
Don’t leave the exam room early. If you have finished before the time is up,
use the time to review your answers.
The MBT usually offers an examination workshop on campus at Kensington at least
once a year. Exam workshops will be advertised on the MBT Student website and via
an email to all enrolled students. The resources from a previous workshop are
available at: www.student.mbt.unsw.edu.au/ExamWorkshopResource.html
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16. ACCESSING FURTHER INFORMATION ON STUDY SKILLS
This guide has been developed to help guide you along the MBT study path. During
your time in the program, Course Coordinators and Class Facilitators may also
provide you with more specific advice relevant to a particular course in which you are
enrolled. Further advice can also be obtained from the following UNSW sources.
EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT UNIT
The Education Development Unit (EDU) provides a number of services for students
in the Australian School of Business at UNSW, including:
•
printed and web-based resources
•
printed study skills materials
•
academic skills workshops
•
math/stats workshops for postgraduates
•
group and individual consultations for academic issues
You can find further details at:
www.asb.unsw.edu.au/Learningandteaching/Pages/default.aspx

The EDU provides one-on-one consultations for MBT students.
EDU contact details for MBT students
Telephone:
+61 2 9385 5584
Email general inquiries:
edu@unsw.edu.au
To book individual consultations:
mbtconsultations@unsw.edu.au
Location:
Ground Floor West Lobby
Australian School of Business
University of NSW Kensington
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UNSW LEARNING CENTRE
The UNSW Learning Centre offers learning and communication assistance to all
enrolled students. Assistance for academic work is provided through:
•
workshops
•
individual consultations
•
student self-access materials
On the Learning Centre website you will find a large range of study skills resources,
and information about programs and services: www.lc.unsw.edu.au
UNSW Learning Centre contact details
Telephone:
+61 2 9385 2060
Email:
learningcentre@unsw.edu.au
In person:
Lower Ground Floor,
North Wing
Chancellery Building
(Map reference C22)
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17. ANSWERS TO ACTIVITIES
Answers to Activity 8
Extract 1
This extract is from a newspaper report. The language is typically that of a newspaper
report. The use of the present perfect tense in the verb ‘has delivered’ suggests that
the writer expects the reader to be reading the report in the same time period as the
writer wrote the report. This is a normal expectation in newspaper writing.
In academic writing we expect the writing to have currency over a longer period of
time. This means it is necessary to use time phrases to indicate the period to which we
are referring, e.g., ‘In 2002’. The use of the term ‘spectacular rewards’ has some
emotional overtones that should be avoided in academic writing. Also, the expression
‘lined up’ is a metaphorical expression. The investors didn’t literally ‘line up’. In
academic writing metaphorical language is used sparingly.
Extract 2
This extract is from the Course Notes for an MBT course. The Course Coordinator
writes as if they are in the classroom addressing you, the students. They use the
pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you’ to give you the sense that you are all there together in a
classroom. A teacher or textbook writer typically uses ‘we’ and ‘you’ when
explaining academic topics to students. This is a friendly way of addressing students
and serves to make the students feel included in a learning enterprise together with the
teacher. It is not, however, appropriate for a student to write ‘we’ or ‘you’ when
writing an assignment for a teacher.
Extract 3
This extract is from an article in an issue of Harvard Business Review. Although
articles in the Harvard Business Review are sometimes written in academic style, this
one is not. It is written in a style people might use when they want to sound as if they
are speaking to an audience. It is sometimes described as a rhetorical style – the style
public speakers might use when they are trying to persuade an audience to think the
same way as they do. This is evident from the use of ’Let’s admit it … ’. The third
sentence has five phrases all beginning with the same kind of word. This builds up a
kind of rhythm that captures an audience’s attention when spoken.
Extract 4
This extract is also from an article in a Harvard Business Review, but the style here is
closer to the academic style in which you will be expected to write. The language is
impersonal – there is no use of ‘we’ or ‘you’. Also, the language used has no
emotional overtones. Notice the subject of the last sentence ‘Carrying out prototype or
pilot production cycles well’. Using long noun phrases as subjects like this is typical
of academic writing. This allows the writer to condense a lot of information into a few
words. It indicates the writer has done a lot of thinking before writing.
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Answers to Activity 9
Format required: REPORT
Topic
Issues arising from an e-business
application
New e-business opportunities
Limiting
Words
Task Words
Your
organisation
Compare and contrast the
functionality
Provide a detailed analysis on value
add
Two e-business
opportunities
not currently
implemented
Examine two new e-business
opportunities
Justify the opportunities
Take account of costs and benefits
Make use of relevant theory
Answers to Activity 14
1.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001, 5676.0 Business Indicators: Australia,
ABS, Canberra,
www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/ausstatshome?OpenView,
2.
Brewer P C, 2000, ‘An approach to organizing a management accounting
curriculum’, Issues in Accounting Education, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 22–25.
3.
Terry A and Giugni D, 2002, Business and the Law, 2nd edn, Harcourt Brace,
Sydney.
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Answers to Activity 14
The grammar, spelling and typographical mistakes are shown below, bolded and
underlined. An explanation of each mistake is then provided (see overleaf).
If you had difficulty finding the mistakes, you may like to follow the recommended
links provided at the end of this section to access further advice on grammar.
This article is about how practitioners of knowledge management have been trying
to develop ways of capturing knowledge and, in particular, tacit knowledge.
However, as Long notes, that (1) practitioners experience great difficulties of (2)
capturing the wisdom of knowledge workers in data form. The article is interesting
because it address (3) the challenges faced by a company in capturing tacit
knowledge. I think the transition to knowledge management is necessary and
therefore practitioners and management need to overcome the resistance to
change.
The (4) tacit knowledge is the know-how that individuals acquire through years of
experience. Most organisations still treat this knowledge as a product, something
that can be acquired from a book. Long claims, however, that the best way to
acquire tacit knowledge is through sharing. It is acquire (5) through the process of
socialisation – human interaction.
However, from my experience I can see that their (6) is a lack of ‘real’ support for
the idea of ‘sharing tacit knowledge’, as not all professionals want to share this
knowledge with colleagues. Long argues that this is because knowledge
represents a kind of power that people have. Therefore (7), knowledge is an
important element that makes professionals distinguishable from each other. I
agree that this is the main reason for resistance to change.
In my opinion, encouraging more employees to to (8) involve themselves in the
design and implementation processes of knowledge management is vital in the
promotion of it’s (9) acceptance and effectiveness. Indeed, I feel that there is
already a momentum towards change, so more effort and communication is
required by practitioner (10) of change management to help management and
professionals overcome resistance to change. I hope that it will not require a long
time to see the results of this effort and that the sharing of tacit knowledge will
become commonplace.
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Explanations
1.
‘That’ should be omitted. The original sentence had two subordinate clauses and
no principle clause.
2.
The correct preposition to use here is ‘in’. If English is a second language for
you, correct use of prepositions may be one of the last areas of English grammar
you master. A good Advanced Learners’ Dictionary could help.
3.
This should be ‘it addresses’. This is what is known as subject-verb agreement.
4.
‘The’ should be deleted. In this sentence ‘tacit knowledge’ as a general concept
is being defined. The use of ‘the’ makes it specific and is, therefore, incorrect.
5.
This should be ‘it is acquired’. If you are a native speaker of English a mistake
like this would be a typographical error. If you are a non-native speaker of
English it’s possible you don’t realise that the auxiliary verb ‘is’ must always be
followed by a verb participle, not the finite verb.
6.
The spelling should be ‘there’. This is a common mistake, even for native
speakers of English who are writing according to sound and not to meaning. A
good computer spell check will probably correct this mistake for you.
7.
The use of ‘therefore’ is unnecessary, as this sentence is an elaboration of the
preceding sentence. It is a common mistake with students inexperienced in
academic writing to overuse words such as ‘therefore’, ‘however’, ‘furthermore’
etc. These words have their uses, but should be used sparingly.
8.
Omit the second ‘to’. This is a typographical error. A good spell check should
pick this up.
9.
This should be ‘its’. When we write ‘it’s’ we are writing a contraction of ‘it is’.
The word ‘its’ indicates possession. We are talking about something that
belongs to ‘it’. The incorrect use of apostrophes is quite common. In fact native
speakers of English make this mistake more often than non-native speakers of
English.
10.
This should be ‘practitioners’. If you are a native speaker of English a mistake
like this would probably be a typographical error. Some non-native speakers of
English write the singular form or a noun when the plural is required because
the distinction does not exist in the same way in their native language.
Further information on grammar
•
If you had difficulty with this activity you may like to download the handout on
Editing your Writing for Grammar Mistakes from the EDU website:
http://www.asb.unsw.edu.au/learningandteaching/Documents/Editingyourwritin
gforgrammarmistakes.pdf
•
You can access a guide to punctuation on the UNSW Learning Centre website:
www.lc.unsw.edu.au/olib.html
•
A good site that provides information on proofreading your own writing is:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/561/01/
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APPENDIX 1: WEEKLY PLANNER
W/c
/
/
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
5–6 am
6–7 am
7–8 am
8–9 am
9–10 am
10–11 am
11–12 noon
12–1 pm
1–2 pm
2–3 pm
3–4 pm
4–5 pm
5–6 pm
6–7 pm
7–8 pm
8–9 pm
9–10 pm
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APPENDIX 2: SEMESTER PLANNER
Week Beginning
Week
Unit
Orientation
Overview
Week 1
Unit 1
Week 2
Unit 2
Week 3
Unit 3
Week 4
Unit 4
Week 5
Unit 5
