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KAZIAN GLOBAL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

MARKS: 80 COURSE: EMBA Sem-I

Case -1 A perfect response to an Imperfect storm Twelve days. Thats how long it took for Mississippi power to restore electric power to the heavily damaged areas of southern Mississippi after hurricane Katrina slammed into the Mississippi gulf coast on august 29, 2005, with 145-mph winds and pounding rain. Thats remarkable, given the devastation that news photos and television newscasts so graphically displayed. Its something that even the federal and state governments could not accomplish. How bad was the damage company employees dealt with? One hundred percent of the companys customers were without power. Sixty-five percent of its transmission and distribution facilities were destroyed. And yet, this organization of 1,250 employees did what it had to do, despite the horrible circumstances and despite the fact that more than half of its employees suffered substantial damage to their own homes. It speaks volumes about the cultural climate that the managers of Mississippi power had created. As a corporate subsidiary of utility holding company southern company, Mississippi power provides electric services to more than 190,000 customers in the Magnolia state. When Hurricane Katrina turned toward Mississippi. Managers at Mississippi power swung into action with a swift and ambitious disaster plan. After Katrina land fall, Mississippi power management team responded, with a style designed for speed and flexibility, forget thing done amid confusion and chaos. David Ratcliffe, senior executive of southern company said, I could not be prouder of our response. What factors led to the companys ability to respond as efficiently and effectively and effectively as it did? Imagine this is your second day at work as a manager supervising a team of financial analysts in the major technology corporation. Your boss the chief financial officer, calls you in and asks you to have your team find creative ways of improving sales figures. Look back at the framework in exhibit 3-8 and think about the potential consequences as you decide which of the following option you will choose, and why. Option A: Call a meeting of your analyst team and present the bosss request as a hypothetical challenge

designed to sharpen their skills. Present the results to your boss without telling the team. Option B: Work by yourself to dream up a few outlandish, impractical ideas so you can avoid being seen as someone who is not committed to your companys success. Option C: Privately discuss the situation with the human resources manager who hired you (or another manager you trust) and explain why you are concerned about your bosss request. One key element is the companys can-do organizational culture, which is evidenced by important values inscribed on employees identification tags Unquestionable trust, Superior performance, Total commitment. Because the values were visible daily, employees knew their importance. They knew what was expected of them, in a disaster response or in just doing their everyday work. In addition, through employee training and managerial example, the organization had, steeped its culture in Stephen coveys book, The 7 habits of highly effective people. (The companys training building the covey Center-flooded during the storm.) These ingrained habits-be proactive; begin with the end in mind; put first things first; think win/win; seek first to understand then to be understand; synergize; and sharpen the saw-also guided employee decisions and actions. Another important element in the companys successful post-storm response was the clear lines of responsibility of the 20 storm directors, who had clear responsibility and authority for whatever task they had been assigned. These directors had the power to do what needed to be done backed by unquestionable trust from their bosses. Said one, I dont have to ask permission. Finally the companys decentralized decision making approach to contribute to the way in which employees were able to accomplish what they did. The old approach of responding to a disaster with topdown decision making had been replaced by decision making being push further down to the electrical

substation level, a distribution point that serves some 5,000 people. Crews working to restore power reported to these substations and had a simple mission get the power back on, Even out of state line crews, hired on contract and working unsupervised, were empowered to engineer to there solutions. What the crews

often did to get the power back on was quite innovative and entrepreneurial. For instance, one crew stripped a generator off an ice machine to get a substation working. Mississippi powers president Anthony topazi said, This structure made things happen faster then the expected people were getting more done.

All in all, employees at Mississippi power working in difficult treacherous and often dangerous situations did what they had to do they got the job done the reorganization of the companys outstanding efforts to restore power in the wake of hurican Katrina Mississippi power was honored with an emergency response award by the Edison electric institute in January 2006.its an award that all the companys employees can be proud of.

Question :-

1. describe how you think new employees Mississippi power learn the culture 2. what stack holder might be important to Mississippi power ?what concern might each of these stack holders have? would these stack holder change if there was a disaster to which the company had to respond? 3. What could other organization learn from Mississippi power about the importance of organization culture? Case -2 When Yes Doesnt Always Mean Yes, and No Doesnt Always Mean No When a major chip-manufacturing project ran more than a month late, David Sommers, vice president for engineering at Adaptec, felt that perhaps the companys Indian engineers didnt understand the sense of urgency in getting the project completed. In the Scottish highlands, Bill Matthews, the general manager of McTavishs Kitchens, is quite satisfied with his non- Scottish employeescooks who are German, Swedish, and Slovak and waitresses who are mostly Polish. Other highland hotels and restaurants also have a large number of Eastern European staff. Despite the obvious language barriers, these Scottish employers are finding ways to help their foreign employees adapt and be successful. When Lee Epting of Forum Nokia gave a presentation to a Finnish audience and asked for feedback, he was told, That was good. Based on his interpretation of that phrase, he assumed that it must have been just an okay

