Group Project Management

This project is intended to encourage you to apply the concepts presented in this class to some current management issues. Together with your teammates, you are to write a paper explaining and discussing the happenings outlined in the two editorial articles indicated below. The issues you are to write about were discussed in two editorials which ran in the Topeka Capital-Journal on August 11th and 12th of this year, entitled “No one cared enough for Detroit” and “Michigan’s governor is optimistic about Detroit’s future.” Your group assignment is to prepare a brief (5-6 page) paper analyzing these articles and arguing in support of your analysis. Describe the events and trends discussed in the articles, and offer your ideas about the causes of these events and trends. The following list addresses specific elements of the assignment: 1. Gather information from two editorial articles, the internet, and/or other appropriate sources regarding the topic at hand. Develop a realistic understanding of the opportunities and difficulties and the causes of the trends and events discussed in the articles. 2. Collect information from the library, internet, and other sources sufficient to allow you to analyze and understand the issues and make meaningful comments. Rules: 1. Remember that this is a management class. The object is to apply management techniques to these real issues. Justify your assumptions, but do not get bogged down in marketing, finance, or accounting. 2. Limit your report (50 points possible) to 5-6 pages, plus exhibits, appendices, and citations, and your individual report on group dynamics and technology to 2-3 pages plus citations (30 points possible). Remember to use and cite at least two sources in your individual paper other than the textbook. The first article No one cared enough for Detroit By Bill Roy The Topeka Capital-Journal August 11, 2013 My Detroit. Not many people are saying “my Detroit” these days. But, long ago, Jane and I spent more than 1,000 happy days there. We moved to Detroit in January 1950 with a week-old baby in arms, and left for Topeka and the Air Force three and a half years later with three busy, healthy daughters, and completion of my obstetrics and gynecology residency. We also bought our first car there, a new $1,480 four-door Ford. After four years of marriage, we were no longer dependent on the public transportation of our nation’s second and fourth largest cities, Chicago and Detroit. The Detroit Receiving Hospital idea came about my fourth year in medical school. I decided to intern at a private Northwestern University hospital, where I would see the highest standard of medical practice. After a year of watch, don’t touch internship, I wanted my specialty residency at a charity hospital, the likes of Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, New Orleans’ Charity, New York’s Bellevue or Detroit’s Receiving. There, house officers made the decisions, did the work and taught interns and residents, with university teaching physicians for backup only. After three or four years at such an institution, you had literally seen and done it all. In addition, Detroit Receiving paid stipends: $2,800 the first year, $3,200 the second and $3,600 the third. In mid-20th century, Northwestern, Yale, Duke and a handful of other medical schools granted your M.D. only after completion of a one-year rotating internship where compensation was usually room, board and laundry. No wonder Dr. Loyal Davis, internationally famous surgeon, chair of surgery at Northwestern, and stepfather of Nancy Davis Reagan, nearly asked me, a 21-year-old newlywed, what contraceptive we were using. Davis believed doctors should be married only to medicine until they entered practice. It was said Henry Ford himself, father of the $5-a-day salary and the highly regarded Henry Ford Hospital, decided physicians in training in Detroit would be paid. All emergency cases came to Detroit Receiving from a catchment area of two million people. In my specialty, we often saw several extra-uterine (ectopic) pregnancies a day. The first-year residents, assisted by a more senior resident, got to operate all ectopic pregnancies, an ideal introduction to female surgical anatomy. Similarly, first-year surgical residents operated on patients with gunshot wounds, which could lead them nearly anywhere in the body. Our emergency room was staffed full-time by a medical resident, surgical resident, obstetric-gynecologic resident, and a psychiatric- neurology resident plus four to eight interns. Ambulances arrived with 30 to 40 emergencies an hour. At Receiving, I learned many women die or become permanently infertile from the bleeding and infections of criminal abortions. And, why, at that very time, a committee of the American Law Institute of the American Bar Association was working to establish new state laws making early abortion legal and safe. Kansas passed the ALI law in 1969, awakening a host of people who had cared not one whit about abortion 10 minutes before. A new Republican Party was born. California passed the ALI law before Kansas did, and Gov. Ronald W. Reagan praised it and