Tuesday, December 7, 2010

[who is ronjie?] defining moment #1

When I attended the Dale Carnegie Course on Leadership, Communication, and Interpersonal Relationships, we were asked to give a speech about a defining moment in our life - i.e. something that happened that shaped our values and personality, or that made us realize what kind of person we are.

Here's one.  When I was in my junior year in college, I attended this Geodetic Engineering class, where basically we take some measurements by following a certain procedure, and then document our results.  Part of the documentation is the computation of the "error" in our measurement.  In the class, there were at least four groups of around 5 people per group.  So, our group simply followed the procedure, and presented what we got - we computed a huge error (say, 10%?  or 20%?) and that is what we showed in our documentation.  Other groups apparently came up with some tricks and came up with very low errors (say, 5% or much less).  After all groups had submitted the documentation, our professor was a little angry at the beginning of the next meeting.  He asked how can all groups have very low errors?  That is, except our group.  He highly commended our group.

Honesty and integrity.  It works.

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