Week 6

I would like to start by saying hello and thank you to all the readers. A couple classmates had mentioned that their blogs were being viewed by people other than just those in class. To add to this fact, some individuals are in different countries across the globe. I was surprised to see this is the case for my blog as well. Hello and thank you for reading my blog.

This week we began our live simulation. We made decisions for the first two rounds. Each round we faced a special decision to make. The first round we were asked if we would like to enter our company into the world of social media. Our company would create a presence on sites such as facebook or twitter. We decided this would be a good idea. At the same time we reduced our advertising budget. Our social media did well but this did not make up the difference in our reduced spending on advertising. We lost a little ground in the marketplace. The next period we were informed that distributors would not accept product within 12 months of expiration. We had a batch within 6 months of expiration. Our choices were to send the batch out and hope they would not notice but if they did we would have to pay for return shipping and producing a new batch. We could sell it to a “jobber” who would not mind the expiration date and we would pay an additional $50,000 to get our product on the shelves without any issues. Our final option was to pay $100,000 to ditch the batch and produce a new batch and avoid any issues. We chose to ditch the entire batch. We figured that if we tried to get it out without being noticed but it was that it was a gamble that may cost more money in the end and we also did not want bad press that would make customers question our brands quality and company’s ethics. We didn’t see any impact positive or negative but I guess this was the intent in making the decision we made.

Overall, the first rounds were good to get some experience under our belts but we did not make decisions that led to gains by our company. We are hopeful that after doing our situation analysis we will have more information to create and implement a successful strategy.

Also this week I got some interesting bits of information. Once again we were given examples of Drucker’s skill in predicting future events. I’m not saying he was a fortune teller. He said that to him it wasn’t difficult. He just took into account what has taken place in the past and took assessment of what was currently taking place to determine what would come. It sound simple but the true skill is to see how certain events impacted each other. This also showed me how valuable experience is. It is important to understand what is happening so you can sort of see around the next corner in business. This will allow you to take advantage of advances or new markets before your competition. Some people may have great instincts and a this will help them but experience is incredibly important.

Another bit that I got out of the readings this week had to do with leadership. Cohen made that point that good leaders don’t quit. They lead by example. If they come into the office early and leave late it shows that they feel what they are doing is important. If they don’t at least act like it is important why would their subordinates feel the business is important? I think of a coach in sports.

 

The good ones are the first in the building. Regardless of it being for a game, a practice, or coming back from the offseason they are the first there and the last one to leave. Their players see their dedication and for most of them they realize how important their preparation is in order to win or achieve their goals.

We also read about abandoning a product. In the life cycle of a product it may be necessary to abandon a product that was successful. There are different reasons you may need to abandon the product. I tried to think of a product that I had seen take place but I couldn’t. I did a little research of products this had happened to and found some examples but none that I was familiar with. Can any of my readers think of an example?