Essay-Marketing – Teamwork

Marketing- Communicationand Managerial Control

Answer these essayquestions:

1.   Identify acommunications difficulty that occurred when you used an electronic channel(Email or SMS) that you believe would not have occurred had you delivered themessage in a face-to-face meeting. What was there about the use of theelectronic channel that was at the heart of the problem that is not an issuewhen talking face-to-face? If you have an opportunity to send the same kind ofmessage again by an electronic means, what would you do differently, and why?

2.   Firms are becoming evermore dependent upon electronic communication channels for many reasons,including: virtual employees, growth of project complexity, the globalmarketplace, and the fact that customers can now come from everywhere. Do youbelieve that high quality virtual presence (video, audio, shared documents,etc.) is becoming more important? Explain your answer.

3.   It has been argued thatbureaucratic control systems are a holdover from a time when businesses,products, technologies, and society itself ran, and changed, at a far slowerpace than it does today. Due to the rapid growth of global competition, theacceleration of technology change, and the growing interconnectedness ofindividuals some believe that bureaucracies should be replaced by more agileand dynamic mechanisms. For example, statistical process control, one of anumber of tools and methods W. Edwards Deming successfully advocated afterWorld War II, strived to improve quality and productivity by removing sourcesof variation. Detractors assert that business in todays agile world changestoo quickly for statistical process control to be useful. Attack or defend theposition that the basic ideas of bureaucratic control systems are stillrelevant in todays world, and support your argument.

4.   Some argue that thetraditional role of managers and bureaucratic control systems are in conflictwith the principles and processes of self-management and self-designing teams.It has been suggested that managers need to change to be more like coaches inorder for such agile teams to be effective. Attack or defend this idea andsupport your position.