People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.
Fighting a Fire
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Del curso dictado por University of Pennsylvania
Managing Social and Human Capital
1047 calificaciones
De la lección
Making Good and Timely Management Decisions
In this module, you'll learn how to make good and timely management decisions. Through several real-world examples, you'll see how leaders create and build a decision making mindset. You'll also learn how leaders can make costly decisions that affect their team or their entire company negatively. By the end of this module, you will be able to apply key concepts to making good and timely management decisions and build a higher performing team.
Conoce a los instructores
Michael UseemProfessor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management
The Wharton School
Peter CappelliProfessor of Management, Director, Center for Human Resources
The Wharton School
Let's go back to John Chambers, Silicon Valley.
Those four good precepts from
the Officer Candidate School of the US Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia.
Think about Charlene Barshefsky.
Think about the problem with necklace trading.
And now we're going to do a bit of a deeper dive into a very difficult
circumstance which begins really inside the aircraft.
We're looking outside of one of the windows from an aircraft.
It does say US, United States.
Public employees who are about to open up the door, jump out and
to go to work on extinguishing that fire we see right there.
So come with me now as we do a deep dive or, as you'll see in a minute,
a big jump out of the aircraft we see right here, into a fire zone.
That's going to put a premium on making good and timely decisions.
Take me about five minutes to describe it and then I've got four or
five questions I'm going to throw at you.
So absorb the information as we go forward in that I'm going to take all that we've
done up to this point and ask you to apply what we learned from Silicon Valley,
from John Chambers, from the US Marine Corps, from Charlene Barshefsky,
from Ann Livermore, from Charles Elachi and beyond, to interpreting the good and
timely decisions that are going to be made as the team drops.
There's the DZ, the drop zone, you see now, and as they are on the ground,
and I'll do this in non-metric, the drop zone's about one mile from the fire.
The fire, again, scope very small by western US fire standards.
It's about 30 acres, small fire.
Fires like this start all the time with a lightning strike.
That's what happened here.
It's a very dry and combustible area.
It's early August, and thus as you hit the ground, the drop zone,
with a total of 16 firefighters, you're going to be heading towards that fire,
about a mile away in a relatively routine operation.
They've been doing this dozens of times across the summer months.
As I said already, it's August 5th.
And at 5 o'clock, after the team is on the ground at 4,
the team leader, the team manager.
This could be you, age 33, his name is Wagner Dodge,
simply turns to the other 15 members of his team and says, let's go.
Three words, let us go, let's go.
And the team heads down, there's the arrow, towards the fire,
about a half mile on its way to the fire area.
And now the manager of this team, without explaining himself, in fact,
behind the scenes, other firefighters refer to him as a man of few words.
Technically brilliant, but very often almost saying nothing.
And true to form, when he gets to that one mile, sorry,
half mile point between the drop zone and the fire, he turns to the team and
he says all right everybody, stay here, eat something, I'll be back.
And now to add to a point, to anybody's good and timely decision making template,
he heads towards the fire, the team leader, the team manager,
to give it a fancy or maybe a more academic phrase, his due diligence.
What that means is nothing more than knowing what our strategy
is which is to safely put out the fire.
I now gotta check to see, can we do it from the side?
What are the fire conditions I should be savvy about?
Due diligence.
By the way, he's doing that by himself, keep note of that.
As he comes close to the fire, his name is Wagner Dodge,
age 33, nine years of experience.
He abruptly turns around and
goes back to where the team is finishing off their sandwiches.
And to give that a time point, the lunch spot, that first arrow, they
began at 5 o'clock and they get to the head of that first arrow at about 5:20.
He's now come back, and he says to the team, without explaining what he saw,
which was very bad news, I'll come to that in just a second.
I want you to go directly down on the chart here.
I want you to go down the mouth of the gulch to river's edge.
By the way, the river,
you can see it there in the photograph, is the Missouri River.
It originates in Montana.
Most Americans, myself included, didn't appreciate that till I went there,
and thus he sent 15 firefighters without himself down to river's edge.
In the meantime, he's going back to the drop zone.
And that's that upper wavy arrow that actually has an arrowhead back at the DZ,
just to the right.
