Topical Engineering Issues for MBA Dissertation Topic

Well, topical is easy! How can businesses utilise / adopt / gain advantages through technology to respond to short / medium / long term issues from Covid-19 / climate change / opposition to globalisation (i.e. the global rise in nationalism). Perm any combination of these. The problem is less to find a topic, more to narrow it down to something achievable!


The fundamental question facing all businesses is how to create a business model that is flexible enough to adapt not only to the current chaos, but also whatever will hit next. Technology (specifically video calling and conferencing) dug us out of a hole this year, how can such measures become an opportunity to work better rather than a stop gap? And equally, how does a business protect itself against e.g. hacking and power disruptions whilst still achieving productivity?


Lots of other angles regarding transportation as well - thinking about Kodak being caught out by the digital camera revolution, which transportation sectors are risking the same in a world of home working and fossil fuel reduction? (Who would you invest your money in these days for trans-Atlantic working, BA or Zoom?)


Have fun! It really is a good time to be doing this...


Andy

Hi Andy, 


Thanks for your reply and thoughts. I've been refining my initial ideas and settled (just now anyway) on something that's not directly engineering related but impacts the wider business. The topic I'm now considering is to understand when business efficiency measures (which so many organisations are relying on right now to survive / keep share holders happy) become ineffective as they reduce employee engagement significantly, subsequently reducing productivity. I'm still in the refining phase so always open to feedback and suggestions ?


Thanks

Hi Jamie

You have an interesting idea there, and I would suggest an extension. Why are small businesses so much more able to be efficient than big businesses? The whole idea of building businesses by aquisition often does not work. One can find may examples of this on the stock market, particularly in the USA. I wonder if you have read the books by Eliyahu M Goldratt, he has written a number of novels which describe company situations in a number of sectors to illustrate his "Logical Thinking Process" of business improvement through analysis and problem solving. There is also a textbook and a number of other books, but the novels will get you thinking about your dissertation area. A typical big business which has made a number of fairly bad choices in aquisition because it did not understand what made those businesses work is Belden, Inc. a big player.


It produces electronic cables, coax etc, and has attempted to diversify into the broadcast electronics market by aquision of several companies, eg. Grass Valley Group. GVG had already aquired Snell  of the UK amongst others. The are now all sold to a venture capital company, probably for peanuts. This group was the crown of Broadcast, but stopped innovating and began to make software products with largely COTS hardware some years ago, causing costs but also selling prices to fall hugely. Support became very expensive and became poor in quality because of management failure to realise that Broadcast and Film is a 24/7 operation which cannot tolerate delay in fixing problems.


I am suggesting you follow a real problem rather than a theoretical one, the value to a business is much greater than simply an academic discussion (or dissertation)! It is the application of your MBA that is important in the future, not the letters after your name, and my and many others experience is that actions speak much more strongly than words. You can analyse the problems this company had with the tools you have learned, and show how they could have prevented the problems, and highlight the mistakes made. You might well find that junior managers doing things because their seniors expect them is an interesting factor, as well as "snag shifting" down the chain to people who do not have the power to make change, but can be blamed, is quite important too. Covid-19 will be blamed but is not a factor!


I can give you more info. and a contact, if interested send me a PM.

Hi David, thanks for your response. I completely agree that growth purely through M&A is not always the best option. My concern with a topic like this is that it has been covered extensively in literature already, I'm not sure what 'new' info I could add. Although a case study exercise would be very interesting, the dissertation must have an element of first hand research to demonstrate contribution to the academic world of business. To add some context the area I mentioned above, my hope is that it goes beyond a theoretical investigation and I am able to generate actionable insights which can act as a guide for leaders when determining which business efficiency measures to pursue.

I think you may have slightly misunderstood my suggestion. M&A is not the topic, it is how to deal with the result. As it happens my brother is an M&A specialist Lawyer, to him it is the deal which counts, in other words the money and contracts. To me it is management change which inevitably happens AFTER the merger. For example companies may use different IT systems, trying to merge these inevitably is very difficult. The question to address is why merge them at all, because the employes know how to run the business with what they have. It is only the new management (the aquiring company) which needs some view, and this can readily be obtained with much less upheaval of the aquiree. In my example, spare parts delivery to a customer went from next day via DHL, to up to 2 months via a warehouse on a different continent with often zero stock level. The question is, why make such a change, and did it save money? It certainly upset the customers. Was it to make everything the same for same sake (and it cannot have worked well for the existing business) or a properly taken and researched decision? I see chains of bad decisions and changes for no reason. Why would managers do this, and I think the underlying reason might be that the Managers cannot adapt to change! This is surely very bad for everyone, and one of the reasons why you want an MBA, to see change in a rather different light. I hope that helps.

Hi David, thanks for the clarification. I see where you’re coming from now.

There is a corollary, but only for brave managers, and that is the idea of allowing a skunkworks, that is to say to allow  a part of the company that is allowed relative free rein within the larger organization. These (in my limited experience of electronics companies and places that slightly odd physicists get employed), depend heavily on the right characters in the command chain, and the skunkworks teams being able to produce enough 'golden eggs' to be left alone by the corporate boss characters. A number of organizations have "special project teams" or "rapid prototype facilities" that work in such a way, allowed to bypass some or all of the internal company process, such as use of non-vetted subcontractors or novel materials, just because there is a grudging admission even at the top that the official one size fits no-one process is too heavy for some types of things to be done well otherwise.  The problem is that the retirement of one or two key folk and it all gets flattened, and quite often the previously successful company does nothing new again, ever.

M.

Thanks Mike, that indeed is an interesting topic. When I think of special projects, I tend to think of automotive OEMs and their exciting halo cars - probably a dream job for me! My company has something similar, we call it a venture group where the aim is to identify and build upon potential growth areas. The ethos is fail fast. If a project gets above a certain value it is converted into a formal project within a business unit. We are quite a large business with some fairly rigorous processes, this is why the venture group exists - to allow fast pace development. It is often an area of discussion in other parts of the business, especially when there are cuts and the 'golden child' projects are being fed more money. There is a lot of literature on the impact of employee engagement on innovation, I might try to cover an area like this as a sub-topic of my dissertation. Perhaps the impact of organisational efficiency measures on the innovation culture within the business. 


Thanks for your input.