MBA 715 - Reflections on Module 2 Concepts

Week two is wrapping up, and it’s been challenging. Our focus this week continued further into understanding the creation phase of a new business. We also looked at ethics in the workplace. Here’s this week’s questions to address…

What can a leader do to promote innovative ideas from workers? What role does a leader play in generating creative ideas? Explain why you believe this.

The most important thing a leader can do is empower his employees to be creative. The employees also need to be incentived in order to encourage innovation. In a previous company, this was encouraged by the leadership of the company by providing bonus checks each quarter to employees that came up with innovative ideas. There was criteria set up for this and employees knew how the judgments were made. Leaders, as visionaries, need to encourage their employees to “take an idea and run with it.” Employees who are encouraged to run with ideas and develop them will often become leaders themselves, as their esteem is built through the process.

Why is it important for an effective leader to be cognizant of the functional content areas of business when they are not his or her area of expertise?

An effective leader is aware of his strengths and weaknesses. He needs to have at least a basic understanding of all the areas in his realm. If it’s not an area of expertise, he still needs to have a general understanding in order to know if things are getting done or not. It is also helpful so that he can pull in the people with strengths in those areas so that he can get more accomplished.

You and your coach discussed tactics of obtaining information and data from within an organization. What can a leader do to strengthen the informal culture of an organization to make data more easily available to those within the company?

The leader needs to encourage people not to be siloed. People need to feel secure in their position enough that they are comfortable not keeping information to themselves. The leader needs to strengthen the employees comfort level so that they will openly share information between the team members. It is also important for the leader to educate his team about the importance of sharing info and how it makes the whole team more effective.

What is the impact on obtaining needed data if you were working in organizations in each of the four different waves. Is the ability to obtain data in companies that operate in different waves of change a challenge? Explain how data access or collection may vary between the waves of change.

I work in a company that has information spread across a couple of different change waves. We have acquired a number of companies over the years, and sometimes when you bring in these companies, their legacy IT (or complete lack thereof) can take some adapting to bring into our technology. Some of our companies still work in the industrial wave and do everything off of paper. Most are working in the information wave and moving towards the judgment wave. In the retail sector, many of our retail customers are providing large amounts of data electronically in the understanding that we will share our industry data back to them so that we all have a better understanding of the marketplace.

April 8, 2007 | Filed Under MBA 715 

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