Week 6
Unit 6
Week 7
Unit 7
Week 8
Unit 8
Week 9
Unit 9
Week 10
Unit 10
Week 11
Unit 11
Week 12
Unit 12
Assignments Due
Commitments
Exam Week
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APPENDIX 3: NOTE-TAKING STRATEGIES
On the following pages is a typical reading from an MBT course: it is a section from a
text on strategy. We then provide examples of ways of note-taking for this particular
reading, using:
•
linear notes
•
mind maps
•
notes with commentary
Remember to always include full reference details at beginning of any notetaking strategy: you need to keep track of where you found the information for future
inclusion in submitted work.
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Fusfeld Alan R, ‘How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning’, in Burgelman R
A, Maidique M A and Wheelright S C, 2001, Strategic Management of Technology
and Innovation, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, Reading 11–1, pp. 62–66.
Commonwealth of Australia Copyright Regulations 1969
WARNING
This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by and on behalf of the University of New
South Wales pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act).
The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under this Act. Any further reproduction or
communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act.
Do not remove this notice.
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Note-taking Example 1 – making linear notes
READING: Fusfeld Alan R 2001,’ How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning’, in
Burgelman R A, Maidique M A and Wheelright S C, Strategic Management of Technology and
Innovation, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, Reading 11–1, pp. 62–66.
Technol. can play import. role in corp. success e.g. Intel, 3M, Polaroid etc.
BUT most execs. limited management exper. w. technol. (lack intuitive feel for
strategically directing & positioning R&D compared w. marketing, sales etc.)
Causes:
• usually not trained in technol. fields
• knowledge is new
• lack of adequate frameworks
• technol. change proceeds slowly but 90% US R&D activities designed to be
implemented in 3 yrs.
• most R&D towards existing needs
• most US corps organised round production process.
• Technol. innovation seen as risky
Only 3 areas where techol. change routinely considered in strategic corp. planning
• acquisitions
• licensing area
• venture activities
Technol issues can affect:
• management
• materials procurement
• manufacturing
• marketing
• financial results
• future growth through new products
Analysis of corp strategy needs to ask questions re current ways of addressing technol
issues in a corp.
Adequate unit of analysis vital. Must be on level of generic technologies.
(Carburettor is application of a technology. Vaporising a liquid and mixing w. gas is a
generic technology.)
Basic Parameters for Explicit Analysis
• Functional performance
• Acquisition cost
• Ease-of-use characteristics
• Operation Cost
• Reliability
• Serviceability
• Compatibility
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‘Elasticities’ (term borrowed from Economics – ‘price elasticity’
Can analyse demand for product when, for example, its
• performance improved
• ease of use increased
• service requirements lowered
2 types of elasticity important for planning:
• absolute (responsiveness of total market demand to improvements)
• relative (shifts in market share as competitors introduce new better
performing products)
NB Significant diffs. among customers’ preference sets and technol. market
elasticities eg, GPs & hospitals have diff requirements from machines.
Next step to apply analyses to compare a company’s technology with needs of market
segments to produce competitive technological profile.
This can be represented graphically in charts.
Need to consider generic technol strengths of enterprise.
Depending on analysis may need to
• add new generic technol through a merger
• offer technology through merger to acquire other strengths
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Note-taking Example 2 – mind maps
READING: Fusfeld Alan R, 2001,’ How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning’, in
Burgelman R A, Maidique M A and Wheelright S C, Strategic Management of Technology and
Innovation, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, Reading 11–1, pp. 62–66.
Profile by
market
segments
compet
technol prof.
‘Elasticity’
(absol. & rel.)
import. in
technol.
planning
7 basic
parameters
for explicit
analysis*
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Profile Co.
technols
eval of tech
rel. mark
needs etc
Technology
in
Corporate
Planning
Analysis must
be on level of
generic
technologies
Some egs of
successes
• Intel
• 3M
• Polaroid
Gen. bus.
management
no feel for
R&D in
technol.
Analysis of
corp strat
must include
?s re technol.
91
READING: Fusfeld Alan R 2001,’ How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning’, in
Burgelman R A, Maidique M A and Wheelright S C, Strategic Management of Technology and
Innovation, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, Reading 11–1, pp. 62–66.
Functional
performance
e.g. fridge to
remove heat
Compatibility
how fits with
other devices
in larger
system
Serviceability
how long it
takes and how
expensive
Acquisition
cost
e.g. with fridge
cost per cubic
foot
Seven
dimensions
of product
acceptability
Reliability
how often
needs service,
expected
useful lifetime
Ease-of-use
characteristics
e.g. magnetic
door latches
Operation
cost
e.g. no. of
kilowatt-hrs
used per unit
of service
The two mind maps above have been produced using the diagram option in Microsoft
Word. However, if you draw mind maps freehand you will be able to establish more
complex relationships between the different concepts in the texts you are reading.
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There are a lot of software applications available for mindmapping both on tablet
computers as well as desktops. For a brief overview of mind maps and studying see:
www.squidoo.com/Improve-Your-Study-Skills-with-Tony-Buzan-s-Mind-MappingTips-in-Note-Taking
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Note-taking Example 3 – Notes with commentary
READING: Fusfeld Alan R, 2001,’ How to Put Technology into Corporate Planning’, in
Burgelman R A, Maidique M A and Wheelright S C, Strategic Management of Technology and
Innovation, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, Reading 11–1, pp. 62–66.
Content
Page #
Technol. can play import. role in corp. success eg,
Intel, 3M, Polaroid etc.
BUT most execs. limited management exper. w.
technol. (lack intuitive feel for strategically directing &
positioning R&D compared w. marketing, sales etc.)
Causes:
• Usually not trained in technol. fields
• Knowledge is new
• Lack of adequate frameworks
• Technol. change proceeds slowly but 90%
US R&D activities designed to be
implemented in 3 yrs.
• most R&D towards existing needs
• most US corps organised round production
process. Technol. innovation seen as risky
Only 3 areas where techol. change routinely
considered in strategic corp. planning
• acquisitions
• licensing area
• venture activities
62–63
Notes
Fusfeld argues most
executives have limited
management experience
with technology, but this
is not the case in the
engineering company I
work for. There are
nevertheless problems –
3rd, 6th of F’s point most
relevant in my company.
64
Technol issues can affect
• management
• materials procurement
• manufacturing
• marketing
• financial results
• future growth through new products
Analysis of corp strategy needs to ask questions re
current ways of addressing technol issues in a corp.
Adequate unit of analysis vital. Must be on level of
generic technologies.
64–65
(Carburettor is application of a technology.
Vaporising a liquid and mixing w. gas is a generic
technology.)
Basic Parameters for Explicit Analysis
• Functional performance
• Acquisition cost
• Ease-of-use characteristics
• Operation Cost
• Reliability
• Serviceability
• Compatibility
94
65
F provides a useful set of
questions – seems to
include all.
Will compare and
contrast this with
another set of
parameters I read in a
journal article last week –
will check author later.
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Content
‘Elasticities’
(term borrowed from Economics – ‘price elasticity’
Page #
65
Can analyse demand for product when, eg, its
• performance improved
• ease of use increased
• service requirements lowered
2 types of elasticity important for planning
• absolute (responsiveness of total market
demand to improvements)
• relative (shifts in market share as competitors
introduce new better performing products)
65
Notes
Will try to come up with
some of my own egs of
this – digital camera?
Will work on this for my
organisation.
NB: Significant diffs. among customers’ preference
sets and technol. market elasticities eg, GPs &
hospitals have diff requirements from machines.
Next step to apply analyses to compare a company’s
technology with needs of market segments to
produce competitive technological profile.
66
This can be represented graphically in charts.
Need to consider generic technol strengths of
enterprise.
Depending on analysis may need to
• add new generic technol through a merger
• offer technology through merger to acquire
other strengths
Mergers may not be only
response.
Summary:
Useful article. Will use
criteria of applicability in
my context as key
criteria for evaluation of
article. Will use
framework from other
article to look for
possible weaknesses in
this one.
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APPENDIX 4: UNSW LIBRARY
All MBT participants are eligible to use all UNSW library services available to
external students. These include the supply of texts and journal articles, reference
services, interlibrary loans, reciprocal borrowing rights and access to databases.
Full details available at:
www.library.unsw.edu.au/borrowing/offcampus.html
Services for Off-campus Users
External students may find it convenient to try the following options to access
resources:
Local academic library access:
Users may join the University Libraries Australia (ULA) Reciprocal Borrowing
Scheme, to borrow books from more geographically convenient local academic
libraries where access is possible.
Electronic resources access (via the Internet):
Sirius – gateway to electronic journals, databases and resources
Catalogue (LRD) – catalogue search for links to electronic journals and databases
How Do I Find – Guides to finding various resources
Registration and Request Procedure
How to register:
Complete the Off-campus Users Registration Form . Borrowing requests can
be processed only once you have been registered and received email
confirmation/instructions.
How to make a request:
Once registered, request Library items through the Catalogue by selecting the ILL
Request tab.
Library contact details
Contact information:
www.library.unsw.edu.au/contact/index.html
Online
Enquiry:http://libraryinfounsw.altarama.com/reft100.aspx?key=refshort&ref=120/
Outreach Librarian
(Australian School of Business)
Mail:
+612 9385 3651 or ahocking@unsw.edu.au
Returning books by Post
Book Return
UNSW Library
Sydney NSW 2052 Australia
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In person:
Help Zone – Level 2 Library Tower
UNSW, Kensington, 2052
Opening hours (Help Zone)
Monday – Thursday: 9am–8pm
Saturday and Sunday: Midday–4pm
Library Opening hours:
Monday – Thursday: 7am–10pm
Saturday and Sunday: 10am–6pm
Library catalogue (LRD)
