Case: Earning Organizational Respect

In this case, you and your classmates play the role of the marketing department in a
firm involved in new product development. Your firm is struggling with instituting
team-based product development, and over the last several months several of the
marketing staff have been placed on product teams with personnel from engineering,
design, and manufacturing. The experience so far has not been positive for you and
your marketing colleagues. You feel that marketing is routinely left out of key team
decisions and that top management seems more sympathetic to the engineers when
conflicts arise within the team. You suspect that part of the reason is that most top
management personnel in your firm come from an engineering background and just
understand the perspectives and the decision-making style of the engineers better.
You also feel that marketing has a lot to contribute to product development. There
is an excellent marketing research department that can provide quick feedback on
customer behavior using state-of-the-art equipment, and the sales force is second to
none in the industry and routinely gathers key market information and intelligence.
There are several very good creative people on staff responsible for generating
high-potential ideas, which your firm has developed into many successful new
product launches.
One of your creative colleagues in product development suggests using a problem-
based ideation approach, commonly used to generate new product ideas, to try to
find a way to get top management to respect the marketing department more. Ideally,
you would like them to recognize your skills, training, and experience and to
appreciate and use the unique information you can bring to the new product process.
You succinctly state your problem as follows:
“How can we communicate the value and potential contributions of the marketing
department effectively to top management, so that they will respect us more?” Using
the ideation techniques given in Appendix B (or any others you prefer), develop
creative solutions to this problem. First, generate at least half a dozen ideas
individually. Keep a basic rule in mind: There are no bad ideas—the more, the
merrier. Then, with your instructor working as a group facilitator, boil these down
to the four or five best ideas and, as a group, discuss and refine these. Your goal is
to arrive collectively at one or more clear, well-thought-out programs that you could
realistically begin implementing soon. One other rule: Use your imagination! This
is an exercise where you can really stretch. Though you can try any of the techniques
given in Appendix B, some you might find particularly useful are the following:
Scenario Analysis: Identify a set of trends (fashions, hot places to live/work,
celebrities, exciting new products, etc.). Think about what might be suggested by or
associated with any of these.
Creative Stimuli: Look at the set of stimulus words provided in Appendix B and
select a few of these at random. Ask yourself how each of your words suggests
something that helps you solve your problem. Be creative.
Forced Relationships: Forget about your problem altogether for a little while.
Select a magazine. Turn randomly to a page and look at the picture on that page.
(If none, leaf through the magazine until you get to one.) What does the picture
suggest to you? Jot down at least half a dozen thoughts. Now, return to your problem
and use the thoughts you came up with to help you think creatively about possible
solutions. For a variation, use a dictionary, encyclopedia, or the Yellow Pages
instead and find a random word on a random page.
Use of the Ridiculous: Think of the most ridiculous idea you can. Then ask yourself
if it suggests to you a not-so-ridiculous new idea.