PART - A

1.         Identify major planning process premises, that, in your judgment any Company would need in order to forecast its growth for the next two years.

2.         What are the tools and strategies that a business organization can use for meeting the challenges of corporate social responsibility?

3.         Define organization and how can an organization institutionalize ethics?

4.         Discuss the different constituents of organizing.

5.         What are the objectives behind centralization and mention the advantages associated with it.

PART - B

1.         What are the reasons for failure of delegation and elucidate the consequences of poor delegation?

2.         How staffing processes are executed and highlight the trends affecting staffing function in the 21st century.

3.         Select a business or a political leader whom you admire and identify his/her leadership style. Throw some light with specific reference to transformational/ transactional/ entrepreneurial/ trait/ charismatic style of leadership.

4.         Conflict among managers emerged soon after a French company acquired a Swedish firm. The Swedes perceived that the French management as hierarchical and arrogant, whereas the French thought the Swedes was naive and cautious and lacked achievement orientation. Describe ways to minimize dysfunctional conflict.

5.         What is control and outline different mechanisms to exercise control.

PART - C

1.         Discuss how IT revolution is changing the way business is being conducted worldwide.

2.         Why are contingency plans important and Comment on the effectiveness of MBO method of goal setting?

3.         What is the role of rationality, intuition and risk management in decision making?

4.         Give a brief on span of control and sources of power.

5.         Discuss the characteristics and contributions of various management approaches.

CASE STUDY

The Wayward Bus Line

Things had gotten out of hand for Manuela M., the bus dispatching supervisor at the Hometown Transit Authority. Drivers were arriving late for their shifts. Buses were not running on time. There was an inordinate number of breakdowns on the road, which required that the maintainence department send out special buses to continue the route and to tow the the disabled bus back to the dispatching shed. There were also frequent reports of buses not following their specified routes, and skipping scheduled stops on their return trips. On the other hand, many drivers who started their trips on time to the garage late from their runs with unsubstantiated excuses. Nevertheless, they still had to be paid the extra monies that their union contract guaranteed them. In a disturbing number of cases, too, a driver's cash receipts did not conform to the normal expectation of fare collections for a scheduled run.

Manuela had been puzzling for some time over what to do about this deteriorating performance, when the situation was brought to a head by a call from the transit commisioner. "The mayor and I have been receiving far too many complaints from bus riders this year. The complaints include just about everything, including the rudeness of our drivers, being deliberately passed by at a bus stop and unreliable timetables. For my part, l;ve reviewed the expense reports for the last few months and your department is way over budget, specially for overtime. Fare collections are down, too.

"I know that you can't be responsible for everything that's happened, but I do want you to come up with a plan that can put a stop to these irregularities".

"I'll do my best", said Manuela.

Questions

Q1.      What can you suggest in the way of control measures that would help Manuela Correct the existing conditions, preferably under preventive and corrective controls?

Q2.      Under each heading of preventive and corrective controls, mention the problems/conditions in the case that could be solved best by the particular kind of control.

Q3.      Discuss the problems Manuela might encounter when instituting these controls and what she could do to overcome the problems.

CASE STUDY 2

The Big Cookie Burnout

What seemed like a simple problem with an obvious solution turned out to be anything but that? It happened in the baking department of one of the nation's largest cookie makers. Too many batches of cookies, more than 10,000 dozen of them, were spoiled due to overheating. And when the finger-pointing was over, it was Arsenio, the department supervisor, who ended up being the fall guy.

Arsenio hadn't intended it to be that way. In fact, he was so sure that Joanna, the chief baker on the oven line was at fault that he suspended her on the spot. It had seemed like an open-and-shut case. Chief bakers were supposed to monitor oven temperatures continuously, even though temperatures were automatically controlled by a sophsticated series of thermostats. The chief bakercould override th eautomatic controls,however, if at any time she felt that the oven was getting hotter or colder to "Manual" and then manipulating a lever to increase or decrease the flame levels in the oven

Monitoring was easily accomplished by observing a number of temperature indicating devices. The main temperature indicator was an automatic recorder mounted at the chief baker's workstation at the front end of a 200-foot-long oven. It was there that the raw cookies entered the oven. The cookies had previously been formed by an extruding machine that squeeezed the dough mixture through a battery of nozzlesonto a stainless-steel conveyor belt. After entering the oven, the belt automatically carried the cookies through the oven at a predetermined speed. According to the kind of cookies being baked, it took from 12 to 18 minutes for them to move from one end of the oven to the other.

Besides the main temperature recorder, temperature indicators, were mounted every 50 feet or so so along the oven's side. The automatic temperature controls could be switched to manual control at each of these points.

On the day of what came to be known as the Big burnout, the cookies were just not "overdone", they were burned to a crisp. So after first blowing his stack and shunting the spoiled cookies to the garbage truck, Arsenio demanded of Joanna, "How could you ever hav elet this happen?" "I can't understand it," said Joanna. "I never left my workstation. I must hav elooked at the recorder a dozen times during that period. And whil eoven temperatures were nudging the high side occasionally, they always seemed to be within the control limits."

So," said Arsenio," you were too lazy to get off you duff and check the oven-side thermometers".

"That's not true. I can't remmeber whether I checked them because I was talking with the extruder-machine operator at that time about a problem he was having with his equipment. That distracted me"

"That's no excuse," said Arsenio, "and I don't believe for a moment you were talking, machine problems. You were probably arguing about last night's ball game. Anyway, your job is to watch ovens, not to chat with every person in the shop. And no matter what the main recorder indicated, you're supposed to be monitoring the oven-side thermometers. It's obvious that somewhere along the line, temperatures got too high and you should hav ebeen there to take over. By not doing your job right, you made a big mistake that cost the company a lot of money.

So I'mm going to suspend you for a couple of days to give you a your headd straight about this job".

To Arsenio' dismay, Joanna's suspension did not stick. Th ereason? After listening to Joanna's story, the bakery manager asked the plant engineer to examine the oven equipment. The plant engineer found that temperatures indicated by the main recorder were accurate, as were all th eoven-side thermometers. He also checked the automatic temperature controls and found that they were functioning properly. He then asked the extruder-machine operator, "and I've had to shut the belts down from time to time to clean them".

"Don't you realize", said the plant engineer, "that when you shut the belt dow, the belt in the oven stops, too? It is no wonder the cookies burned up. Next time you want to stop the belt, be sure to let the chief baker know in advance. Meanwhile, we'll see if we can't adjust the automatic control system to avoid this problem".

Questions

1.         Coment on Arsenio's approach to handling this problem.

2.         (i) Of the five alternative opinions provided below, which do you think is most appropriate and why?

(ii)        Rank the alternatives on a scale from 1 (most appropriate) to 5 (least appropriate). Also justify your ranking.

(iii)       You may add another alternative, if you wish.But justify your opinion.

a.         Arsenio was justified in suspending Joanna because he had no way of knowing the whole story at the time.

b.         The suspension was justified because no matter what the extruder-machine operator had done, the chief baker should have discovered the belt stoppage befor damage was done.

c.         Arsenio's only mistake was that he did not clearly identify and specify the problem to begin with.

d.         Arsenio's biggest mistake was to jump to a conclusion without having all the facts.

e.         Arsenio solved the problem as best he could under the circumstances.