The LRD (Library Resources Database, the catalogue) is the gateway to the complete
collection of library holdings. It includes books, journals and electronic resources. It
gives the details of every item held or able to be accessed via the library, and
information about its availability.
Sirius
Sirius is the gateway and search facility for the library’s electronic resources. It
provides access to databases, e-journals, e-books, etc.
Databases
The library makes available a large number of electronic databases that can be
searched and provide access to literature in a wide variety of subject fields. The
materials able to be accessed include journal articles, conference papers, technical
reports, theses and other documents, many of which are available in full text.
Electronic journals
The library provides access to an increasing number of full-text e-journals. These may
be accessed through the LRD catalogue (journal title search) or through the electronic
journals page in Sirius.
Library card
Your student card acts as your library card. It will need to be presented at the library
every time you want to borrow items in person. The barcode number on the card must
be quoted for every request made by phone, email, etc.
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Offsite requests for items held at the library
Requests can be made for any material that the UNSW Library has made available for
loan. Requests can be made via the Internet or by phone, fax, mail or email.
Returns
The library pays the outward mailing charges for items you request, but you must pay
for return of the item. A padded postage bag should be used, and returns addressed to:
UNSW Library
The University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
Loan periods
•
Four-week loan period: This is the normal loan period. Note however that these
items may be recalled if reserved by other users. In all cases, you will incur a
fine if the item is not returned by the due date.
•
Three-day loan period: These items are in high demand and are available only
to users who can borrow and return in person. Fines apply after the third day.
 Final course results may be withheld if library fines are outstanding.
Reserving an item out on loan
If the item you require has been borrowed by another user, it appears in the online
catalogue with the status ‘on loan’ with the date due back. You can reserve the item
electronically through the catalogue or by contacting the library directly.
Renewals
An electronic renewal may be requested for items you have out on loan. A renewal
will be blocked if the item is already reserved by another borrower or if you have
overdue items or outstanding fines.
Photocopies
As an external student, you can request photocopies of library materials that are not
available for loan or able to be accessed electronically. Photocopy request forms are
available via the library’s website. There is a nominal charge for this service.
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Interlibrary loans
This service is available to postgraduate students, and applies to items not held in the
UNSW library but able to be borrowed from other libraries either in Australia or
overseas. Note that such requests may take four to six weeks for delivery. Requests
can be made via the interlibrary loans page at:
http://info.library.unsw.edu.au/ill/services/post/illservices.html (a once-only student
registration is required for this service).
Using other academic libraries
Borrowing in person from other Australian academic libraries
University Library Australia (ULA) is a national borrowing scheme that allows staff
and students of the Australian Vice Chancellors’ committee member universities to
borrow from any other member university in Australia. Registration and details are
available at: http://info.library.unsw.edu.au/usd/using/reciprocalunsw.html
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APPENDIX 5: BEGINNING THE ACADEMIC ESSAY 3
The writer of the academic essay aims to persuade readers of an idea based on
evidence. The beginning of the essay is a crucial first step in this process. In order to
engage readers and establish your authority, the beginning of your essay has to
accomplish certain things. Your beginning should introduce the essay, focus it, and
orient readers.
Introduce the Essay. The beginning lets your readers know what the essay is about,
the topic. The essay's topic does not exist in a vacuum, however; part of letting
readers know what your essay is about means establishing the essay's context, the
frame within which you will approach your topic. For instance, in an essay about the
First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the context may be a particular
legal theory about the speech right; it may be historical information concerning the
writing of the amendment; it may be a contemporary dispute over flag burning; or it
may be a question raised by the text itself. The point here is that, in establishing the
essay's context, you are also limiting your topic. That is, you are framing an approach
to your topic that necessarily eliminates other approaches. Thus, when you determine
your context, you simultaneously narrow your topic and take a big step toward
focusing your essay. Here's an example.
When Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening was published in 1899, critics
condemned the book as immoral. One typical critic, writing in the Providence
Journal, feared that the novel might "fall into the hands of youth, leading them
to dwell on things that only matured persons can understand, and promoting
unholy imaginations and unclean desires" (150). A reviewer in the St. Louis
Post- Dispatch wrote that "there is much that is very improper in it, not to say
positively unseemly."
The paragraph goes on. But as you can see, Chopin's novel (the topic) is introduced in
the context of the critical and moral controversy its publication engendered.
Focus the Essay. Beyond introducing your topic, your beginning must also let readers
know what the central issue is. What question or problem will you be thinking about?
You can pose a question that will lead to your idea (in which case, your idea will be
the answer to your question), or you can make a thesis statement. Or you can do both:
you can ask a question and immediately suggest the answer that your essay will argue.
Here's an example from an essay about Memorial Hall.
Further analysis of Memorial Hall, and of the archival sources that describe
the process of building it, suggests that the past may not be the central
subject of the hall but only a medium. What message, then, does the building
convey, and why are the fallen soldiers of such importance to the alumni who
built it? Part of the answer, it seems, is that Memorial Hall is an educational
tool, an attempt by the Harvard community of the 1870s to influence the
future by shaping our memory of their times. The commemoration of those
students and graduates who died for the Union during the Civil War is one
aspect of this alumni message to the future, but it may not be the central idea.
3
Copyright 1999, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard University
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The fullness of your idea will not emerge until your conclusion, but your beginning
must clearly indicate the direction your idea will take, must set your essay on that
road. And whether you focus your essay by posing a question, stating a thesis, or
combining these approaches, by the end of your beginning, readers should know what
you're writing about, and why—and why they might want to read on.
Orient Readers. Orienting readers, locating them in your discussion, means
providing information and explanations wherever necessary for your readers'
understanding. Orienting is important throughout your essay, but it is crucial in the
beginning. Readers who don't have the information they need to follow your
discussion will get lost and quit reading. (Your teachers, of course, will trudge on.)
Supplying the necessary information to orient your readers may be as simple as
answering the journalist's questions of who, what, where, when, how, and why. It may
mean providing a brief overview of events or a summary of the text you'll be
analysing. If the source text is brief, such as the First Amendment, you might just
quote it. If the text is well known, your summary, for most audiences, won't need to
be more than an identifying phrase or two:
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's tragedy of `star-crossed lovers'
destroyed by the blood feud between their two families, the minor
characters…
Often, however, you will want to summarise your source more fully so that readers
can follow your analysis of it.
Questions of Length and Order. How long should the beginning be? The length
should be proportionate to the length and complexity of the whole essay. For instance,
if you're writing a five-page essay analysing a single text, your beginning should be
brief, no more than one or two paragraphs. On the other hand, it may take a couple of
pages to set up a ten-page essay.
Does the business of the beginning have to be addressed in a particular order? No, but
the order should be logical. Usually, for instance, the question or statement that
focuses the essay comes at the end of the beginning, where it serves as the jumpingoff point for the middle, or main body, of the essay. Topic and context are often
intertwined, but the context may be established before the particular topic is
introduced.
In other words, the order in which you accomplish the business of the beginning is
flexible and should be determined by your purpose.
Opening Strategies. There is still the further question of how to start. What makes a
good opening? You can start with specific facts and information, a keynote quotation,
a question, an anecdote, or an image. But whatever sort of opening you choose, it
should be directly related to your focus. A snappy quotation that doesn't help establish
the context for your essay or that later plays no part in your thinking will only mislead
readers and blur your focus. Be as direct and specific as you can be.
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This means you should avoid two types of openings:
1.
The history-of-the-world (or long-distance) opening, which aims to establish
a context for the essay by getting a long running start: "Ever since the dawn of
civilised life, societies have struggled to reconcile the need for change with the
need for order." What are we talking about here, political revolution or a new
brand of soft drink? Get to it.
2.
The funnel opening (a variation on the same theme), which starts with
something broad and general and "funnels" its way down to a specific topic. If
your essay is an argument about state-mandated prayer in public schools, don't
start by generalising about religion; start with the specific topic at hand.
Remember:
After working your way through the whole draft, testing your thinking against the
evidence, perhaps changing direction or modifying the idea you started with, go back
to your beginning and make sure it still provides a clear focus for the essay.
Then, clarify and sharpen your focus as needed. Clear, direct beginnings rarely
present themselves ready-made; they must be written, and rewritten, into the sort of
sharp-eyed clarity that engages readers and establishes your authority.
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APPENDIX 6: ESSAY WRITING CHECKLIST
Use the following checklist to review your essay:
Doing the research

