Case -01 Questions 1. What management skills did jack demonstrate as a marketing manager at the travel product company? What management skills did he demonstrate as a VP at the consumer product firm? 2. Should Jack have taken the special assignment offered him by the consumer products? What kinds of skills was the president of overseas operations thinking about when he offered the assignment to jack? 3. What management skills would have helped jack avoid the catastrophe that befell his project at the consumer-electronics firm?
Question-1:
What management skills did Jack demonstrate as a marketing manager at the travel products company? What management skills did he demonstrate as a VP at the consumer products firm? Answer-1: At the travel products company, as a marketing manager Jack was able to demonstrate a few management skills that helped in his success at the company, will help to achieve the organizational goal. He was able to show his technical, conceptual, diagnostic, and decision making skills. Moreover, his ability to plan, organize, and lead, control, communicate also helped him to come up with a new product. These skills enabled Jack to effectively hold this position within the company efficiently. First, he recognized that new products were the best route for the company and for him personally. He then quickly made the decision to devote his time and energy to this endeavor. Then From my point of view, I also feel that he had to use technical skill because he was heading projects where new products were being created. In order to lead these projects, he would certainly need some technical expertise about the items that were being made. He also had strong conceptual skills, recognizing that the chair his team was creating would be a major success. As vice president of a consumer products firm, Jack was able to spot promising items in the company’s new product pipeline. Because of his ability to monitor and evaluate the products, as well as his technical and conceptual abilities, Jack quickly gained the attention of upper management at the company. This time Jack showed a great deal of decision-making skills that are required at all levels of management. His ability to recognize that products like the oral-hygiene rinse for dogs would be a success and how this would benefit the company showed that he could see the “big picture”. However, it is required more at the top-level of management. A manager must be able to make quick and correct decisions. Jack must also be able to implement his decision wisely.
Question-2: Should Jack have taken the special assignment offered him by the consumer products firm? What kinds of skills was the president of overseas operations thinking about when he offered the assignment to jack? Answer-2: From my opinion, I will suggest that Jack should have taken the special assignment offered to him by the consumer products firm. It’s pretty obvious Jack should have taken the special assignment overseas because he would have the opportunity for more management experience in an international setting. There are some reasons on the basis of which the president of overseas operations thinking about when they offered the assignment to jack:
The upper management of the company were impressed by Jack’s current management skills and wanted to give him a chance to learn more from other managers within the company, enabling him to grow and to become more valuable to the company. He will learn from all areas of the business, learn more about time management, planning, inter-personal relations and decision making skills that he ended up needing in his last job as a divisional president. This would have been extremely valuable when and if jack became finally a division president. Instead, he took the job with the consumer electronics firm, made a bad decision and is facing the prospect of losing his job. Moreover, taking the overseas job would have required Jack to work with managers from every other area of the company. This would surely have improved his communication and interpersonal skills The president of overseas operations was obviously intrigued by Jack’s ability to spot successful products and wanted to use Jack’s skill to expand into overseas markets. Jack’s conceptual skill and decision making that was shown in his previous successes could have possibly led to success in these overseas markets as well. These would certainly come in handy as well when he became a division president.
Question-3: What management skills would have helped Jack avoid the catastrophe that befell his project at the consumer electronics firm? Answer-3: If Jack had been more effectively handle with the technical details and more knowledgeable, he may have been able to identify the problem earlier and take care of the problem. However, It would have also helped if he had stronger interpersonal and communication skills because his team hid the glitch from Jack, showing a lack of communication within his organization. Also, better interpersonal skills would have probably led Jack to be in better contact with the production line in Malaysia and he may have been informed of the glitch much sooner. Some other skills will help jack to solve the problem as: Skills Service Orientation - Actively looking for ways to help people. Social Perceptiveness - Being aware of others' reactions and understanding why they react as they do. Persuasion - Persuading others to change their minds or behavior. Judgment and Decision Making - Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one. Coordination - Adjusting actions in relation to others' actions. Active Learning - Understanding the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making. Monitoring - Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or organizations to make improvements or take corrective action. Critical Thinking - Using logic and reasoning to identify the
strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems. Time Management - Managing one's own time and the time of others. Complex Problem Solving - Identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions. Negotiation - Bringing others together and trying to reconcile differences.
