Crisis Management

This week we had our presentations with our temporary "new" groups. My group was in charge of the Japan Airlines situation. This experience reminded me a lot of the final group presentation I did in COM 114. For that project our class was divided up into small groups where each had to compete for "funding" for some type of project dedicated to help Purdue. After one group presented, it was the job of the rest of the class to find weaknesses in their proposal and call them out on it. While the rest of the COM 320 class wasn't trying to shoot down or Japan Airlines proposal, the same concept applies. Another similarity was being prepared to answer questions posed by our classmates. This would be especially practical in a real world crisis situation or even when making a proposal to your boss. In the Japan Airlines case, I was actually surprised no one asked how we would deal with flight delays and the uncertainty involved with it. Also no one asked about our plan to deal with customers should they become unruly due to flight cancelations, delays, baggage limits, etc. These would be some issues I would have raised had I not been a member of the Japan Airlines group. The following is from the comic strip Dilbert and is about small groups in general. View Larger.

- Steven Gitter