He doesn't explain that, he doesn't explain why the firefighters have been
sent down to the mouth of the gulch, and that's characteristic of Wagner Dodge.
Everybody says behind his back, who work with him, he's a man of few words.
Technically brilliant, nine years of experience.
Four frontline, five years now as a team manager and he knows how fire behaves,
but he never seems to really want to put that into words in any form whatsoever.
And thus the team begins to head down to the mouth of the gulch without the bus.
The team manager has gone back to the drop zone for reasons unexplained.
That's that upper arrow.
Now if you were on that team, let's say a person being managed by Wagner Dodge,
I'd like you to now calculate or maybe just try to understand,
why has he sent you down to the mouth of the gulch?
If we had an opportunity to talk about that pretty quickly.
We're all saying that because they're, I didn't mention this,
I'll mention it now, because of a wind, very strong, gusty
blow that's coming from the lower right hand corner of that photograph, heading up
towards the upper left hand corner, is probably hitting 40 miles per hour.
This fire is very dangerous, could blow up.
And what Wagner Dodge also discovered when he got close to the fire,
doing his due diligence, good that he found this out,
is that the material on the ground is very dry, very thick, very combustible.
More so, more dangerous than what he could see from the aircraft as he circled twice
around the drop zone.
So he's got 16 people now in potentially a lot of harm's way.
So the firefighters are now heading to the mouth of the gulch.
To come back to my question, I'd like you to think for a second,
the first of five questions, why have you been sent down to the mouth of the gulch?
Well, some of you are thinking, no doubt, that it's to get around the,
call it the leeward side of the fire, the fire's blowing away from you,
harder to stop it, but a whole lot safer.
Secondly though, very important, firefighters then knew this,
if you have a stream, a lake, a swimming pool, an ocean close by,
if the fire goes nuts, begins to spread, blows up, to use the phrase
of that particular profession, then you simply get into the water.
To become a firefighter, ironically at that time,
you had to pass a swimming test, and you will survive any fire condition.
So the firefighters, they are thinking, as I hope you thought too,
we're going to the leeward safer side, consistent with the strategy.
Safety first is the top of the strategy for a firefighter, and
also we are thinking about worst case scenario.
Part of the manager's template, if you will, gotta think about worst case,
what can go wrong?
And we gotta guard against that, gotta be ready to bring over optimism down so
it's [LAUGH] extremely realistic.
With that being said, I'm going to take us now to the next point.
Wagner Dodge, that's the name of the firefighter in charge.
The manager of this team gets up to the drop zone, comes racing back, and
overtakes the team at about 5:20 PM.
So there's a final arrow I've drawn, a little hard to see there,
in the middle of the gulch.
They're almost to water's edge, and now Wagner Dodge, the team manager,
has resumed his place at the front of his 16, a total of 16 firefighters.
And by the way, for the last few minutes the number two person,
momentarily this is going to figure in to the architecture of the moment.
The number two person, his first name is Bob.
When the incident commander, as the title goes,
when Wager Dodge went back to the drop zone,
the number two person temporarily becomes number one, that's the protocol.
The number two person's name is Bob, Robert Sally, French Canadian name,
is feeling probably pretty good about the fact that even though he's age 17,
he's actually the front leading firefighter.
Only temporarily, but for a moment, he's the team manager.
But now, it's 5:40 and again, thinking strategically,
for strategic intent, where does the intent come?
Well, we gotta think strategically.
I'd like you to take just a couple seconds here, and
if you're the team manager, what are you thinking?
Right now it's 5:40 PM on this fateful day, August 5th of a summer,
what are you thinking about in light of what we've talked about so far?
And even go back to the section of this whole course on strategies.
So just take a second, think through what's on your mind or
should be on your mind.
Good, sure enough, you're thinking about the condition of the people behind you.
Gotta worry about the people in our organization.
Are they fit?
Are they staying with us?
Gotta think about where we could hunker down at night time,
kind of forward planning.
Gotta understand what the fire's doing.
Have to appreciate, do we have the right equipment?
And is there a need, maybe, for backup, more firefighters?
Because this fire,
with a 40 mile an hour wind, threatens to become a much larger inferno.
