Reference no: EM132315166

PRINCIPLES OF MANAGEMENT

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussion and the any insights you gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3 PAGES

1. Using the Internet, find an example of major company that is currently facing problems (or has faced problems in the last 12 months) in one or more markets around the world due to one or more of its corporate policies (privacy, intellectual property, patents, etc.). Identify the company, the problem it is facing in some markets but not in others, and describe the issues at the heart of the difficulty. Support your position with proper citations.

2. Identify either an instance of what could be considered an ethical violation that you have personally experienced in the last 12 months (e.g. an executive describing company policy in a very public way, but behaving in a manner inconsistent with statement made) or one that you read about in the news. Describe what you believe the ethical violation may have been, explain why you believe the action is indeed an ethical violation, and try to describe why the individuals involved might have taken the actions they did. Explain whether this a case of a good person in a bad situation, or something else?

3. Given your insights from your analysis of Eisenhower's quote, what are the purposes of, and differences between, strategic, tactic, and operational plans? Don't just define these terms. Focus on the purposes, the differences, and the importance of each to a successful business.

4. Considering the speed with which today's business world changes and what you have read from the book, which of the following is likely to produce a better result and why: more effort on coming up with the right decision or more effort on implementation a decision well? Use an example from the real world or your personal experience to support your answer.

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and the any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3 PAGES

1. For entrepreneurs to be successful, there needs to be a large enough pool of potential customers who have an unsatisfied need or are willing to consider that they may benefit from the entrepreneur's products or service. Entrepreneurial startups tend to be small and have little available cash. One would think that larger firms with numerous employees, proven suppliers and distributors, and much more working capital would be able to outperform the startups. Time and again, however, this is not the case. What do you believe are the key factors that give the advantage to the entrepreneur?

2. Imagine you are a successful and well-respected, mid-level professional in a large corporation that is concerned about losing business to an ever-growing number of competitors, many of which are far smaller. You have been asked to create a "skunkworks unit" within the firm to develop new strategic insights and products to help your firm survive. Drawing on your personal experiences, as well as insights from the text and the Internet, produce a prioritized list of five to seven key attributes at the heart of the design of your new unit.

3. Consider two firms: one that has the very best people but an ineffective and frustrating work environment and one that has average workers but an excellent environment. All else being equal, which is likely to be more successful over time, and why?

4. It has been said that many high-tech firms outsourced too many of their core competencies to off-shore firms and, as a result, "hollowed themselves out." If your firm asked you to propose how it could become more profitable and agile through off shoring but not hollowing out, what would you recommend be outsourced, what would you keep, and why?

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3PAGES

1. When workers do identical jobs on an assembly line, measuring and assessing worker performance is rather straightforward. How might job appraisals be performed to ensure fairness when a firm employs high-performance work teams, where employees work individually or in pairs on different aspects of a project and then support the integration of the parts into a fully functional whole?

2. Select a major employer featured in the news during the 12 months for exceptional growth, and that you believe must have experienced human resource issues as a result of such growth. Explain how you would have addressed these issues and why.

3. An executive at a major firm asserts to you that the growth of global competition and the global marketplace demand diversity in all aspects of the workforce if companies are to remain competitive and profitable. Provide a well-reasoned explanation for this executive's position.

4. If a firm has a truly diverse workforce with respect to all of the standard measures of diversity, what barriers might still remain with respect to global marketplace success? What actions can be taken to overcome these barriers?

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions:

1. Identify a company in the news during that last 12 months that has expressed what you believe to be a compelling vision for the future. Identify what you found particularly compelling about this vision and why you consider it to be a vision as opposed to just a "marketing message."

2. Consider this statement from a senior leader: "That is a behavior than needs to be rewarded but not promoted." Imagine and describe a scenario in which an employee might have done something to prompt the senior leader to say this, and explain the rationale behind the leader's statement.

3. There is seldom a reward for playing it safe and not taking risks. If you want people to take well-considered risks, how would you explain to them the difference between "good" risk taking that did not play out as desired and ill-considered mistakes?

