Tag: Classified

This article is part of a series called Classified, in which we spotlight some of the more powerful lessons faculty are teaching in Haas classrooms. If you have a suggestion for a class to feature, please email Haas Newsroom editor [email protected].

On a Monday afternoon in the new Berkeley-Haas Innovation Lab, a team of six students shared ideas in rapid-fire succession for alleviating San Francisco’s parking woes: an aggregator app that shows the availability of valet spots at restaurants and hotels, Airbnb for parking where people rent out their personal spaces online, a floating car that hovers above the street when not in use. No idea is too crazy at this stage, and students hold up sketches of their ideas. Soon dozens of solutions are clustered on large poster board panels.

It's ideation day in the MBA Problem Finding, Problem Solving (PFPS) class, taught by Senior Lecturer Sara Beckman and Lecturer Brandi Pearce. The class teaches students how to collaborate effectively, open up problems, and find more innovative solutions. During the semester, the twelve teams learn the four-stage PFPS method—observing; generating insights; diverging and converging (today's lesson); and iterating/experimenting, or rapid prototyping—by focusing on one of several problems.  Today’s goal: to use exercises involving metaphors and the business model canvas to generate even more ideas, then combine and refine potential solutions to arrive at a handful of solutions to take forward into the testing phase.

“The class teaches us to think of ideation and problems differently,” says Yaya Zhang, MBA 15. PFPS teaches you not to be opposed to something seemingly unrealistic, she says. The solution she'll focus on going forward is rent-a-lift: earning money by letting others use your car instead of parking it.

Unlike other courses that might be 90 percent lecture, in this flipped class, 90 percent of students' classroom time is spent engaging with teammates. Exercises push them out of their comfort zones and force them to embrace ambiguity. Students tend to want to know the end, but you can’t get it until you complete the entire process, Beckman says. “A big part of the class is being OK with not knowing what’s coming next.” To help them along, alumni, staff, a Haas executive-in-residence, and external professionals each coach two teams through various exercises.

 “I'm used to having a fixed set of options," says Oseyi Ikuenobe, MBA 15, who describes himself as goal- and solution-oriented. Before PFPS, he says, he would have stuck with the original parking problem and tweaked a solution, instead of reconceptualizing the issue to focus on helping people find the right type of parking for them. "Now, I'm working on dynamic pricing," he says of the solution he will pursue throughout the rest of the semester.

Students admit the PFPs process and learning how to work together can be disorienting, but Pearce, an organizational behaviorist who leads the MBA Team Performance and Research Program , guides them. Her lessons focus on the drivers of effective innovative teams, including balanced patterns of communication; thorough exploration of differing ideas; active reflection and feedback; and team norms in which risk-taking and failure are supported, accepted, and encouraged.  “Teams aren’t just about a collection of people. They are the engine around which companies are run,” Pearce tells students at the beginning of the class. “Innovation outcomes are highly dependent on the nature of your collaboration.”

Pearce runs each cohort through exercises that help them examine their team dynamic,  generating ideas about what’s working and what needs to be adapted. For one exercise, each team member selects from an assortment of pictures that reminds them how they feel about the group project: a cellist, deep space, a cowboy on a bucking bronco, a preening dancer, a bowl of Froot Loops. The methods speak to cultivating tolerance for ambiguity.  The visual format of a picture provides a platform for quickly communicating complex ideas and creating opportunities for developing shared understandings.  Pictures also aid visual learning and help bridge language differences.  Solo brainstorming time allows those who prefer to think before speaking gather their ideas.

At times, the atmosphere of PFPS smacks of rehearsals for an improv troupe as warm-up exercises have students blurting out random sounds (a monkey screech, a boing), making up names for imaginary products (flugleflam and jam-bams), and creating a story with each teammate offering one word at a time.

The point, says Beckman, is to jar them into a different creative space. The room itself, a new space at Cal Memorial Stadium, helps inspire creativity. One team dips into a bucket of suckers before beginning their brainstorm. Other teams select toys from the center table:  Play-Doh; Slinkys; monkeys with long bendable arms; soft, spikey rubber balls resembling sea urchins. Post-It Notes, markers, and large whiteboards are readily available; each team also has poster board panels that are folded up and stored for the next class so they can retain their visual information and have it readily at hand in each session.