presentation . . . nothing spectacular. However, because Finns tend to be generally much quieter and more reserved than Americans, that response actually meant, That was great, off the scale. And John S. Bank, chairman of Chicago-based Phoenix Electric Manufacturing Company, who now has two factories in Suzhou, China, is dealing with the challenges that many companies moving to China face: understanding the way their Chinese employees view work and nurturing Chinese managerial talent. Its not easy being a successful global manager, especially when it comes to dealing with cultural differences. Research by Wilson Learning Worldwide says there is an iceberg of culture, of which we can only see the top 15 percentfood, appearance, and language. Although these elements themselves can be complicated, its the other 85 percent of the iceberg thats not apparent initially that managers need to be especially concerned about. What does that include? Workplace issues such as communication styles, priorities, role expectations, work tempo, negotiation styles, nonverbal communication, attitudes toward planning, and so forth. Understanding these issues requires developing a global mind-set and skill set. Many organizations are relying on cultural awareness training to help them do just that. Having outsourced some engineering jobs to India, Axcelis Technologies Company had its U.S.-based employees go through a training program where they role- played scenarios with one person pretending to be Indian and the other his U.S.based co-worker. One of the companys human resources directors said, At first I was skeptical and wondered what Id get out of the class, but it was enlightening for me. Not everyone operates like we do in America. And in China, companies like FedEx that are succeeding are investing heavily in training to integrate employees, such as drivers, engineers, and sales staff into their global organizations ... and keeping them motivated so they wont jump ship. You have to make your company a place where people want to stay. In our global world, successful managers must learn to recognize and appreciate cultural differences and to understand how to work effectively and efficiently with employees no matter their nationality. Questions:1. What global attitude do you think would most supp ort, promote, and encourage cultural awareness? Explain. 2. Would legal-political and economic differences play a role as companies design appropriate cultural awareness training for employees? Explain. 3. Pick one of the countries mentioned in the case and do some cultural research on it. What did you find

out about the culture of that country? How might this information affect the way a manager in that country plans, organizes, leads, and controls? 4. What advice might you give to a manager who has little experience globally?

Case -3 Communication Lesson This is a story about a hallway conversation that cost $200,000 and 4 months of unnecessary effort. Talk about a communication blunder. Voyant, a tech company based in Colorado, makes teleconferencing technology that allows users to call various people at once and invite them to join a conference call. The company was acquired by videoconferencing provider Polycom in 2004. Prior to that acquisition, a chance meeting in a headquarters hallway between company CEO Bill Ernstrom and his chief engineer led to the decision to have its engineers add streaming media to the companys flagship product. Now, Ernstrom wishes he had never had that conversation, especially after a product manager who had learned of the project produced a marketing report that showed most customers had little interest in streaming anything. That incident underscored a communication challenge that had been ignored for too long: Top engineers werent listening to the product managersand vice versa. Ernstrom says, We got a long way down the road, built the code, got the engineers excited. Then we found out that wed sell about 10 units. The communication barriers experienced by Voyant arent all that unusual in high-tech organizations. The cultural and language gap between computer geeks and the more market/businessoriented colleagues happens time and time again. In these types of organizations, the early stages of a new project belong to the engineers. Its crucial to get the technology right, but what they produce is often elegant technology that has no market, is too complicated, or doesnt match customers expectations. Ernstroms challenge was to get the two competing groups to collaborate. His solution involved structural and communications changes. The first structural change Ernstrom made was to hire managers to lead each of the companys four product lines. But this change alone wasnt enough as the engineers felt that these individuals knew little about the companys culture and even less about technology. To improve the situation, Ernstrom decided that another new position was neededa chief product officer. The person he hired, John Guillaume, had a

strong telecommunications background in both engineering and marketing. Guillaumes first move was to raise the profile of the four product managers by giving them visible tasks, such as writing product definitions and presenting marketing research. Then, Guillaume took a riskier step and asked two of the star engineers to lead product groups, which they did reluctantly. With the structural changes in place, Ernstrom was ready to try some changes in communication. Among these changes is that now when an employee has an idea for a new product, he or she submits a proposal through the company intranet. A team of engineers and product managers and the executive team assess the proposal. Theres a lot more interaction between the geeks and the suits. If the proposal is given the go-ahead, managers determine what content will be delivered at what time and the engineers get bonuses for meeting those goals. By themselves, these changes might have accomplished little, but together theyve done a lot to close the gap. Ernstrom firmly believes that the companys customers are happier than ever. As one engineer put it, Were building stuff that people use Questions:1. What barriers to communication were evident at Voyant? What other communication barriers likely existed? Explain. 2. What suggestions presented in the chapter might Voyants employees have used to overcome communication barriers? 3. Why were the structural changes important to the success of the communication changes? 4. Why do you think Ernstrom believes that the companys customers are happier than ever before? What role do you think communication plays?