And unfortunately, in the few minutes we just paused ever so briefly to think
strategically and make our next good and timely decision, that fire misbehaved.
Just like humans, sometimes fires are unpredictable and instead of going up
towards the upper left hand corner, that fire has cut off our escape to the river.
We're not getting to that water.
And now, speaking of good and timely decisions, Wagner Dodge, 5:40 PM,
abruptly turns and begins to head actually back up towards the drop zone.
And in his head now are grave concerns about their, in a sense,
entrapment behind a wall of fire.
It's about 100 feet vertical, it's about 1,000 degrees Farenheit,
it's got a big wind coming up its backside.
And so he doesn't hesitate to take action, good and timely decisions here.
He says to number two, remember, his name is Bob.
Bob, drop everything, get rid of it.
Throw it down and now stay with me.
It's going to be a run for our lives.
You got that, Bob?
Pass it down the line.
Well, can imagine, got some summer volunteers, they're all firefighters, but
a few people have only been at this business for eight or nine weeks.
They haven't heard this before.
Word passes down the line and
they are really moving now, up towards the drop zone really.
Where else can they go?
And at this point, Wagner Dodge though makes a final terrible discovery.
He kind of knew this, of course, but just didn't put it all in a broader context,
that he's coming out now of a forest.
And so far, no problem in a sense, because a fire will cut through a forest,
a stand of trees, at about four, five, six miles an hour.
Most people can outrun that on a sustained basis even going uphill,
which is what they'd been doing, of course.
But now all off a sudden, Wagner Dodge, everybody else strung out behind him
some feet away, appreciates that he's leaving the forest, and
he's coming into an open area that is populated, covered with
thick shoulder high, bone dry prairie grass.
I think intuitively we know the problem, he knew it technically.
A fire in prairie grass can spread through it at 15 to 20 miles an hour.
It feels like the grass is blowing up.
It's not, the fire just moves at a pace nobody can outrun under the circumstances.
We're uphill, we've got big boots on.
If you do a 4 minute mile,
you're doing 15 miles an hour, you've gotta do 20 miles an hour going uphill,
thick grass, heavy combat boots on, you're not going to do it.
And so for the moment, Wagner Dodge
stops, right now probably 5:49 PM, and takes a match out of his pocket and
starts a small fire right there, a little red dot.
Fire spreads out through the grass, becomes a burning ring of grass.
Wagner Dodge steps back, takes a running dive through that burning ring,
untouched by the flames really, and now he's in the middle.
He's a man of few words, so he's not going to explain his actions, but Bob,
the number two guy, can see that the boss, the team manager,
is starting a fire up in the grass.
And it spread out very quickly, and
the boss now has gotten inside a burned out area.
I'd like you to take just a moment to think about what's the purpose of
that fire?
Unexplained, but
you can imagine Bob is trying to understand what's the boss doing?
We got plenty of fire coming up our tailpipe,
why does Wagner Dodge want to put more in the landscape in front of us?
Couple seconds pass, Wagner Dodge signals to Bob.
Bob, get in here now.
And Bob, for reasons I'm going to have you think about,
start thinking right now about this decision, decides to go left.
And he goes up over a cliff side or a kind of a cliff crest, and
plunges into the next valley over to the left of the screen there.
The third firefighter today in this line, sort of like circus elephants almost,
his name Walter Rumsey, and Walter takes a look.
Does he follow the guy he's been following?
Does he follow the team manager, you?
He doesn't understand necessarily what that fire is all about, and
whatever the thinking is, Walter decides to go with Bob.
So very physically, the red dot now has one person, the team manager.
Two people have broken away from the team manager and
they're now down on the other side of a crest.
The other 13, with fire increasingly coming up their backside,
their shirts are beginning to smolder from the radiant heat.
And I'm going to sum it up with three final arrows right here.
The final 13, represented by three arrows only.
Take a look at Wagner Dodge and the small burned out area.
They kind of appreciate, we think, the two ahead of them had gone over to the left,
but they're in the thick prairie grass when the fire does overtake them.
And thus, the summary, terrible tragedy and
I'm going to ask you now to interpret what happened.
The after action review, looking back on decisions so
we can make them better next time.
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