4. Identify a job you have worked and assess it using the Hackman and Oldham model. Compare and contrast how you feel about that job with the results from your assessment. List and prioritize what you consider to be the most effective aspects of this model and, for the least effective aspect, describe how it might be improved from your perspective.

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3PAGES

1. Not all work processes are properly designed for effective use by true high-performance teams. (E.g. Great teamwork is not one member working and three others watching.) What are the key aspects of the processes that make for a true high-performance team? Explain your answer.

2. The natural path from groups to teams to high-performance teams seems to include a change in the role of the manager. What is it about true high-performance teams that seems to require less from the manager and more self-management and self-designing from the team members?

3. The number one interpersonal skill needed for good team membership is defined as "listening skills." Dig deeper into your personal experiences to identify, at a deeper level, the key behaviors needed to develop better listening skills. (E.g., It is easy to listen without hearing the message being sent.) Explain the more subtle skills and behaviors and why they are critical to true high-performance team success.

4. It's been suggested that the basis of most conflicts should be resolved during the "norming" phase of Tuckman's model. Assume a situation in which a conflict develops among members of a true high-performance team, while the members are still in alignment in terms of Tuckman's model and nothing happened to undermine the trust. Propose a possible root cause for this conflict, suggest a path to a resolution, and explain your rationale.

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3PAGES

1. Identify a communications difficulty that occurred when you used an electronic channel (Email or SMS) that you believe would not have occurred had you delivered the message in a face-to-face meeting. What was there about the use of the electronic channel that was at the heart of the problem that is not an issue when talking face-to-face? If you have an opportunity to send the same kind of message again by an electronic means, what would you do differently, and why?

2. Firms are becoming ever more dependent upon electronic communication channels for many reasons, including: virtual employees, growth of project complexity, the global marketplace, and the fact that customers can now come from everywhere. Do you believe that high quality virtual presence (video, audio, shared documents, etc.) is becoming more important? Explain your answer.

3. It has been argued that bureaucratic control systems are a holdover from a time when businesses, products, technologies, and society itself ran, and changed, at a far slower pace than it does today. Due to the rapid growth of global competition, the acceleration of technology change, and the growing interconnectedness of individuals some believe that bureaucracies should be replaced by more agile and dynamic mechanisms. For example, statistical process control, one of a number of tools and methods W. Edwards Deming successfully advocated after World War II, strived to improve quality and productivity by removing sources of variation. Detractors assert that business in today's agile world changes too quickly for statistical process control to be useful. Attack or defend the position that the basic ideas of bureaucratic control systems are still relevant in today's world, and support your argument.

4. Some argue that the traditional role of managers and bureaucratic control systems are in conflict with the principles and processes of self-management and self-designing teams. It has been suggested that managers need to change to be more like coaches in order for such agile teams to be effective. Attack or defend this idea and support your position.

Start by reading and following these instructions:

1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.

2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.

3. Consider the discussions and any insights gained from it.

4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.

Answer these essay questions: 3PAGES

1. Consider a business in your neighborhood that you frequent and that you believe is particularly innovative in spite of the products or services themselves not being particularly high-tech. Using the definitions and notions from the text, explain what it is about the business and its operation that you believe makes it innovative?

2. Some argue that becoming too large is the root of the end of innovation. Many point to companies such as Microsoft, where the assertion is that the only real innovation that has happened in recent years has been through acquisition. Attack or defend the notion that getting too large usually stifles or kills innovation. Explain your answer using real businesses, and support your answer with recent articles, Web pages, or book citations.

3. Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute studies more than just software engineering. Its research into technology adoption and how to improve upon it is worthy of special note. The IDEAL model is an example of work that has broad implications far beyond software and system engineering. Compare and contrast the IDEAL model with the various models from the textbook. Focus on one aspect of the IDEAL model that you believe is particularly important, and explain why businesses trying to implement change should not ignore this aspect.

4. Dealing with resistance is an important part of any major change effort. It is common for one or more employees with excellent work history and great reputations to be rather vocal in their resistance to a change. Why might it be a mistake to ignore the resistance, or to sanction the resisters, in order to remove their resistance?