Case: ENG 260 Business And Professional Writing: Fall 2011

Rather than structure the course around a textbook, I'm structuring the course around a project. The information retrieval, analysis, evaluation, and presentation skills needed for this project are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills; you can take them from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel and use the same skills and software.

Up and Down the Organization

Business are organized in many different ways. For example, most organizations have some kind of marketing department. It may be called Marketing, as on the sample generic chart below, or it may be called something like Customer Relations. At Medaille, the marketing department is called Admissions.

Most commonly, organizations are divided into departments according to function. These functions also correspond to many of the courses that you take in school: accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, production, R/D (research and development).

How the boxes are arranged signifies who reports to whom. As a rule, information flows up a chart like this and decisions flow down. The form that the information flow takes is reports. A report is information packaged in predictable ways so that it can be quickly extracted from the package.

You can see how each of those boxes above can be themselves composed of many other boxes. For example, the Sales Department could be divided into three: local sales, regional sales, and national sales. Each of those sub-departments could have a manager, and so on until you get to people who don't manage anyone. That's where you'll start your career, but eventually, you'll move up the chart, after which, for the rest of your career, you will be both the manager and one who is managed. You'll be the boss, but you'll also have a boss. advocate

An enormous amount of the communication that is done in any organization is oral. The modes that we have you practice in writing class, slowly, on paper, the compare/contrast and cause/effect sort of thing, will be your best tools in these oral situations. You need to be able to decode what others are saying, and you need to be able to do it quickly. You need to be able to think on your feet, whether in an informal one-on-one with the boss or in a meeting will all the other department heads competing for a share of the same inadequate resources that the organization has available.

Most of this kind of communication is goal-oriented. You are trying to get someone to do something a certain way or to see something a certain way, generally to the advantage of you or your department. Marketing wants Production to speed it up. Accounting wants Marketing to spend less on advertising. R&D wants Production to try something new. HR wants everyone to learn new things, even if you don't want to. Above all, you want your boss to see you a certain way when it comes time for raises and promotions.

Or you're the poor guy in the image on the right pleading with HR not to fire your best worker. The rest of the department is watching how well you can persuade power.

While this kind of communication is very important, there's another kind that is also very important. The oral communication is more for persuasion, when you're communicating like a lawyer.

The other kind of communication is when you act like a scientist, not a lawyer. This kind of communication is almost always written. The writing can range from an informal email to a glossy, color-printed, bound volume. Organizations are downing in data. A report sucks out some of that information and organizes it to help someone solve a problem or make a decision. The best reports are attractive and accessible. They are also authorized.

Most of the jobs you've had so far in your life were hourly. You put in your scheduled time. Less time, less money. The jobs you want with your college education are going to be more professional. In practical terms, that means you get to control a certain amount of your time. As long as you're on time and under budget, you can determine much of what you do hour by hour. reporting

Much of this kind of communication is routine. It is periodically recording data that is constantly being generated, like quarterly sales reports or daily production logs, as in the screenshot on the right. Much of it is done with forms and formulaic writing. It is read like a map is read -- you quickly get what you need and ignore the rest.

However, much of this kind of communication is not routine. The organization has a problem to solve, for example, how do we increase sales 10% next quarter? Or it has a decision to make, for example, which market to we open first, Brazil or China? The decision goes down: incease sales; open new markets. The information goes up: your report. The decision goes down: here's the budget for your sales plan; we'll market in Brazil first.

The information going up is always authorized. Very rarely, and at great political peril, are you going to write a report all by yourself at your own initiative. First of all, you probably are going to write it on a team. And second, when you are at work or you are representing your organization in public, including online, you lose many of your civil rights -- freedom of speech and association chief among them. So there will always be some person or committee authorizing a report. You will perhaps write a part and sometimes all of the first draft of this report. If the authorizing agent, usually your boss, accepts it, then it is no longer yours in any real sense. The information in your report will get incorporated into the process of solving the problem or making the decision. Or not.

The point here is that your opinion of all this as a report writer does not matter. At all. When you work for an organization, they are renting your brain, your communication skills, your problem-solving and decision-making skills. If you make something or write something or produce something at work, it is not yours. It belongs to the organization. When you leave, you don't take all the writing you did with you. It stays there for a long, long time.

When you are doing this "scientific" kind of communication, you are selecting and analyzing data. Your analysis will have a conclusion and, if appropriate, a recommendation. But you can't change the data. And logic is logic. Whether anyone will like it or not like it doesn't matter one bit to the data.

Your Project

As you can read between the lines above, report writing is full of peril, politically speaking. Many people in organizations go to great lengths to write as little as possible. The upside of that peril is power. If you write attractive, accessible, logical reports, you will have a path to more power and influence in the organization than those who don't write at all or, even worse, write poorly, that is, not attractively, accessibly, logically.

This course addresses what you are going to do to make money. What knowledge and skills will you offer in exchange for money?

We are currently preparing students for last century's jobs . . . using centuries-old technologies . . . in order to solve problems that aren't problems anymore.

