4 S&F Groups/Teams

Successes & Failures Groups and Teams

This is a picture of a success story: guess what?  Guess who?

Getting the Successes and Failures research underway immediately and delivered PDQ. You should already know the points below from reading the brief – but BEWARE, once you have got your ‘case-study-hunting-hats‘ on, you are likely to forget why you are doing it and just bring back ‘description’ without having thought at all critically about it!  So you need to make sure you are:-

• establishing the split E&M’s TD1  and TD2 (plus sharing out evenly between them any ERASMUS students that don’t do E&M’s English class).
• Getting yourselves sorted out into pairs.
• Re-read the brief thoroughly concerning successes and failures so you really understand what you are doing and why and can start work with confidence.
• Ensure there is no duplication of choices of cases between the pairs and that the cases selected have some small, medium and large companies in them wherever possible.
• Ensuring that you have understood that this task is not just: ‘Look I’ve found one’ and describing it – rather it is about analysing and evaluating the material to see whether it is ‘good stuff‘ which offers an insight into how, why and at precisely what point in the process of internationalisation decision-making things began to go wrong and why nobody saw it, corrected it or stopped the entire process [it is easy to think: « It went wrong when they didn’t sell very many »… but that is a symptom of earlier failure(s) – maybe lack of cultural understanding leading to poor product design… lack of initial research…lack of product testing]. What we are after are the root causes – and there are often more than one! The pairs will need to really analyse and evaluate the case studies deeply to pinpoint the causes AND to consider how they could have been avoided.  Same for successes: where were the ‘hallmarks‘ of success evident – what made it all go ‘right‘ [and avoid failure causes creeping in] … where, when and by whom were the correct critical ‘calls‘ made?
• The pairs in each TD team will need a way of sharing their case studies and their analyses and evaluations of them: Google Drive(s) maybe.  Needs setting up v early.
• The next step will be for each TD group to SYNTHESISE their pair findings: «OK, so what have we learned from the causes of success / failure that we can perhaps put in a chronological set of phases, so that COCI businesses can cldarly see the Anatomy of Success and the Anatomy of Failure?  Putting those things together can we put together principles for a process set for success and the avoidance of failure? »  Bringing the two TD groups’ work and findings together in whole promo brainstorm / synthesising process will be our next objective.  Make sure you are thinking about this: it is a big step and your responsibility has not just finished because you have found and thought about a case study!!

T