The final project for this course is the creation of a decision-making and principles of management paper. As you continue on your path to earn a degree in business administration, you
The final project for this course is the creation of a decision-making and principles of management paper.
As you continue on your path to earn a degree in business administration, you will deepen your understanding of how effective management is a crucial aspect of overall business success, especially in today’s complex business world. As business and society continue to evolve, there will continue to be demand for managers who are able to organize their resources and strategically implement the functions of management to achieve the goals of an organization.
The final paper for the course is divided into two parts: Final Project One and Final Project Two. Both parts of the assessment will focus on decision making and the fundamental principles of management.
In Final Project One, you selected a successful company from the list provided in the Final Project One Document. You analyzed the company’s best practices and effective implementation of the fundamental principles of management.
In Final Project Two, with the help of your instructor, you will select a struggling company from the list provided below. You will analyze the company’s ineffective implementation of the fundamental principles of management. Once you analyze the struggling company, your task will be to make recommendations for a management improvement plan explaining how the company’s management team can improve in areas such as decision making, employee performance, and sustainability. Final Project Two consists of the selection of the struggling company (a non-graded task due in Module Five) along with one milestone, which will be submitted to scaffold learning and to ensure quality final submissions. This milestone will be submitted in Module Six. Final Project Two will be submitted in Module Eight.
In Final Project Two, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
- OL-215-01: Analyze how an organization’s goals influence organizational planning that informs strategic decision making
- OL-215-02: Analyze the functions of management and ethical principles for executing effective decision making in organizations
- OL-215-03: Apply management techniques that ensure the continuous improvement of personnel and business processes to measure organizational
performance - OL-215-04: Apply communication techniques aimed at increasing employee performance, thus achieving organizational goals and objectives
- OL-215-05: Illustrate the important connection between management and organizational culture
Prompt
The general manager has reviewed your analysis of a successful company and was impressed with your work. As a result, you have been asked to provide recommendations for a management improvement plan for a struggling company.
For the second part of the final project, you will focus on a struggling company and make your recommendations in a management improvement plan. Be sure to focus on the company at the time of their struggle. Your recommendations will show how management performance, employee perception, and organizational success intersect. You must select a company from this list of suggested companies. Resources related specifically to the struggling companies listed are provided.
Enron
- Enron Case Study – https://app.sophia.org/tutorials/enron-case-study
- Enron Scandal (4:48) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PEnWd4MetY
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
- Profile of a Struggling Company
- Assess how the management planning practices interfere with or prohibit the organization’s ability to optimally function. You could consider using the fundamental principles of management in your explanation.
- Describe how the employees’ perception and organizational culture have been impacted by management’s performance. You could consider the connections between management and its impact on culture.
- Explain how communication has played a part in management’s inability to increase employee performance. You could consider the connections to specific communication barriers that exist within the organization.
- Management Plan Recommendations: For this section of the summative assessment, you will make recommendations for the management improvement plan.
- Describe how implementing the fundamental principles of management will help to improve the management process within your company. You could consider the factors that interfere with or prohibit effective management.
- Identify how aspects of the fundamental principles of management will be implemented and communicated to all personnel within the company. You could consider thinking about this from a training standpoint.
- Describe how the application of the fundamental principles of management will lead to increased employee performance. You could consider what needs to improve the most to help increase employee performance.
- Explain how applying ethical principles to the fundamental principles of management would be sustained and monitored by the company. You could consider using the rational decision-making model to show how this process can help with ensuring long-term success.
- Conclusion: For this section of the summative assessment, you will provide a summary of your recommended changes to the management improvement plan using examples revolving around the fundamental principles of management.
a. Summarize how these management changes, based on the fundamental principles of management, will help to ensure organizational success. Be sure to provide examples of how these changes will have the most direct impact.
Milestones
Milestone One: Profile of a Struggling Company
In Module Six, you will submit a one- to two-page document that will provide a profile of your chosen struggling company. This milestone will serve as a rough draft and must cover the three critical elements in Part I of Final Project Two. You are expected to provide a minimum of two to three paragraphs for each of the three critical elements, which include: management planning, employee’s perception and organizational culture, and communication. This milestone will be graded with the Final Project Two Milestone One Rubric.
Final Submission: Management Improvement Plan for a Struggling Company
In Module Eight, you will submit Final Project Two. It should be a complete, polished artifact containing all of the critical elements of the final product. It should reflect the incorporation of feedback gained throughout the course. This submission will be graded with the Final Project Two Rubric.
