1. How many managers do you know have had formal academic training in the field of management? How well-prepared are they to assess the validity and value of management bestsellers?
2. Assume you were asked to become CEO of a company whose board of directors wanted you to lead as a higher ambition leader. What are some of the first things you'd consider doing? Why?
3. Discuss ways that management can provide employees who survive organizational downsizing reasons to stay with the organization.
4. How would you go about persuading your boss to adopt a strategy of "responsible restructuring"? Provide specific examples of strategies and practices that you would advocate and how they might help the organization meet competitive challenges.
5. Drawing upon (but not repeating verbatim) Schein's definition, explain (in your own words) what organizational culture means to you.
6. What are the challenges to achieving organizational transparency?
7. How would you go about establishing transparency in a department that you manage? Provide specific steps.
8. What are the benefits of an organization that values and promotes camaraderie?
9. Why is the partnership method effective?
10. Think about a time when you were unsatisfied and unmotivated at work. Why were you feeling this way? Did your compensation package play a part in your dissatisfaction?
11. How long could you survive in a work environment that paid handsomely, but where you are bored, unchallenged, and have little control over what you do?
12. What is your personal action plan for success?
13. What are four positive leadership strategies? Why are each of them uniquely important?
14. How is a positive climate obtained? What might detract from it, or prevent it from succeeding?
15. Discuss and identify situations where "bad" leadership has been effective, not in the sense of the end point but in terms of the means employed.
16. Compare and contrast a real life example of good leadership with "bad" leadership. How are they similar? How are they different? Discuss.
17. Identify a time you (or a friend) sabotaged your (their) own performance. Discuss strategies to catch/avoid self sabotage.
18. Which of the costs of power bothers/worries you the most? How could you mitigate this cost?
19. How are Collaborative Work Systems different from team-based organizations?
20. How do McGregor's ideas about training and development compare to what you have experienced or witnessed in organizations? How does it compare to college courses in management topics?
21. How do the traits of agility, discipline, and focus position a company to control Michael Porter's Five Forces? How do the traits of diffuseness, rigidity, and ineptness hinder efforts to gain control of the Five Forces