Erick Peterson Case Diagnosis

Problems to diagnose within the Erik Peterson Case:

* Leadership

Hardy – Peterson tension: both lack of experience in the technical field; no clearly defined reporting relationship. Peterson faced included lack of support from Hardy on decisions he made for the good of GMCT.

Peterson’s lack of expertise: lose confidence, can’t win arguments with Green and Cantor. Second-guessing of his decisions especially when there were problems.

Curt Andrews, his chief engineer has poor planning capabilities and lacks the system operating knowledge and expertise to help Peterson out by providing advice or guidance. Peterson wants to replace Curt with a more experienced leader in planning and managing, but it was not approved by the corporate.

Multiple management challenges among subordinates, all of which Peterson was handling well, but which required some decisions that required local knowledge to understand why they were good (e.g., moving Stevana in charge of construction)

* Corporate

GMCT tension: conflict of interests, lack of communication (change of standard and equipments without notifying Peterson), unaligned vision (target on high margin vs. reach out to larger customer base), undefined reporting relationship.

The key problems facing Erik Peterson are his lack of industry knowledge, his lack of clarity on the reporting structure above him and the problems that existed when Peterson first took over the project and the lack of a good plan to start out with.

* Equipments could not arrive on schedule -> delay installation process (due to Curt’s inability of managing inventories). Neither effectively managed nor were these communicated to the upper management in time which left senior management unaware of it.

* The inconsistency of CelluComm’s organizational structure

* The political and cultural environment in GMCT

* External forces that were complicating system design and construction. (non-performing and...