Case: MBA 504 eSkills for Management: Spring 2006

Rather than structure the course around a textbook or a set of lectures, I'm structuring the course around your laptop. What do you need to know about using it? What do you need to be able to do with it in order to prosper in today's business organizations?

The skills of information retrieval, manipulation, exchange, and presentation that you develop here are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills; you can take them from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel. You can take them home.

Underlying these skills is the computer technology, knowledge of which is not only transferable. It's daunting if not downright scary.

Pedagogy in this course

Project-based learning is a teaching and learning model that focuses on the central concepts and principles of a discipline, involves students in problem-solving and other meaningful tasks, allows students to work autonomously to construct their own learning, and culminates in realistic, student-generated products.

Could this be you?

The story thus far ...

Your mother didn't raise any fools. She told her sons, "Typing's for girls. Important men don't type. You'll have a secretary to do your typing and writing for you." She told her daughters, "Don't ever tell anyone you can type, or they'll make y

ou a secretary." So who's left to do the typing?

Now here you are, years later, in upper management. The boss just hired some fancy consultant to come in and make more work. The consultant is going to lead all the upper managers through a training course about, of all things, are you ready for this? ... e-business!!

The boss wants to know what the company should do about all this e-business everyone is talking about. All this Internet stuff. The boss's kids do it at school and are always yammering about getting this AOL thing.

In your opinion, your company is thoroughly computerized. All the secretaries have computers. Some of the machines on the shop floor are run by computers. The yo-yo's in the PR department have Internet access and they're always talking about getting one of these Web sites and doing that e-commerce you hear about in the TV commercials. Where's it all going to end? You're in business, after all, not computers.

Now the boss has this idea. He wants to know what you think your organization should do about e-business. How geeky do regular workers, not just IT, but marketing, accounting, HR, how geeky do they have to be? He called a meeting for the middle of June to answer two questions:

Personally, you're going to have to do something else first -- and fast -- or everyone's going to know that you don't know nearly as much about computers and the Internet as you've been pretending you do.

So you've signed up for this course at a local college. They give you a laptop and then they put you in a room with people who mostly seem to know way more than you do. And then the goofy teacher, ... you couldn't believe the guy. You heard that they don't let him out of his root cellar until the sun goes down, just in case. You came to learn about computers and all he wants to talk about is communication. Here's what he would have said the first night if he hadn't been so busy showing you how to make web pages.

Lecture by the teacher

To do any job, you need to be a content expert, whether it be finance, marketing, operations, human resources, or whatever. These general functions would be supplemented with your industry- and company-specific expertise. Thus, you might be a marketing person who works for Dunlop Tire; before long, you would have great expertise in marketing parts for the automotive industry. Your skill set would be largely transferable to a marketing job for Westwood Pharmaceuticals. It would be highly transferable to a marketing job for Firestone, another tire company.

What do managers need to know above and beyond their functions in the organization? Does the marketer need to know finance? Does the accountant need to know training? Does the production-line supervisor need to know public relations? Can they stay in their own silos, or do they need to work together on teams? Where does one department's territory end and another's begin?

In addition, no matter what job you do, you need other skills: problem-solving, decision-making, teamworking, interpersonal communication, and more formal communication skills. These skills are less industry- and company-specific; they are yours and you take them from job to job. In general, they develop over decades, not months.

Here we will address the more formal communication skills, along with some others that you will develop for the MBA program. If you look at the provocative ideas on the welcome page, you may agree that computers are putting unreasonable demands upon management. Is your boss a dinosaur? Are your co-workers ostriches? What about you? Do you still cling to paper like a baby to her binky, a familiar object to protect you against the uncertain and scary future?

oral presentations

information retrieval, creation, and manipulation: research, writing, spreadsheets, images, charts

information design and display: presentations, webs, images, videos, printed documents

information technology: computer hardware and software tools

Another way of grouping these skills is the traditional college majors that would address them. Please note that the list below does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the list above.

