Business Applications of Mind Mapping

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 643.

Down

Across

3. a plant which is processing oil, metals or sugar

4. milestone

8. official examination to check if everything is as it should be

14. arrogant, domineering

15. local, belonging to a place or region

16. deprive of human qualities as pity, kindness and creativity

17. trade-off

18. swollen

1. tarnish, defame

2. of the original stock; true, authentic

5. governance

6. a new candidate

7. a valuable or desirable thing, property, resources

9. to train and instruct

10. a person who fights for smb. or for a cause

11. a series of meetings for intensive study

12. insurance

13. evade

BUSINESS SKILLS

15. Read the following articles and pick out information about new ways to solve corporate problems. Express your opinion of these innovations.

Shall We Play A Game?

Playing war games can give companies new perspectives on complex problems

WAR GAMES are commonly used by the military to evaluate strategies, explore scenarios and reveal unexpected weaknesses. American ships and aircraft have just begun two weeks of war games in the Gulf, prompting protests from Iran, and last week South Korea carried out an annual computerised war-game exercise.

Might war games deserve a greater role in business? Military analogies abound in the corporate world. Plenty of bosses look to Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese general, for management tips. And in business, as in war, outcomes depend on what others do, as well as one's own actions. Yet many firms fail to think systematically about how rivals will react to their plans — and traditional planning does a poor job of taking competitors' responses into account, says John McDermott, head of strategy at Xerox, an office-equipment company. Corporate war games, which simulate the interactions of multiple actors in a market, provide a better way to do so.

Such games have two chief characteristics. First, players break into teams and take on the roles of fierce competitors (and sometimes other constituencies, such as customers). Second, the games involve several turns, allowing competitors not just to draw up their own strategies but to respond to the choices of others. Their popularity is rising. Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), a consultancy, is running 100 war games a year, up from around 50 three years ago. Open Options, a Canadian strategy consultancy, has been going since 1996 and its revenue doubled last year.

Games can vary greatly in sophistication. Fuld & Company, a consultancy, recently ran a simple public game devoted to social-networking websites at the London Business School. Student teams took on the roles of YouTube, MySpace, Second Life and Facebook, and devised strategies that were judged by a panel of outside experts. Halfway through, organisers spiced things up with the announcement that Apple had entered the market with iTown, a fictitious online community for users of its iTunes music service. (If the game is an accurate guide to the future, MySpace is sitting pretty and Facebook is in trouble.)

BAH introduces a quantitative element into its games, calculating the effect of each team's strategy on their company's profits and stockmarket value at the end of each turn. Open Options takes the number-crunching further still. To help Xerox understand the market dynamics of the print and copy industry, it ran a one-day workshop in which teams from Xerox took the roles of the big companies in the market, itself included. Each team identified the things “their” company could do to change its strategy and drew up a list of its desired outcomes; these “preference trees” were shared with the other teams and fine-tuned. The results were then pumped into Open Options' proprietary software tools, which played out interactions between the companies and produced a range of possible outcomes.

Mr McDermott says the game's predictive power was astonishing: one forecast, that a company would start to acquire a certain group of assets within the industry, came true within six months. By shedding light on areas where companies have different priorities, the concept of preference trees helps to highlight potential trade-offs, as well as competition. Open Options charges North American clients roughly $100,000 for an engagement. “The bang for buck was outstanding,” says Mr McDermott.

The secret of successful war-gaming does not simply lie in mathematics, however. Interaction, not algebra, is the best way to win support for a new strategy. Game-players must be senior for the same reason — although having the top boss on a team can stifle feedback. Strategies also have to capture competitors' hard-to-quantify corporate cultures: when designing a game, BAH seeks out employees at its clients who have actually worked at competitors for that reason. But perhaps war games' greatest value lies in the way they encourage managers to think differently about the consequences of their actions. “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy,” as Sun Tzu would say.