signed it. He later counted votes and said he had been misled by physicians. The Detroit I knew in 1950-1953 — admittedly, greatly sweetened by the perspective of youth, a new family and plenty of productive work — was America’s recent Arsenal of Democracy (making 75 percent of World War II American aircraft engines, auto capital of the world and the home of fulfilled middle-class dreams. The kids went to college and the parents took campers to beautiful woods beside idyllic Michigan lakes. Then something happened, and no one seemed to care enough to fix it. the second article Michigan’s governor is optimistic about Detroit’s future by George Will for the Washington Post, reprinted in the Topeka Capital-Journal This city is the broken tooth in Michigan’s smile. Nevertheless, the preternaturally optimistic governor, from whom never is heard a discouraging word, cheerfully describes his recent foray with a crew cleaning up a park in a particularly, well, challenging neighborhood: The weeds, says Gov. Rick Snyder, were so tall you could not see the sidewalks, or even the playground equipment. Concealed in the underbrush were some old tires. And a boat. And, he notes with an accountant’s punctiliousness about presenting a complete record, they also found “a body.” Never mind. Now another block of an almost cadaverous city has been reclaimed. Snyder, who has called himself “one tough nerd,” began life after the University of Michigan as an accountant and is tough enough to have strengthened the relevant law and then wielded it to put Detroit under the governance of an emergency manager, an appointed autocrat. Detroit is the sixth Michigan city, along with three school districts, to have earned its loss of autonomy. Snyder is neither surprised nor dismayed by the Obama administration’s prompt refusal to consider bailing out the city: “I had made it clear I wasn’t going to ask them” for a bailout. One example of Washington’s previous costly caring is Detroit’s People Mover, the ghost train that circulates mostly empty. Snyder dismisses this slab of someone else’s pork as “part of the 60 years of failure.” He has largely forsworn attracting businesses to the city by offering tax credits, which he calls “the heroin drip of government.” He speaks not of “fixing” but of “reinventing” Detroit, by which he means a new “culture of how to behave and act.” He correctly stresses the cultural prerequisites for prosperity. And for popular sovereignty. Detroit under the emergency manager is enduring a democracy deficit because self-government requires collective self-control — the restraint of appetites by realism about their costs. But fixing an urban culture is more complex than filling potholes. The 1994 bankruptcy of California’s Orange County, which includes fabulously wealthy beach communities, and the 2011 bankruptcy of Alabama’s Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham, resulted from bad investment decisions. Detroit, however, has suffered not just economic setbacks but also a cultural collapse that precludes a rapid recovery. Despite some people’s facile talk about “rebooting” Detroit, as though it is a balky gadget, this is a place where dangerous packs of feral dogs roam. No city can succeed without a large middle class, and in spite of cheery talk about a downtown sprinkling of “hipsters and artisans,” a significant minority of Detroit’s residents are functionally illiterate and only 12 percent have college degrees (in Seattle, 56 percent do). Families are the primary transmitters of social capital, and 79 percent of children here are born to unmarried women. What middle-class family would send children into a school system where 3?percent of fourth-graders meet national math standards? Detroit has Michigan’s highest income tax, and the highest property tax among its large cities, but with an average income of $15,000, high rates raise little. There are 78,000 abandoned structures.Mitt Romney’s boyhood home has already been demolished in a formerly upscale neighborhood. The business tax doubled last year, and white flight long ago was followed by black flight — the entrepreneurial act of self-preservation and self-improvement by the motivated and talented. Against this litany of woes, Snyder happily illustrates the city’s revival by brandishing his shiny new wristwatch. It is a Shinola, manufactured here from Swiss parts, by a startup that also makes bicycles and other things. About the vacant land opened up as the population has contracted Snyder says: “Hops.” This grain is used to make beer, and microbreweries make, or at least often accompany, urban gentrification. And those hundreds of millions of public funds for a new hockey arena? He gamely explains it as a “quality of life” magnet for the gentrifiers. With that, Snyder shifts, as a governor should, into Michigan chauvinism: With its lakes and “micro-climates,” Michigan has, he says, the nation’s second-most diverse climate, so just about anything can be grown, even Detroit. Here — he bounces back to urban reinvention mode — “the middle class was created,” beginning with Henry Ford’s 1914 decision to pay workers an astonishing $5 a day.