Mccaskey Summary Essay Example

Associates Is a mid-sized consulting firm with based in Chicago and with offices in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Founded in 1962, by 1996 it had around 500 employees and it always had a reputation of high professional and technical standards. The company had four divisions: Management Control and Systems, Financial Services, General Management and Industry Analysis. This last one was the newest of all and it was kept separate as it operated as an autonomous unit in San Francisco. The other three division were all in Chicago.

Industry Analysis Division (IAD) Consisted of 15 Professionals, 12 Analysts and 6 support staff, a Vice-President (Richardson), a COO and 2 senior groups. The groups were different, one reported to Hackert and they were referred to as “the Old Guard”; the other group “the New Guard”, reported to Davies and was formed of all MBA’s and had higher salaries and were known to spend their time equally between individual and group projects. The “Old Guard” only worked on individual projects which were assigned by Malone. Malone and the two group managers had previously worked with Richardson.

Both, clients and employees described Richardson as an excellent salesman and a charismatic individual. When he reached the age of 40, he opened his own consulting firm which is what took him to San Francisco. Martha McCaskey At her 29 years of age, Martha McCaskey had been working for Seleris for 18 months; she joined the firm in 1995 after receiving her MBA from Harvard. Prior to getting into Business School, she worked in the consumer electronics industry for three years. She held a Bachelor’s Degree from

CalTech on Electrical Engineering.

In the summer between the two years when she was completing her MBA, she worked as a consultant in a small bio-tech firm in Massachusettss. While at this company, McCaskey, developed product strategy and implementation plans for a supplement to one of the product lines. She gained important experience and enjoyed the role of consultant as well as the project itself. Seleris was one of several firms where McCaskey interviewed with. The first interview was at the San Francisco office with Malone, the firm’s vice-president.

During the interview, Malone told Martha all about how great of a workplace IDA was emphasizing that she could get involved in some very interesting projects. Malone was very impressed by Martha’s dynamic personality and he thought she would be a great addition to the team. Back in Boston, Martha received a call from Richardson, the senior executive of IAD, on which he stated he was very interested in meeting her. Malone had told him all about Martha and he told her she was just what the company was looking for to grow and he made her a very good offer which she accepted a week later.

Working at IAD On her first day at work, McCaskey met with Malone and he told her that he needed her help on an industry analysis. In fact before the conversation was over, Martha was in charge of doing the analysis alone. This was not a common practice at the company (where new consultants did individual work). Nonetheless, Malone took care of everything with Martha’s group manager and they agreed to offer support to McCaskey should

she need any. The project turned out to be relatively easy for Martha, and she had no problems to complete it.

A couple weeks later, Martha got assigned to a case involving competitive analysis for a company that made printed circuit boards. The project required certain information that could be considered confidential and not accessible to everyone. Malone suggested that Martha go to Rendall and Kaufmann, two members of the “old guard”, who had some of that information she needed based on previous projects they has worked on. Rendall was known as a leader amongst his group and also close with Richardson, but, Martha perceived him as being difficult and uncooperative.

Kaufmann was out of town and therefore useless to her. Given the challenges she was facing, McCaskey decided to focus on her own approach to the project. In the next six months, she conducted 300 phone interviews, she attended trade shows in the US, Europe and Japan; she personally interviewed consultants, distributors and industry representatives. She ended up working seven days a week and about 10 to 15 hours per day. The contacts she made in Europe provided her some of the information she needed just 3 days before her presentation for the client.

The results were positive, however, Martha felt that both Richardson and Malone were not happy with the way she handled the project and thought that she could have finished it in less time and with a lot less work. And she was not the only one that felt that way. It seem like most of the employees of the company felt unappreciated. Work environment at IAD By

the middle of 1996, several senior associates had left the company. Two of them went to work for a competitor, another thought about taking a job with one of Seleris’ clients and another was simple exhausted by the work he was performing.

In the last six months there has also been high turnover within the associates. This turnover could be attributed to the work load, performance expectations or the previous year’s bonus which everyone was not happy about. This personnel situation had to be controlled otherwise more team members would leave the company, but Malone thought he could get new people at any time. Everyone at the company considered Malone as an intelligent individual despite his aggressiveness, and his motivation was making money.

Both Malone and Richardson were great sales men, but never included anyone else on their dealings so people felt that they were not given the opportunity to make any contributions. Kaufmann had a reputation of working on projects where he would employ questionable tactics for contacting and interviewing individuals that could provide him with detailed information on target companies. McCaskey believed that Kaufmann did his job out of the loyalty he had towards Richardson and Malone.

Most of these projects had triggered conversations among McCaskey and her colleges about “proprietary information” and what to do, if anything, if anyone on the team was to obtain any of such information. As was the norm, McCaskey, would identify herself as presented herself as a representative of a newly formed trade journal for the specific industry she was analyzing at the time. To her that was not as dishonest as visiting target

companies on the pretense of interviewing for a job as one of her friends did at another company.

In any way, her performance was well recognized by Richardson and towards the end of 1996 she received a raise along with a bonus check larger than most of the senior associates’. Silicon 6 Project In January of 1997, Richardson and Malone met with McCaskey to talk about her new assignment. The new project included a new type of semi-conductor chip that was already being produced by the client’s competitor. The information that she was to collect as part of her project was the following:

1. Detailed cost information per 1000 chips.

2. Salaries for professionals.
3. Number of people in each category of hourly workers
4. Overhead allocation.
5. Equipment.
6. Raw materials.
7. Marketing and service Expenses.

The project had initially being assigned to Lee Rogoff, however, he had been removed from it as he was unsuccessful at obtaining the required information for the client. Malone and Richardson met with McCaskey asking her because of her background in electrical engineering and because of her previous experience on technology related projects. At the same time they informed her that the client has place a constraint on the project: they were not to contact the target company directly.

McCaskey decided to take on the project and to obtain additional information on this type of projects she contacted one of her old professors, from the Engineering school, who had had previous experience with semi-conductor manufacturers in Europe. However, he has unable to provide her with any information but, he did suggest that she contact Phil Devon, a California

consultant, who had recently been involved in the design of a plant for a European firm.

So she did, she contacted him and set up a meeting with him. Devon was a 40 year old man that looked very professional and relaxed. McCaskey introduced herself mentioning that she was representing an international company that was interested in building a semi-conductor plant here in the United States. Devon seemed to be willing to provide her with any information she needed, but it he thought it would be beneficial to know what company Martha was representing.

As the meeting progressed she realized that Devon could be of great help to her project and that he could provide important technical information since he seem to be extremely knowledgeable on the subject. And, at the same time she started second-guessing herself. She question if the way she was going about to obtain the information she needed was the “right” way of doing business. She felt she was misleading his contact. This situation put McCaskey in an ethical dilemma, and she decided to only collect enough information and told Devon that her client had not given her specific details about the products.

She suggested they met later on once she had all the specs from the client. Devon provided her with general information on the structural costs of the plant among other things on McCaskey’s list. At the end of the meeting Martha paid Davon his professional fee and thanked him for his time. She ended the meeting telling him that once she had met with her client she would contact him to develop a more specific

plant design.