Organizational Processes enhances students’ ability to take effective action in complex organizational settings by providing the analytic tools needed to analyze, manage, and lead the organizations of the future. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the organizational context in influencing which individual styles and skills are effective. The subject centers on three complementary perspectives, or “lenses”, on an organization: political, cultural, and strategic design. Students enrolled in this class are also jointly enrolled in 15.328, Team Project, in order to complete a field study of an organizational change initiative. Organizational Processes also operates in conjunction with 15.280, Communication for Managers, by sharing certain assignments and holding some joint classes.

The Piggy Bank Primer: Budget and Saving e-book for 7 through 9 year olds uses a story, activities, and puzzles to introduce basic economic concepts saving, savings plan, spending, costs, benefits, goods, services, and opportunity cost.

Through a story and activities, the student book introduces students to economic concepts such as saving, spending, budgeting, wants, goods, services and opportunity cost.

This course takes a broad-based look at poker theory and applications of poker analytics to investment management and trading.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT in January. IAP provides members of the MIT community including students, faculty, staff, and alums with an opportunity to organize, sponsor and participate in a wide variety of activities and topics that are often outside of the regular MIT curriculum.
Faculty Advisor: Paul Mende

Did you know that it takes less than seven-seconds to decide whether you will buy most items? What influences us to make those snap decisions? Advertising? Packaging? The product? This theme unit investigated what drives consumer behaviors. Students examined often overlooked pieces of our environmental impact by analyzing the “stuff” in our lives…what we own, buy, consume, and discard. Inspired by Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com), we followed the life cycle of products from extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. We considered the hidden costs, human costs, and environmental costs of our “stuff.”

Prices send signals and provide incentives for buyers and sellers in ways you possibly never thought about. In a market economy, price signals prevent massive shortages and ensure that consumer wants are largely satisfied. In this podcast, hear how price signals from gas prices influence decision-making for both a father of three and a production supervisor for an oil refinery. Do you see price signals influencing decisions in your life?

Designed to meet the scope and sequence of your course, Principles of Finance provides a strong foundation in financial applications using an innovative use-case approach to explore their role in business decision-making. An array of financial calculator and downloadable Microsoft Excel data exercises also engage students in experiential learning throughout. With flexible integration of technical instruction and data, this title prepares students for current practice and continual evolution.

This module assumes that a thorough understanding of people requires a thorough understanding of groups. Each of us is an autonomous individual seeking our own objectives, yet we are also members of groups—groups that constrain us, guide us, and sustain us. Just as each of us influences the group and the people in the group, so, too, do groups change each one of us. Joining groups satisfies our need to belong, gain information and understanding through social comparison, define our sense of self and social identity, and achieve goals that might elude us if we worked alone. Groups are also practically significant, for much of the world’s work is done by groups rather than by individuals. Success sometimes eludes our groups, but when group members learn to work together as a cohesive team their success becomes more certain. People also turn to groups when important decisions must be made, and this choice is justified as long as groups avoid such problems as group polarization and groupthink.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

This unit describes the processes used by a nurse in making clinical decisions and assessing patients. It also describes how nurses are trained, where they work and the procedures that they perform.

Risk analysis, assessment, and management is essential to any engineering field. This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of how to perform a comprehensive risk assessment applicable to a wide variety of engineering problems. The course will focus on failure mode and effect analysis, fault tree analysis, probabilistic risk analysis, and human reliability analysis. The course will also cover fundamental probability and statistics content.

This course examines joint fact-finding within the context of adaptive and ecosystem-based management. Challenges and obstacles to collaborative approaches for deciding environmental and natural resource policy and the institutional changes within federal agencies necessary to utilize joint fact-finding as a means to link science and societal decisions are discussed and reviewed with scientists and managers. Senior-level federal policymakers also participate in these discussions.

How do we make choices in the face of uncertainty? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), MIT professor Kerry Emanuel joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to talk about climate risk. Together, they break down why the climate system is so hard to predict, what exactly scientists mean when they talk about “uncertainty”, and how scientists quantify and assess the risks associated with climate change. Although this uncertainty shrinks every day — as researchers refine their work, computing power grows, and models improve — what we do and how quickly we act will ultimately come down to how much risk we are willing to accept.

Spending patterns change over time because of changes in income, education, the structure of our families, and technology. The April 2018 issue of Page One Economics: Focus on Finance addresses how phone technology has changed our lives and our budgets.

tudents learn about scarcity, alternatives, choices and opportunity costs by reading So Few of Me. The class participates in an activity to help Perdita figure out her morning schedule at summer camp. The students identify Perdita's alternatives, choose activities for her and identify the opportunity costs of those choices. Then, students work in groups to make choices and identify opportunity costs for Juan's after-school schedule.

A cost-benefit analysis is a good way to weigh the costs and the benefits and compare them to see if the decisions being made are sound and worthwhile. For a hypothetical solar farm design problem, students are given a solar cost-benefit analysis sheet to complete within groups. They weigh the expense and benefits of two types of solar panels (with different costs, wattage outputs and land impacts), consider the cost of using the acreage for solar (which removes it from ranching use), and explain why they consider the panel combination they propose to be best. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then a project is not worth doing. On the other hand, if the benefits outweigh the costs, then it is worth implementing the plan.

In this lesson, students learn about the act of saving and how the accumulation of money saved is termed savings. They are read a story about a family that saves and how savings can be used to make a large purchase the family would not ordinarily be able to make. They recognize that there is an opportunity cost to saving, as well as an opportunity cost to spending.

Students make a choice between a cookie and an ice cream cone and state the opportunity cost of their decisions. They then listen to the story Something from Nothing and identify all the items Grandpa makes his grandson Joseph, beginning with a blanket. Using a sheet of paper that represents Joseph's blanket, students cut out the various items Grandpa made and identify the opportunity cost for each item they cut out.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Understanding how human decision-making and preferences manifest before conscious thought has long challenged researchers focused on cognitive and information science. Now, the field of neuromarketing – a discipline that looks at the neurocognitive underpinnings of consumer behavior – is starting to uncover, in amazing detail, exactly how the brain goes about recognizing a brand. An international research team based in Auckland University of Technology and Nottingham Trent University has devised a new machine learning method that tracks brain responses to logos on the millisecond timescale…even before conscious thoughts are formed. Their results shed light on the early spikes in brain activity that are tied to brand awareness. The method utilizes one of the most promising recent trends in artificial intelligence research: spiking neural networks. These networks use algorithms loosely modeled on the behavior of the human brain to recognize patterns in sets of streaming data..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.