Team

Lately I have been watching the new Netflix show Narcos which is about Pablo Escobar and Colombia's Medellin Cartel. It is a great show so I will do my best not to include any spoilers. While at first glance it seems like Cartels can be unorganized and mindless, the show offers an inside look on the operations controlled by drug king pin Pablo Escobar in the 1970s and 1980s. I am only half way through the series so I still have a lot to learn, but it has really amazed me how smart these criminals could be, which explains why Escobar lasted as long as he did and why the Cartel was so powerful and remains in tact.

One of the structural assumptions that stood out to me as I was reading Bolman and Deal was "Troubles arise and performance suffers from structural deficits, remedied through problem solving and restructuring". While the Medellin Cartel has a different method of problem solving than most organizations, they managed to solve their problems pretty efficiently. They basically had no limits, which allowed them to get what they wanted almost all the time. Whether it be paying off corrupt government officials and police or killing somebody who gave information to the people hunting them down, their purpose was to retain balance in the organization.

One of Katzenbach and Smith's six characteristics of high quality teams reads "High performing teams develop the right mix of expertise". This is very evident in Narcos. As a vertically coordinated organization, the entire cartel is led by Escobar who, through authority and a mostly unspoken set of rules and policies, controls the work of his employees. He divides certain duties to certain people who specialize in that sector, who then divide further, similar to the structure of the graph we saw in class a couple weeks ago on the structure of University of Illinois staff. One man controls production of the drugs, one man routes shipments and works on smuggling into the United States, one plans assassinations, and so on, all under the commands of Escobar. This exemplifies the characteristic that teams have complementary skill sets because they all specialize in an area to help contribute to the cartel's mission.

The only characteristic of a high quality team that I found hard to relate to the Medellin Cartel in Narcos is "Members of high performing teams hold themselves collectively accountable". More times than not a mistake within the organization is credited to one person, who then undoubtedly receives punishment in the form of death. I do believe that in most cases Katzenbach and Smith are correct in considering that a distinguishing characteristic, but in this case I consider the cartel high quality even though that characteristic is not evident.

Lastly, Bolman and Deal has a very interesting quote in the Chapter 3 when focusing on Challenges of Global Organizations. It reads "No company can operate effectively on a global scale by centralizing all key decisions and then farming them out for implementation". The story of Pablo Escobar proves this theory to be true in the end considering the eventual death of Escobar in the 1990s and diminishing power of the Medellin Cartel.

Opportunism

There are many times in my life that I was given a great opportunity but turned it down in order to protect something else, whether it be a friendship, money, time, or something else, but it never really gave me long term regret. However a friend of mine has had an experience where he turned down a great opportunity that ended up being an even bigger opportunity when all was said and done.

I had a friend in high school that ended up moving but we kept in touch. He moved somewhere in New York and was attending a huge high school that is very well known in the New York area but I can not remember the name of it. He's a huge theater geek and always did plays and everything for as long as I can remember. When he first got there high school he did a couple plays and theater productions and ended up getting a pretty good reputation. I remember one day he was telling me that the lead role in their big Spring production, which I think was Our Town, was having a lot of trouble and was way behind schedule in learning all his lines and the other things people do in plays. Couple days later he tells me he was offered to take over the role because the teacher was nervous the other kid wasn't going to be able to figure it out in time. Since my friend was new he did not want to make anyone mad so he ultimately turned it down. Couple weeks after the play is over and they are all done he learns that the kid who played the lead was contacted by some big acting school in New York saying that their scout or something happened to be at one of the showings and wanted to do an interview for admission into the school. There's obviously no guarantee that he would have given a good enough performance to get the same offer, but now that kid is in that acting school and my buddy is going to school in New Jersey. We have not really talked about it that much but I can tell he regrets not taking that opportunity.

This is a good example of the idea that "Good things happen to those who wait" because I am sure that, since this was not his last theater production in high school, he thought he was going to have another chance for the lead role. I am similar in that way. I am not much of an opportunist and try to get through life making the least amount of people angry as possible. While sometimes it pays off to take an opportunity that looks promising, there are definitely times where an opportunity looks great but ends up being a huge regret. It is always really hard to tell and that is what makes opportunity an interesting topic.

Blog Post 2

I used to work at a grocery store in high school. I worked there from Sophomore year until I came to college. There was a hierarchy in the my department of the store. There were baggers, checkers, and managers. In my mind it was a pretty flawed system because when we were short on checkers, lines got very long because baggers could not help by using the registers and managers were either busy doing other things or just felt like that wasn't part of their job. I was a bagger so I was not very involved in the business side of the operation, however I did occasionally talk to the managers about it.

My senior year our company was bought out so we merged with others and in an effort to make all stores the same, we changed things around a bit. Before these changes, our customer service was great. All of the employees were relatively happy with their position and customers felt comfortable shopping with us. One change we made was that instead of asking customers if they wanted help out to the car, we were supposed to say "I am going to help you out to your car" and insist to go even if they say they don't need it. It was very clear that people felt very uncomfortable with this. My mother even stopped shopping there because it was just poor execution of customer service at that point. They even forced us baggers to wear aprons at all times, which made zero sense considering we were grabbing prepackaged foods and putting them in a bag.

I feel that those changes presented unnecessary transaction costs. Like I said, the workers basically forcing themselves to go out to your car with you drove people away, losing customers and therefor forfeiting sales. They also lost some quality employees. A friend of mine worked there with me and disagreed with all the changes so much that he accepted another job and left the grocery store. I was given the offer to return for summers but opted to turn it down for another part time job. Just recently I learned that the store manager, who ran the entire store (under the direction of corporate), retired early because he was so fed up with everything he was being forced to do. This was my first real job and it gave me a very negative opinion on large organizations.

Dale Mortensen Econ 490

Picture retrieved from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2010/mortensen-facts.html

Dale Mortensen was an American economist with a focus on labor economics. He got his Bachelor's degree from Willamette University and proceeded to get his PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mortensen ended up becoming a professor at Northwestern in 1965, where he stayed for most of his career. He was also the professor of a graduate student named Lanny Arvan and a member of his dissertation committee.

He won the 2010 Nobel Price in Economic Sciences with Peter Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Christopher Pissaride of the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work evaluated tendencies of the labor market with a focus on unemployment. Many people use his work to to help them understand the labor market as well as other fields.

I have heard Dale Mortensen but have never took the time to learn anything about him until now. It is clear that Mortensen had much influence in the field of Economics. His work in labor economics will remain very influential for a long time. I am sure a lot of what we will learn will involve some of his work.

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