Week# 4 1. Using specific examples from your personal / professional life as well as specific theories from the text, please react to Peter Drucker's article, "Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself" posted in the Readings for the Week.  What can you take from this article to use in your own organization? What do you consider your most significant leadership trait? (200 words) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2712.html 2. Identify a person or persons who you consider a leader. What types of power do they use to accomplish their goals? How can you use these same types of power in your life? (200 words) Week# 5 1. What does it take to be an effective communicator? Citing specific examples from the readings and your own experiences, who is the best communicator you know? Why do you consider that person to be so? (200 words) 2. Discuss some of the issues (positive and negative) that you have found in group decision making. What are some of the pros and cons and how, in your personal experiences, have you handled them? (200 words) ORGB 2008 Case Assignment CHAPTER 10: DECISION MAKING BY INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS [File contains 1 case with quiz] 3M’s Conundrum of Efficiency and Creativity Well-known innovative companies, like Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), that are successful share at least four fundamental characteristics: (1) Putting people and ideas at the heart of the management philosophy. (2) Giving people opportunities and latitude to develop, try new things, and learn from their mistakes. (3) Building a strong sense of openness, trust, and community throughout the organization. (4) Facilitating the mobility of talent within the organization. 3M believes in the power of ideas and individual initiative; and recognizes that entrepreneurial behavior will continue to flourish only if management is willing to accept and even applaud well-intentioned failure. Innovation, the traditional hallmark of 3M’s business operations and success, is a process that thrives on multiple, diverse, independent and rapid experimentation, in a failure-tolerant environment that values and accommodates constructive conflict.  The creative and innovative orientation of 3M and in particular a tolerance for failure or defects or errors came under serious attack in late 2000. When former General Electric executive James McNerney took over as CEO of 3M in December 2000, he immediately began implementing Six Sigma. Management programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems in work processes, and then use rigorous measurement to reduce variation, eliminate defects, and increase efficiency. When initiatives such as Six Sigma become embedded in a company’s culture, as they did at 3M, creativity and innovation can easily get squelched. In mid-2005, when McNerney departed 3M to take the CEO’s job at Boeing, he left his successors with the difficult question of whether the relentless emphasis on efficiency had made 3M a less creative company. Accordin.

1. Week# 4
1. Using specific examples from your personal / professional
life as well as specific theories from the text, please react to
Peter Drucker's article, "Managing Knowledge Means Managing
Oneself" posted in the Readings for the Week. What can you
take from this article to use in your own organization? What do
you consider your most significant leadership trait? (200 words)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/2712.html
2. Identify a person or persons who you consider a leader. What
types of power do they use to accomplish their goals? How can
you use these same types of power in your life? (200 words)
Week# 5
1. What does it take to be an effective communicator? Citing
specific examples from the readings and your own experiences,
who is the best communicator you know? Why do you consider
that person to be so? (200 words)
2. Discuss some of the issues (positive and negative) that you
have found in group decision making. What are some of the pros
and cons and how, in your personal experiences, have you
handled them? (200 words)
ORGB 2008
Case Assignment
CHAPTER 10:
DECISION MAKING BY INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS
[File contains 1 case with quiz]
3M’s Conundrum of Efficiency and Creativity
Well-known innovative companies, like Minnesota Mining and
Manufacturing (3M), that are successful share at least four
fundamental characteristics: (1) Putting people and ideas at the

2. heart of the management philosophy. (2) Giving people
opportunities and latitude to develop, try new things, and learn
from their mistakes. (3) Building a strong sense of openness,
trust, and community throughout the organization. (4)
Facilitating the mobility of talent within the organization. 3M
believes in the power of ideas and individual initiative; and
recognizes that entrepreneurial behavior will continue to
flourish only if management is willing to accept and even
applaud well-intentioned failure. Innovation, the traditional
hallmark of 3M’s business operations and success, is a process
that thrives on multiple, diverse, independent and rapid
experimentation, in a failure-tolerant environment that values
and accommodates constructive conflict.
The creative and innovative orientation of 3M and in particular
a tolerance for failure or defects or errors came under serious
attack in late 2000. When former General Electric executive
James McNerney took over as CEO of 3M in December 2000, he
immediately began implementing Six Sigma. Management
programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems
in work processes, and then use rigorous measurement to reduce
variation, eliminate defects, and increase efficiency. When
initiatives such as Six Sigma become embedded in a company’s
culture, as they did at 3M, creativity and innovation can easily
get squelched. In mid-2005, when McNerney departed 3M to
take the CEO’s job at Boeing, he left his successors with the
difficult question of whether the relentless emphasis on
efficiency had made 3M a less creative company.
According to management guru Tom Peters, McNerney
implementation of Six Sigma at 3M more or less closed the lid
on entrepreneurial behavior. Vijay Govindarajan, a professor
at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, observes that when
more emphasis is placed on programs such as Six Sigma and
Total Quality Management, the more likely it is that
breakthrough innovations will be harmed. Art Fry, the inventor

