Teamwork is essential not just in the business world but also in almost all areas of human endeavor, from education, to work, family and romance. Because human beings are autonomies entities with individual’s wants and goals, in order to play on the team of humanity, compromise is necessary. As far back as Aristotle thinkers recognized that humans were social animals with the need to compromise to best achieve their end goals. His ideas and his succinct ordering of them have incalculable influences in today’s world. He had rigid ideas regarding human relationships, happiness, virtues, deliberation, justice and friendship. His Nicomachean Ethics is a conclusive work that governs what he considers to be both the “ultimate” good and specific “goods” attainable for man. He believed that things were directed towards specific ends, and that a virtuous entity was one that stayed true to it’s objective. These things, because of their universal nature, have not changed in their essence, but the world of today is certainly much different than the one that Aristotle was interacting with. In the Mod IV Project Development Team is a real world example of people who work for the same company, but in their on sphere have a shared mutual goal, but conflict in the implementation on it. This essay examines the situation and with mutual gains (a decision which mutually benefits everyone in some way) in mind, proposes the most practical solution.
Linda Whitman was the senior marketing person for the MOD IV and was going to assume responsibly for profit and loss. She knew that a delay would compromise that and was bent on remaining on schedule. She found difficulty in communicating with the engineering and manufacturing team. John Baily, the general manager of BCD was caught in the middle of wanting to give the design team time to work out it’s issues and release the product on schedule.
Since BCD’s abandonment of sequential development in the mid-1980s, this opened up new avenues of resolution of problems. The three critical functions of manufacturing, marketing/sales and engineering could meet on the same team and empathize with each other regarding difficulties that each team was having and the expectation of each of the other.
What all people on the team need to realize is that they all share the same goal of success, but that each has a different sphere in which to achieve it. Only through understanding each other’s struggles to create success, can the problems be democratically worked through. The primary goal of BCD is profit. Without that, the company closes. What each team needs to consider is which decisions about quality are indispensible, meaning, what is the minimum bar of aspects like noise that are acceptable. From there, they need to estimate what the engineer team feels they can complete on additional time, what the loss in sales will be initially, and what productive delays will to for the long term sale of the product.
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