Book Post 5

In the final section of the book I read for the second quarter called The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton, Dutton draws his final conclusions about the connections between psychopaths. Dutton has dragged on through the entire book to finally reach this point, but in the end it was worth the wait.

Dutton closes out the book with a few key points that I picked up on. Throughout the book, Dutton has keyed into psychopaths and their relationship with society. When he suggested the idea that for a society to thrive it needs psychopaths, I wasn’t as surprised as I would have been before reading this book. Dutton believes 10% is a perfect number for psychopaths and I don’t disagree with him. Psychopaths have very strong traits and characteristics that other people can learn from. They operate in unique ways and can acquire a lot of success in life if they have the right make up. Dutton then continued to explain that there are seven psychopathic traits that form the right make up that allow psychopaths to succeed. Dutton labeled them the Seven Deadly Sins. They are the seven core principles of psychopathy that when applied with due care and attention can allow us to “respond rather than react” when faced with challenges and can transform our view from “victim to victor all without turning into a villain.

1)   Ruthlessness

2)   Charm

3)   Focus

4)   Mental Toughness

5)   Fearlessness

6)   Mindfulness

7)   Action”

In the end, I thought this book made very interesting connections between psychopathic traits and finding success in life, but it didn’t create much interest for me. Although this book has some business points, I believe it is much more psychologically based. I also thought Dutton added too many stories and dragged the book out way too long.

Class Post 5

In our final full week of working on these two projects, my group worked on lot on organizing the “storefront” in preparation for our final presentations. Similar to last week, the majority of the focus during this week was directed towards the storefront project. After the New Year, calendars took a backseat to the storefront project. However, we still manage to sell a few calendars a week during our free time and are continuing to profit. We hope to keep making money all the way until the last day of second quarter, but it will not be as much as we originally imagined which is slightly disappointing. Overall, the calendar project went very well, as we broke even within the first three weeks of sales and made a profit for the athletic department with our success.

As we wrap up the calendar sales, the due date for our storefront project comes closer and closer. During this week, we focused a majority of our class time to creating the presentation. On Monday we drafted a script and PowerPoint presentation with only images representing each slide. On Tuesday we did a very dry run through of our presentation and received feedback from Ms. Stevens and Mr. Fischer. Wednesday was a confrontational day for my group as we discussed the overall work on the projects, group evaluations and participation grades. One member was very bothered by the amount of credit he was given based on the amount of the work he “did”. However, when we looked back through the projects it was clear to see that his grade equally reflected the amount of work he had done. I was absent on Thursday, but my group worked on editing our script and PowerPoint based on the feedback we received on Tuesday. Overall, I believe these two projects were a lot of fun and I hope you continue them in the future.

Book Post 4

The next reading in my book The Wisdom of Psychopaths written by Kevin Dutton was a little bit more boring than the recent ones, but Dutton did provide more connections between business and being a psychopath, which is something that continues to interest me.

My stance on the book has not been altered due to this reading. I believe that Dutton makes some really interesting points connecting psychopaths to the business world, but I believe a lot of details and stories that Dutton adds are unneeded. They do not help further Dutton’s argument and sidetrack the reader from the connections he is making. In this section, this exactly what Dutton did.

The reading started off very well. The first few pages built up a strong connection between the traits of strong business leaders with those of psychopaths. Dutton showed a chart that showed the traits of a leader compared side by side with the traits of a psychopath and the results were shocking. With different wording, most of the traits were seen on both sides of the chart.  Dutton went on to discuss the perfect mix of traits. Clearly psychopaths are psychopaths and businessmen are businessmen for a reason. They can’t easily switch from one lifestyle to another, but businessmen can be functional psychopaths according to Dutton. If you take away the poor decision-making and put a person in the right environment, having the emotionless, persuasive and impulsive abilities of a psychopath can put you in front of the pack in the business world. After Dutton explained this, he digressed into a story about how society has become less dangerous and then a story about his friend Andy and their encounter with a psychopath.

Overall, the connections that Dutton made this week were similar but he shined new light on the idea of a functional psychopath and how they could fit into society. The book continues to show times of excitement but overall doesn’t spend all its time on furthering the argument.

Class Post 4

The first week back from break is always less productive than most other weeks of school. Everyone is fresh off two weeks of relaxation and there is no real drive for productivity. Additionally, with two weeks off it takes a couple of days to get operations back to running full speed. We spent most of this week just tidying up details and getting reorganized in both the two hundred dollar and storefront project. 

For the two hundred dollar project, since it is after the New Year our prime time of higher need for calendars has expired. People have bought the calendars they plan on using for 2015, so for the most part our calendars would just be extra. Even as we approached the New Year, it was clear to see our calendars weren’t selling at the rate we expected. Coming back in 2015, we realized that we needed a price cut to make the calendars seem more appealing and to hopefully increase the rate of selling them. We broke profit before the winter break so we aren’t as concerned with making money as we are with simply selling the rest of the calendars. We are continuing to sell the calendars and have class blocks along with lunch blocks set aside to sell them in the upcoming week.

For the storefront project, we really focused on the fine-tuning and details this week during class. We had completed all of the hard work before break, and had to focus on putting it together into a nice organized packet for the bank. We wrote an overview and combined parts one through six to make up the packet. After reading it through for errors and adding flow to the packet, we sent it off to Mr. Gladstone at Citizens bank for him to review. Overall, it was a good first week back and we hope to build on it in the final two weeks of these projects.