In November 2019, digital marketing firm Arcane was six months into the conversion of its London, Ontario, headquarters into an organization of “agile” squads (small, self-managed teams)—a radical departure from the discipline-based silos that had served the agency since its beginning in 2011. Chief executive officer Lindsay Schneider and chief operating officer David Bunce, the architects of the change, were preparing an update for Arcane’s Ownership Group the following week on the status of the squad structure rollout. Schneider and Bunce were tasked with reviewing the introduction of the squad structure and assessing the success of its implementation.
AWARD-WINNING CASE - Women in Business Category, 2019 European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Case Writing Competition. In August 2017, a memo written by an engineer at Google LLC (Google) was leaked to the public, revealing fractured communication and leadership at Google. Labelled an “anti-diversity manifesto” by its detractors, the memo set off a public controversy over the causes of gender disparities in tech and the limits of free speech within organizations. With ideological divisions across the company, open disdain expressed between colleagues, and the credibility of leaders at a low, the new vice-president of diversity needed to establish trust and candour among the employees and move the company forward.
HBA Job Offer Negotiation is a role play between a job applicant who is graduating from an undergraduate business school and a recruiter from a global consulting firm. It is intended to illustrate the importance of preparation and planning; integrative negotiation in the context of job offers, and specific behaviours that contribute to effective negotiation. To be used with 9B16C043.
Negotiation skills benefit everyone in a management position — not just sales and procurement executives. While a lot of training is indeed dedicated to these functions, negotiation happens in the daily lives of all people. Some employees possess a natural talent for deal making, but training can still make them better at leadership, collaboration and big-picture thinking. Being an effective negotiator is not about shouting demands and putting on a good poker face. It requires an understanding of negotiation techniques, developed interpersonal skills and a commitment to developing a knowledge-driven negotiation strategy. To reach agreements that can be implemented successfully, negotiators must be prepared. Long before anyone comes to the negotiating table, they should know their goals, their alternatives, and what they may be willing to give up to meet their objectives. They must also understand the other side’s position and objectives and anticipate ways in which these can be met. In the corporate world, negotiation is typically about creating value by aligning resources, and non-monetary issues often prove to be key in negotiating acceptable outcomes. Negotiation training seeks to make professionals better at their jobs by helping them develop the ability to lead a collaborative process that aims to achieve the best outcome for everyone while developing high-quality relationships.
The Water Cooler case is support to a DVD (Windows Media Player) depicting Geoff Mueller's first day at work at the fictitious company called Ginko. The first part of the DVD details the day through the eyes of the many employees at Ginko and how they view Geoff. The second part shows how Geoff Mueller personally experienced that day. The two perspectives are entirely different. The Water Cooler DVD is available, product # 7B08M024.
Linlin Chen, a sales manager at Allnation Import and Export Co. Ltd. is in her office looking at the revenue reports for her sales in the past three months. Her numbers are very good, and she knows she is about to be rewarded with a promotion and the opportunity to become a shareholder in the company. Chen has been thinking about becoming an entrepreneur for some time. As she weighs in the risks and the opportunities, she realizes that she needs to make a decision within nine days when she will be asked to become a shareholder in the company.
Shift the focus from business functions to business issues and transform the static, hierarchical organization into the dynamic, responsive enterprise and you're on the leading edge of management thinking today.
Job Offer Negotiation is a role play between a job applicant who is graduating from an MBA program and a recruiter from a global consulting firm. It is intended to illustrate the importance of preparation and planning; integrative negotiation in the context of job offers, and specific behaviors that contribute to effective negotiation. To be used with 9B05C012.
Leo Burnett Company Ltd. is a global advertising agency. The company is working with one of its largest clients to launch a new line of hair care products into the Canadian and Taiwanese test markets in preparation for a global rollout. Normally, once a brand has been launched, it is customary for the global brand centre to turn over the responsibility for the brand and future campaigns to the local market offices. In this case, however, the brand launch was not successful. Team communications and the team dynamics have broken down in recent months and the relationships are strained. Further complicating matters are a number of client and agency staffing changes that could jeopardize the stability of the team and the agency/client relationship. The global account director must decide whether she should proceed with the expected decision to modify the global team structure to give one of the teams more autonomy, or whether she should maintain greater centralized control over the team. She must recommend how to move forward with the brand and determine what changes in team structure or management are necessary.
Blinds To Go is a manufacturer and retailer of customized window coverings. The company has been steadily expanding the number of stores across North America. The vice chairman is concerned with the lack of staff in some of these newly expanded stores. With plans of an initial public offering within the next two years, senior management must determine what changes need to be made to the recruitment strategy and how to develop staff that will help them achieve the company's growth objectives.
Blinds To Go, a small retail fabricator of custom-made blinds, is looking to for the best talent it could to help them achieve their aggressive expansion goals. Emphasis was put on establishing internal programs that would groom candidates for senior management positions. Despite the temptation to bring in a vice-president from outside the company, the company believed it was in their best interest to develop and promote talent from within. This is a supplement to the Blinds To Go - Wanted: People To Lead Explosive Growth (A) case, (product number 9B01C002).
The president of Blinds To Go, a small retail fabricator of custom-made blinds, announces his plans of expanding the business across North America one region at a time. With substantial backing from an investment firm, the business has quintupled its revenues in less than two years and is looking to expand aggressively across the United States. However, the company has experienced significant turnover in its senior management positions. The company struggles with the issue of how to get and keep the senior management talent needed to achieve the growth the company wants.
The founder and only employee of Montreal-based Drawn and Quarterly, a company that published comic books and graphic novels, wondered whether there were changes he should make in how he ran his company. He loved his job; he was working with excellent cartoonists, and he enjoyed being his own boss. He wanted to invest in new projects, but his ability to do so depended on getting enough revenue from sales. He recently made a substantial investment in the publication of an anthology of international comics and knew this investment could put the company at risk. There were many factors for him to consider in planning the growth of this small company: management preferences in strategic growth, marketing in entrepreneurial firms, the comic book industry and the management of small companies in cultural industries.
OP4.com, an Internet portal for teenagers, had just celebrated six months of existence. The co-founders of OP4.com knew that the internal culture had to reflect the identity of its Web site, so they wanted to cultivate a savvy, hip staff. They used unique methods to evaluate a prospect's fit into the company and some unorthodox training and feedback systems. With profitability being the next key step, they had to determine how to maintain this culture through the next stage of growth; one which would result in the creation of business units and formal reporting structures for staff.
The technology deployment specialist of the Adelaide District School Board needed to make immediate changes to the purchasing system to respond to service demands. The current system was not widely accessible or user-friendly and was creating heavy workloads and the need for overtime. Senior management recognized the advantages of implementing a system that would integrate the data processing of all functions, including human resources, inventory, finance, purchasing, etc., and gave her the mandate to find an integrated system and develop a proposal for its implementation. In addition to finding a system that would meet these criteria, she had to consider the conflicting interests of different users, a new system that had been implemented in the finance department, and the ongoing changes in the organization.