Case – 02 Questions 1. Which forces Goldman Sash’s external environment have accounted most for “the fortunes of fate” that the company –indeed the investment banking industry –has experienced since 2008? 2. Explain the roles of Goldman’s partners, both as owners and employees, in forming and managing its internal environment. 3. In 2008, citing Goldman is one of the” top 20 most admired companies” in the united states, Fortune magazine characterized the firms culture as “an impossible to replicate mix of extreme aggression , deep paranoia ,individual ambition, and robot like teamwork, “judging from our case,, how valid do you regard this characterization? If you were a top manager at Goldman, how would you deal with the apparent conflict between ‘individual ambitions” an “robot like teamwork”?
Question-1: Which forces Goldman Sash’s external environment have accounted most for “the fortunes of fate” that the company –indeed the investment banking industry –has experienced since 2008? Answer-1: Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and is headquartered at 200 West Street in the Lower Manhattan area of New York City, with additional offices in international financial centers. The firm provides mergers and acquisitions advice, underwriting services, asset management, and prime brokerage to its clients, which include corporations, governments and individuals. The firm also engages in market making and private equity deals, and is a primary dealer in the United States Treasury security market. According to the text book, during 2008, Goldman Sachs faced the under of the global financial crisis. Because of this global financial crisis, Goldman Sachs lost ten percent of its workforce or cut more than three thousand of its coveted jobs. Not only the loss of workforce and coveted jobs, but also the loss of the stake-holders. Some of the nervous investors sold off their shares. That caused the stock price of Goldman Sachs fallen about 50 percent from the highest price which was 247.92 dollars. Under the influence of this external environment, Goldman Sachs decided to transform itself from an investment bank into a holding-company bank. Before this transformation, Goldman has epitomized a high-risk, high-return culture. However, when it became a holding-company bank, it no longer kept this high-risk, high-return culture. The external environment are those factors that occur outside of the company that cause change inside organizations and are, for the most part, beyond the control of the company. Customers, competition, the economy, technology, political and social conditions and resources are common external factors that influence the organization. Even though the external environment occurs outside of an organization, it can have a significant influence on its current operations, growth and long-term sustainability. Ignoring external forces can be a detrimental mistake for managers to make. As such, it is imperative that managers continually monitor and adapt to the external environment, working to make proactive changes earlier on rather than having to take a reactive approach, which can lead to a vastly different outcome The external environment is everything outside an organization's boundaries that might affect it Included in the external environment that surrounds an
organization, is the economic dimension, which encompasses the overall health and stability of the economic climate that the company operates in .
In the case of Goldman Sachs, the firm was inevitably touched by the global financial crisis (following the collapse of the housing bubble in December 2007), and was forced to convert from an investment bank to a holdingcompany bank in 2008 (Griffin, 2013, p. 3-7e). Although executives attempted damage control, there were factors in play beyond their control, causing Goldman Sachs company stock price to fall approximately 50% at the height of the financial collapse. Actions in the 2007–2008 mortgage crisis During the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, Goldman was able to profit from the collapse in subprime mortgage bonds in the summer of 2007 by shortselling subprime mortgage-backed securities. Two Goldman traders, Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum, are credited with being responsible for the firm's large profits during the crisis. The pair, members of Goldman's structured products group in New York, made a profit of $4 billion by "betting" on a collapse in the sub-prime market, and shorting mortgagerelated securities. By summer 2007, they persuaded colleagues to see their point of view and convinced skeptical risk management executives. The firm initially avoided large subprime writedowns, and achieved a net profit due to significant losses on non-prime securitized loans being offset by gains on short mortgage positions. The firm's viability was later called into question as the crisis intensified in September 2008. On October 15, 2007, as the crisis had begun to unravel, Allan Sloan, a senior editor for Fortune magazine, said: So let's reduce this macro story to human scale. Meet GSAMP Trust 2006-S3, a $494 million drop in the junk-mortgage bucket, part of the more than halfa-trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities issued last year. We found this issue by asking mortgage mavens to pick the worst deal they knew of that had been floated by a top-tier firm – and this one's pretty bad. It was sold by Goldman Sachs – GSAMP originally stood for Goldman Sachs Alternative Mortgage Products but now has become a name itself, like AT&T and 3M.
