Success and Teamwork

My Example of being part of a successful team is a fairly straight forward one. In high school I played soccer for 4 years and in those four years I managed to be a part of two fairly successful teams, my sophomore year and my senior year. The book talked about basketball and how coordination between players is necessary, and this is also the case in soccer, and it was very apparent during the two successful seasons that cohesion and everyone being on the same page was a major factor in our success. While there are many parallels in the two seasons, they were far from identical. Structurally, within the team both were a one-boss arrangement, with our coach being the boss, but that is pretty much where the similarities end. My sophomore year coach had been the varsity coach for several years before stepping down to the sophomore level to spend more time with his kids. What this meant was that he brought his varsity philosophy to the sophomore level, meaning he had ultimate authority on everything from formation to positions and tactics. This is very different from my senior year, where the varsity coach was the one who replaced the old varsity coach, essentially swapping positions. What the new varsity coach brought to the team was different than what I had experienced sophomore year in that, while still being a one-boss arrangement, he very rarely put himself in a place of complete authority or power, rather it in many ways was like an all-channel network with the coach leading the discussion and having the final say. An example of this is when our season began on the wrong note and we were struggling, we, the players, decided it was time for a change in formation, and came to the coach with this idea it was implemented and had a positive effect. This is an example of on of Katzenbach ad Smith’s characteristics of a high-quality team, that we held ourselves collectively responsible. This sort of thing would not have happened under my sophomore year coach, as he wanted to play ‘his system’, and everyone had to fit into ‘his system’ rather than finding a system that fit the team, meaning he was holding himself solely responsible for the success of the team. I believe that both years’ structures were good and both had their strengths and weaknesses. The first reason they worked for each of the coaches is because the team configurations fit their personalities, one being all about control and the other being more relaxed and open to experimentation. The second reason I think the two systems worked is because once we had gone through our sophomore year where we had learned ‘the system’ and understood it and learned more about the game in general, we were then able to make adjustments and apply what we had learned from our time under a strict system to then be more creative with a more hands off approach.

The thing I have not mentioned yet is how successful each of the teams were, because the success was relative to several factors. My sophomore year our team went undefeated in the regular season, 20-0, my senior year we only won 4 games in the regular season, but we were able to win regionals. The book talks about structures and how success is determined. In the case of both of my teams, Success was evaluated and determined in very different ways. Sophomore year, winning was the only form of success, our coach made sure every practice and every game that it was expected of us that we win, and in the end we did. Varsity year our expectations were no different, but after struggling at the beginning of the season, we had to reevaluate our goals. There was a team wide discussion where we as a team discussed where we saw ourselves heading and what could be done, if anything, to turn our season around, which culminated in a regional win. This is another example of a characteristic of a high-performing team, the ability for a team to shape purpose in response to a demand. Out of these two seasons, while to 20-0 run was fun, I feel as though me and my team succeeded more my senior year than my sophomore year. Being able to overcome unforeseen obstacles and push through tough times made that regional win that much more rewarding than the 20-0 record. In both of these cases the coach gave the team a direction, and if that works, as It did my sophomore year, fantastic, however if things don’t go quite as well as expected it is not just up to the coach but the entire team to create achievable goals so that success is still able to be achieved.

Opportunism

There are generally two ways for one to be opportunistic. The first way is largely positive, and it is the approach of seizing chances when they are presented to this person. The positive connotation of an opportunist is someone who is proactive and ambitious, a real ‘go-getter’. The second sort of opportunism is viewed as negative. This is the approach of preying on the less fortunate or exploiting some weakness or flaw. This negative view of opportunism can often be described as selfish and sometimes immoral. The latest example I have seen where this negative view of opportunism can be clearly seen is with the case of shell getting permission to drill in the arctic since climate change has melted the ice. An oil company drilling in the arctic is an egregious form of opportunism, as they were a main contributor as to why they are even able to drill there in the first place; Shell seems to be taking a ‘by any means necessary’ approach to how they go about getting oil and therefore money, while in the mean time they seem to be metaphorically defiling ground zero for climate change with seemingly no remorse.