Have I done sufficient research to be confident that I am aware of the basic facts and the range
of perspectives offered on the topic?

Have I used a range of resources? (e.g. online information, journal articles, newspaper articles)
Applying analysis and developing an argument

Have I applied the core concepts I have learnt in this course?

Have I identified the key issues?

Have I used my sources to support my argument?

Is my position clear in my response to the question?

Have I qualified my position by careful consideration of possible counter-arguments?

Will I leave the reader with the impression that I have been actively trying to make sense of the
question and thought hard and deeply about the complexities involved?
Structuring the introduction

Does my introduction have a statement introducing the topic?

Does my introduction identify the key issue?

Does my introduction indicate my position in relation to the key issue?

Have I given a brief indication of how I will answer the question?

Have I indicated any limitations on the scope of my essay?

Have I defined any terms that need defining?
Structuring the body

Have I presented my paragraphs in a logical sequence? (i.e. following the order outlined in the
introduction)

Does each paragraph develop one aspect of my essay?

Does each paragraph begin with a topic sentence that both introduces the main point of the
paragraph and connects it to the essay as a whole?

Have I provided evidence in each paragraph to elaborate/support the main point of my
paragraph?
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Structuring the conclusion

Have I provided a final answer to the question?

Have I restated my position in a new way (perhaps modified) from the way I stated in the
introduction?

Have I very briefly summarised my main points?

Have I made a final comment, for example, suggesting areas for further exploration, predicting
future developments?

Have I observed the requirement not to introduce new information in the conclusion?
Using the right language

Have I checked my spelling? (Not only by using the computer spell check, but also by proof
reading)

Have I checked the grammar for common mistakes e.g. subject-verb agreement, number
agreement, complete sentences?

Have I written in an appropriate academic style (i.e. formal, objective, and not conversational or
journalistic)?
Referencing correctly

Have I acknowledged the arguments, ideas and evidence of others with in-text references?
(necessary whether quoting, paraphrasing or summarising)

Have I used the correct format for in-text references?

Have I used quotation marks when I am quoting?

Have I paraphrased and summarised well enough when not quoting so that I cannot be
accused of plagiarism?

Have I included a list of references organised alphabetically according to author on a separate
page?
Presenting the essay in the required format

Have I typed the essay?

Have I used 1.5 or double spacing?

Have I numbered the pages?

Have I used the cover sheet included in the course outline?

Have I checked that my essay is the required length?
Acknowledgement: This checklist was developed by Carolyn Cousins and Liz Craven of the EDU.
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MBT Learning Guide
APPENDIX 7: WRITING A CASE ANALYSIS REPORT
What is a 'case'?
A case is a scenario that gives you the opportunity to identify problems and
recommend a course of action in a business situation. The case may be real or
fictional, but will usually represent a complex situation with no ready solutions.
What is your role as an analyst?
In analysing a case your task is to:






identify the problem(s) in the situation presented in the scenario
analyse the key issues within the context of the theory presented in your course
develop and compare alternative solutions to the problems
consider the advantages and disadvantages of various possible solutions
select the best solution and make recommendations for action
write up your case analysis in appropriate case analysis report format.
Why are you asked to write case analyses?
You are asked to write case analyses in some of your courses to enable you to
demonstrate that you can apply conceptual frameworks from your course to real
situations and integrate topics in your analysis.
Case analyses also enable you to improve your critical thinking and analytical
abilities, your ability to evaluate sources of information and your written
communication skills.
Case analyses are often used in employment interviews to assess:



how you think
how you structure problems
your ability to conceptualise, draw clarity from ambiguity, form views, make
recommendations
What are the stages in preparing a case analysis?
There are a number of stages in preparing a case analysis:






understanding the case
identifying the core problem in the case
analysing the issues in the context of a theoretical framework
exploring alternative solutions with reference to a theoretical framework
choosing the best solution
making recommendations for action.
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What do you need to do to understand the situation?
Your first task is to understand the scenario you are given. When you read the
scenario you should identify the facts of the case. The following questions can guide
you in doing this.












