Gen 200 Researching Leadership in the Consumer Product Industry Week 4 Paper

Researching Leadership in the Consumer Product Industry

Daniel Standifird

GEN 200

May 20, 2010

James Blevins

Researching Leadership in the Consumer Product Industry

“Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right” (Bennis, n.d. para. 6). Online research of leadership in a production environment can be a daunting task to accomplish if students do not know where to look. On the other hand, take the above quote; a quick search on Google will afford several insightful quotes on leadership and management. Some of the best and worst methods of researching this topic are Google, Business Insights, Best in-Class Benchmarking Reports, Business Source Complete, RDS Business Suite, and JSTOR.

Google has a fancy little feature called Google Scholar. Anytime a Google search meets certain criteria within its programming, a little link pops up recommending searches under Google Scholar instead. A query of “Production Industry Leadership” yields several results with which to choose. Although some of the web pages seem unprofessional and simple, littered with book suggestions and annoying advertisements, a first glance at this particular engine can yield quick and easy results.

The first link displayed leads to an abstract of a case on a Swiss watch making company. The site looks professional with an online search engine for, what seems to be, thousands of articles. Upon further examination, accessing any articles in full requires a login and password. After accomplishing this however, permission to access anything remains elusive.

The next website is much like the first with a fancy little banner at the top displaying the website name “JSTOR.” The article displayed is “Leadership and Organizational Performance: A Study of Large Corporations” (Lieberson & O’Connor, 1972). To the right there is an advertisement offering full access to the article by paying its writer $14. Paying this much money for an article that has undoubtedly...