A632.1.4.RB - Multistage Decision-Making

Leaders are faced with many hard decisions in today’s ever-growing industries. The US President Dwight D. Eisenhower evidently once said: ‘the most urgent decisions are rarely the most important one’s (Krogerus, 2012, p. 10).  As leaders we are called to make the right decision at the correct time. Napoleon Bonaparte said that, “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide” (Roberto, 2002). It is human nature to make decisions, from when to start dinner to when to start your own business. A good decision-making process that I just learned about is the Eisenhower matrix begins with breaking down the problem and deciding how to progress. The top half of the chart shows what tasks you can do, and the bottom half shows what tasks you can delegate. This matrix is a simple approach to understanding what tasks need attention now; what can be put off to later and what should be delegated to someone else.

Another resource available to a leader is the dynamic decision problems formula. The Wharton text explains a complex formula used by researchers to solve multistage problems.  This formula inputs the variables and probabilities to provide a solution with the greatest chance of success. This approach referred to as dynamic programming is aimed toward the idea that “a decision problem may involve a large number of stages…one need not enumerate and take expectancies of all possible contingent future realizations to arrive at an optimum decision policy” (Hoch, Kunreuther, Gunther, 2001). One-way a leader can narrow down their decision process is by asking these simple questions, such as the following: 1) Am I being myopic? 2) How appropriate is the starting analogy I'm using to solve a problem? 3) What are the penalties for making an error? And 4) what am I learning from the feedback I am receiving? (Hoch, Kunreuther, Gunther, 2001). The dynamic programming is a process for solving multistage decision problems that is widely credited to the mathematician Richard Bellman (Hoch, Kunreuther, Gunther, 2001). This complex, but effective approach is a great resource for making complex decisions. Even though I’m not in a position to utilize this equation in my current position, it will certainly be useful in the future.

As leaders we must be flexible to be able to think and make sudden decisions. A question to consistently ask ourselves is this: “does this decision outweigh the risk?” With the many resources made available to leaders, precise and well thought out decisions can reliably be achieved.

Reference:

Krogerus, M., & Tschappeler, R. (2012). The decision book: Fifty models for strategic thinking. New York: W.W. Norton &.

Roberto, M. (2002). Ivey Business Journal. Retrieved October 25, 2015, from http://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/making-difficult-decisions-in-turbulent-times/

Hoch, S.J., & Kunreuther, H.C. (2005). Wharton on making decisions. (1^st ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A631.1.5.RB - EcoSeagate

         Seagate Technology, Inc. has been the world’s leading independent manufacturer of rigid magnetic disks and disk drives for computers since the 1980s ("Seagate Technology, Inc." International Directory of Company Histories. 2000). Seagate Technology employs a total of 45,000 personnel (Max, 2006). The company continues to continue to strive for innovation and quality. One reason why the company has been so successful is due to it employees and how the company trained their high performance teams. According to Brown (2011), team development is a useful and successful vehicle for bringing about significant changes in a team.

         Developing high performance teams increases the communication, cooperation, and cohesiveness of work teams, resulting in increased organizational efficiency (Brown, 2011). To develop and encourage it’s employees, Seagate has created the ultimate team-building experience.  This program is extremely popular to its employees and is known as “Eco Seagate”. The company brings 200 high-performing employees to Queenstown, New Zealand (Max, 2006). This event is an all pay expenses to participate in a one of kind experience in which it tests all physical and emotional boundaries of endurance (Max, 2006). Seagate spend $9,000 person, that’s a total of $180,000 for 200 employees. The program boosts the employee morale, support office amity, and encourages teamwork (Max, 2006). The Eco Seagate is a week-long teambuilding program, which includes a 10-mile trek, 12- mile bike ride through mountain terrain, 3 mile in a kayak, rappelling down cliff and team building activities (Max, 2006). This is an effective way to keep morale and encourage innovative thinking within a team and in my views a great value to the company. It is important to remember that team development is only a part of an organization-wide change program that values participation, collaboration, and the maximization of the use of human resources (Brown, 2011).

         With an ever-changing world, with technology increasing at rapid pace, a company needs to focus on increasing productively and effectiveness. One-way Seagate is doing this is by developing it’s high performance teams. CFO Pope believes in this program, and states "I consider this an investment,"(Max, 2006). At the completion of the event, the employees reflected on the last week, in which people from across the country with different backgrounds came together to work as team to achieve all the objectives of the program.