“Using these tools really makes solving and thinking about problems easier,” says Michael Lindh, MBA 15, who says he'd learned in PFPS not to squelch creativity during idea-generation time. "Delaying judgment adds a lot of value," he says.

This article is part of a series called "Classified," in which we spotlight some of the more powerful lessons that faculty are teaching in Haas classrooms. If you have a suggestion for a class to feature, please email Haas Newsroom editor [email protected].

Alienation or camaraderie. Betrayal or consensus. These were just some of different feelings students experienced last week—depending on their teams—during a multi-person, multi-issue exercise in Senior Lecturer Holly Schroth’s Negotiations class.

The negotiations exercise, focused on a swimwear company competing against market leader Speedo, became so contentious for one team that students threatened to quit their fictional jobs. And that was after a mock “cocktail party.”

“We needed to have a certain minimum amount of funding and the CEO didn’t honor that, so we decided to walk away,” says Adrian Kok, who became a disgruntled director of development during the exercise.

Other teams, meanwhile, reached consensus on 90 percent of their issues before their formal "crisis meeting" and felt much more congenial toward their colleagues.

"This exercise shows students how it's so important to negotiate behind the scenes before the actual meeting to understand everybody's interests, to influence others in a positive way, and to build consensus," says Schroth. "It does take a lot of effort and a lot of time."

Schroth created the case after observing difficult relationships between the marketing and engineering groups at a semiconductor company. “I developed this based on my real-life experience that most deals are done in the shadows, behind the scenes,” she says.

The exercise began a week earlier when students learned their roles and then spent the next several days making phone calls and jockeying behind the scenes to create alliances and reach consensus on three decisions for a company called Swimwear Everywhere.

When students returned to class Monday night, they mingled in their assigned roles during a 30-minute “cocktail party” with juice, soda, cookies, and chocolate-covered pretzels. Then they broke into their teams for a 30-minute “crisis meeting” to reach an agreement on these decisions:

• Should Swimwear Everywhere invest in new technology for recently acquired subsidiary TTR to produce the next generation of high-tech suit?
• Should TTR and Swimwear Everywhere drop lawsuits filed against Speedo, USA Swimming and its head coach, and a swim star who made disparaging remarks against TTR and said he intended to wear Speedo despite being under a contract with TTR?
• What should TTR do about its sponsored swimmers who insist on wearing Speedo instead of TTR?

“That was painful,” Kurt Zhao, MBA 14, said with a sigh of relief at the close of a difficult negotiation Monday night, which in his group ended up pitting students representing marketing and product development against each other in a debate on how to spend $20 million.

“It doesn’t have to be black and white,” noted Stephanie Lai, MBA 14, who represented legal counsel. Her suggestion that marketing and product development split the $20 million 50-50 was rejected by the “CEO.”

Ultimately, the CEO called a vote and the majority agreed to give the entire $20 million to the marketing department. Two students representing product development were the only ones to vote against the deal.

CEOs on a few teams made the mistake of proposing a vote on issues, which can alienate others, Schroth says. Proceeding with lawsuits against swimmers and coaches was another common mistake—a company should never alienate its customers, she explains.

Lily Wang, MBA 14, another “CEO,” succeeded in leading her team  to consensus on most of the issues before coming to the crisis meeting. Consequently, it proved less contentious.

Wang says she talked to classmates more during the one-week exercise than any other week during her time at Haas. A strategy manager at Google whose role includes negotiating contracts with vendors, Wang says the exercise taught her the importance of re-confirming assumptions and talking not only with the people she is negotiating but also the people for whom her negotiating partners are responsible.

“I realized in the early stage that I needed to get consensus and move the company forward,” she says. “It goes against my personality, but I think that’s important.”

Similarly, Kok, who became the disgruntled product manager, says the exercise is proving very valuable in his workplace as his boss recently put him in charge of creating a structure to help executives make product feature decisions.

Explains Kok, who works at a firm that builds analytics for mobile networks: "What I'm doing differently right now is creating a mental note that I really need to reach out to some of the folks on the opposite side and pay special attention to them and apply sources of influence if not to have them be enthusiastic about my point of view but at least make sure they’re not going to stand up and walk out the door.”

