Diplomatic Disputes and healthy arguments in teams have the potential to generate lot of energy. Sometimes positive and sometimes negative…Today was one of those days, where my group witnessed both form of energies.

We started our Markstrat ‘Strategic planning’ session yesterday evening 5:30 p.m. and we continued the session till today morning 7:00 a.m! That’s 12 hours of non-stop session(with a break for dinner)…As we are placed in one of the worst performing Firm types, we had to unleash all our street-smartness and employ number-crunching talents to propel our products into the visible area of market share chart! Given that we managed to achieve a Zero net contribution in the previous period, our tasks were cut out..Our only consolation was that 5 out of 11 competing firms had negative net contribution!

A team relationship that doesn’t witness any quarrels or disputes is too shallow. The one which goes through quarrels and heated disputes developes a strong bonding. We fell in to the second category today…Everyone did good job. But special credit to R, who showed lot of commitment and enthusiasm, inspite of being the youngest member in the team. We allotted R the role of CEO! Rest of us took product manager roles…We had 5 products and each of us took the responsibility of one product. K was busy employing his ‘regression’ skills and came up with a model that will predict future values…M, G, myself and A were busy throwing ‘fundas’ on the table while worrying about the future of our products..In the middle of the session, there was some kind of ’situation’ and we had to relocate to new place for further discussions. Sorry G for what happened today…In the end, we managed to come up with decisions. Now fingers crossed!

The amount of learning that we obtained today was enormous. As Prof. Raju said, it’s good to be in-charge of worst performing firm. That’s where the considerable learning comes from…When such a crisis situation is combined with too much energy in a team, the situation could be too demanding… You not only have to come up with ideas but you have to convince others…that’s where the energy drain happens…But it’s all in the game! Good session in the end…