Connor's Bio:
I’m Connor Foley and this is actually only my second semester at UWM after going to Marquette University for my first two years of college. This is my first year as business student majoring in marketing after studying English previously. I’ve worked two marketing internships with Pepsi and loved it, which prompted me to change my major. For this project I wrote my personal essay on Roger Martin’s article, “How Successful Leaders Think” along with making a model for it. I wrote about the topic of how leaders effectively bring ideas together to generate new ideas in our large passage about what it is to be a good team, and edited it as a whole. Chris and Henry did their personal essays and sections of the large essay. Chris made the large essay flow and wrote the introduction and conclusion, while Henry made our base model for an effective team and put together the website.
I’m Connor Foley and this is actually only my second semester at UWM after going to Marquette University for my first two years of college. This is my first year as business student majoring in marketing after studying English previously. I’ve worked two marketing internships with Pepsi and loved it, which prompted me to change my major. For this project I wrote my personal essay on Roger Martin’s article, “How Successful Leaders Think” along with making a model for it. I wrote about the topic of how leaders effectively bring ideas together to generate new ideas in our large passage about what it is to be a good team, and edited it as a whole. Chris and Henry did their personal essays and sections of the large essay. Chris made the large essay flow and wrote the introduction and conclusion, while Henry made our base model for an effective team and put together the website.
Connor's Essay:
Integrative Leadership
A constant topic in business interviews is if you’re a successful leader. Can you lead? Have you led? Explain how you have? I’ve had opportunities to do this in many facets of my life. Leading is essentially problem solving – making everyone happy. The key to my model and my group’s main model is that a team needs to effectively denote roles and having an effective leader is one of them.
Being an effective leader, something I think I’ve known subconsciously until I read “How Successful Leaders Think” by Roger Martin is that leaders aren’t conventional thinkers. They look for the least obvious answers, and don’t take other peoples ideas as completely right or wrong. They have the ability to have several ideas in their mind at once, think of the problem at hand as a whole, and bring it together while creating their own original idea that solves the problem. They are integrative thinkers and without even thinking about what I was doing, I’ve had to be one of these integrative thinkers when I’ve needed to step up and come up with solutions.
My model lays out all the steps to successfully thinking like a leader and obviously by thinking this way being an effective one. First you have to filter all the relevant ideas and applicable factors to the problems, avoiding the most obvious and not shying away from potentially complex solutions. The next step is analyzing the relationships between the options given and determining the nonlinear and less obvious connections between them, again not shying away from something that may seem farfetched just because its complicated. This also consists of not just writing any of the options as just right or wrong, but seeing how they connect however different they are.
After identifying these nonlinear relationships, the problem has to be looked at as a whole. In order to continue integrative thinking you have to analyze how the different parts come together and how each one affects the other instead of separating it into sections, working piece by piece. The last step in generating a successful solution to a problem or situation is bringing the first three steps together. You’ve filtered all the possible options, identified their relationships, and pieced together how they all can work together as a whole. The key is not to just pick the one thing that seems to be right, but to have an all-encompassing solution while incorporating your own original and hopefully better idea.
I have witnessed this behavior on AMC’s show Mad Men every Sunday night. The main character, Don Draper, is the master of this disposition towards being an integrative thinker. He is the head Creative of an advertising firm with employees under him pitching him ideas for their different clients’ ads. Throughout the show he is bringing their ideas together while bringing his own ideas into final products. Although in the show he takes some liberties when giving credit for the ideas, so as everyone is he has his flaws, but the main idea is the way he thinks when generating a solution.
During my time as an intern at Pepsi the last few summers, there have been several occasions when I’ve needed to rise to the occasion and solve problems. Interns were separated into teams under sales representatives for a select few towns in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I am from.
Our job was to boost Pepsi sales in the area and trying to make it as exclusively as possible. We had to go into every account that Pepsi Direct (this meant ordering from the headquarters in North Carolina) delivered too and make sure they were content with their service and see if they needed to be added onto the local warehouse truck routes to better suite each consumer’s need. Large format stores like Walmart and Stop and Shop weren’t ever an issue because they were national and regional accounts but smaller format consumers like delis and gas stations sometimes went unattended to.