The Economist, 31 May 2007

Piecing Things Together

What companies can learn from playing with Lego

WHEN recruiting at British universities, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy, presents candidates with an unusual exercise. They are asked to build a tall and sturdy tower using the smallest possible number of snap-together Lego bricks. Similarly, at Google Games, a recruiting event first staged by the search-engine giant in April, candidates are invited to build Lego bridges — the stronger the better. In each case, the company is trying to convey the idea that it offers a creative, fun working environment. “It was as much advertising as a way of trying to get recruits,” says Brett Daniel, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who built the Google Games' weakest bridge.

The eponymous Danish firm, based in Billund, Denmark, has embraced the corporate use of its coloured plastic bricks. As part of a scheme called “Serious Play” it is certifying a growing number of professional Lego consultants, now present in 25 countries. They coach managers by getting them to build “metaphorical abstractions” of such things as corporate strategy, says Lego's Jesper Jensen, who runs the scheme. Hisham El-Gamal of Quest, a management consultancy based in Cairo that offers Serious Play workshops, says demand for the two-day, $7,000 courses is booming.

Firms in crisis, such as those besmirched by scandal or in the throes of a takeover, tend to be most receptive to the idea of Lego workshops, says François de Boissezon of Imagics, a consultancy based in Brussels. The results can be embarrassing, particularly for senior managers. Tsai Yu-Chen of UGene Mentor, a Serious Play consultancy based in Taipei, says a common exercise is modelling, but not naming, “the people you hate most”. One chief executive was modelled as a figure so fat that he blocked a hallway, suggesting he was clogging up the company.

Lego workshops are effective because child-like play is a form of instinctive behaviour not regulated by conscious thought, says Lucio Margulis of Juego Serio, a consultancy in Buenos Aires. This produces “Eureka” moments: a perfectionist who realises the absurdity of frustration over an imperfect Lego construction; the owner of a firm with dismal customer relations who models headquarters as a fort under siege; or an overbearing boss who depicts his staff as soldiers headed into battle. Even in the office, it seems, Lego has a part to play.

The Economist, 5^th July 2007

get real

15. Role play. Conduct a TV round table. Ask ‘consultants' about strategies companies use to achieve their goals.

Consider such ideas as scenario planning, change management, active inertia, benchmarking, economies of scale and economies of scope, etc. Use computer slides to illustrate or emphasize what you are going to say.

16. Read the passages and fill in the gaps with the names of people who have made a name in management.

1. He reminded us again and again that responsible management is not about buzzwords. It's not about fads. Ultimately, it is not even about developing new products or fattening the bottom line (although he believed those things are important).

Rather, it is about far more fundamental tenets — a philosophy that grew directly out of [________]'s experience as a young writer who had witnessed the rise of Nazi Germany (which in the early 1930s banned and burned the Austria native's work).

[________] wrote that management, at its core, "deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed, as everyone has learned who…has been working with managers of all kinds of institutions for long years, management is deeply involved in moral concerns — the nature of man, good, and evil."

2. Some innovators, like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, develop products that change the way we live. Others, such as Martin Luther King Jr., force us to see the world through a new moral lens. [________]'s contribution is both more abstract and more elemental: He invented the very idea of the modern American corporation. [________] was the first Organization Man, a visionary devoted to bringing discipline to the impulsive, informal, often chaotic capitalist enterprise of the early 20th century. [________] saw that the business of business could be rationalized, the output measured, and managers rewarded in a way that pushed them to reach for excellence. His ideas, which are now the model for virtually every large corporation, are almost invisible because of their ubiquity. But when he introduced these principles to General Motors Corp. in the 90s and 1930s, they were revolutionary.

3. [_________] is known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival and was regarded by many as the leading quality guru in the United States. Trained as a statistician, his expertise was used during World War II to assist the United States in its effort to improve the quality of war materials.