3. of 3M’s Post-It notes, says, you have to go through 5,000 to
6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business but the Six
Sigma program would ask why not eliminate all that waste and
just come up with the right idea the first time?
However, others have made the argument that Six Sigma should
not be criticized indiscriminately.
Six -Sigma is argued to be very useful in reducing waste in
virtually all processes where there is a known result that must
be achieved.
Unfortunately, the deployment of Six Sigma at 3M was in an
environment of innovation where the target is unknown. The
problem is not with the methodology itself but rather with how
it is applied and what specifically it is applied to if managed
effectively, Six Sigma can absolutely co-exist with innovation.
Six -Sigma can eliminate mundane, repetitive, and tedious tasks
that impede creative thinking and innovation.
Six- Sigma focuses on efficiency and quality in order to
enhance profits, but the lifeblood of long-term profitability for
most, if not all, businesses is innovation. Indeed, to compete in
the coming decades, creativity is one process that can’t be left
for later .Still, turning ideas into commercial reality requires
persistence and discipline, and overall effectiveness ultimately
depends on top management being able to find the right balance
between corporate creativity and efficiency. Effective
innovation requires a delicate balancing act between play and
discipline, practice and process, creativity and efficiency, where
firms need to learn how to walk the fine line between
rigidity which smothers creativity and chaos where creativity
runs amok and nothing ever gets to market
Robert Carter, a consultant at Raytheon, indicates that the Six
Sigma process of define, measure, analyze, improve, control
(DMAIC) can lead to overanalyzing the situation, which can be

4. very detrimental when an idea begins to germinate. Six -Sigma
tries to replace subjectivity with objectivity and intuition with
data wherever possible. While this is appropriate for some
operations like administration, logistics, and manufacturing it’s
detrimental to exploratory research and design, which depend
on subjectivity and intuition. Creativity is seldom a logical
process, and Six Sigma is not a panacea.
Answer the below questions
1. How would you describe 3M’s efficiency and creativity
conundrum in terms of programmed and non-programmed
decisions?
2. How would you describe 3M’s efficiency and creativity
conundrum in terms of the rational and bounded rationality
models of decision making?
3. What role do intuition and creativity play in the decision
making that is evident in 3M’s efficiency and creativity
conundrum?
Read the Controversial Retention Bonuses at AIG case below
and answer the questions in a Word Document.
CASE STUDY: AIG
Controversial Retention Bonuses at AIG
American International Group (AIG),
a behemoth insurance and financial services company, became
notoriously famous
in early 2009 for the payment of $165 million in retention
bonuses to employees
in its Financial Products unit. This was the same unit that was

5. instrumental in
bringing AIG to its knees and necessitating the infusion of
billions of dollars
in U.S. Government bailout money. Although the near-collapse
of AIG was significantly influenced by “soured trades entered
into by the
company’s Financial Products division,” the operations of
other AIG units, such
as the financial gambles of its Investments unit, helped cripple
the company as
well.[1]
Rapidly mounting
financial losses had been occurring in the Financial Products
unit for some
time. Consequently, AIG decided to unwind the
business and shut it down. In early 2008, employees in the unit
were asked to
remain with the company through the shutdown and, essentially,
to work
themselves out of a job.[2]To entice talented employees to stay
and work, a
contractual retention bonus plan was instituted.[3]According to
a report in The Washington Post,
the Financial Products employees were repeatedly assured
that AIG would honor
these contractual obligations.[4]
The bonus plan was highly favorable to AIG’s Financial
Products employees, as there was no firm
connection to their job performance. The unit’s employees were
paid bonuses
totaling $423 million in 2007, despite a paper loss of $11.5
billion on toxic
real estate assets.[5]The 2008 bonus plan, which was approved
in March of that year just as the unit’s
losses were beginning to surface,[6] was “designed to kick in
without regard to paper losses.”[7] For 2008, paper losses on

6. the toxic real estate assets
ballooned to $28.6 billion, and total losses were more than $40
billion.[8]
According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who
was threatening legal action against AIG, seventy-three
Financial Products
employees received $1 million or more in bonus payments. The
top recipient,
identified by The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Poling,
received more than $6.4 million, whereas the next half-dozen
top bonus recipients got more than $4 million each. In addition,
another
fifteen employees received $2 million or more, and fifty-one
other employees
received $1 million or more.[9] “Of those people collecting
more than $1 million, eleven
have already left the company, Mr. Cuomo’s office said.”[10]
When the retention bonuses were paid in March 2009, the
U.S. Congress, President Obama’s administration, and the
public were outraged.
Under intense political pressure, AIG’s CEO Edward Liddy,
who was working for
only $1 a year, asked the “bonus recipients to cough up half
their pay, despite
fearing that resignations would follow.”[11]In defense of the
bonuses, however, Gerry Pasciucco, head of the Financial
Products unit, observed that the “top bonus recipient, Douglas
Poling, had successfully sold off several holdings in his
area of responsibility, infrastructure and energy investments.
He’s done an
excellent job at the task of unwinding his book, of realizing
value.”[12]
In the ensuing emotionally charged days, employees of the
Financial Products unit pondered what to do. According to one
account,
“employees have huddled in small groups in conference rooms

