Business management
distributors to gauge their interest and use focus groups made up of her target market that have no bias toward her product.
Bonus Question (5 points) What are the advantages and disadvantages of group or participatory decision-making?
Personally I like to make important decisions on my own. If I just consider all of the facts that I can and make the decision I save myself a lot of frustration. The hardest part of involving a group to make a decision is to deal with their dynamics. If everyone would focus on the question at hand it would make the process easier. I was the president of the Cooperative Preschool last school year. I was the only male there and it was very hard to get a bunch of moms to focus on the task at hand. I decided to grin and bear it and chalk it up to leadership experience. It would take a lot of time to get a simple decision during a 2 ½ hour long 1 hour meeting because it was hard to fit important topics in between the conversations about quilting and stuff. There was one woman, the treasurer, who had a very strong personality. Everyone was afraid to make a decision if she wasn’t there and when she was there she tried to dominate the meeting. I had to do some careful stepping to make sure that she did not have undue influence on our decisions. It is very hard to get the right mix of talents when your talent pool is the parents who happen to enroll their kids in the preschool that year. I did my best and tried to get the right personalities in the right positions.
It may sound like this was a bad experience but, no way, it was a great experience. I learned that I cannot always make all of the decisions and that if I included others they were generally more accepted. All of the moms, and me, put our heads together, brought our individual talents to bear, and made some great decisions like getting xxx to help us get all new tables, chairs, play equipment and learning materials. I learned that I did not always have all of the information necessary to make a proper decision. Once I wanted to have the accounting done professionally, and almost did it before I decided that the entire board should make this call. A parent told us that she knew someone who would donate accounting services to us. I did not have that information! Being president of the preschool was beneficial to me and the other parents because we all developed lasting relationships and learned much about decision making.