Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Marty Abbott: Team Building and Relationship Conflict

Go to any nearly geographic location in the US where there’s a high density of medium and larger sized businesses and you’ll find at least one small business focused on helping these corporations with “team building events”.  There’s a good chance that you are familiar with such businesses; they usually have some outdoor space dedicated to an obstacle course and have “camp counselors” who both help teams negotiate the obstacles and spark debate over various challenges the team is expected to accomplish. The courses are typically fun, the events challenging and the results for the team in the long term… well… inconsequential.

On closer inspection, this claim shouldn’t seem so surprising.  Our desired results are clear, at least to us: We hope build a “better functioning team”.  Often this means that we want to increase team cohesion through the fostering of shared identity born from shared experiences.  The more we know each other, the better we can operate.  The more time we spend together, the more likely we are to form a common identity and think of ourselves as a team.  The more our team thinks of itself as a single (or common) team, the lower our levels of internal relationship conflict.  The less relationship conflict we have in our team, the higher the level of team performance. 
The key to creating long term identity lies in the plural of the word “experience”.  A single experience simply will not foster long term identity for the team and will not produce the long term benefits we expect.  Our qualitative research indicates that leaders must consistently reinforce this identity through any of a number of activities.  One way to do this is to consistently reinforce (as in often – not once) team identity through shared experiences beyond the boardroom as in the case of an obstacle course.  Leaders can also create this identity through the creation of a compelling vision that transcends the team – focusing the team on transformational activities greater than any individual or even the sum of individuals within the team.  Such an approach also needs to occur repeatedly, as when leaders stop focusing on team identity development, the benefits of shared identity deteriorate.
Regardless of approach, identity must be nurtured over time if one wishes to harvest the benefits.  Team building is a journey, not a destination.
 Marty Abbott is a Managing Director of AKF Partners (www.akfpartners.com), an organization located in Fountain Hills, AZ that assists organizational teams resolve critical scale and availability issues by aligning organizational technology and product strategies with the needs of the business. He is also a Doctor of Management (DM) candidate at Case Western Reserve University and can be reached atmarty@akf.com.

Michael Fisher: First and Last

This past week kicked off the last semester of my classroom work in the DM/PhD program. This made me think back on the past two and a half years to when this journey started and I realized that I had written several reflection papers that first semester. Reading these papers again, I had a few observations that I thought note worthy.
In that first reflection paper, I highlighted three observations that I made during the first residency: multidisciplinary studies, self-directed study, and the purpose of reflection. As most would expect from a DM program the curriculum (http://weatherhead.case.edu/degrees/doctor-management/curriculum) spans a wide variety of disciplines ranging from collective action to complexity theory to global economics. This trend starts immediately with the first semester and continues throughout the program and also includes deliverables of qualitative and quantitative research projects. While we have spent significant amounts of time in the classroom discussing all of these topics we were and continue to be asked to explore our own interest. Often our research takes us into disciplines and topics that no course has prepared us for but the ability to teach ourselves is as important of a skill as grounded theory in qualitative research or regression analysis in quantitative research. While our time in the class draws to an end we can look back knowing that we are much broader and hopefully more critical thinkers but most importantly, in my opinion, is that courage and curiosity to pursue all the other knowledge that lays in our possible futures.
At this time again it is appropriate to reflect on reflecting. Two and a half years ago I wrote that “instead of either dismissing the EDM program for a couple of days in order to catch up on work and family obligations or immediately diving into the homework assigned for the next residency, this time spent thinking has given me an opportunity to bring the major concepts back into focus.” Unfortunately, I have never been one to keep a journal despite the genre of diaries and journals being one of my favorite for the first hand observations and unpolished narrative that it provides. And despite one of my former MBA colleagues keeping and later publishing his reflections from that pursuit (http://www.amazon.com/Physicians-Odyssey-MBA-Thomas-Stellato/dp/0750674164?tag=akpa-20) I still not keep up with my reflections during this program. Perhaps my contribution can be the spark for someone else to pursue this endeavor of self reflection.
Michael Fisher is a Managing Director of AKF Partners(www.akfpartners.com), an organization located in Fountain Hills, AZ that assists organizational teams resolve critical scale and availability issues by aligning organizational technology and product strategies with the needs of the business. He is also a student in the PhD in Management: Designing Sustainable Systems program at Case Western Reserve University and can be reached at michael@akf.com.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Stephan Liozu: Managing Complexity in Value and Pricing Management

Pricing is a complex process (Monroe, 1990; Nagle & Holden, 2002). Many industry managers consider pricing a headache and many firms have “thrown in the towel” on pricing. They complain that they have no control over prices since “the market sets the price and (they) have to figure out how to cope with it” (Dolan & Simon, 1996)Lancioni et al. (2005)proposed that pricing strategy has implications for stakeholders both within and outside the firm. For them, pricing is a difficult and complex process due to the plethora of internal and external economic and political influences that shape the firm’s pricing decisions. The tasks of price setting and implementation have numerous implications throughout the organization. These tasks involve “multidimensional processes affecting customers, products, cost recovery efforts, produce margin levels, customer retention, market share, and domestic and international sales” (Lancioni, et al., 2005, p. 125).
So what makes pricing so complex? Can pricing management be considered as a complex system? How do firms manage the complexity generated by the multidimensionality and multileveledness?
Our research work in the area of pricing management led us to conclude that one of the critical elements of the organizational journey towards pricing excellence is the organization capacity to change. Moving from a formula-based pricing orientation to a customer-value orientation requires deep changes and an overall organizational mobilization to achieve desired goals (Liozu, Boland, Hinterhuber, & Perelli, June 2011). This combination of change and complexity dimensions in pricing led us to the work of Richard Boyatzis and especially his 2006 paper on Intentional Change Theory from a complexity perspective.
Boyatzis refers to complex systems as “multi-level combination of systems that may behave in a way independent of any one of the component systems” (Boyatzis, 2006, p. 608). Later in his paper, he explores the aspect of his change theory that makes it a truly complex system: its multileveledness. We adopt these dimensions of system combination and multileveledness and apply to pricing management in organizations. We actually go one step further by stating that pricing is much more complex than that. Our figure below paints a complex picture. Complexity in pricing management is nested at various levels across multiple dimensions and cultures, and requires the convergence of multiple languages. Complexity is the result of complex interactions between internal sub-systems (functions and departments) exposed to the internal/external on-going opposition.
We conjecture that pricing management is multi-functional, multi-dimensional, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-leveled. Pricing requires the careful management of the multitude of agents involved in pricing decisions and the plethora of information that need to be consider to set price levels. Because all agents and actors act independently, tensions, conflicts, misunderstandings, difficult negotiations, and internal arguments are part of this complex price setting process. There is plenty of room for failure, for poor decision making and for break downs in the process. That is may be why most managers “throw in the towel”. 
Stephan Liozu is President & CEO of Ardex America Inc (www.ardexamericas.com), an innovative and high-performance building-materials company located in Pittsburgh, PA. He is also a PhD candidate in Management at Case Western Reserve University and can be reached atsliozu@case.edu.