He was invited to Japan at the end of World War II by Japanese industrial leaders and engineers. They asked [________] how long it would take to shift the perception of the world from the existing paradigm that Japan produced cheap, shoddy imitations to one of producing innovative quality products.

[_________] told the group that if they would follow his directions, they could achieve the desired outcome in five years. Few of the leaders believed him.

4. [_________] didn't invent the automobile, but he invented the automobile business. When he founded the [_________] Motor Co. in 1903, cars were fussy, unreliable, costly novelties. [_________]'s genius was to make them simple, solid, and inexpensive necessities. In so doing, he built the largest industrial organization of the early 20th century and amassed a personal fortune of $1 billion ($36 billion in today's dollars), but he also placed himself at the forefront of a social revolution that had an immeasurable impact on American life. When he got his Model T rolling in 1908, the horse disappeared so fast that the conversion of acreage from hay to other crops is said to have caused an agricultural revolution. And that was only the beginning.

5. [_________] is usually portrayed as the consummate computer geek. Editorial cartoonists and magazine illustrators love to caricature his dweeby spectacles, intransigent hair, and quaintly ill-fitting clothes. Business journalists relish describing his idiosyncratic physical mannerisms and his goofy, jargon-laced speech. Indeed, [_________] himself seems to cultivate a nerdy image.

But the reality is that [_________] is, if anything, the quintessential fin de siecle businessman — a hypercompetitor who combines equal parts technologist, entrepreneur, and corporate architect. Though it's been decades since he actually wrote computer code, he still peruses the work of key programmers and makes detailed suggestions for specific products. Perhaps the shrewdest business strategist of the last quarter of the century, [_________] has flummoxed much larger competitors like IBM and found ways to steal the march on brilliant IT innovators like Apple and Netscape. And unlike most techno-entrepreneurs of his generation, his skills as an imaginative manager and leader have kept pace with his company's breakneck growth.

17. Make a mini-presentation about the person, who you believe has made a significant contribution to the theory and/or practice of management. (Portfolio entry).

REFLECTION SPOT

What have you learned from the Unit? What competencies did it help you develop?

VOCABULARY

· to dehumanize workers

· piece rate

· time rate

· to refine one's principles

· (in)efficiency

· leadership n

· vision n

· management fad

· management practices

· leverage n

· leveraged a

· leveraged buyout

· junk bond

· bloated a, syn. swollen, sprawling

· champion v

· champion n

· national champion

· medical coverage

· preference tree

· tug of war

· an overbearing boss

UNIT 2. THE NEW ORGANISATION

Competencies · ability to demonstrate relevant knowledge and understanding of organizations · developing the ability to analyse and to make judgements · developing translation skills · ability to give the gist of the interview · developing transferable skills

READING AND SPEAKING (1)

· What forms of organisations can you name?

· What structure was considered pre-eminent in the industrial past?

· What do you know about the new workers of the Information Age: the knowledge workers and networked workers?

· Are the organisational structures servants to the corporate strategy or the other way round?

· Are our corporate structures effective for tomorrow or only suitable for yesterday?

1. Scan the following text and say why new organisational structures are needed in today's environment.

The New Organisation

The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organized lags behind, says Tim Hindle

FIFTY years ago William Whyte, an editor at Fortune magazine, wrote a book called "The Organisation Man" that defined the nature of corporate life for a generation. The book described how America (whose people, he said, had "led in the public worship of individualism") had recently turned into a nation of employees who "take the vows of organisation life" and who had become "the dominant members of our society".

Foremost among the organisations that Whyte had in mind was the corporation, which he thought rewarded long service, obedience and loyalty quite as faithfully as did any monastery or battalion. "Blood brother to the business trainee off to join DuPont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy," he wrote. The New York Times praised Whyte for recognising that "the entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organisational crawl."

In an article in the McKinsey Quarterly last year, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, two of the firm's consultants, argued that "today's big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organisational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient." In other words, 21st-century organisations are not fit for 21st-century workers.

