Time's Harvest

Small Group Report Three: What Business?

Last updated: 3/31/01
Link back to course Welcome

Team 1:
Carole Bentley-Bell
Sharon Finch
Ernie Gagne'
Kiki Herfert

Team 2:
Paula Miller
Wendy Vaughter
Ebony Woods

I will set up separate computer conferences for each team - W01 TH Team 1 and W01 TH Team 2. When you log in to the conferencing system, in addition to the course computer conference, you will see your team's computer conference, but not the one for the other team. If they want, teams can meet in person rather than use the computer conference.

Team Assignment:

  1. Review "The Law of the Situation" at the bottom (this is from Chapter 4 of John Naisbitt's best-seller, Megatrends).
  2. Using your team's computer conference, decide on one of the companies in the bulleted list below to analyze, using the three numbered questions below.
  3. When you team has decided, post the choice on the Times' Harvest conference so that everybody can see it. No two groups can post or analyze the same company, so get your choice in early! The dates and times on the postings will determine priority.
  4. Third, develop a Team Report that answers the following three questions:
    1. What business is this company really in?
    2. Consistent with the business it is really in, what should this business be doing that it is not doing?
    3. Are there any activities of this business that you feel are inconsistent with the business it is really in?
  5. Turn in the team report as a posting on the full course computer conference, and email me (David Bowen, silly!) that it is done.

The is meant to be a fun assignment that gives you a chance to apply some of what you have reading and writing about to a company or organization that is familiar to all of us, that we have all dealt with.

Due on April 14.

List of Companies

The Law of the Situation: The Railroads Did Not Understand
From Megatrends (1982) by John Naisbitt; Chapter 4

"The kinds of changes that are forcing us to think long-term, however, are so pervasive and so powerful that what is really required in that we completely rethink our businesses as part of the shift to the long-term. One way to do this is by applying "The Law of the Situation." The Law of the Situation is a term coined in 1904 by Mary Parker Follett, the first management consultant in the United States. She had a window-shade company as a client and persuaded its owners they were really in the light-control business. That realization expanded their opportunities enormously. The Law of the situation asks the question 'What Business are you really in?'

"The Question for the 1980's is 'What business are you really in?'

"When the business environment changes, a company or organization must reconceptualize its purpose in light of the changing world. And now, with situations in constant flux, we must apply the Law of the Situation to present-day businesses.

"One business that did not understand The Law of the situation was the railroads.

"We all know that the railroads should have known there were in the transportation business and not just railroading. It was not so long ago that the railroad industry was the largest in the U.S. economy, and we were celebrating the Pennsylvania Railroad as the best-managed institution in the country. But times changed. We started to build big trucks and highways for those trucks and then jumbo jets. Even when the evidence was overwhelming that trucks and airplanes were the wave of the future, railroad men (and they were all men) remained, as Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt has written, "imperturbably self-confident." They thought they would go on forever. So did the people who continued to hold railroad stock.

"Railroading is, I think, the great lesson for business. And today's appreciation of that lesson is to see that other great industries that have served us so well in the past are in the process of being replaced by the new tasks.

"As with the railroad industry, it is difficult for us to believe that we are in the process of losing the automobile industry that has served us so well and has in fact been the economic underpinning of this country for so long." [end of  Megatrends quote]

[Comment on the last sentence about the automobile industry. This is a quote from the 1982 best-seller futures book, Megatrends. It illustrates a problem with trend analysis, namely that trends change. The US, of course, do not lose the automobile industry. The US companies went through some very tough times, as any Michigan resident during that time remembers very well. The US companies went through a lot of "creative destruction," (slick phrase, but wasn't that a painful process?) and emerged as strong competitors, and some of the Japanese manufacturers are now in trouble (Honda and Toyota are still strong companies and excellent competitors). But the conclusion for this course is that trends change and so trend analysis is not a reliable guide to the future. The trends that are projected have so many social factors interwoven into them that when many aspects of society are changing at the same time, the trends change each other, in ways that we only understand after the fact, if then.]