What is the mission of the organisation?
Who are the "stakeholders" within the organisation?
Who are the "stakeholders" or target groups outside the organisation?
What is the formal decision making process in the organisation?
What are the informal decision making processes in the organisation?
What is the process of production or service delivery?
Who are the competitors?
What external factors impact on the organisation?
What is the major problem?
What are subsequent problems and implications?
What is the role of management in relation to the problem?
What is the role of production/service providers in relation to the problem?
As you are reading you will also need to fill in gaps based on your knowledge of
theory and of the world and ignore irrelevant details.
What are the steps in identifying the core problems?
As you identify the facts of the case you will begin to think about the problems and to
decide which problems are core problems. In doing this you will need to



distinguish between symptoms of the major problems and the major problems
themselves
distinguish between immediate and longer term problems
find evidence to support your decision about what you believe to be the core
problems.
What are the steps in analysing the issues?
As you identify the core problem(s) you will begin to analyse the issues underlying
these problems. The following steps assist with this.








106
Identify any bias in the way the case is described.
Classify the factors that influence the problem as internal or external to the
organisation.
Reflect on theoretical principles from your course that might explain aspects of
the case.
Apply analytical models from your course to further illuminate the situation.
Identify the decisions that need to be made.
Identify strategic issues.
Identify risk factors.
Identify historical precedents.
MBT Learning Guide
What are the steps in exploring alternative solutions?
As you are analysing the issues you will begin to think about alternative solutions.
You should:




consider individual and organisational levels
consider the long and the short term
define the alternative possible solutions
compare the alternative solutions in regard to *theoretical grounding, *strengths
and weaknesses, *risk factors.
How do you choose the best solution?
As you explore the alternative solutions you will begin to decide on the best solution
for the organisation in solving its problems. It is important at this stage to provide a
justification for the solution you choose.
What are the steps in making a recommendation?
When you have decided on the best solution you will be able to make a
recommendation or recommendations. At this stage you should do the following:



Express your recommendation(s) precisely.
Ensure that your recommendations are complementary.
Ensure that it is feasible to implement the recommendations.
How do you present your case analysis?
A case analysis is presented as a report. Refer to the EDU handout on reports for
guidance on how to format a report.
The following is a suggested structure for a case analysis report:
INTRODUCTION:
Describe the situation and identify the main
problem.
BODY:
Analyse the problem and the issues underlying
the problem. Present and analyse alternative
solutions to the problem.
CONCLUSION:
Identify the best solution.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Identify the courses of action needed to
implement the best solution.
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What makes a good case analysis?
A good case analysis:








clearly identifies the core problem(s)
provides a justification for the choice of core problem(s)
analyses the issues underlying the problem in terms of the relevant theory
uses appropriate terminology
justifies the alternative solutions in terms of appropriate theory
justifies the choice of the best solution
presents feasible and complementary recommendations for implementing the
best solution
is presented in appropriate report format.
Is there a best answer for a case analysis?
It is important to remember that there is no one correct answer to any case analysis.
As in real life, there is more than one way to interpret a case and solve problems, so
there is no single answer. The approaches, interpretations and recommendations of
different students will probably vary considerably. This provides a useful opportunity
to compare and discuss different analyses and alternative solutions, which is a
common practice in real life before finally recommending one solution.
Are all case analyses similar?
The general principles explained in this handout are relevant for all case analyses.
However, there are some differences in requirements from one course or one case
analysis or one lecturer to the next. Sometimes, for example, it will not be necessary
to make recommendations. These notes provide a general understanding BUT you
should always give priority to your lecturer's requirements!
Do I answer 'critical incident' questions in the same way as case analyses?
Sometimes, especially in an exam, you may be presented with a case study in the
form of a 'critical incident' and asked a series of questions about it. In this case you do
not have to write a case analysis according to the format described in this handout.
You simply answer directly the questions you are asked.
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MBT Learning Guide
MBT Learning Guide
Supplement
An Introduction
to
Business and Technology
By Craig Tapper
The aim of this supplement is to provide a conceptual entry point for
new MBT students into the key theories, models and management
thinkers in contemporary business.
It explains why ‘business’ and ‘technology’ are given equal
prominence in the MBT; introduces the basics in relation to strategy:
what it is and why organisations need to operate strategically; and
briefly outlines how the rapid rate of technological change and
development impacts on contemporary business.
It is hoped that you find this introductory document valuable. It
should provide you with a basic understanding of the key concepts
that underpin all MBT learning, and thereby assist you in grasping
the higher level material in the courses themselves.
Craig is the Course Coordinator for the MBT capstone course
GBAT9113 Strategic Management of Business and Technology.
He has consulted to major companies and government departments
and has lectured in a range of postgraduate programs in the areas
of strategy, business planning, marketing and management.
10-Jan-12
LG Supplement Page 2 of 18
An Introduction to Business and Technology
Table of Contents
Why does the MBT integrate business and technology? ................ 4
What do we mean by business? .................................................... 4
Do non-commercial organisations engage in business? ................ 5
Why do we need to study technology? .......................................... 6
Why the T in the MBT? ............................................................................. 7
How is the T integrated in the MBT? .......................................................... 7
What do we understand technology to mean? ............................... 8
What are the key principles of corporate strategy? ....................... 9
Who is Michael Porter? ............................................................................. 9
What are the different levels of strategy? ................................................. 10
What is a strategic plan? ........................................................................ 10
What sorts of issues do we need to analyse? ............................................ 11
What about analysing the micro environment? .......................................... 12
What is Porter’s Five Forces Model? ......................................................... 12
Broadening these questions out .............................................................. 13
What is Porter’s value chain? .................................................................. 14
A quick summary of corporate strategy....................................... 15
What is corporate governance, and why is it important?............. 15
What do we mean by corporate governance? ............................................ 16
What does corporate governance involve? ................................................ 16
What significant business concepts relate to corporate governance? ............ 17
Conclusion ................................................................................... 17
References ........................................................................................... 17
An Introduction to Business and Technology
LG Supplement Page 3 of 18
Why does the MBT integrate business and technology?
With so many graduate business programs in the marketplace, why does UNSW offer
postgraduate level education in ‘business and technology’? Why are so many people
enrolling in the MBT Program? Why is it important to recognise the role of both
business and technology in management education?
The answers lie not in what is ‘wrong’ with alternative business courses, but in what
they typically don’t adequately address – how the rapidly changing technological
environment so significantly influences the management of business today, and will do
so into the future.
Let’s start by being clear about what we mean by these two terms – ‘business’ and
‘technology’.
What do we mean by business?
Many people confuse the study of business with the study of commerce. Commerce is
the term applied to organising and managing transactions that involve the exchange of
goods and services in return for money, where the goal or intent of the organisations
that establish themselves in the market is to attract and engage in enough of these
exchanges to make profits that will help them achieve financial success. In a
commercial organisation, the profits are then used to repay investors and shareholders,
pay creditors, and invest in further developing the organisation to achieve its goals and
purpose into the future.
So if business does not equate to commerce, then what is it? At this point we might turn
to some renowned management thinkers to help us.
Peter F Drucker (1910–2005), considered to be one of the world’s leading
management gurus, believed that the purpose of business is to create and then retain
satisfied customers. Although firms have to make money, Drucker argued that making
money is a necessity, not a purpose: rather, it is the result, a desirable outcome, of
creating a satisfied customer.
A similar sentiment was expressed by Theodore Levitt (1925), a Harvard Business
School professor, who explained this by an analogy with human beings: all human
beings have to eat to survive, but eating is not their purpose. Furthermore, making
money does not provide a legitimate reason for society to support the money-making
enterprise. A society supports business because business serves society’s members by
catering to their needs to leave them satisfied. Dissatisfy enough customers, and not
only will these specific customers stop buying from your organisation, but society at
large will condemn the organisation and may even penalise it – to the point of its
extinction (Sheth et al. 1999, pp. 11–12).
So, perhaps we can summarise that the purpose of business is to create and retain
satisfied customers – and in order to do so, a commercial organisation must make
enough money to keep doing so into the future, in the same way as a human must find
enough to eat to survive into the future.
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
Do non-commercial organisations engage in business?
Some of you will no doubt work in the non-commercial world – in government, semigovernment and not-for-profit organisations. So why study business? Clearly, the
purposes of your organisations and the focus of their major activities are not commerce
(money-making transactions). So how do the Drucker and Levitt quotes relate?
If, instead of using the term customers we use stakeholders, how would that sit? If
instead of saying that the purpose of business is to create and then retain satisfied
customers we were to say that the purpose of business is to create and then retain
satisfied stakeholders, then all organisations do in fact engage in business.
The study of business that we adopt in the MBT Program enables you to develop
knowledge and skills that will better equip you to help your organisation create and then
retain satisfied stakeholders – government ministers, clients, donors, voters, supporters,
users, employees, funding bodies, the wider community.
A number of the disciplines and courses that you will study may have commenced their
academic life focusing heavily on the money-making world of commerce. However, it
was quickly recognised that all courses need to be just as relevant to managing where
success is determined by measurements other than money – by client satisfaction,
environmental sustainability targets, improved outcomes for key stakeholders, limiting
or preventing harm, and many other outcomes.
In the same way that the commercial world post-Enron, One-Tel and Parmalat, etc.
increasingly recognises that there is much to learn from the values and practices of notfor-profit and government agencies, so too managers and decision makers in not-forprofit and government organisations (as well as large and small commercial ones) need
to understand the core management competencies, including:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
managing people
managing the organisation
developing and implementing strategy
managing innovation and change
managing projects
managing quality
managing finance
managing information and knowledge
managing information and communication technologies
managing marketing
managing risk and OHS
managing resources
managing sustainability
managing legal responsibilities
managing manufacturing
promoting ethical and socially responsible business practices.
An Introduction to Business and Technology
LG Supplement Page 5 of 18
Why do we need to study technology?
Few people today have had their working lives, or indeed their non-working lives,
untouched by the changes that technology has wrought. Technology brought us the
invention of the steam engine in the 18th century; the light bulb and internal combustion
engine at the end of the 19th century; the discovery of antibiotics in the 1930–1940s;
microwave cooking in the 1960s; rapid changes in material science (Teflon, carbonfibre) in the 1970s and 1980s; and rapid changes in communication and information
technology in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Consider everyday activities such as how people do their banking, use public transport,
pay tolls on major roads, purchase consumer goods, prepare meals, check sports results
and stock market share prices. Consider also the importance of drug therapies for
transplant patients, the effect of genetically modified crops on world food production,
the benefits of digitisation and miniaturisation for surgical implants.
Technology has continued to play a profound and ever-increasing role in daily life
throughout the developed and developing world, as well as in the way that work is
performed within organisations.
Indeed, many business and social commentators of the last half of the 20th century were
keen to highlight the rapidly increasing speed with which technology was changing and
impacting life and work and using the analogy that it was changing from a slow-moving
river to a fast-flowing river. At the turn of the millennium it may have reached the white
water stage!
Let’s take the introduction of the mobile phone as a simple example. Consider that in
the late 1980s these were seen as specialist devices likely to be owned and used only for
technical purposes. However, by 2005 in Australia there were as many mobile phones
as fixed-line phones and, indeed, it appears increasingly likely that for many people and
many organisations the fixed-line, wire network telephone is becoming redundant.