English rhetoric (writing and speaking)

psychology

art (visual design)

computers

Yet another way is to ask what you have to know to do your job, be it marketing, accounting, human resources, or in my case, teaching. Do you have to be able to:

crunch numbers with a spreadsheet?

give an oral presentation supplemented by visual aids?

find information on the Internet?

design and write web pages?

maintain a web site?

collaborate online with co-workers and customers?

inform and persuade in front of a video camera?

Even harder to answer is how well you need to perform these new media communication skills. If you look around, you'll see that many managers don't perform these skills at all if they can avoid them. Others do perform them, but not well.

If you were in charge, what would you expect your staff to do and what would you hand off to a specialist, either in-house or out-sourced? When the new hires -- those smart-aleck MBAs and those net-savvy teenagers -- can do these previously out-sourced jobs themselves, will you give the new hires more salary? Some of the new hires are skilled enough to run their own web sites and make terrifically entertaining oral presentations. How will you integrate them with the more experienced workers who can't or won't learn the new skills? They call themselves "technologists" but they still use overhead projectors and textbooks. Technologists of the 1980's, maybe.

To answer those questions, you are going to participate in a networked group in public, that is, in class.

You will make web pages and you will maintain a web site. You will make a movie. You will learn a little bit about a lot of software. You will participate in an online discussion forum. And you will make a number of oral presentations supplemented by web pages. Most importantly, your mental models will become more accurate and useful.

Part of your web will be a communications plan. What do you still need to learn? You, as well as your employer and corporate trainers, will be able to use the plan to measure your progress and decide what step to take next.

The fates guide those who go willingly; those who do not, they drag.
-- Seneca (c. 5–65), Roman writer, philosopher, statesman

Your Online Portfolio

Your web site is located at Ricci Street's Parkside Plaza. The URL of your home page is:

Note that there is no page name (*.htm) in that URL, only a path to a folder name. It is case-sensitive only after the first slash, .net/.

In response to such a request, asking for a folder but not a specific page, the server will return a default page, in this case index.html.

You will change the content of that page, but please always keep a file named index.html in your last name folder. This "home page" or "index page" will link to your web's other pages:

your resume in .txt, .doc, and .htm formats

your personalized start-up page

your communications profile weblog or page

your personal-interest web

your oral presentations' visual aids

your other homework, as appropriate

This map is just a suggestion. Follow it if it's useful. Do it your way where my suggestion is not useful.

You are starting to build an online portfolio. The part with all your MBA 504 homework can expand for every course you take. We can call that a learning portfolio. The MBA program can use it for outcomes assessment to document your learning for accreditation agencies. It will also be of use to the community of employers that send you to us and hire / promote you when you have your MBA.

You can use it as a professional portfolio in the sense that future employer might look at it before hiring you. It can be a personal portfolio for family and friends to document what's going on in your life and what's important to you.

Finally, your online presence can include a web for your business or other interests, your own .com or .net domain. Ricci Street is an example of mine.

OK, that's the contents of all your web pages, what they're about. But what should they look like? CoolHomePages will give you lots of idea. So will Vincent Flanders' Web Pages That Suck, "Where you learn good Web design by looking at bad Web design." You should also look at the webs of students who took MBA 504 recently to see what they accomplished.

Roundtable

Talking to each other and using the words similarly and sharing concepts if not mental models are essential to clear communication. Rather than write a report on paper to measure such learning, you're going to talk to each other in an online discussion forum at the Ground Zero Bistro.

Distance education

After we have practiced with video conferencing in mid-October, you will each spend part of one class night later in October attending the class via a video conference from a remote location (down the hall).

Presentations

Individual

For the first couple of weeks, you're going to take turns having your laptop plugged into the projector and following my clicking and scrolling instructions. Please note that your desktop and parts of your file structure will be on the wall, too. (Hint: You might want to tidy up a bit.)

In the middle of May, you're going to give a presentation, standing near the wall and asking another student to do your clicking. You are going to take us on a tour of a web site. Rather than a shopping site or your company's site, I'd like you to venture forth onto the Web to a place you've never been before.

Take your pick from all the fun stuff in the Port 80 Boardwalk's Net Culture page as well as the Toolkit's Webtop page. Pick a site you discover. Show us something useful, entertaining, unusual, unexpected. Surprise and delight us.

Remember that you will have fifteen minutes maximum, so don't try to do too much.

