Martha Rinaldi from Iowa City earned a MBA in May 2008 from a business school in Chicago. After her first year of MBA program, she had the opportunity to do an internship at the Deep Dive Pizza located in Chicago as an assistant to the director of Promotions. She was doing so well in her responsibilities that the CEO himself was interested of having her in the company. He even proposed her to lead a new and special project in the marketing department. Later on, she got another job offer in a different and bigger company, the Potomac Waters.
From that time, her main challenge was to choose between these tow companies. Both have their advantages and inconveniences, which we will be talking about more in detail later in our study. Finally, she decided to work for Potomac Waters as the assistant product manager. However, as she stated working, things aren’t going as she expected, and problems got bigger and bigger as time passed by. After few months working there, she started doubting about her decision of working there.
Did she take the right decision? This study will help us answer this question throughout the study. The problem started from the beginning when she was still making the decision of choosing either to work for Deep Dive Pizza, where she had her internship or at Potomac Waters, a way bigger company with more potential in the market. Before she decided to work for Potomac Waters, she went to get information from the company, by visiting the industry itself and meeting the employees from different departments.
She was so in love with the way the employees work and welcomed her that she would hesitate to work there anymore. Her vision of the company and the way they work was yet still broad. Like all decisions made, there are always consequences (both good and bad) no matter what decisions are made. However, some decisions have more bad consequences than good, and that’s what Martha felt after months of working for Potomac Waters. As she started her new job, she would mostly be dealing with her colleague, Jamie Vaughan, and her direct manager, Nathalie Follet.
However, problems will start appear mainly because of the relationship between the three main characters in this case. The bad quality of communication and relationship between Follet, Vaughan, and Martha would have a great impact (both short and long term) at work but also in the entire company. Now, we’ll see the different problems that happen in the case to understand better why their relationship weren’t as good as it’s supposed to be. We’ll also see what the three of them, Martha, Vaughan and, Follet, can do as their part to improve things.
Central issue: The central issue here is about communication. This might seem awkward to have a problem of communication in a marketing department, where communication is more than necessary in order to improve the company’s profit and attract customers. However, communication within the department itself is the one that needs a lot of work. Throughout the study, we’ll see problems from the three main characters and how they can resolve their issues that are strongly related to lack or confused communication.
