Reference no: EM132273467

Team Task: Decision Making

I. Introduction

Scan today's headlines, and you'll probably find an example of how a bad business decision has cost an organization time, money, and resources, resulting in lost revenues, bad publicity, and possibly even lawsuits.

All organizations - from Ford Motor Company to the sandwich shop on the corner - rely on their managers to expertly solve problems and make sound decisions. Yet, not all decisions turn out for the best. As part of their productivity and improvement processes, managers need to master proven methods for analyzing problems and making decisions.

II. Purpose

In this activity, your group will choose an actual example of a bad business decision, and then, as a group, you will work through the six-step decision-making process to reimagine a different approach that the organization could have taken.

This exercise provides an opportunity for students to apply problem-solving techniques to an urgent and important real-world problem. Through this process, you will start to understand the pressures managers face every day in the course of meeting organizational goals, satisfying customers, and maintaining a good reputation for the company.

III. Skills Used

In this group project, you will have the opportunity to practice valuable managerial skills, including:

• Teamwork: working cooperatively with others to produce innovative solutions and achieve goals.

• Systems Thinking/Organizational Awareness: providing analysis and solutions to problems and issues that account for the interactions of all systems and organizational entities involved.

• Problem solving: Resolving an issue by defining it, collecting and analyzing information, and using logic and judgment to arrive at a solution.

• Decision-making: taking action after considering available facts, constraints, and probable consequences.

IV. Getting Started

To begin the project, your team will need to identify several examples of business decisions that have been documented in the news so that you can choose the one you will use as the subject for your project. Try to choose something relatively current, perhaps from the last 10 years.

Look for a major business event that was clearly described and thoroughly analyzed by journalists and business practitioners. Team members may want to do this research collectively, or you may want to come up with options as individuals, then share them with the group and have the group choose the best option.

Either way, look for a significant, weighty business decision, and try to find a story that intrigues all members of the group.

Once you've chosen a scenario to explore, dig in to the facts of the case as a group. Then imagine that you can go back in time and act as the management team faced with making the exact same decision. Work through the six-step decision-making process to determine what you would have done if you were the management team.

What information would you want to have? What factors would you consider in making the decision? Most important of all, did you arrive at the same decision, or has your group concluded that a different choice might be better? Your conclusions will be presented in a group slide presentation.

The rubric for this assignment is available for your review. Some milestones you should consider setting for this activity are identifying potential subjects for your projects, choosing a subject for your project, working through the six steps, and completing the final deliverable, which includes a slide presentation with your set of recommendations..

V. Activity Steps

Step 1: Your team should start searching for a suitable subject for your project. Remember, you are looking for a business decision made within the last 10 years that was thoroughly documented and analyzed in news sources or in management journals. Or, your group may decide to do this preliminary research as individuals, and set a date to hold a second meeting when you can discuss your options and
choose your example. Either way, your group will need extensive background information on the company and context under which the original decision was made in order to complete the assignment.

Step 2: Once everyone is familiar with the facts of the chosen business situation, you will meet again to reenact the decision-making process. Acting in the roles of the managers at that organization who had to make that specific decision, group members should work through the six-step model from the group's own perspective. Groups should define the problem, generate alternative solutions, evaluate the options to select an appropriate solution, and so on. Just keep in mind that you can only work from the same facts that were available to the real management team at the time. You cannot incorporate any of the knowledge that was revealed afterward.

Step 3: To complete the assignment, your team will work collaboratively to create a slide presentation of your results, using the presentation software of your choice (PowerPoint, Prezi, etc). In your presentation, your group will need to describe the background of the original decision, as well as the outcomes of the decision. (Remember to cite your sources of information.) You will then want to illustrate the process your team went through in using the six-step method to reimagine the decision.

What did you discuss at each step of the decision process? What information did you have or feel you needed? What was your final decision, and why? How does it differ from the real decision? Do you think the outcomes would have been different if your group's decision had been implemented? Finally, your presentation should conclude with one or more insights that team members learned about the decisionmaking process from this activity.

Some examples of bad organizational decisions

1) JC Penney CEO's decision to drop "fake prices" - 2012 (Ron Johnson)

2) Martin Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals raising pharmaceutical price

3) Decision of Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, to change structure to a "holacracy"

4) Shigehisa Takada, CEO, Takata Corp, decision to not acknowledge faulty airbags

5) Reed Hasting's, CEO of Netflix, decision to split its services in two

6) Uber CEO deciding to pay ransom to hackers and not notify users