Business Studies

1. Read the article, “Mastering the Management System” (reading for the July 30th or July 31st class, see Section D for detail). This article discussed a 5-Stage closed-loop management system model. Your assignment shall focus on Stages 2 and/or 3 and/or 4.

2. Based on your working experience (your current and/or former company that you have worked at), identify and discuss effective/ineffective examples/management practices relating to the practices discussed in stages 2 and/or 3 and/or 4. In other words, what are the examples of effective/ineffective practices you observed pertaining to stages 2 and/or 3 and/or 4 of the Management system? You do NOT need to discuss examples of all 3 stages, just focusing on one or two stages is fine.

General Requirement

1. Each pair will be assigned to one topic to do a write up (see below).
2. Submit a 1 to 2 page write-up (font size: Times New Roman 12) with one or two optional additional pages of charts, figures, tables and references. Please submit the write-up at canvas on the assignment due date (see below).
3. In your write-up, when citing company examples, I encourage you to consider Asia based companies or the Asia operations of non-Asia based companies.
4. It is highly possible that you may need to share your write-up stories with other students at class that your write-up is due.
5. See below for the topics, requirements and due dates of each write-up.

ANSWER

Effective Management

Strategy is an integral part of effective management. Without a strategy, there is no plan; without a plan, everything would crumble, and there would be no organization. However, developing strategy is the beginning of the work. This is the first step to making the company work effectively. There are other steps that follow after that, such as translating the strategy. This is the second step to ensuring effective management (Kaplan & Norton, 2008). Managers should translate the strategy to ensure that all units of employees understand it and can be clearly communicated. If strategy is not effectively communicated, it leads to failure. I worked at COSCO shipping company, and this is one of their strengths. The managers ensure that the strategy is translated to the employees. The company does not create strategy and leaves it at that. It ensures that all the employees understand how it is going to affect them and the role they will play in making it effective.

One effective way of translating strategy I saw in COSCO is that the strategy was divided into different themes. For example, the company aimed at being the most efficient shipping company. This meant that employees had to work as a team. However, each sector has its own role, so instead of giving each department the whole company’s goals, each department was given their goals and how they are required to execute them (William, 2015). This made it easier for the employees to perform their roles. With each department doing their best to work towards their goal. Each department understood what they should be doing without being stressed about what the other department should be doing. This worked effectively as everyone understood their roles in achieving the company’s mission.

After translating the strategy and each department being educated on what is required from them to achieve the themes on the board, the next step is planning the operations. In stage two, the initiatives are short-term. To execute strategy, a company must also enhance the performance of the ongoing processes. This means that a company such as COSCO should pump up their operations and ensure that the shipments get to the customers on time, there are no delays, and the products get to the consumer within the promised time. This involves deconstructing the strategy and identifying the critical factors (Srivastava, 2017). For example, looking at the major causes of delayed shipments. Looking at this will help them change the processes and even make the necessary changes to ensure that the shipments get to the consumer in good time.

One ineffective way I saw this apply in COSCO is that after creating a strategy and translating it, the managers would sometimes fail to improve the processes and performance. For example, one time, they created a strategy to improve the amount of time it takes to ship materials. However, by that time, the company was dealing with high employee turnover, and most of the time, we were understaffed; instead of dealing with the root cause of the turnover and increasing employees, they ignored this step. This led to the strategy being null because they did not effectively follow the process (Ansoff et al., 2018). If they had first addressed the issues in the departments that were causing the high turnover rates and then enhanced the performance of the existing processes, the company would have been more productive.

References

Ansoff, H. I., Kipley, D., Lewis, A. O., Helm-Stevens, R., & Ansoff, R. (2018). Implanting strategic management. Springer.

Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (2008). Mastering the management system. Harvard business review, 86(1), 62.

Srivastava, A. K. (2017). Alignment: the foundation of effective strategy execution. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management.

Williams, C. (2015). Effective management. Cengage Learning.