Mercer Delta, a consulting firm that specialises in "organisational architecture", recently observed that "the models and frameworks that shaped our leading organisations from the end of the second world war through the conclusion of the cold war are dearly obsolete in this new era of e-business, perpetual innovation and global competition." The design of today's complex enterprises, says Mercer Delta, requires an entirely new way of thinking about organisations.

The classic structure in which organisation man felt comfortable consisted of number of business units that operated similarly but separately. They were controlled by a head office that determined strategy and watched over its implementation. It was a system of command and control in which everybody knew his place made visible in the organisation charts that laid down the corporate hierarchy.

A surprising number of companies today still have much the same command-and-control structure that they had 50 years ago. According to the Boston Consulting Group, what it calls "the imperialist corporate centre" is still the most common type of headquarters. And companies that do decentralise decision-making and accountability often recentralise it again when they run into trouble.

Twenty years ago, Motorola, a co-inventor of the mobile phone, was a tightly centralised business. Three men in its headquarters at Schaumburg, Illinois, were in control of almost everything that went on. As the company grew, they decided to decentralise. But by the mid-1990s the company's mobile-phone business was growing so fast that decentralisation made it impossible to control. "While the numbers are getting better, an organisation can be falling apart," says Pat Canavan, Motorola's chief governance officer. In 1998 the company laid off 25,000 people and repatriated control to the Schaumburg headquarters.

The trouble with silos

The main failing of the classic structure was that it impeded the spread of knowledge and limited the economies of scale that could be reaped. Ideas and commands moved up and down from headquarters to the units, leading to the creation of vertical "silos" with very little communication between them. Financial-service institutions were notorious for not knowing whether customers who signed up for one service were already customers for other services being provided by the same institution.

As firms became more global, they added what McKinsey called a "matrix overlay" to this structure. Most famously associated with Philips, a Dutch electrical and electronics giant, this attempted to take more account of the different national markets in which a company was operating by superimposing geographical silos that cut across the traditional business units.

Such organisations have not commanded universal admiration. In 1990, in a paper published by the Harvard Business Review, Sumantra Ghoshal and Christopher Bartlett, two academics, reported that matrix structures "led to conflict and confusion; the proliferation of channels created informational logjams as a proliferation of committees and reports bogged down the organisation; and overlapping responsibilities produced turf battles and a loss of accountability." Nigel Nicholson, a professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, called the matrix structure "one of the most difficult and least successful organisational forms."

Messrs Ghoshal and Bartlett wrote in the past tense, suggesting that companies had escaped from the matrix corset. But 15 years after the article was published, many are still trying to struggle free.

Gerard Fairtlough, a former CEO of Shell Chemicals and the founder of Celltech, a British biotechnology company, also suggests that companies are still being held back by their addiction to hierarchy. In a recent book, "The Three Ways of Getting Things Done", he points to alternatives to the hierarchical structure that many companies see as their only option. "You can't have a bunch of hippies running a plant full of explosive hydrocarbons," he says. "But would you rather have the plant operated by trained professionals, for whom pride in safe working is part of their personal identity, or by people who only work safely because they are afraid of the boss? The identification of discipline with hierarchy is a dangerous mistake." Mr Fairtlough's preferred alternative is something he calls "responsible autonomy", a form of organisation in which groups of workers decide for themselves what to do, but are accountable for the outcome.

Clearly there is a need for new kinds of organisation that are more appropriate to modern working methods. But there are many reasons why companies are not in a hurry to adopt them.

The Economist, 21^st January, 2006

2. Read the text and find information to answer the following.

a) What observations do the analysts make about the hierarchical and matrix organizations?

· William White;

· Mercer Delta;

· Messrs. Ghoshal and Bartlett;

· Nigel Nickolson;

· Mr Fairtlough;

· the author.

b) What kind of organisation will suit the knowledge worker and the networked worker best?