We should be preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist . . . using technologies that haven’t yet been invented . . . in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

Please fill out this form during class on Tuesday, September 13, and submit it before you leave.

For ENG 260, you are going to write like a scientist and package an analytical report. In a real organization, it would be a question of getting rid of data. You'd have too much. Here, it's a question of finding data. We don't have enough time in the semester for you to spend much of it doing research, so I'm going to provide much of the data. reports

Then we'll carve out the appropriate data set so that you can write this report.

What company are you working for?

The list on the Wikipedia's Social Media page seems pretty up-to-date. Pick one to work for. If none of these looks promising, try something similar, some kind of high-tech company preferably. Try Go2Web20.

In what department are you working?

The differences between one report and another has less to do with the department or function and much more to do with the culture of the organization within which it is written. At work, you'll get reports and you should read them if only to know what to do when you have to write one. For this course, there is a section of models lower on this page. You can follow one or mix-and-match as much as you want. Remember: accessible and attractive.

So within the company you have chosen, pick one of these departments to work in. If you were spread out evenly, two or three per each, that would be great. I am also open to other case scenarios.

R&D: Where can we find more customers soon?

The Research and Development Department is supposed to come up with new things to make or do so that the company can make more money. In this case, your social media company is facing tough competition for its product/service in the U.S. The company wants to take the product/service to a foreign market. They know that it is inevitable that they will have to make design changes, if only for the language differences and probably much more. The idea is to minimize the cost of those adaptations. Thus, R&D, the department that will have to develop the adaptations, wants to know which country is best suited for this social media product/service. Your boss has authorized you to research some likely countries at GapMinder and rank order them for suitability.

If differences in IQ across the world are largely due to exposure to infectious disease during childhood, then reducing exposure to disease should increase IQ.

Marketing:

What should our new logo look like?

Your social media company has been successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. It was started by a couple of kids on a laptop in a dorm room and now has X employees and an annual income of $X million. The company is going to become a publicly held corporation with shares on the stock exchange and lots of people are going to get rich. It's time for a new logo. The bosses have narrowed it down to four logos that they want tested. You have been authorized to design and administer a questionnaire asking an appropriate target audience to examine the four logos and give their opinions.

For this school project, you also get to design the four logos. Models to follow at Go2Web20. Google search results for < logo maker >. I recommend Pixlr, the free online image editing software.

Instead of a logo, you could go to an online animation site and make a couple of ads (for TV or Web) to test.

Customer relationship management

a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

There's a whole industry of companies making software to manage customer relations. Comparison charts: Wikipedia and QualityIntegrity.com.

You could evaluate two or more of these systems for whether they should be bought by your company.

The Lemonade Game

Have you ever wondered if you would be good at running your own business? Well here is your chance! You now have your very own lemonade stand and 30 days to try and make some money.

This one doesn't have statistical displays like some of the others. You're going to have to take screen shots as you go along.

The Stocks Game

Your goal in the Max's Investment World is to increase the value of Your Portfolio. To do so, you need to buy the stocks and mutual funds that will increase in price.

HR: What salaries do musicians report to the IRS?

Your social media company has decided that it needs to include pop music downloads in its services. The company's lawyers, housed in the HR Department, began negotiating the rights to do so and found that they had entered a nest of misinformation and downright deceptions. Just answering basic questions is difficult, for example, how much do musicians make from their recorded music? How has that changed since the advent of social media?

As part of the answer to that question, the legal department has formulated a sub-question. What salaries do musicians report to the IRS? How has that changed since the advent of social media? You're the department's salary specialist, so you've been authorized to answer the question in a report.

The answer to that is downloadable and searchable from the IRS web site. Learn more.

IT: What can server logs tell us about who visits our web site?

Every time you click on a link on a web site, you initiate a protocol, that is, a series of exchanges between your computer and the computer where the web site's files are sitting, aka the server. That protocol is a back-and-forth exchange that quickly results in the new web page appearing on your screen, so most people don't think much about it. Yet each step of that protocol is recorded on the server.

You will be surprised what you can learn from analyzing that server traffic. Many companies now use Google Analytics. I'm not hopeful that we'll be able to find detailed server logs for a real social media company. If you are interested in this topic, we can use the data from one of my web sites, Lens On Leeuwnehoek and build a context around that.

Production: How can we tame the bullwhip? bullwhip effect

You go to the bar and order your favorite beer, and the bartender says, "Sorry, we're out of that." You find the perfect pair of pants, and they have every size except yours. You go into a store, and what you're looking for is on the shelf, but they're all dusty and it doesn't look like anyone has touched that shelf in ages. Are you going to grab one? Will you blow off the dust before you take it to the register?

Let's ask the same questions from the point of view of the business organization. How much is it worth to Applebee's that the bartender never has to say he's sorry? How much is it worth to the clothing store to have you not go home and go online and purchase the right size from a competitor? How much is it worth for a store owner to have products moving off the shelves so fast that they never have to be dusted?

