GROUPS AND TEAMS AT WORK

For this assignment, you will engage in a roleplay, placing yourself in the role of Management Consultant. Your deliverable will be a PowerPoint Presentation. You will draw on the background material and your analysis of a scenario presented in a memo to prepare your presentation.

Background: You work for a management consulting firm, Capital Consultants (CC). Your firm has been hired to advise Leading Edge Fashions, a small high-end house with a celebrity clientele. You have received the following memo from the head of CC.

To:  <Your name>

From: Vivian von der Bach, President and Senior Consultant

I am assigning you to our newest client, Leading Edge Fashions. As you may know, this well-known fashion house has experienced problems since the death of its chief designer, Sir Francis Green.

In the two years since Sir Francis’s death, the CEO of Leading Edge, M. Etienne Roget, has delegated artistic control to a committee of experienced designers chosen from within the company. The results have been far from what was hoped.  In the first year, the committee could not decide on a theme for Spring.  As a result, that season’s collection was a confused mess that one critic referred to as “the remnants of a Hollywood garage sale.” In the second year, the committee tried to avoid making the same mistake and settled on a theme after meeting for only one hour. The “Game of Thrones” collection was another disaster, with such inappropriate items as a bronze helmet and a bearskin cape.

M. Roget has been searching the world for a chief designer to fill the void created with Sir Francis’s death. He has been unsuccessful to date. Further, he fears that disbanding the committee would be seen by its members as a vote of no confidence and would lead to mass resignations.

Your job is to join the committee as a co-chair and advise it on organizational matters, especially as relates to the team’s development. Obviously, you should not try to advise the committee on fashion—CC has no expertise in that area. Your task will be to guide the committee in its deliberations and to help a small group of experienced, opinionated designers achieve good results on Leading Edge Fashion’s Winter collection for next year.

Before you join the committee, M. Roget would like to have some idea of what you will be looking for and what you may be able to accomplish. To that end, you should prepare a  PowerPoint presentation in which you present what may have happened to the committee, namely what may have “gone wrong” in the past two years and what you could do to keep it from happening again.

Your PowerPoint presentation should be professional with a recommended length of 8 to 12 slides. Please use the notes section of the slides to explain your slide content in detail. Be sure to include citations in the body of the presentation as well as a “references” slide.