Particular Assignment BrowningJason W ClevelandMIT 500-Case Study 2January 29, 2012What do I think of the particular assignment given to Browning?Browning did not have an easy task at hand. Because IMT was a combination of different companies with decentralized leadership based of geographic location and then further split into two heads of one animal with cost and R&D separating them. Browning walked into a hornet’s nest. Any one of the four options could place an already struggling market in jeopardy. Overall Browning did a great job at understanding the task and the current company environment. He stayed in his lane and tried to give honest feedback to June.
Consider CMCI’s Mission/Vision Statement and the Fort Wayne MIS Directions and Objectives Statement. What is your opinion of these Statements? Are they appropriate? Are they comprehensive? Are they at the correct level of generality? Were these statements appropriately developed and adopted?
My thoughts are that the CMCI’s statement in 1997 is not very inspiring. It reads like a dime store novel in that it really does not say anything or give direction and purpose. While after reading Mr. O’Neil memo/Directions and Objectives Statement I get a fuller since of where the ship is heading and what the demands are for company moving ahead. O’Neil talks about being structured and having a reasonable level of risk in moving forward. I would say that given the timeline and events of when both of these statements were written that they both provided some form of leadership and common management tools. They speak about similar things that are universal within any given business, but I believe O’Neils to be more a map to solution rather then Edward Fortesque.
I agree. The statement was written for this project, and to be fair I was only in the middle of its development on Kickstarter. I’m really excited about the possibilities.
The thing I liked about the article is that it focuses on it with the broadest of lenses, but I think you really are seeing the scope for that with the kind of stories you want to tell. Many of your contributors are professionals who are in their early 40s, and have really good experience in the market with financial and/or venture capital. While the focus of this article was on making money for a small company based on a small business, it also did have a point of view. That is the story of a small company that, while it has been around for years, has suddenly started to look more like a real company.
What was the vision for the company and how did you come up with the company name?
Our first idea was to be a public company. We’d be a nonprofit organization and we had our own board of directors and were to use the money from the fundraiser as a private capital offering for the company to fund legal matters.
We would buy the land and use the land for the building so we would have a house that housed a few of our investors who raised $1500 on Kickstarter. We would use this same funding to hire and build new office spaces. While the house would provide a place for investors to live they would come up with an amazing, innovative and beautiful apartment. The building would also house offices on our main deck that would connect us with many offices around the country where we could have a meeting place. These offices would be used to meet the company’s needs and we would have the necessary funds for all of this if we needed to build a new office or two within a few years.
Our first step to become a real company would be to have a set of founders and founders, who would be well versed in the market they are talking about, and who would give us a shot at financing. By buying the land we would provide the financial backing for the building, but if we were able to sell a lot of capital, we would end up with a very high-quality condo that we could rent to a very high-priced developer on the street level. It has been speculated that this was the start of the company name and that the company would continue this growth under the leadership of our top execs.
This idea really attracted to me very quickly, so I did both brainstorming and reading many of Mr. O’Neil’s documents and writing an article on his project where he had more or less given me instructions on how to actually do that and that would come to the next level when I actually completed that piece in a few months.
In the beginning I was hoping or hoping that he would take a shot on this. When I finished that article I immediately thought of his blog post in the fall of 2015 which did not seem
Mr. Fortesque statement was very limited in vision and not comprehensive enough. While both statements do talk about similar things if you are going to use it to bring three different companies in-line with each other it is too general. I would say Fortesque’s stamen would be the correct level if it were geared towards one company with one set of values. Plus this was only issued at the Fort Wayne site and not adopted by the US division. Joe O’Neil’s management memo also has some holes in it as well. While I think it to be appropriate for his level of influence within the company I think he does not provide an all too comprehensive version. In his own words “ I do not have a formal mission for the MIS group, but essentially I am looking to provide an adequate, responsive, and economical network structure of data processing support for all sites within the division” (Managing Information Technology, Brown, pg. 120) I would expect a senior manager to have a vision and guidance to his division.
Overall