Executive Summaries – MGMT 3010 – Organizational Behavior
What is the problem?
There may be several that are contenders for most critical, therefore, it is required that you give a brief explanation as to why you feel the one you’ve chosen is the most critical. This needs to follow your problem statement.
Note: While your problem must be tied to the relevant week’s chapter content, there is no one right answer to this question, as you’ll likely identify more than one problem, so the key is in that brief explanation as to why you feel this is the most important problem. You are essentially creating an argument for why this particular problem is the one that needs to be addressed, and this will become important later in the assignment. This is where your critical thinking skills will come into play in this section.
How to succeed in this section: Clearly state the problem up front, in concise yet thorough terms that tie to chapter content. Explain why you believe this is the most critical problem to address using concepts from the chapter and your critical thinking skills in analyzing what is happening in the case.
What are your recommendations?
Review the material in the chapter that most pertains to what you’ve discussed above and look for practical recommendations to solve the key problem you’ve identified. Combine this information and any personal OB knowledge or experience to generate 2 brief recommendations. Include a brief statement explaining how this will help solve the problem.
This section has two parts, and they are both critical. You need to both state the recommendation and explain how it will solve the problem, in that order. Recommendations must be actionable, which means that anyone should be able to read the recommendation and know exactly what actions to take to fix the problem. No generalized commentary or recommendations. The executive you hand this to may very well delegate the recommendations.
Again, there is no one right answer (I can’t emphasize this enough!), the key to success is in being on-point in addressing the problem and explaining how it will help. Your answers here MUST DIRECTLY tie to the problem you’ve identified on the first page.
The explanations as to how the recommendation will help must be direct and straightforward. As long as they explain the connection to the problem as identified, they don’t have to be complicated. Also, double check yourself by working your way back up the assignment from the recommendations to the main problem you’ve identified. They should directly tie together in that the recommendations should directly address the problem. Terminology should appear in both places.
How to succeed in this section: Clearly state two actionable recommendations, each followed by a statement explaining how this particular recommendation will solve the problem. Use concepts from the chapter and your critical thinking skills to identify high-impact recommendations and explain exactly how they will solve the problem you’ve identified.
General notes:
Don’t read into the case or make assumptions that are not supported by information in the case; stick with the information that’s there and you will have plenty to work with.
Somewhere in the document, you must incorporate, appropriately, chapter content. This may be an outcome you pick up from the case, part of the problem, or the problem itself. It is critical that you demonstrate your knowledge of chapter content and its application through critical thinking for this assignment.
The more you are able to link your assignment to the case and chapter content, and explain the rationale in both sections, the better grade you will get. The difficulty is in doing that in the small space you have available to you. And, the reason why I give you so little space is because in reality, someone reading this information in the workplace will not spend a lot of time, so you will need to practice being very brief yet very thorough.
By way of example, most executives, the target audience for this assignment, will spend no more than 30 seconds reading any document you put in front of them. When I review these assignments to grade them, I will spend 30 seconds reading them. If I cannot understand the problem, why it’s important, your recommendations and how they’ll solve the problem in that time frame, you will not be able to convince an executive to listen to your ideas. This assignment is about developing your critical thinking skills, but also developing your professional communications skills and credibility on the job.
The sections should connect to each other. You should be able to read the assignment from the top down and also from the bottom up and it should make logical sense when reading both ways. In other words, you should be able to read the recommendations and know what they are targeting.
A note on formatting:
There is no one right or wrong way to format this assignment. Part of what you are learning with this assignment is a way to develop your own way of communicating a large amount of information in a small space. The summary needs to be:
Readable (in 30 seconds)
Understandable (anyone reading the document should be able to understand what you have written, this relates to both content and grammar, spelling, etc.; it’s likely that if you hand this to an executive, they will delegate handling it to someone else)
Comprehensive / Thorough (there should be no further questions needed to clarify what you’ve written in either portion of the assignment – see “Understandable” above)
Succinct (i.e. to the point; all business communications should be succinct, period.)
Professional (you are presenting this information to an executive, and it needs to reflect that)
Beyond, that, how you choose to format the information is up to you. Where appropriate and professional, feel free to use tables, bulleted lists, and formatting techniques to guide the reader through your content.
How to succeed on this assignment: Present a professionally-written, concise, thorough, and understandable document that states the problem presented in the case (see notes above) and presents actionable recommendations (see notes above) to solve the problem you’ve identified.
FAQ’s:
Will you give us a template for this assignment? No. You need to develop your own way of presenting this information, a way that is comfortable to you. Why? You will be asked to provide all sorts of information in an executive summary format, quickly, and in some cases in differing formats (e.g. PowerPoint, Prezi, verbal only [you’ll want notes], interpretive dance). You need to develop a mental framework for yourself that you can use on the fly and a format I give you may not be appropriate.
Why is this assignment so ambiguous? This assignment is ambiguous because workplace problems and the resources you have to identify and solve them are ambiguous, changing, and unique to the organization and job / type of work that you do. This assignment teaches you how to think and present information, not fill in boxes.
But, “readable”, “understandable”, “comprehensive”, “succinct”, and “professional” are all subjective terms! How can I succeed when the grading criteria are subjective?You will learn, from me, but also from your classmates, as we go. Do not expect this assignment to be easy from the get-go. This is why we spend the first weeks in class, learning how to do the assignment. Grading for this assignment will be on a curve while we are doing the assignment in class, because of this. After we go through it a few times, and we discuss the assignments as a class, things will start to click, and you should feel more comfortable about what these terms look like when you’re doing the assignments on your own.
Why are you making us do this assignment? I’m making you do this assignment for several intellectual and professional reasons. Here are some: a) it will hone your critical thinking skills; b) it will hone your communication skills; c) it will provide you with a framework for communicating information to those above you in the organization in a way that they will easily digest, therefore; d) it will improve your credibility on the job, therefore; e) your name will be remembered when it comes time to promote someone; f) many junior level employees have great ideas (fresh eyes) that will go overlooked if they can’t be communicated effectively; g) I guarantee that at some point you will either want to, or be asked to put together what is essentially an executive summary.
