Aston-Blair Inc. Case Study

The case is about a precious metal alloys family own company, now they faced the problem of business losses. The CEO Aston thought it was poor forecasting so that he asked Casey and Trott both are the vice president to solve this problem. They appointed Bacon to form a task force to deal with it. The team was include four departments, Reiss, Holt were from Corporate Planning the same with Bacon; three are product managers; Meir was from the Economic Analysis and Forecasting; Bodin was represented Burns the Vice president of Sales. Bodin found the sales estimate were exaggerated before the presentation, after discussed with Bacon and Reiss, they delayed to report it. The presentation went toughly and received some resistance from marketing managers, finally was postponed. Another thing came up was Meir saw Bodin’s report and reported to his supervisor Dr.Cornelius.

In the end of the case we could identify problems facing by Bacon and predict the progress of the problems in below:

1. How should Bacon continue the presentation at 3 pm, how should he convince the marketing manager and the two vice presidents to accept it? If Bacon did not take any action or new evidence to persuade them, he could be lost his trust from them, even in his task force. And finally he may lose the job of the task force.

2. How should Bacon deal with the Bodin’s report, should he keep it as confidential information or not? What could Bacon do for Bodin to ease the problem would proposed in Sales Department? What should Bacon reply to Dr. Cornelius? If Bacon do nothing to Bodin’s report, firstly, he may put Bodin in an embarrassing situation, Bodin would lose his trust from Burns; Secondly, the Sales also would face the same problem, they do not have time or opportunity to improve or introspect.

3. How could Bacon regain his trust from the two vice president? And how could Bacon regain his respect from Reiss? The same to problem 2, Bacon could easily lose the respect from Trott, it was...