3. Explain the following quotes from the text.

"Blood brother to the business trainee off to join DuPont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy.”

“The entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organisational crawl.”

4. Infer the meaning of the following words and phrases from the context.

READING AND SPEAKING (2)

5. Read the following text and say what factors contributed to the survival of the biggest companies. Make a mind-map of the text.

Big is back

Corporate giants were on the defensive for decades. Now they have the advantage again

IN 1996, in one of his most celebrated phrases, Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over”. He might have added that the era of big companies was over, too. The organisation that defined capitalism for much of the 20th century was then in retreat, attacked by corporate raiders, harassed by shareholders and outfoxed by entrepreneurs.

Great names such as Pan Am had disappeared. Others had survived only by dint of huge bloodletting: IBM sacked 122,000 people, a quarter of its workforce, between 1990 and 1995. Everyone agreed that the future lay with entrepreneurial start-ups such as Yahoo!—which in late 1998 had the same market capitalisation with 637 employees as Boeing with 230,000. The share of GDP produced by big industrial companies fell by half between 1974 and 1998, from 36% to 17%.

Today the balance of advantage may be shifting again. To a degree, the financial crisis is responsible. It has devastated the venture-capital market, the lifeblood of many young firms. Governments have been rescuing companies they consider too big to fail, such as Citigroup and General Motors. Recession is squeezing out smaller and less well-connected firms. But there are other reasons too, which are giving big companies a self-confidence they have not displayed for decades.

Big can be beautiful…

Of course, big companies never went away. There were still plenty of first-rate ones: Unilever and Toyota continued to innovate through thick and thin. And not all start-ups were models of success: Netscape and Enron promised to revolutionise their industries only to crash and burn. Nevertheless, the balance had shifted in favour of small organisations.

The entrepreneurial boom was supercharged by two developments. Deregulation opened protected markets. Some national champions, such as AT&T, were broken up. Others saw their markets eaten up by swift-footed newcomers. The arrival of the personal computer in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s created an army of successful start-ups. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976 in the Jobs family's garage. Microsoft and Dell Computer were both founded by teenagers (in 1975 and 1984 respectively). Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in Stanford dorm rooms.

But deregulation had already begun to go out of fashion before the financial crisis. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, introduced after Enron collapsed in disgrace, increased the regulatory burden on companies of all sizes, but what could be borne by the big could cripple the small. Many of today's most dynamic industries are much more friendly to big companies than the IT industry. Research in biotechnology is costly and often does not bear fruit for years. Natural-resource companies, whose importance grows as competition for resources intensifies, need to be big — hence the mining industry's consolidation.

Two further developments are shifting the balance of advantage in favour of size. One is a heightened awareness of the risks of subcontracting. Toy companies and pet-food firms alike have found that their brands can be tainted if their suppliers (notably, from China) turn out shoddy goods. Big industrial companies have learned that their production cycles can be disrupted if contractors are not up to the mark. Boeing, once a champion of outsourcing, has been forced to take over faltering suppliers.

A second is the emergence of companies that have discovered how to be entrepreneurial as well as big. These giants are getting better at minimising the costs of size (such as longer, more complex chains of managerial command) while exploiting its advantages (such as presence in several markets and access to a large talent pool). Cisco Systems is pioneering the use of its own video technology to improve communications between its employees. IBM has carried out several company-wide brainstorming exercises, recently involving more than 150,000 people, that have encouraged it to put more emphasis, for example, on green computing. Disney has successfully ingested Pixar's creative magic.

You might suppose that the return of the mighty, now better equipped to crush the competition, is something to worry about. Not necessarily. Big is not always ugly just as small is not always beautiful. Most entrepreneurs dream of turning their start-ups into giants (or at least of selling them to giants for a fortune). There is a symbiosis between large and small. “Cloud computing” would not provide young firms with access to huge amounts of computer power if big companies had not created giant servers. Biotech start-ups would go bust were they not given work by giants with deep pockets.

