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Students who want to enter society, especially employment, need to put in effort to develop efficiency and creativity during university life. Traditionally, a social organization(company)’s goal is “result”. Some people complain that business is too biased toward meritocracy. However, this isn’t the real problem. If a business failed to meet its natural goal, it would be a big problem.
For the past 100 years, business has defined the source of performance as “efficiency” and has focused to improve it since Taylor’s scientific management theory. Efficiency can be defined in two ways. First, we need to make more outputs while the same resources are put in. Second, make it possible to put less resources to get same outputs. Therefore, traditional businesses are composed of efforts to achieve efficiency.
For the past 100 years, we have believed that efficiency is the heart of business performance. But recently, not only efficiency but creativity has become an important source as well. In the past, the key point of determining results was efficiency, but now it cannot guarantee the best performance alone. Recently, creativity is needed additionally based on efficiency. The game rules of creating outcome changed, this has put management in the face of enormous challenges. Now the efficiency that management has pursued over the generation has become difficult to achieve goal of results alone. Companies in the 21st century need to demand efficiency and creativity at the same time.
However, this creates a problem. The way to achieve efficiency and creativity are often in opposition. Uniformity is important because efficiency can be achieved on the basis of predictability and consistency. For example, efficiency can be accomplished when members of an organization think in common or have identical values. On the contrary, creativity can be expressed when diversity is prioritized. Being unpredictable and impossible in making accurate calculation are negative sources for efficiency, but can be positive in creativity. Efficiency (Traditional) and creativity (New) have opposite characteristics. There is an example. If members in the company think in various ways, having different values each and preferring all different means make creativity expressed. In other words, if we pursue efficiency, we should value uniformity, but if we value uniformity, creativity will be reduced. Conversely, if we increase creativity, we should value diversity, but if we value diversity, creativity will decrease.
Companies are making efforts to increase efficiency and creativity at the same time. Also, they are trying to recruit new employees that have efficiency and creativity. It is very difficult to achieve both at the same time. Companies and students that want to get jobs are faced in difficult challenges. Nowhere in society presently can anyone clearly suggest how to achieve the opposite goals of efficiency and creativity. The way to get both is to master our efforts.
If the existing school curriculum has been driven by efficiency, attempts to increase creativity have been highlighted recently. In school, they are making efforts to enhance creativity by executing teaching innovations like problem-based learning or flipped learning. However, there is a limit to focusing too much on innovating teaching methods. It is just a combination of creativity-oriented education methods with existing efficiency-oriented curriculum. So far, it has fallen short of suggesting a real solution to the simultaneous achievement of efficiency and creativity. Business in the 21st century has the task of solving the dilemma of efficiency vs. creativity simultaneously. If we respond to this challenge, companies and individuals will develop more. From the student’s point of view, they need to intentionally make experiences for the development of our creativity. Because creativity can be made by combining various experiences and different kinds of knowledge. We need to pay attention to indirect experience by watching people’s experience, including direct experience. Since an indirect experience is a high-cost effectiveness experience, we should try to accumulate it by using media such as the Internet YouTube, SNS, books and observing acquaintances around us. I hope your future will be full of sunshine.
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▲ Dept. of
Business Administration
Prof. Seung-Wan Kang
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