Consider also the impact of digitisation on the camera industry – such a fundamental
change that within a decade or two of the digital camera’s introduction and widespread
adoption, the giant Kodak Corporation that once dominated the world of photography is
struggling to survive!
And with the digitisation of music, Apple, formerly a computer company, now makes as
much from selling its ubiquitous iPods as it does from selling PCs, and is rapidly
moving to dominate sales of recorded music, threatening the dominance of companies
like Sony, EMI and HMV.
Clearly the speed of innovation and technical change is revolutionising all sorts of
industries and the contemporary manager who is not able to understand and apply
effective knowledge of how technology management and business management
interact is perhaps jeopardising the future of the organisation.
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
Why the T in the MBT?
The following quote from Burgelman et al. (2004, p. 4) may help us to define this:
Technology is a resource that, like financial and human resources, is pervasively
important in organisations. Managing technology is a basic business function. This
implies the need to develop a technology strategy, analogous to financial and human
resource strategies.
Technology is now considered to be as important as any of the traditional areas of
business learning. It is as significant to the success of the modern organisation –
commercial, government, not-for-profit, large and small – as are finance, human
resources and strategy.
From your own observation, you should be in little doubt that most markets and
industries are increasingly dependent on the important role that technology plays as a
key driver or enabler of ‘the way things are done’. So much so, in fact, that for many
organisations today – perhaps even most – any lack of understanding of how to
integrate technology effectively into the organisation’s strategy and operations
potentially limits its ongoing success, or possibly even questions its long-term survival.
How is the T integrated in the MBT?
In the MBT, we recognise explicitly that for many managers in many organisations
understanding how the business management practices interface and integrate with the
management of technology is vital. Recognising the powerful impact of these two areas
on an organisation’s success and survival requires they are given additional attention to
that offered in more traditional graduate business programs.
By studying MBT courses, you have the opportunity to develop a broader range of
essential management competencies. The MBT offers you a unique opportunity to
customise your program to focus on improving your business management and
technology management competencies and knowledge.
In your final year we offer two alternative capstone courses uniquely designed to
ensure that you understand how the business management and technology management
focuses come together. You can either integrate these through the lens of corporate
strategy via the course Strategic Management of Business and Technology, or through
the lens of innovation in Management of Innovation and Technological Change. You
are, in fact, encouraged to take both capstone courses, wherever possible.
An Introduction to Business and Technology
LG Supplement Page 7 of 18
What do we understand technology to mean?
Before we go on, let’s pause here and point out that many of the readings you will find
in your MBT courses may focus on information and communication (I&C) technologies
and, particularly those written in the last few years, on the Internet.
These technologies are relevant to all MBT participants, regardless of their industry or
profession. Whilst it is also possibly true that I&C technologies are essential elements
of the operational and strategic actions of most organisations, let’s be clear that
technology is not only I&C technology.
•
•
In the health care, veterinary care, pharmaceutical, agricultural and food production
industries, for example, biological and gene technologies are already considered to
be having as great an impact as – and perhaps even greater than – I&C technology.
There are in fact some suggestions that gene technology may also revolutionise
energy, transport and a whole host of other non-medical industries.
Composite materials technology has revolutionised the construction industry,
vehicle manufacturing, sporting goods such as skis, diving gear and golf clubs,
motor racing, boats and a myriad of other applications.
These are but two examples of the broader impact of technologies beyond the focus on
IT and telecommunications that has predominated in the popular media.
So, while some of the focus in your courses may be on I&C technology due to the
broader interest in this area of many MBT students, don’t fall into the trap of equating
technology with I&C technology only.
Technology – in whatever form it may impact on or exist within your organisation – is
an essential element in your organisation’s success.
Now that we have acknowledged that technology is more than just I&C technology,
perhaps we could best employ the following definition, that technology:
… refers to the theoretical and practical knowledge, skills, and artefacts that can be
used to develop products and services as well as their production and delivery
systems.
(Burgelman et al. 2004, p. 4)
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
What are the key principles of corporate strategy?
As you begin your MBT Program, it will be helpful if you have a basic understanding of
what corporate or organisational strategy is all about. First, let’s start by getting an
understanding of some key concepts.
What is strategy?
What does strategy mean?
The Macquarie Dictionary (1999, p. 793) defines strategy as ‘skilful management in
getting the better of an adversary or attaining an end’. A tactic, on the other hand (p.
820), is defined as ‘a plan or procedure for achieving a desired end’.
Therefore:
•
a corporate strategy is the set of management decisions – designed by
executives, the board, senior management team or whoever are the final decision
makers in the organisation – that are meant to get the better of adversaries or attain
the organisation’s ‘ends’
•
tactics are the plans or procedures that they adopt to implement these strategic
decisions.
Who is Michael Porter?
Amongst the most significant authors on strategy of recent decades is the Harvard
academic, business guru, strategist and author, Michael Porter (b. 1947).
As well as developing a number of specific tools and frameworks for analysis, Porter
highlighted that the purpose of strategy was to gain and defend some form of
competitive advantage – which in our definition of strategy fits quite neatly with the
idea of ‘getting the better of an adversary’.
Porter said in his groundbreaking books in 1980 (Competitive Strategy) and 1985
(Competitive Advantage) that there are really only three forms of competitive
advantage:
1. cost leadership – having lower costs than any other competitor enables
either superior profits or a capacity to offer lower prices
2. differentiation – being able to offer customers something different from
anyone else in the market, as long as it is something that customers value
and will prefer
3. focus – being acknowledged as a specialist and having expertise and
knowledge of particular customers or activities and processes that are highly
prized.
So, from Porter’s perspective, the purpose of a corporate, business unit or functional
strategy would be to develop, refine, defend and exploit one of these three sources of
competitive advantage.
An Introduction to Business and Technology
LG Supplement Page 9 of 18
What are the different levels of strategy?
Strategy can be developed at many levels – in a multi-layered organisation there may
be:
•
•
•
corporate-level strategy – decisions made for the whole corporation or
organisation to gain the better of adversaries or attain ends
business unit or divisional strategy – decisions made for the business unit or
division to gain the better of adversaries or attain the business unit’s end
functional strategies – such as marketing/finance/human
resources/IT/technology/ operational/production/etc. strategies. There would be
marketing decisions (or finance or HR decisions, etc) designed to get the better of
an adversary or attain a marketing/finance end.
So what do we mean by ends? Other terms that are frequently used here for the same
concept are goals or missions or visions.
Organisations typically have (or should have) a set of goals, desired outcomes or a view
of their purpose (mission), or their future achievements and positions (visions) in mind.
Ideally these are clearly articulated and understood by everyone in the organisation.
When these ends (goals, missions, visions) are clearly understood, then the board,
management, staff and partners of the organisation are able to ‘develop’ strategy to
achieve these.
What is a strategic plan?
A plan, whether strategic, tactical, operational, marketing, finance – or whatever – is
really just a set of decisions that have been captured in some form (document, web
page, PowerPoint presentation, video, etc) that set out the answer to three key questions:
1.
Where are we now?
2.
Where are we going?
3.
How will we get there?
Accordingly, a plan is formed by:
•
analysing the existing and expected future trends and factors affecting the
organisation/business unit, etc
•
setting down clear statements of the outcomes that will help to achieve the ends
that the organisation has set itself (these statements of outcomes are commonly
called objectives)
•
describing some tactics and actions that will achieve the outcomes
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
What sorts of issues do we need to analyse?
Before developing strategy and tactics, the decision makers of any organisation need to
analyse and understand the forces and trends in a range of key environments that impact
on the strategic options or choices available to it. These are generally summed up as the:
•
•
•
internal environment
external macroenvironment
external microenvironment.
The macroenvironment is the nation, region, society and community within which the
organisation and its microenvironment or industry sits. Some organisations such as
transnational and global corporations/bodies (e.g. IBM, Qantas, World Bank, UN, Red
Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières) operate in many macroenvironments; others may
operate in only one or two (in Sydney, or Sydney and Melbourne, or Australia and
Hong Kong).
During your MBT studies, you will be exposed to a wide range of tools and frameworks
designed to assess all three environments. We don’t want to pre-empt all the possible
techniques that you will be exposed to in the wide range of courses that you will study,
however, there are a number of particular tools that you will potentially cover that we
will touch on here.
PESTLE analysis a tool for examining the macroenvironment. Whether operating in
only one, a number or many such countries/markets/communities a set of key factors or
forces are said to impact on an organisation’s strategy.
These are summarised by the acronym PESTLE which stands for:
Political forces and issues
Economic trends and forces
Sociocultural changes and trends
Technological changes and trends
Legal and regulatory issues and forces
Environmental changes and forces (ie, the natural environment)
Not all of these aspects are of equal importance or have an equal weight for every
organisation.
For instance, for an insurance company or agricultural products company, the natural
environmental (flood, fire, storm, drought, etc) may have great significance; whereas for
a telecommunications company it will have less significance. For an aged care provider
or health service, sociocultural changes such as the ageing of the population, increased
rate of divorce and family breakdown, change in the ethnic and cultural mix of a
population would have greater significance than for an air conditioning manufacturer.
Consequently, while all these forces must be considered, it does not mean that for all
organisations they will be equally significant.
An Introduction to Business and Technology
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What about analysing the microenvironment?
Michael Porter, whom we have mentioned earlier, developed a number of widely used
and highly regarded analysis tools for understanding the micro environment. You will
