Answer to Question #267419 in History for Kelsey Jand

Question

Context Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM

Question: Make observations about the task, the team, and the leadership.

Answer 1

IDEO is a multinational design firm dedicated to making a positive difference. As of 2015, the Palo Alto, California-based company employed approximately 600 workers. Business design, branding, communication design, food science, education, food science, and organizational design are among the disciplines represented at the firm. Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, and Ford are among the clients who have entrusted the organization with their design needs. They believe themselves to be experts in the subject of design process rather than specific product design. Furthermore, the organization hires workers from a variety of backgrounds. Their team consists of MBAs, linguists, marketing experts, psychologists, and biology students. The organization also feels that the team leader should be someone who can work well with groups rather than someone who has worked for the company for a long time. The team's diversity contributes to a plethora of fresh ideas from a range of views. The video demonstrates how IDEO creates a shopping cart for a customer.

IDEO employs a wide group of people. Peter Skillman made it obvious in the film that the boss could not possibly be the one with in-depth knowledge of shopping carts. They believed that each of them could contribute to the development of these vehicles in some way. Furthermore, due to the participation of diverse team members, the team gained conflicting opinions on the design process. They were all pursuing the same objective. They had ideologies that encouraged crazy ideas and built on them before passing judgment. They pay close attention to each other's thoughts. They collaborate to create a large number of prototypes because they believe in learning via trial and error. As admirable as the teamwork displayed in the video is, it is not obvious why the employees picked to stay till midnight were chosen. The teams were operating as a cohesive unit, but such differentiation could have caused division among the team members, who may have felt alienated or obligated to stay even if they did not want to.

Leadership is the process through which a person persuades others to achieve a goal and steers the organization in a more unified and coherent direction. In this project, the team leader is Peter Skillman, an engineer who is the team leader because he is skilled with groups. He has the ability to motivate his team to go outside the box and bring new ideas to this project. He made every suggestion feel welcome, and the team ultimately decided to incorporate the most helpful portion of each suggestion. Nonetheless, it was shown in one of the images that the elders, or so to speak, were having an informal discussion, which would contradict the team leader's comment that the leader might not be the one who has specific knowledge in shopping carts. It may have also made the other members feel isolated. And, at some point of time, they also introduced time limits for the team to present their ideas.