7. off the division’s
main trading floor in Wilton,
Conn., debating what to do. Some
have expressed worries about retaliation. One employee said he
had instructed
his wife to call the police in the event his identity became
known and a news
truck appeared at his home. Others commiserated that their
children have been
verbally abused in school. Employees have passed around
emails from colleagues
who opposed returning the payments.”[13]
Some Financial Products employees decided to return their
bonuses. Mr. Poling indicated he intended to return his
bonus.[14] “Fifteen of the top 20 recipients of the retention
bonuses
have agreed to give back a total of more than $30 million in
payments.”[15]
Others Financial Products employees opted to keep their
bonuses, perhaps the most notable being Jake DeSantis, a
Financial Products
unit executive who received an after-tax bonus of $742,006.40.
On March 25, 2009, in an Op-Ed contribution to the New York
Times, DeSantis published
an open letter to AIG’s CEO, Edward Liddy, wherein he
resigned from his AIG
position. His letter read in part:
After 12 months of hard work
dismantling the company—during which A.I.G. reassured us
many times we would be
rewarded in March 2009—we in the financial products unit have
been betrayed by
A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In
response to

8. this, I will now leave the company. ¼ I take this action after 11
years of dedicated,
honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform
my duties in
this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so.
Like you, I was
asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a
sense of duty
to the company and to the public officials who have come to its
aid. Having now
been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12,
14 hours a day
away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me
down.[16]
With respect to his intention to
not return the retention bonus, DeSantis wrote,
I have decided to donate 100 percent
of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment
directly to
organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the
global
downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe
that I at least
deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want
to see them
disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal
government’s
budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many
from the more
pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my
share of it
benefit those truly in need.[17]

9. DeSantis’s Op-Ed piece
stimulated much discussion regarding the proper response to the
retention bonus
fiasco. Did DeSantis do the right thing?
This case was written by
Michael K. McCuddy, The Louis S. and Mary L. Morgal Chair
of Christian Business
Ethics and Professor of Management, Collegeof Business
Administration,ValparaisoUniversity.
Discussion Questions
1. What types of work behaviors did AIG intend to
encourage through its retention bonus plan?
2. Which needs seem to be important to the employees of
AIG’s Financial Products unit?
3. using the model of the individual-organizational
exchange relationship, explain the relationship that employees
of AIG’s
Financial Products unit believed they had with the company.
How was this
exchange relationship violated?
4. Which motivation theory do you think has the most
relevance for understanding the responses of the Financial
Product employees to
the implementation and unraveling of the retention bonus plan?
Explain the

10. reasoning behind your answer.
5. The amount of compensation earned by executives—as
well as by professional athletes and famous actors/actresses and
musicians—often sparks emotionally charged debate. Do you
believe the $1
million plus retention bonuses received by seventy-three
employees of AIG’s
Financial Products was excessive? Why or why not?
6. What would you have done if you were one of the
seventy-three Financial Products employees who received a
retention bonus of $1
million or more? Explain the reasoning behind your answer.
Career Counseling & Vocational Rehabilitation (PY542)
Textbook Applying Career Development Theory to Counseling
Richard S. Sharf
1. Discuss the potential for conflict between the information-
providing aspect of career counseling and the goals & methods
preferred by most counselors. How might you, as a counselor,
try to resolve (or at least minimize) this conflict? (200 words)
2. Trait-and-Factor theory posits that people engaging in career
counseling need to accomplish three goals. What are they?
Which of them do you think would come most naturally to you
as a counselor? How do you imagine yourself implementing this
step? Which do you think you would find least congenial? Why?
(200 Words)
3. Often people’s abilities correspond with their preferences,
meaning that they incline toward occupations in which they are
likely to thrive. But sometimes this is not so. What issues does

11. such a discrepancy raise for a counselor? How would you
handle a client whose expressed desires were a poor fit with
her/his abilities? (200 words)
4. Study your own Strong (or SDS) results, using your two- or
three-point code type. How consistent is it? How well
differentiated? Assume the human services profession to have
an SEC or SEA code. How congruent are you with the field?
How might any incongruence affect your professional life? And
what, if anything, came as a surprise?
(200 words)