The larger the organization and the more complex its product or service, the harder it is to do this. No two people have ever graduated from Medaille having taken the same forty courses together. (Several couples/siblings have tried and come close.) The fancy name for this is supply chain management and the problem is called the bullwhip effect. Instead of a smooth, straight flow of products, there are constant fluctuations, either too much or too little. The up and downs look like a bullwhip. The effects on an organization's profits can hurt like a bullwhip.

Simulations at Forio will let you make real time decisions about managing a supply chain, which will generate a unique data set. I think several of the sims will work well for this course, but I'd be happy to hear your reasons why another one would be more interesting to you.

Beer Game

Here’s how the Near Beer Game works: at the beginning of the simulation your supply chain is in perfect equilibrium. Customers are ordering ten cases of beer each week, you have ten cases in inventory, ten cases are brewing, and ten cases worth of raw materials are arriving from your vendors. In week two, demand increases to fifteen cases per week and remains at fifteen cases for the remainder of the simulation. The game ends when you manage to get your supply chain back in equilibrium for fifteen cases of beer.

Even with perfect information, even when there are no breakdowns in communication, you'll still feel the bullwhip effect due to procurement and manufacturing delays.

Volvo found itself with extra inventories of green cars. To get them off the dealers’ lots, Volvo’s sales department offered special deals, so demand for green cars increased. Production, unaware of the promotion, saw the increase in sales and ramped up production of green cars.

beer game - does this version work on your browser? http://www.masystem.com/o.o.i.s/1365

Others

You are the Game Warden for an island which is experiencing an explosion in its rabbit population. In order to keep the population within SUSTAINABLE bounds (estimated to be a population of 500 rabbits) it has been decided to introduce some predators, specifically foxes, to the island.

The simulation lasts 50 years. When it begins, the island is without foxes. Each year thereafter, you can either release foxes onto the island or remove them from the island (either by shooting them or humanely trapping them for return to the mainland). It is your task to stabilize the populations of both animals.

Discover the possibility of transforming our troubled U.S. health system. You have the tools to navigate trends toward greater levels of health, equity, and cost-effectiveness, if only you can discover how.

Business cycles are a fact of life for many industries. Market demand peaks one year only to plummet a year or two later. In this case study of a semiconductor business, Henk Akkermans, Professor of Supply Network Dynamics at Tilburg University, explores different policy options for order handling, production planning and capacity management to reduce oscillation and improve system performance.

The British Petroleum oil well disaster is a highly visible symptom of our nation's (and the world's) dependence on oil. The fact that we are willing to drill at such depths, with such risks (economically and environmentally) suggests that dependence is strong. In the past few years, there have been many studies indicating a range of projections for how much oil is left. These studies are contradictory, leading to a sense of confusion...perhaps paralysis about what to do. Experiment with different assumptions and reach your own conclusions!

Your task | write, package and re-package a report with two goals in mind:

accessibility

attractiveness

Multiple report formats

They all have the same basic ingredients: bread/pasta, meat, cheese, tomato sauce. Think of the ingredients as the content. Then the pizza, spaghetti, and the chesseburger are the packaging, the form in which the ingredients/nutrients are delivered to the eater.

That's what we're going to do in this course, package and re-package the same information in a variety of nutritious formats.

Above, you will find links to some simulations that will produce unique real datasets. Pick one that interests you. Or you may find one of your own.

Next, develop a plausible boss who would use that data in his/her/their business to make decisions or solve problems. In this case, I strongly recommend that you use one of the rhetorical modes you practiced in ENG 110 and ENG 200: comparison/contrast and process are the two most common. Your client needs to decide between two or three options. Or you need to explain how to do something, or how something works, or how something happens.

Third, you will write a short report that answers one or two questions for which your client needs the answers. For purposes of the course this report must have:

Charts

If you open Excel and go to the excel charts 1

Insert tab, you'll see the panels of choices below. If you pull down "Other Charts", you'll see the other screen shot below. Your report needs to have quantitative data that can be displayed as a table and as one or more of these chart types. more excel charts

Generic outline / table of contents for your report

If you are going to compare logos, there are two logical ways for you to organize the body of this report, by option or by criterion.

If you are not doing a comparison, you may well be organizing the body of your report chronologically, according to a process involving a chain of causes and effects. Or you may be profiling your customers, which is a classification or description. These rhetorical modes are the most commonly used in business reports, though the terminology may differ from company to company. These were also the rhetorical modes that you should have practiced in the composition courses (ENG 110 and 200) that are prerequisites for this course. If you need to, review the rhetorical modes relevant to the structure of your report for this course.

You must finish the text (unformatted, sent as email) of this report by Tuesday, October 13. You cannot proceed in the course without it.

For the rest of the semester, you will package and re-package that text, adding audiovisual media where appropriate. The bulk of the course time and your energies will be spent in this part of the course.

Model reports

Here are some professionally produced reports that we can analyze, that is, that we can break into parts to look at the differences between reports.

For your project, you should choose one of these reports (except the ones marked web) to use as a model. Your choice will appear on the table to the gateway page to your projects. If you don't see it there, please email your model to me ASAP. Include any major variations that you expect to make in yours.

The Case

ENG 260 Business And Professional Writing

Medaille College - Fall 2011