This begs the question of is what Shell is doing wrong. Is being opportunistic wrong? In the example of Shell’s drilling, I may feel that Shell is in the wrong and they shouldn’t drill, but someone high up at Shell must feel differently for them to give the OK for the drilling to begin. I think in the most general sense what separates opportunism that is good and opportunism that is whether or not there are victims. Everyone is inherently an opportunist, the difference between most peoples’ opportunism and a decision Shell’s opportunism is that when most people take advantage of an opportunity it doesn’t negatively affect people, or if it does it’s the case where it negatively affects the other people who were trying to take advantage of the same opportunity. In the case of Shell’s opportunism, it comes at the cost of every single person on the planet, as global warming, in one way or another, affects everyone. So when it comes down to it, the presence of victims is most relevant when considering whether an opportunity is worth seizing.

In the case of my own experience of someone not being opportunistic, my father’s kindness and generosity spring to mind. My father is a tinkerer, and loves to work on pretty much anything mechanical, as evidenced by his nine motorcycles and seven generators. And while the motorcycles don’t present my opportunistic moments, whenever the power goes out, the generators come out. My dad offers generators to anyone who needs one, free of charge. Not taking advantage of this opportunity to make some money might seem strange, but my dad wouldn’t have it any other way. As to why he does it, I feel this is a perfect example of a just being a ‘good citizen’, and just feeling like it’s the right thing to do. Also, relating it to what I had been talking about earlier about the two types of opportunism, if my dad did have people pay for the generators, I don’t think those people would feel like they were being victimized or taken advantage of, and would therefore be viewed as a positive form of opportunism.

Post 2: Organizations and Transaction Costs

     My experience with an organization is with my internship last summer that had me working for a part manufacturer and distributor for cars, trucks, boats, and wind turbines. My role at this company was as part of the marketing team, which was in charge of cataloging the products among other things. The structure of the company was rather interesting for a few reasons. First, it is a German company, with the building I interned at being one of the main manufacturers and distributors in North America. The second reason the structure was interesting is rather specific to the marketing team in that because of our area of expertise and the equipment we were using we were similar to a support staff for the rest of the office in many ways. Because of these two reasons, I had very much a first person view of the benefits and failures of a hub and spoke style structure of running a company, both internationally and internally. Internationally, it was nearly flawless, the language barrier was a non-issue and hardly ever was there a need for direct communication over-seas, at least from what I could see, and our branch was fairly autonomous, without much need for direction. The only problem I ever saw encountered was when having to deal with time sensitive cases, however those were few and far between and hardly the norm. Thus leading me to believe that hub and spoke, at least at an international level, can be conducted fairly successfully. When it comes to the same kind of system internally within the building I was interning, hub and spoke somewhat surprisingly encountered more hiccups and had its flaws revealed. As an intern as part of a ‘support staff’ as I described it before, I was the spoke to a much larger spoke and therefore my perspective may be a bit skewed. However, from my experience there was large amounts of information and data flow lag which set many deadlines behind. The difference that I saw between the international hub and spoke and the internal one was the reliance that people placed on each other. The amount of times I was asked to stop what I was doing to help with something else in another department meant that now what I had to put on hold what I was doing previously as well as get caught up on a new project and do that. This lead to deadlines being pushed back and inefficiencies that couldn’t be avoided without changing the entire system. My experience has lead me to believe that hub and spoke system works much better when the more autonomous and self-sufficient the spokes are.

     As far as transaction costs go, being an intern I had very limited interaction with customers. However, one of the few projects that did have me interacting people outside of the company had me interacting with some suppliers for parts that we would then be passing on to consumers. This project had me emailing suppliers to get them to sign documents making sure they were producing their product in an appropriate way that meets our standards. While many companies complied, there were several companies who refused. For these companies the transaction cost of signing the documents and doing business with us was too high. The only problem with this though, is that several car manufacturers (i.e. Ford, GM, etc.) had told us that we needed to do business with several of these companies who weren’t submitting the signed documents. In these cases, our company was forced to bear the transaction costs of doing business with the noncompliant companies, meaning our company was taking on the uncertainty and risk by continuing to do business with the other uncooperative companies.