The Gap between Theory and Practice at Columbia Business School - Research Proposal Example

Essay1: Master es are the epitome of bridging the gap between theory and practice at Columbia Business School. View link below. Please provide an example from your own life in which practical experience taught you more than theory alone. (Recommended 500 word limit) : ‘Technical standards’ were taught as the thump rule in Information Technology, all through the conventional education I had in this subject. This rule was often mistaken as a limiting factor and the systems developed usually got stuck with in this boundary to result a ‘not much different’ design in terms of performance and diversity. The case was not much different with the ‘Standard Translation Planning and Management System’ (TPMS), a tool for managing the IBM globalization and localization process. The generation system set as per the standard protocols of the related technology, developed by a team of engineers from Egypt, failed poorly with regard to utility, steadily affecting customer satisfaction. In 2007, I was appointed as Manager of a new team with the responsibility of renovating the existing system and developing a Next Generation TPMS .An extensive research into the technicalities of the system, and upon taking the opinion of the clients, I could detect four major drawbacks of the ‘standard’ system .They were ‘very slow performance’, ‘lesser customer utility’, ‘too complicated advanced features’ and an ‘unfriendly user interface’. A shift in the focus from the theoretical technology standards to very practical customer friendliness was the basic change needed. The primary attention in the architecture of the new system was to select tools as per user’s requirement. On a customer based investigation, some users required the replacement of ‘desktop application’ with ‘web application’ so as to enjoy a clean application added with the ease to use. As the others’ concern was system response time, they opted for desktop application which was faster than the web application. A trial to integrate the requirements of this wide range of customers gave us the thought of blending both the applications which was quite new to the knowledge base and expertise of IBM. The product was to be formulated based on practical mix of both the tools. The challenge was to bridge the standard framework and the practical architectural tools. The effort started with a feasibility study and I gradually led the process of prototype development. Finally we invented a desktop web-client architecture which ensured both system response speed and an incredible user interface. Then on, the efforts went in the direction of nullifying the gulf if any, between the theory of the system and the feasibly in its usage. I initiated a quality assurance group of 29 user representatives from 16 different countries who were brought into confidence to evaluate each step of the innovation. Upon their advice, I amended the system and took off some too much theoretical stuff from it. Incidentally, this methodology went well with one of the three core values of IBM: ‘to make innovation that matters’. This gap filling methodology in between the theory and the practicability successfully proved the product to be cost efficient, reputed as the most efficient system and created 87 percentage satisfied customers. The success of the innovation was made possible when unfeasible theoretical components were replaced with practicability oriented ones. Please provide an example of a team failure of which you’ve been a part. If given a second chance, what would you do differently? (Recommended 500 word limit): It was soon after the completion of my Masters Degree that I made a master plan to make my family invest in one of my friends’ company. The whole venture was meant to be a team work involving me and my family. I single handedly conducted a cost-benefit analysis. I didn’t care to exploit the experience of my parents and ignored the effectiveness of a combined effort. On the other hand my parents too were of the impression to leave things to my discretion and didn’t contribute their expertise and experience to build an efficient team. They restricted their role in the team merely to invest. My analysis suggested a Valuation Adjustment Mechanism (VAM) with the company which imposes a proportional increase in the number of shares of the team in case the company fails to achieve a set profit goal. My idea was that, this would persuade the company to work better. No discussions were made with the company and they too didn’t consider the investors as a part of the team. The investment of the team plunged as the company didn’t perform as expected. I realized that the diverse experience within the family was not utilized as a group, and a better team effort would have made higher gains. In this case, neither the roles of the members were defined nor the plan was discussed with in the team. A team effort would have proved things to be different. The team would have had an initial discussion to realize what the role of each member would be, as the first principle of an effective team implies on the diversity of the skills and personalities with in the team. A team proves its efficacy when different personality types balance and complement each other. The expertise of different family members would have put together constructive suggestions on the investment plan. The real plan and goal would have been properly communicated within the team. As a team leader, my planning too was not integral. I was rushing too much for profit. The team would have done company’s situation analysis. The fact that the company’s leading product was in its initial phase in China was completely ignored. The team would have waited for another year to analyze the performance of the company. A close association with the company during this waiting period would have helped the team to develop confidence in the company’s performance. More effort should have been taken by me as a leader to arrange delegations in between the team and company’s officials which would have added positive collaboration. Under these circumstances more better ways of collaboration than VAM would encourage the company to do well. Looking back into the setback, I realized that investment is not strictly buying versus selling; rather, it focuses on persistent teamwork. Integration of personalities with in the team, inspiring them to take bold and wise joint decisions and working in the same direction fetches faster and better results than individualized efforts. Read More