Businesspsychology Essay Example
Businesspsychology Essay Example

Businesspsychology Essay Example

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  • Pages: 3 (710 words)
  • Published: September 3, 2016
  • Type: Case Study
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Jonas Goldberg and Rande Gedaliah, lifelong friends, went into business together to establish The Living Room, a café bookstore. Lately, Jonas has not been doing his fair share of the work and has been unreliable, shrinking many of his important duties. Rande has reached the point of confronting Jonas and wants to take immediate action to resolve this situation.

Profile

  • Jonas Goldberg co-founded The Living Room. As co-owner and manager, Jonas oversees all bookstore needs and manages the café and community events portion of the business with his partner and long-time friends, Rande Gedaliah.
  • Rande Gedaliah is a Partner, Manager and Co-owner of The Living Room, a café and bookstore with an active community center and bakery. She is solely responsible for overseeing the bakery, which distributes to local rest
    ...

    aurants and stores. In addition, she also manages the café and its community events along with her partner.

    History

    “The Living Room” is a small business located in the Boston Suburbs. The business is a new spin on the café bookstore, with the additions of an active community center and bakery with distribution to local restaurants/stores.

    Jonas is a freelance writer and stay at home Dad with three young children. His wife is a District Attorney. He was looking for a side venture as well as supplemental income.

    Rande is a divorced mother of two young schoolboys and a successful sculptor who needed income with a schedule she could control. Rande is very level-headed and generally calm, as long as all the balls she’s juggling stay in the air.

    Rande and Jonas opened The

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Living Room two years ago and have recently expanded the hours/customer flow drastically in an attempt to finally make a decent income.

They split most of the business duties, share the larger tasks, and each spend a certain number of hours in the café supervising – they are 50-50 partners. They have known each other for years (their parents are family-friends) and have had a generally smooth relationship. Jonas and Rande had agreed completely about increasing business hours so drastically about two months ago. But Jonas did not anticipate the impact this would have on his life and is struggling to deal with it.

In the past six weeks Jonas has cancelled meetings last minute, missed the Tax Accountant meeting altogether, forgot to do employees weekly payroll twice, and has not brought in a single community event for the month (both are responsible for booking at least three lucrative events/month). Meanwhile the change in hours is exhausting Rande and Jonas’ unreliability is totally stressing her out.

Scene Set-up

After calling Jonas three times to remind him, Rande and Jonas are finally meeting to discuss Rande’s dissatisfaction with Jonas’ contribution to the company.

The Meeting

Rande indicates to Jonas that the distribution of the workload and his repeatedly missing meetings and other major responsibilities (e.g., payroll) is not acceptable. Jonas understands this but contends he is doing the best he can and is still contributing significantly to the business. Rande asks him what can be done to improve this situation. Jonas cuts the meeting off because he has to pick up his daughter. Rande tries to pin him down on

another meeting time which he half-heartedly agrees to.

Six days later, Rande finally meets with Jonas again and asks him what solutions he came up with. He says he’d like to bow out gracefully but wants to reserve the right to sell his share to whomever he wants in order to make the most money. Rande seems relieved at his decision but explains that she has the right of refusal and that she has already discussed their partnership agreement with their lawyer. They agree to meet with the lawyer the following Monday.

Afterthoughts

Rande is shocked at Jonas’ expectation that he could sell his share of the business to anyone he wants. She feels the interaction went very poorly and is saddened that he didn’t seem to make their friendship or the success of the business a priority in his life. She feels he never truly appreciated the impact of his actions on their business or friendship. She notes the difficulty of going into business with a friend.

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