I will try to arrange one other individual oral presentation from each of you as we go along.

Meeting

In early June, you're going to take a decision-making role in a company called Chameleon. The Board has charged the CEO with assessing the information technology needs of the company.

The Board's goal is to make sure that Chameleon has enough in the budget to enable employee computer knowledge and skills that will keep Chameleon competitive, both by increasing internal productivity and by communicating effectively in the marketplace.

To make his assessment, the CEO has, in turn, convened a joint meeting of the Strategy Council and the Executive Council, including you. All of you have just taken a crash training course, a survey of new technologies at a local college. Now you have to help the Board set the goals that you folks in upper management will then implement with policies and strategies.

For now, two questions are on the table concerning networked computer hardware and software:

1. What do employees in your area need to do their jobs?
2. Where do we draw the line?

What's a necessary job skill? What are the skills that are likely to get us branded, for good or ill, as knowing more than most of our colleagues? How self-sufficient are we? At what point will our bosses want us to hand it over to a specialist?

more about the company ...

Chameleon Touring and Promotion Services

Full-service pop music international concert production and promotional services.

Contracts with indie labels to do turn-key concert production in exchange for a percentage of ticket and merchandise revenues.

Markets primarily to the indie bands and labels.

Then markets to concert-goers on a venue-by-venue basis complementing the indie labels' and the bands' own marketing.

Your role and some more details are on the table below. You will meet first in small groups to answer the two questions. The groups are divided by the darker rows in the table below.

Then each small group's C-level officer (the far right column below) will report to the whole group before I lead a discussion for the time remaining to us.

Strategy Council

name	Your job title and job function	You report to ...
Doug	CSO - chief strategy officer - supervises d-level; the boss	CEO - chief executive officer - responsible to the owners for overall performance

Don	DOPL - director of production and logistics - produces concert tours	CTO - chief technical officer - designs concert themes, staging, sfx
Colleen	DRD - director of research and development - innovates for concerts and online	- CTO (direct), CMO/CIO (indirect)

Rick	DOP - director of promotions - promotes concerts	CMO - chief marketing officer - markets Chameleon to indies
Katia	DSS - director of sales and customer service - sells merchandise at and after concerts	- CMO
Marc	DIS - director of information services - designs and maintains external web presence	- CMO

Sean	DAC - director of accounting and control - AKA "the whip"	CFO - chief financial officer

Kristy	DPT - director of personnel training - both technical and organizational	CHR - chief human resources officer

Doug	DIT - director of information technology - maintains intranet and apps	CIO - chief information officer

Final Presentation

For this final report, you will dress for success, stand, speak without notes from the web pages showing on the big screen in the Lecture Hall, and direct someone else's clicking.

You will give a how-to demonstrations about something you have learned in this class. Your presentation will fall into one of these overlapping categories:

operating system: software programs bundled with or added to the operating system to extend its usefulness

web making tools: common software tools and utilities to design, assemble, optimize, and run a World Wide Web site

collaboration tools: the Web for research, presentations, team meetings, discussions, calendaring, shared whiteboards, individual and group emails, conferencing, and Internet telephony

business media software: slide shows, web sites, charts and graphs, and images both still and moving, including music and audio

office productivity software packages: especially spreadsheets, to process and display words, numbers, data sets, and images; hand-held and other embedded and portable devices

Webtop tools: software programs on the Web designed to be used on the Web, for example a search engine, banner maker, or Java applet.

Instead of being a printed-out, page-numbered and stapled report, you will put the same information onto a small web of several illustrated and linked web pages. You will then use that web as a graphic aid during your final presentation.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to Web surf and he won't bother you for week.

Evaluation

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you'll see, I'm big on formative feedback and Socratic questioning.

I expect you to participate in both our physical classroom and our digital classroom. At a minimum, you should:

follow all the links on the syllabus, especially those on the To Do (homework) lists

contact me a dozen times via email

post at least a two dozen messages at the Bistro, especially the Roundtable

maintain a web site at Parkside Plaza

complete the skills chart: Your Communications Profile and Plan

do the other homework on the reports page, especially the presentations

Your course grade will come from doing the minimum above and from one individual presentation and one final presentation.

