Q 1: Kaplan and Norton suggest methods for implementing strategies devoid of disrupting organizations. Provide illustrations from your work experience of disruptive and non-disruptive strategy implementations.
Q 2: Were the strategies that didn't disrupt the organization deliberately designed so as not to be disruptive?
Q 3: Is it sometimes appropriate - even essential - to design strategies with the intention of disrupting organizations? Can implementing disruptive strategies constitute a strategy for organizational change? How do disruptive strategies impact middle managers?
Q 4: Mintzberg distinguishes between 'deliberate' and 'emergent' strategies. What are the merits of emergent strategies? Are they particularly suitable and effective in certain types of organizations? In certain types of environmental and competitive conditions? In tackling certain kinds of problems?
Q 5: Comment on RosabethKanter's use of improvisational theater as a metaphor for the emergent and flexible strategy.
Q 6: What limits your capability to innovate? As a manager, how do you empower your subordinates to be innovators? Does your organization support such efforts?
Q 7: What risks does your organization face with respect to your regions of responsibility? How do you and your organization assess and mitigate such risks?
Q 8: What distinguishes quality initiatives such as ISO 9000 and the Baldridge National Quality Program from Total Quality Management (TQM) and similar managerial commitments?
Q 9: There is some evidence that in the years instantly following Baldridge or ISO certification or accreditation, performance standards and attention to quality actually decline to levels below the build up to accreditation review. What might describe this result? How can managers guard against this kind of 'relapse'?
Q 10: If you have been employed in an organization that has gone via the Baldridge or ISO process, share your experiences. What challenges did you face? Was the payoff to the organization worth the effort?
Q 11: Characterize the culture of the organization in which you work. How does this culture influence the work of middle managers?
Q 12: Have you experienced deliberate interventions by senior management that was intended to refocus, refine or revise the culture of an organization? To what degree were such interventions successful or unsuccessful? Why?
Q 13: What is organizational design? How is it like and how unlike design of a manufacturing process (for illustration: automobile production)?
Q 14: Organizations have both formal and informal (tacit) structures. How can we predict the effects of computed and deliberate organizational change on informal networks and structures? How can we mitigate against unanticipated and unintended effects of organizational redesign?
Q 15: Give illustrations from your experience of the different types of leaders recognized in the readings. Are typologies of leadership styles helpful in the practice of management? If so, how? If not, why not?
Q 16: Does a good manager need to be a leader? Is a leader essentially a good manager?
Q 17: Within any group a leader typically emerges. How can a manager efficiently supervise an employee which emerges as a group leader and turn the leader-employee into a managerial asset?
Q 18: Provide illustrations from your work experience of ways that managers strike the balance between their organization's commitment to systems of control and to empowering employees. Are there systematic strategies to address such challenges?
Q 19: To what degree does an organization's success in this area depend on the good instincts of middle managers and the good will of employees?
Q 20: Tannen analyzes gender differences in communication in organizations. Does her analysis resonate in your experience? Have gender-specific differences in communication become less pronounced as participation by women at all levels of employment has increased or do they remain stubbornly fixed and inflexible?
Q 21: In your experience are female bosses which speak and manage like their male counterparts perceived differently by their subordinates? How so? Why? Do women managers confront more resistance from male or female employees or is there no observable difference?
Q 22: Do managers of color face obstacles comparable to those that Tannen discusses with respect to women? What regarding managers from minority religions? Old (or very young) managers? Managers with disabilities? Gay or lesbian managers?
Q 23: What strategies can organizations employ to enhance communications in light of the patterns, influences and challenges that Tannen discusses?
Q 27: Have you encountered situations that you would explain as examples of Ghoshal's allegation that 'bad management theories are destroying good management practices?' By contrast, can you recall conditions where management theories have assisted managers in making good decisions?
Q 28: Roxburgh identifies some 'hidden flaws in strategy." Give illustrations from your own experience. Have you encountered strategic flaws which do not fit into the categories which Roxburgh identifies?
Q 29: Does Rosabeth Moss Kanter's article resonate in your experience? How?
Q 30: Do you feel empowered and capable to innovate in the organization in which you work? And to what extent?