This issue, which is backed by ultra-risky second-mortgage loans, contains all the elements that facilitated the housing bubble and bust. It's got speculators searching for quick gains in hot housing markets; it's got loans that seem to have been made with little or no serious analysis by lenders; and finally, it's got Wall Street, which churned out mortgage "product" because buyers wanted it. As they say on the Street, "When the ducks quack, feed them." On September 21, 2008, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two major investment banks in the United States, both confirmed that they would become traditional bank holding companies, bringing an end to the era of investment banking on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve's approval of their bid to become banks ended the ascendancy of the securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and capped weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp. According to a 2009 BrandAsset Valuator survey taken of 17,000 people nationwide, the firm's reputation suffered in 2008 and 2009, and rival Morgan Stanley was respected more than Goldman Sachs, a reversal of the sentiment in 2006. Goldman refused to comment on the findings. The forces in Goldman Sachs’s external environment that accounts most for “the fortunes of fate” are the economic dimension, the sociocultural dimension and the regulators that are part of the task environment. For the economic dimension is when Goldman Sachs was in time of a global financial crisis, which made some of the investors at jittery and nervous and so they begin to sell off their shares until the company’s stock price fell in half. After they transitioned from an investment bank to a holding – company bank and the big external force were the regulators; like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the sociocultural dimension. When they transitioned, they differed from their high-risk, high- return culture because at the time they needed to respond to the changes of customs and values in their society and their company, which is the reason why they became a holding-company bank. They adjust to whatever happens in their environment and is one of the reasons why Goldman Sachs’s has been able to survive for so long in the financial market.
Question-2: Explain the roles of Goldman’s partners, both as owners and employees, in forming and managing its internal environment. Answer-2: The internal environment of an organization refers to events, factors, people, systems, structures and conditions inside the organization that are generally under the control of the company. The company's mission statement, organizational culture and style of leadership are factors typically associated with the internal environment of an organization. As such, it is the internal environment that will influence organizational activities, decisions and employee behavior and attitudes. Changes in the leadership style, the organization's mission or culture can have a considerable impact on the organization. The internal business environment comprises of factors within the company which impact the success and approach of operations. Unlike the external environment, the company has control over these factors. It is important to recognize potential opportunities and threats outside company operations. However, managing the strengths of internal operations is the key to business success. As owners, Goldman’s partners helped the company form its internal environment by investing their own money and handling the company’s assets long term. As owners they also help by leading as example for their employees by at first showing their values in high-risk high reward and hard work and then recruiting employees with the same values. This will help
shape the future of the corporate culture by recruiting the certain and specific employees. Their recruiting process is a very gruesome task but is a very big part of Goldman Sachs’s strategy to further shape the company’s internal environment The role of company leadership is an essential internal factor. Goldman’s leadership style and other management style impact organizational culture. Often, firms provide a formal structure with its mission and vision statements. Some cultural implications which help Goldman’s partners, both as owners and employees, in forming and managing its internal environment result from leadership approaches are:
Value of employees The positive or negative nature Effectiveness of communication level of family-friendliness
Partner’s Responsibility
Assist in development of technology Distribute tasks among employees Respond to client requests Help execute developmental processes such as, performance manage ment, diversity, and analytics Prioritize day to day issues Partner with colleagues to ensure Stephany Fernandez
The strength of employees is also an essential internal business factor. Check if employees are motivated, hard-working and talented. They will produce better results compared to an unmotivated and less talented workforce. The processes and relationships between and within departments can also improve effectiveness and efficiency. Employees Responsibility
Specialist Roles Participate in projects to: o design new system changes, o improve current work processes, o increase controls o reduce cost Advanced Specialist
Qustion-3: In 2008, citing Goldman is one of the” top 20 most admired companies” in the united states, Fortune magazine characterized the firms culture as “an impossible to replicate mix of extreme aggression , deep paranoia ,individual ambition, and robot like teamwork, “judging from our case,, how valid do you regard this characterization? If you were a top manager at Goldman, how would you deal with the apparent conflict between ‘individual ambitions” an “robot like teamwork”? Answer-3: In my opinion, Fortune magazine paid Goldman Sachs an impressive compliment with its characterization of the financial institution’s strategy. This statement coincides with Lisa Endlich’s quote about the company’s internal culture, as she stated: “You have to win every head-to-head contest with everybody else in the company who wants what you want, but—and here's one of those troublesome contradictions—“nothing will derail you faster than not being a team player” (Endlich qtd in Griffin, 2013, p. 3-7e). In my view, a person can have their own personal goals and ambitions, yet those objectives can align with the organization’s team-oriented culture if managers apply effective motivational strategies.