The most successful economic ecosystems contain a variety of big and small companies: Silicon Valley boasts long-established names as well as an ever-changing array of start-ups. America's economy has been more dynamic than Europe's in recent decades not just because it is better at giving birth to companies but also because it is better at letting them grow. Only 5% of European Union companies born since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest in the EU by market capitalisation. In America, the figure is 22%.

…but size isn't really what matters

The return of the giants could well be a boon for the world economy—but only if business people and policymakers avoid certain pitfalls. Businesses should not make a fetish of size, particularly if this means diversifying into a lot of unrelated areas. The conglomerate model may be tempting when cash is hard to find. But the moment will not last. By and large, the most successful big firms focus on their core businesses.

Policymakers should both resist an instinctive suspicion of big companies and avoid the old error of embracing national champions. It is bad enough that governments have diverted resources into propping up failing companies such as General Motors. It would be even more regrettable if they were to return to picking winners. The best use of their energies is to remove the burdens and barriers which prevent entrepreneurs from starting businesses and turning small companies into big ones.

The Economis,t Aug 27th 2009

6. Explain the following.

1. entrepreneurial start-ups

2. well-connected firms

3. through thick and thin

4. swift-footed newcomers

5. to be supercharged

6. tainted products, brands

7. shoddy goods

8. to go bust

9. to be a boon for

10. by and large

11. core businesses

12. to prop up

13. deep pockets

14. to minimize the costs of size

7. Define the following concepts. Use the Internet resources if necessary.

1. cloud computing

2. green computing

3. a conglomerate model

4. national champions

8. Comment on the following quotes from the text.

1. The organisation that defined capitalism for much of the 20th century was then in retreat, attacked by corporate raiders, harassed by shareholders and outfoxed by entrepreneurs.

2. And not all start-ups were models of success: Netscape and Enron promised to revolutionise their industries only to crash and burn.

3. Natural-resource companies, whose importance grows as competition for resources intensifies, need to be big.

4. Boeing, once a champion of outsourcing, has been forced to take over faltering suppliers.

5. Disney has successfully ingested Pixar's creative magic.

6. Biotech start-ups would go bust were they not given work by giants with deep pockets.

7. The best use of their energies is to remove the burdens and barriers which prevent entrepreneurs from starting businesses and turning small companies into big ones

9. Read the following information and make a mind-map of the article “Big is back”. (Portfolio entry).

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a tool peculiarly suited to the ways we process information.

It is a useful technique that improves the way you take notes, and supports and enhances your creative problem solving.

By using Mind Maps, you can quickly identify and understand the structure of a subject, and the way that pieces of information fit together, as well as recording the raw facts contained in normal notes.

More than this, Mind Maps encourage creative problem solving, and they hold information in a format that your mind finds easy to remember and quick to review.

Popularized by Tony Buzan, Mind Maps abandon the list format of conventional note taking. They do this in favor of a two-dimensional structure. As such, a good Mind Map shows the 'shape' of the subject, the relative importance of individual points, and the way in which facts relate to one another. Mind Maps are more compact than conventional notes, often taking up one side of paper. This helps you to make associations easily. And if you find out more information after you have drawn the main Mind Map, then you can easily add it in.

Mind Maps are also useful for:

· Summarizing information;

· Consolidating information from different research sources;

· Thinking through complex problems; and

· Presenting information in a format that shows the overall structure of your subject.

What's more, they are very quick to review as you can often refresh information in your mind just by glancing at one. In the same way, they can be effective mnemonics: Remembering the shape and structure of a Mind Map can give you the cues you need to remember the information within it. As such, they engage much more of your brain in the process of assimilating and connecting facts, compared with conventional notes.

While the concept of mind mapping can be applied to any situation that requires problem solving and organisational skills, there are several areas in which the technique can be an invaluable tool in business.