encounter two of these in particular in a number of your courses in the MBT:
•
•
Five Forces Model
the Value Chain
What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
Potential
entrants
Suppliers
Bargaining power
of suppliers
Threat of new entrants
Industry
competitors
Bargaining power
of buyers
Buyers
Rivalry among
existing firms
Substitutes
Threat of substitute products or services
(Porter 1980, p. 4.)
What Porter illustrates is that the dynamics of how a competitive advantage is gained,
maintained and deployed depends on the balance or relative impact of five forces:
1.
bargaining power of suppliers
2.
bargaining power of customers (buyers)
3.
threat of new entrants
4.
threat of substitutes
5.
competitive rivalry between existing firms.
and, in particular:
•
•
•
•
the nature of competitive rivalry
the number of competitors
the size of each competitor
the basis on which they compete (lower costs, differentiation, or focus).
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Broadening these questions out
How easy is it for a new competitor to enter the market? Is the potential threat of a
new competitor real enough for existing competitors in the industry to have to factor
this into their strategic decisions? Or are there so many, or such significant barriers to
entry of new competitors that the existing competitors can operate on the basis of
needing to be concerned only about who is competing in the industry now?
Are there substitutes or alternative products that act like competitors in the
market? For example, glass bottle manufacturers need also to consider the threat from
plastic bottles and containers, aluminium cans, tetra packs and casks, etc. Taxi operators
need to consider the threat not only from other taxis but also from hire
cars/limousines/public transport/parking stations (use of own cars) etc.
Are there any dominant suppliers whose products are so central and important to
the organisation’s operations that they affect the way competitive advantage is
created, maintained and applied? For example, to computer manufacturers such as
Toshiba, Compaq, Sony and Acer etc, the products available from Intel and Microsoft
greatly influence the nature of their competitive advantage. In the airline industry,
because fuel costs make up much of the total cost of running airlines, their competitive
advantage is greatly impacted by changes in oil prices. Because Internet-based strategies
have become so significant to banks and airlines, the broadband speed and capabilities
of ISPs greatly impact on their ability to create, maintain and defend their competitive
advantage in their markets.
Finally, there may be particular customers or buyers whose purchasing or preferences
are so significant that they are able to change what forms of competitive advantage
work. Here are some examples.
•
In the period 2003–2005, the world price of iron ore, minerals, steel, other metals,
oil and gas rose substantially because of demand from China and India. Indeed at
various times demand has outpaced supply. The strategies of mining companies
have been greatly dependent on the pace and continuing needs of growth from
both these customers – China in particular. And the strategies of other steel mills,
energy companies and manufacturers have had to adjust to the impact of the
increasingly demanding Chinese and Indian customer bidding up the prices and
taking much of the raw material in the market.
Other examples.
•
In military aircraft manufacturing, the strategic decisions of the US Department of
Defense, People’s Liberation Army/Navy/Air Force, Russian military and NATO
alliance are so significant that aircraft developments are effectively determined by
these four key buyers.
•
In the pharmaceuticals and health industry in Australia, the Commonwealth
Government through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) acts as a key
buyer – the willingness of decision makers (buyers) in charge of the PBS to buy
or not buy a particular drug, and the price they are willing to pay, has a huge
impact on the industry.
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What is Porter’s value chain?
The other key concept that Porter advanced was the notion that organisations compete
and gain competitive advantage through the differences that they offer in the way that
they create and deliver ‘value’ to customers. This is often known also as their ‘business’
model. Porter suggests that each organisation makes decisions about how it arranges
and manages the activities that produce the value it offers to its customers or clients.
Take the example shown here:
Strategy and Leadership
Corporate Services (eg, IT, Finance, HR)
Margin
Purchasing
raw
materials
and supplies
Inbound
Logistics
Production
Sales and
marketing
Outbound
logistics
What Porter is suggesting is that how one organisation arranges its purchasing of raw
materials and supplies, or its sales and marketing, or its strategy and leadership, may
give it a competitive advantage through (as mentioned earlier).
•
Cost leadership (greater efficiency)
•
Differentiation (creates a customer-valued difference)
•
Focus (gains a reputation for expertise or superior knowledge)
Porter proposed that by comparing and contrasting each competitor’s Value Chain, a
strategist could understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each, and identify
ways to develop a competitive advantage through finding actions in the Value Chain
that could be the source of such an advantage.
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
A quick summary of corporate strategy
This has been a very quick introduction to a number of concepts and frameworks
around corporate strategy. Throughout your MBT career you will be exposed to a wide
range of perspectives and frameworks designed to help you answer the three key
questions related to strategy that we noted earlier:
1.
Where are we now?
2.
Where are we going?
3.
How will we get there?
Remember though, that the purpose of all these tools and techniques is to equip you as a
manager to identify strategies that help you in ‘getting the better of an adversary or
attaining an end’.
What is corporate governance, and why is it important?
Having read to this point you will be aware of a number of key concepts, particularly
that:
Organisations exist for a purpose in addition to making money.
Managers are required to make decisions that affect a whole range of internal and
external stakeholders: employees, shareholders, customers, users, supporters, the
environment, donors, suppliers, the community at large, and many more.
What you also need to be aware of is that sometimes the interests of the managers and
those of some of these stakeholders come into conflict.
High-profile organisational collapses and failures such as HIH in Australia, Enron and
WorldCom in the United States, Parmalat in Italy – and many, many more – highlight
the fact that in an effective business system there is a clear need for oversight of the
actions of the managers of the organisation.
Failures such as these do not just happen in the commercial sector however. Consider
the outcomes of recent government enquiries into the operations of the Commonwealth
Department of Immigration in relation to Cornelia Rau (Australian citizen incarcerated
in a detention centre) and Vivian Alvarez (Australian citizen wrongfully deported to the
Philippines); NSW Railways in the wake of the Waterfall train crash, and many more.
Clearly, the issue of effective corporate governance is vital to the efficient and
successful long-term operation of any organisation – and indeed, any society or
economy.
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What do we mean by corporate governance?
In this context, we will take corporate governance to mean oversight by people or
bodies charged with ensuring that the interests of key stakeholders are not
compromised. Who the stakeholders are in each case is typically set by legislation, and
by legal principles and precedents from the findings and interpretation of courts.
In a commercial organisation, the board of directors is typically charged with the key
responsibility for corporate governance – protecting the rights of shareholders and
creditors, ensuring contractual obligations and regulatory compliance.
In the public sector, the elected government is typically responsible for corporate
governance, and in semi-government and statutory bodies like State Rail, Sydney
Water, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, the University of NSW, etc – and in notfor-profit organisations – governments will usually mandate a body similar to a board of
directors with the responsibility for corporate governance.
What does corporate governance involve?
In a recent article, Gomez and Korine (2005, pp. 739–752) propose that:
Corporate governance can be understood as a set of contracts that defines the
relationships among the three principal actors in the corporation.
To simplify what this actually means, corporate governance is the set of relationships
where:
•
a key stakeholder whom they refer to as the sovereign (in the case of commercial
organisations this would be the shareholders; in the case of public sector agencies,
the elected government; for not-for-profit organisations this is often the ‘members’
or other key stakeholders as defined by legislation)
•
sets in place a governing body (e.g. board, council, senate, etc) with responsibility
for overseeing the actions of
•
the governed (management, staff, employees, volunteers, players).
Increasingly, societies and governments are reacting to a rapidly changing world
surrounding them, and modifying the regulations affecting ‘corporate governance’
accordingly. The numbers and interests of stakeholders who are affected by the actions
of organisations are expanding. Organisations are being seen to impact on:
•
•
•
•
•
the economy
the natural environment
society through opportunities for work and employment
conditions of work
family life.
Consequently, there are increasingly complex expectations placed on organisations of
all sizes to consider and take responsibility for decisions and actions beyond simply
their money making or other purposes and goals.
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An Introduction to Business and Technology
What significant business concepts relate to corporate governance?
In your MBT courses you will be exposed to the following concepts of contemporary
business.
•
Triple Bottom Line – organisations being responsible for financial, environmental
and social ‘bottom lines’.
•
Balanced Scorecard – accountability for a range of outcomes including financial,
customer, organisation and employees.
You will also be exposed to the effects and requirements of various pieces of legislation
in the areas of workplace safety, intellectual property rights, contractual
obligations, consumer protection, and many others.
Perhaps most significant of all is the issue of organisational ethics – setting and
complying with values and principles that should guide and regulate the standards of
behaviour of everyone within the organisation.
All of these things impact on the environment of corporate governance. You should be
beginning to understand that this goes beyond simply complying with legislation and
satisfying shareholders!
Indeed, it is apparent that sustainable organisations are those that, among other things,
have the best and most effective corporate governance.
Conclusion
We hope that this introduction to business and technology will assist you in gaining a
general understanding of some of the key concepts and principles that underpin many of
the courses you will study in your MBT Program.
We wish you the very best of luck as you commence this most fascinating journey into
mastering the white water rapids where business management and technology converge!
References
Burgelman R A, Christensen C M and Wheelwright S C, 2004, Strategic Management of Technology and
Innovation, 4th edn, McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA.
Gomez P Y and Korine H K, 2005, ‘Democracy and the evolution of corporate governance’, Corporate
Governance, vol. 13, no. 6.
Macquarie Essential Dictionary, 1999, Macquarie Library Pty Ltd.
Porter M E, 1980, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Free
Press, New York.
Sheth J N, Mittal B and Newman B I, 1999, Customer Behavior: Consumer Behavior and Beyond,
Dryden Press, Orlando.
An Introduction to Business and Technology
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