There was a time that a certain deli literally yelled at my team and I when we walked in and asked how their service had been. He told yelled some expletives at us and both of my teammates walked out. I looked at the problem as a whole. There were two options, being that we could leave and just forget about the customer, or try and reason with him calmly and try to solve his issue with us. Instead of doing one or the other I saw the things we could for him in his store to help sales, this being to add Gatorade and Lipton teas to his take away fridge, but apologized and left. I then went to my boss and told him the situation and how we could not only fix it but also improve our position. He went in the next day we got the customer to switch exclusively to Pepsi.
I looked at the problem as a whole and didn’t jump to conclusions. I didn’t know it then but I was thinking like a successful leader. I solved the issue without just having a one sided solution to it and brought my own incite into the two options for a successful outcome for both parties being Pepsi and their customer.
Integrative Leadership
A constant topic in business interviews is if you’re a successful leader. Can you lead? Have you led? Explain how you have? I’ve had opportunities to do this in many facets of my life. Leading is essentially problem solving – making everyone happy. The key to my model and my group’s main model is that a team needs to effectively denote roles and having an effective leader is one of them.
Being an effective leader, something I think I’ve known subconsciously until I read “How Successful Leaders Think” by Roger Martin is that leaders aren’t conventional thinkers. They look for the least obvious answers, and don’t take other peoples ideas as completely right or wrong. They have the ability to have several ideas in their mind at once, think of the problem at hand as a whole, and bring it together while creating their own original idea that solves the problem. They are integrative thinkers and without even thinking about what I was doing, I’ve had to be one of these integrative thinkers when I’ve needed to step up and come up with solutions.
My model lays out all the steps to successfully thinking like a leader and obviously by thinking this way being an effective one. First you have to filter all the relevant ideas and applicable factors to the problems, avoiding the most obvious and not shying away from potentially complex solutions. The next step is analyzing the relationships between the options given and determining the nonlinear and less obvious connections between them, again not shying away from something that may seem farfetched just because its complicated. This also consists of not just writing any of the options as just right or wrong, but seeing how they connect however different they are.
After identifying these nonlinear relationships, the problem has to be looked at as a whole. In order to continue integrative thinking you have to analyze how the different parts come together and how each one affects the other instead of separating it into sections, working piece by piece. The last step in generating a successful solution to a problem or situation is bringing the first three steps together. You’ve filtered all the possible options, identified their relationships, and pieced together how they all can work together as a whole. The key is not to just pick the one thing that seems to be right, but to have an all-encompassing solution while incorporating your own original and hopefully better idea.
I have witnessed this behavior on AMC’s show Mad Men every Sunday night. The main character, Don Draper, is the master of this disposition towards being an integrative thinker. He is the head Creative of an advertising firm with employees under him pitching him ideas for their different clients’ ads. Throughout the show he is bringing their ideas together while bringing his own ideas into final products. Although in the show he takes some liberties when giving credit for the ideas, so as everyone is he has his flaws, but the main idea is the way he thinks when generating a solution.
During my time as an intern at Pepsi the last few summers, there have been several occasions when I’ve needed to rise to the occasion and solve problems. Interns were separated into teams under sales representatives for a select few towns in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I am from.
Our job was to boost Pepsi sales in the area and trying to make it as exclusively as possible. We had to go into every account that Pepsi Direct (this meant ordering from the headquarters in North Carolina) delivered too and make sure they were content with their service and see if they needed to be added onto the local warehouse truck routes to better suite each consumer’s need. Large format stores like Walmart and Stop and Shop weren’t ever an issue because they were national and regional accounts but smaller format consumers like delis and gas stations sometimes went unattended to.
There was a time that a certain deli literally yelled at my team and I when we walked in and asked how their service had been. He told yelled some expletives at us and both of my teammates walked out. I looked at the problem as a whole. There were two options, being that we could leave and just forget about the customer, or try and reason with him calmly and try to solve his issue with us. Instead of doing one or the other I saw the things we could for him in his store to help sales, this being to add Gatorade and Lipton teas to his take away fridge, but apologized and left. I then went to my boss and told him the situation and how we could not only fix it but also improve our position. He went in the next day we got the customer to switch exclusively to Pepsi.
I looked at the problem as a whole and didn’t jump to conclusions. I didn’t know it then but I was thinking like a successful leader. I solved the issue without just having a one sided solution to it and brought my own incite into the two options for a successful outcome for both parties being Pepsi and their customer.