Final Project Two Rubric
Guidelines for Submission: Final Project Two must be three to four pages in length (plus a cover page and references) with double spacing, 12-point Times New
Roman font, one-inch margins, and APA formatting. Include at least two references cited in APA format.
Attached is the completed assignment for Module 6. Feedback from the instructor from module 6 is below:
"you did a good job with your assignment this week. When you go back and make revisions to your work, make sure you are citing where you retrieved the information you noted in your work. I am looking at the first section of your paper. Other than that, it is perfectly fine"
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Enron
1. Profile
In 1985, Houston Natural Gas and Omaha, Nebraska's InterNorth merged to become the interstate pipeline business Enron. The Houston, Texas-based Enron was an energy trading and utilities conglomerate. Houston Natural Gas' former CEO Kenneth Lay engineered a merger with Enron and rose through the ranks to become the company's CEO and eventually its chairman. In 1999, Enron grew from being a pipeline company into having the most significant business site in the world thanks to its expansion into the broadband services unit and Enron online. By early 2000, it had grown to become the sixth-largest energy company in the world, with a hundred billion dollars in annual revenue, with each of its nineteen thousand workers generating $5.3 million. After only six months as CEO and as the driving force behind Enron's reorganization, Jeffrey Skilling resigned in August 2001. After he left, Enron's finances started to show signs of strain, and the company posted its first quarterly loss in four years, amounting to $618 million. In December 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy.
2. Management Planning
The company's downfall was exacerbated by poor management planning. Management planning is comprised of aspects of “planning,” “organizing,” “leading,” and “controlling” (Ghafoor, 2023). While the P-O-L-C model may have been followed initially, it became unbalanced as Enron's success and expansion caused a shift in emphasis.
As Enron crumbled, it became apparent that top executives like Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Rebecca had subverted the company's management principles for their benefit. They should have focused more on expansion and growth to develop and maintain ethical standards to ensure the company's long-term success. There needed to be more controls (PLOC) in vital areas like accounting policies and procedures. They should have adequately overseen the work of their subordinates and instead demonstrated better leadership.
Based on POLC's management principles, Enron's planning main objective was to avoid detection. Each target and metric was geared toward disguising the actual state of the company's finances. There was no morality or honesty. Vanity and greed were the driving forces behind everything. The company could not continue.
3. Employees' perception and organizational culture.
The organizational culture at Enron was toxic. Enron's senior management executives' unethical, greedy, and deceptive practices contributed to the company's toxic culture. The company's executives were driving it to ruin by neglecting to communicate with and trust its workers. Employees were hesitant to speak up for fear of retaliation from management, and those who did were either ignored or terminated when they questioned the company's policies and procedures.
Enron's demise can be directly attributed to the company's toxic culture. Lack of trust and communication between management and staff breeds an atmosphere of mistrust and secrecy, which encourages unhealthy levels of competition among employees (Du, 2020). Enron's executives made the atmosphere toxic by ignoring or firing anyone who questioned their actions.
The management at Enron accelerated the company's decline by encouraging an atmosphere of cutthroat competition and a mild form of tyranny. They muzzled employee innovation and input essential to a company's success.
4. Communication
One of the reasons why Enron failed was poor internal communication. Enron's management needed to communicate more adequately to inform employees of organizational operations. Management executives could hide the actual state of Enron's finances, mislead shareholders and analysts with a complex business plan, and employ dishonest accounting processes to falsify earnings since nobody else in the organization knew what they were doing. For a very long time, the senior management at Enron ignored the employees' concerns. Enron's administration failed to keep employees informed adequately and made an effort to keep the facts about the nefarious and fraudulent operations from them.
The vertical organization structure at Enron was a barrier to communication. Communication was one way- from top management to lower-level employees (Worren, 2019). Employees could not communicate upward, especially if it were criticism. Corrective feedback should have been sought. Communication with employees involved instilling constant pressure on them to perform to increase their revenue, forcing employees to use unethical practices.
References
Du, J. (2020). Communication and culture in multinational organizations. Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0253
Ghafoor, L. (2023). Quality Management models for implementation in organizations. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/6cvgu
Worren, N. (2019). Defining the vertical structure. Organization Design, pp. 170–191. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315145112-6
https://app.sophia.org/tutorials/enron-case-study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PEnWd4MetY
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