Case 4 Hostile Mint its probably the last place you might expect to find a hostile work environment. First of all, its a federal workplace. And even more surprising, its heavily guarded against intrusion. But the situation inside the U.S. Mint in Denver was anything but a safe place for 71 women who brought a complaint to the facilitys equal employment opportunity (EEO) officer in 2003. When the organizers of the complaint began to fear that they were the investigation targets instead of the complaints, 32 of the women decided to take the matter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Their contention: The Denver Mint

was a hostile work environment. These allegations were the culmination of a number of incidents that had occurred over a long period of time. The Denver Mint, which opened in 1863, has 414 employees, of which 93 are women. One woman who started working at the Denver Mint in 1997 said, She found the atmosphere completely hostile toward females. When she filed an EEO charge claiming discrimination, she was retaliated against by having most of her job duties reassigned and being required to work at home. Events leading to the current complaint started in 2001, when another female employee who was inspecting a mens room for cleanliness saw a loose ceiling tile, removed it, and found 40 to 50 sex magazines. Some months later, this same employee was checking for rats in an attic and found a stash of pornographic magazines. Both times she made these discoveries, she was with a male colleague. Later, she would say in a statement given to the main office of the U.S. Mint that to her knowledge no action was every taken to address the situations. Another female employee filed a claim of retaliation and sexual harassment with the facilitys EEO officer in 2000. It was 2003 before she got a hearing with the EEOC and an administrative judge ruled in favor of the Mint. However, when she filed her claims in federal court in 2005, a jury found that she worked in an environment hostile to women and awarded her $80,000. In 2001, the facilitys new superintendent held a womens forum attended by the then-director of the U.S. Mint. However, the highestranking woman at the Denver Mintthe administrative services chief, Beverly Mandigo Milnesaid, Nothing changed. The final straw that triggered the complaint was the demotion of the mints acting EEO manager in February 2003. The month after the demotion, the 71 women filed the petition alleging a hostile work environment. An individual from the San Francisco Mint was assigned to investigate; however, the women claimed that the investigation never focused on the facts, but on Milne. One of the women said, They believed that Beverly coerced everyone into filing the petition. That was when 32 of the women took the matter to the EEOC. Despite the filed petition, hostile situations still continued. One woman said that in 2004, a male co-worker offered to pay her for sex. Another woman said that after she returned after a short bereavement leave following her husbands death in 2005, a male supervisor propositioned her. On March 31, 2006, the U.S. Mint and the female employees who had filed the class complaint reached a proposed settlement. The terms of the settlement included a payment of $8.9 million for damages, fees, and costs. The joint press release of the United States Mint and Class Counsel stated, The parties believe

that the settlement agreement represents a fair and just resolution of the matter. Questions:1. What HR problems were evident at the Denver Mint? 2. Some businesses use a zero-tolerance policyunacceptable and detrimental behavior is not tolerated under any circumstances. Is a zero-tolerance policy an appropriate response for combating sexual harassment? Why or why not? 3. What types of training might you suggest for the employees of the Denver Mint? Explain what this training should include and how you would present it. 4. If you were the superintendent in charge of this facility, what steps would you take now that a settlement has been reached to ensure that your workplace becomes a model workplace?

Case -5 Behind the Scenes When the Sun Goes Down Youve probably never really thought about the operations management activities and processes that go on behind the scenes of a major concert tour. However, Kenny Chesneys Somewhere in the Sun 2005 tour provides a funand unusuallook at efficient and effective operations management. Like any profit-oriented business that produces a product, Chesneys tour required both people and operations variables (including equipment and inventory) to be brought together in the right numbers, at the right places, and at the right times. Lets look behind the scenes to see how the magic happened! Planning for the Somewhere in the Sun tour began year ahead of time. Chesney and his production manage- made a pen-and-paper sketch of how they envisioned the stage. Some of the design goals included big amplifiers, vertical screens, and a clean rock n roll look. Once the final computer renderings were finished, it took 5 month to prepare all the components of the setmainly lighting and sound because Chesney wanted to keep the stage se design simple. One month before the tour began. Chesney sat down with the lighting director to ensure that the lights projected the right colors and desire: effects for each song. So what did the stage set consist of? Some of the physical components included 30-foottall speakers, o which the main column composed of 16 speakers provided the majority of the sound coverage; interior and exterior LCD monitors that provided show performance close-ups of Chesney and the audience; 175 stage and 28 remote lights that add visual effects to the performance; and of course, computers, which

were used to control all the amplifiers and lights. Although the stage equipment and inventory were impressive enough themselves, it was the people who also had a role in making it all happen. Shows that took place in arenas (which typically hold about 20,000 people) took a day for some 200 people to set up (stage, lighting, and Sound). But it was the 3 stadium concerts that were the true test of the operational skills of the people behind the scenes. The stadiums (most of which would hold about 55,000 fans) took 5 days to set up the 50 truckloads of equipment. Even an engineer was brought in to measure the distance from the stage to different points in the stadium and then these measurements were used to determine the angle at which to hang speakers for maximum sound quality. in March 2005, the sold-out tour began and proved to be a resounding success It ranked as one of the top grossing tours for 2005. And the fun continues! Chesneys The Road & The Radio Tour is off to a fantastic start undoubtedly with a strong dose of operations management behind the scenes as the sun goes down. Questions :1. How might value chain management be useful in this type of organizational setting? Explain. 2. Would Productivity measures be important to a concert tour? How might productivity be measured in this type of organizational setting?