Except for private email, all the work you do for this course will be publicly available. It will all be linked from the home page of your Parkside Plaza web. In addition, you will chart your own progress on the homework roundtable. Because these skills build on one another, it is very important that you do the homework in a timely manner.

This is graduate school and this is a learn-by-doing course. There is no final exam or convergent skill set for you to master. "This course is all about mistakes" is a phrase I often hear in self-assessments from students who are voracious learners. The idea of mistakes makes some students very nervous. They want to know the One Right Way of doing things and they aren't into taking chances. If I were using a more common grading method, you could not afford to make "mistakes" because you'd have a lower grade as a result. I try to reward mistakes and my biggest enemy is your fear of being hit by a low grade. As a result, I get email like this one from a Fall 2002 student:

"The only way we would learn was by making mistakes." To me this was the biggest takeaway from class. I mean it stuck with me throughout the 9 weeks and every time I went to class or tried doing the homework. I felt that without hearing that I would have been tentative and fearful of doing something I have never tried before. I let myself get geeky in class. ... It all goes back to the first day of class again. All the barriers surrounding success from failure were taken down and I didn't have to worry about anything other than learning the material.

I had fun just like I was a little kid again. I was seeing things as a kid would for the very first time. It made me feel very much alive. I wasn't afraid to make mistakes because I knew it would be ok even if I did. I had nothing to lose in this class so I just went for it -- LEARNING. It was fun.

Putting it off and doing it all at the end in a mad rush will not produce the learning you will need for other courses, especially MBA 600 and MBA 604. Thus:

If you do the minimum above in a timely manner and make the presentations in class, you'll get an A- for the course. That's what I expect most of you to get. Note that I don't mention how well you do them. Because your work is public, I expect that your personal pride will motivate you more than a grade. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll get email after the course wondering why you got "only" an A-. I will reply to the email by directing you back to this web page.

If you do the work with flair and enthusiasm, you'll get an A, but that's exceptional. Your boss could show the web pages or presentation to a client or to the big boss as is. Your boss would remember them when discussing a promotion. It does not matter that you deserve an A+ because you worked hard and are an all-around wonderful person. I don't doubt that for a moment, but it has nothing to do with this course grade. No one has yet received an A in this course.

If you don't do the minimum above in a timely manner or one of the presentations, you'll get no better than a B+ for the course. You will certainly be letting down your team members as well as hindering your own learning. If you don't do two, we need to talk about whether you have time for the course.

Please note that a "lousy" presentation will get the same A- as one I personally "like". However, that doesn't mean I don't have standards and you don't have pride. Note the criteria below as well as my philosophy of learning and grading.

Policy | Because of the progression of the work, the groups, and the tight syllabus, I don't know how and where to fit in a realistic make-up of your oral presentations. Your web pages, Roundtable messages, and other homework, however, can get revised as often as you want after the original due date.

In addition to these presentations, please note that you have one other very important requirement. You must email a self-assessment after you have done all the other work for the course. I will not turn in a grade for you until I get that email.

Criteria

While grades are useless at best and statistically bogus, I'm a big fan of feedback, assessment, evaluation: better now in class than later on the job and better from many sources than from one. I expect you to seek feedback from your team and your classmates as well as from me. My evaluation of written and oral work asks four questions.

content

Is it logical, insightful, and visually interesting?
structure

Is it easy to follow and learn from?
language

Is it designed, written, illustrated, and presented in an appropriate business tone?
mechanics

Is it free of error and attractive to look at?

In short, does your work exhibit a command of business communications and its conventions, especially digital?

It comes down to this: If I were your boss, I would want to see documents, webs, and presentations that are attractive and accessible. Having your work available when I need it affects the quality component of my assessment. The quality of your work can be important at raise and promotion time.

These criteria are loaded with ambiguous and subjective terms: easy, appropriate, attractive, flair, enthusiasm. Such holistic characterizations come from observations colored by assumptions and prejudices. However, there are some generally agreed upon professional standards. We will discuss them in class and at the Bistro before your first presentation.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
- Virginia Woolf

The Case

MBA 504 - eSkills for Management - Spring 2006