Terracog Case

In an organization, meetings take place on a regular basis. Today’s organizations are built around people, so interaction among team members, inter-team, inter-department etc. are very common. The meetings cost organization in terms of time, money, and manpower utilization. Hence, effort is made to make the meeting process more effective.

This meeting started late due to a lack of council members and also audience. After, ten minutes a third member arrived and the meeting began, however the council skipped the first half of the agenda and jumped to Communications. Ten minutes after starting Communications, a fourth council member appeared and the meeting started all over to the beginning of the agenda. The meeting started over because the council could not approve the minutes and agenda without meeting its quorum. This kind of sucked the women presenting Communications because she had to repeat herself all over again. Communications consisted the presenter communicating with the board different people that were being appointed to different committees. This committees ranged from Keep Atlanta Beautiful to Water and Sewer Appeals

Garner buy-in from facility management to work together to solve this problem that negatively affects all parties involved.

4. There is a lack of strong leadership at Terra Nova. One key tenant of Terra Nova was that the employees were intended to have 100% ownership of the firm with share ownership not restricted to partners and no majority shareholder leadership dictation. The founders felt that the firm would not survive without the employee ownership aspect; employee ownership creates an emotional and financial attachment to the job and provides a sense of community. Unfortunately, as the finances at Terra Nova declines, junior employees declined to purchase ownership in the company and the senior partners refused to increase their shares which reduced cash flow within Terra Nova.

In 2001, Terra Cycle was produced by Jon Beyer and Tom Szaky, both Princeton University students. By 2003, Tom left school to pursue the business of TerraCycle full-time basis. The growth process was slow in its infancy stages, but by 2006 several companies became interested in the TerraCycle concept for the All-Purpose Plant Food. It was now necessary for the chief financial officer (CFO) Betsy Cotton to discuss the future opportunities of TerraCycle the Trenton New Jersey company (Clow & Baack, p. 41).

When I go over the case of the Terran Aaron Swartz, all that comes through my mind is “artist must eat too.” While the articles that Swartz downloaded where not works of art, they were the labors of millions of scholars and professors who took hundreds of hours writing grant proposals, setting up and conducting research, writing the article, and getting it accepted in an academic journal. According to copyright laws, creators have full rights to their works for their life plus seventy years. While some may think this is too long of a period of time, this is not what is being debated here. The question that is asked is whether or not Swartz was persecuted for his actions, or in other words does the law overstep. While I do believe that many

TerraCog has many tensions that are causing the company to suffer. The company has an unstable executive team that lacks true leadership, there are no clear departmental or individual objectives, group structure is lacking, the team lacks a decision making process, and there are many team conflicts that lacks negotiating.

This report deals with the problems in organizational communication and group conflictmanagement at TerraCog, a high tech company that develops GPS products for the consumer market.

It actually acted as a tension reliever, I feel, because we were so focused on the task and worried if we were doing the project correctly. Having her come in and interrupt us sort of made it that our discussion could not be perfect and was not supposed to be really because there is no such thing as a perfect discussion. Not having much other conflict could have left us vulnerable to groupthink and made our group less effective. I feel that part of the reason we did not have much conflict is because we were just discussing research most of the time. We could have had more conflict in the solution evaluation and selection phase if we had got that far. We could not really argue over facts. We did, however, counter some statements with other facts. A good example of this was when Colby brought up his research about Germany’s free or extremely low tuition and I countered with my research on why they could have that and how the United States differed from them (me at 25:30). This was good because we were not just reading things and spitting them back out to each other. It made us think a little more critically about what we had researched and this particular example would have been very useful when it came time for the solution selection

One issue that may arise is the unwillingness of a person or department to bend on an issue that could save time in another area of the process. Another issue could be the follow up required after the big meeting. Additionally, if the process becomes stagnant, the managerial “Champions for Change” must be able and willing to motivate the cross-functional team in a timely fashion to get the job done. If for some reason even the perception of managerial support slips, the team’s hopes for change may be dashed as well.

Moreover, the whole team didn’t do adequate forecasts which generated errors and costs for the company.

the success of unique and core option(mini homepage) that now there are incredibly more than

In order to evaluate group climate and the level of trust present, we devised this tool (refer to climate tool). By using this tool, we specifically examined different aspects of what we considered “beneficial criteria” to effective group climate and “detrimental criteria” to effective group climate. The tool was divided into two sections in order to evaluate both good and bad displays of climate by individual members, as opposed to, simply measuring all positive aspects and not taking into account harmful communication. Team members were graded by subtracting their detrimental points accrued from their beneficial points. A maximum score would have been a 24.

If TerraCog would fail to launch the product, there were higher chances of losing the customers. Already we were lagging 2 years behind BirdsI. So before making the decisions the various criteria we have to analyze were:

Letting whatever that is bothering us at work spoken out to the manager is also a solution to get