         In my opinion, we can all learn from this program. In order to achieve greatness a leader must invest in its followers. A company must look to toward the future with new and fun ways to get its employees motivated like CEO Bill Watkins did. Tom Peters once said, “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”

Reference:

"Seagate Technology, Inc." International Directory of Company Histories. 2000, & "Seagate Technology, Inc." International Directory of Company Histories. 1994. (2000). Seagate Technology, Inc. Retrieved October 25, 2015, from http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Seagate_Technology_Inc.aspx

Max, S. (2006, April 2). Seagate's Morale-athon. Retrieved October 25, 2015, from http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2006-04-02/seagates-morale-athon

 Brown, Donald R (2011-01-11). Experiential Approach to Organization Development (8th Edition) (Page 278). Pearson HE, Inc.

A630.9.4.RB - Hiring and Recruiting

Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American software engineer, businessman, as well as the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. He served as Google CEO from 2001-2011. In a video interview titled Eric Schmidt on business culture, technology, and social issues. This interview gave the listener a great insight in the culture of Google and the description of Google being a self-managed company, due to their unique hiring practices. It is impressive to see uniqueness way on which Google had created an effective approach to hiring and maintaining the best and brightest employees. In my on professional opinion this a great way to ensure the company is hiring quality and talented employees. “Excellence is achieved by organizations that push risk taking and decision making down to the lowest possible level” (Brown, 2011, p. 224). This type of method takes courage and determination to implement this type leadership. As leaders we must be ready to be face with the high demands of the industry and be prepare to make those complicated decisions. Additionally, leaders must take in to consideration the risk versus the reward of this method of hiring, since this could backfire. In the Navy we constantly take calculate risk in the recruitment of new officers.  The applications go stringent process and not all applicant make it through the programs. This video is very useful and will provide a different point of view from a very successful person.

REFERENCES:

Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

McKinsey & Company (May, 2011). Eric Schmidt on business culture, technology, and social issues. Retrieved from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/eric_schmidt_on_business_culture_technology_and_social_issues

A630.8.4.RB - Build a Tower, Build a Team

The TedTalks video by Tom Wujec, titled Build a tower, build a team is extremely inspirational. Originally, Peter Skillman, formerly the VP of Designs at Palm, talked about an experiment he conducts with marshmallows and spaghetti and the surprising results he learned from one group. Tom Wujec incorporates this team building workshop and gained great insight into the qualities of high performance teams. Wujec (2011) is a big believer of this experiment, he states “I believe the marshmallow challenge is among the fastest and most powerful technique for improving a team’s capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport and incorporate prototyping, all of which lie at the heart of effective innovation.”

The Marshmallow Design Challenge is conducted with teams of four that each has 18 minutes to create the tallest freestanding structure possible with 20 pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, one piece of string and one marshmallow. One insightful fact, which Tom Wujec found, is that kindergartners performed better on the Spaghetti Challenge than MBA students (Wujec, 2010). I agree with this assessment; Skillman points out that this might be because the kindergartners don’t waste time in seeking power or they don’t sit around talking about the problem. Kids are performing better than adults because they teach other what they learned and they are a reminder of what you forgotten.The children also enjoyed building and try out different types of structure without wasting time.

       According to Wujec (2010), architects and engineers consistently built the tallest, most stable structures, while business school students were the lowest performers. Another interesting fact was that CEOs scored above average, but with an executive assistant they performed much better. In my observation, this is in alignment of the hierarchy of an organization. Executive assistants are in tune with the CEOs insuring they are on track and guiding them through their busy scheduled; they keep the flow of information and relay the CEOs vision down the chain. This is why the CEOs scored higher than if they were alone.

         This is a fun and interactive exercise that is low cost with little time to conduct. Facilitating this experiment is easy to understand and help individual work as a team. An outsider practitioner could utilize this resource to see how well teams are working in the company. This team project will help in communication enhancement and will get members getting to know each other a little better. This is a well balance way to conduct an intervention and develop intervention skills. According Brown (2011), one challenge for the OD practitioner is to try to develop a balanced intervention—one that considers member rights and well being along with improvements in productivity. The Marshmallow Design Challenge will help member work together at the same time improve productivity.

          In summary, The Marshmallow Design Challenge is an exercise that I look forward to incorporating in my department; but also incorporating it in my personal life as well. This exercise  can teach my children the fundamental of structures and most importantly how to work as a team.

References:

Brown ,D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development. (8th ed.). New Jersey:  Prentice Hall.

Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team | Video on TED.com. (February 2010). TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved October 04, 2015, from http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html