Lily Wang, MBA 14, leads her team through a "crisis meeting" during Holly Schroth's Negotiations class. The meeting followed a "cocktail party" with less formal talks.

Imagine you and three colleagues have to choose the next CFO of your company—and each likes a different candidate. How does the group reach an agreement on the best person for the job?

To some extent, it's not so much the candidates' qualifications that matter but the interpersonal style of you and your colleagues making a case for each of them. That's the lesson that MBA students learned firsthand in an exercise last week in their Power and Politics course taught by Professor Cameron Anderson.

"There's always at least one big surprise," Anderson told students Thursday as they debriefed on the exercise, which was held two days earlier in the new Berkeley-Haas Innovation Lab.

On Tuesday, students were divided into groups of three and four each and charged with recommending a chief financial officer to the CEO of a fictional moderate-sized publicly traded tech company. Each student had to persuade the rest of the group to choose his or her candidate, and the groups had 30 minutes to reach a consensus on their top picks.

After the exercise, students rated their own and each others' performances based on five characteristics of interpersonal style: strength (assertiveness), credibility, trustworthiness, likeability, and openness to others' input. The exercise was videotaped so students could watch themselves later to better understand their scores.

The surprises often came from the gap between how students rated themselves and how they were rated by others.

"I try to be likeable and get along with people, make situations less tense, or make people laugh," says Skyler Soto, MBA 14. But "as I watched the video, the one thing that struck me is that sometimes that approach hindered me from being truly assertive."

Soto's other takeaway: being more open and honest than required can hurt credibility. "My classmates ranked me lower because I admitted what I didn't know and then they felt what I said wasn't as credible," she says. "It's important for me to keep in mind that what I think I'm sending out as a signal that I'm being honest, credible, and open can instead be interpreted as a weaker position."

But the reason Soto found the exercise so helpful, she says, was because it gave her the freedom to try new tactics in a safe environment with classmates.

"Halfway through the video I kind of flipped the switch and tried to be more assertive," she says. "I just went for it, and I wouldn't have done that in a professional setting."

Soto's candidate was ultimately picked second by her team. Ten percent of the teams, meanwhile, were unable to agree on a top candidate at all. In executive education classes, where Anderson first began teaching the exercise, 30 percent of teams typically reach an impasse, Anderson says. "They wouldn't budge."

Students debate job candidates for a fictional tech company in an exercise on interpersonal style in Prof. Cameron Anderson's Power and Politics course.

This article kicks off a new series called "Classified," in which we spotlight some of the more powerful lessons being taught in classrooms around Haas. If you have a suggestion for a class to feature, please email Haas Newsroom editor [email protected].

It's 1 o'clock in UGBA 155, Lecturer Daniel Mulhern's Leadership course, and Mulhern and two of his students are standing at the front of the tiered classroom. Simply…standing.

The previous 30 minutes in class seemed perfectly normal, warm even, as Mulhern ran through routine check-ins, but also made a point of walking around the room to greet students individually. The class got off to an upbeat start with a round of kudos for contributions in the last meeting.

But at 1 p.m., Mulhern and the two students at the front of the room wear neutral expressions and say nothing. At first there is expectant silence, then the occasional nervous laugh erupts from different quarters of the room. Someone cracks wise and everyone bursts out laughing, grateful for the chance to turn individual discomfort into a shared experience.

“Maybe we all need to stand up like they're doing,” suggests one student. So most in the room stand, hoping this may be “the answer.” When that changes nothing, the students sit down and continue to discuss options.

“He’s taking himself out of the equation so there’s no leadership in the room,” observes one student. “Try advancing the slide deck, finally suggests another.” Someone close to the lectern does so and the slide comes up: “How did that feel?” it asks.

Mulhern breaks the five minutes of tension and begins a class discussion on how it felt when an authority figure failed to lead as expected, a launching point for a semester-long exploration of leadership—and how it differs from authority.

"The demonstration teaches how tremendously dependent people are on authority, and how their expectations of an authority proscribe how much room the authority figure has to lead," Mulhern explains later. "I never know exactly what will happen, but students almost certainly 'get' the lesson."

While the experiment provoked some feelings of awkwardness, the students largely took things in stride, given that the course is a leadership laboratory. Observed one student: “This would have been really weird had it happened in a math class."