Aston Blair Case

Aston-Blair is a large corporation that produces educational materials for children. They had dominated the industry for a long time until 2004, when the company started to experience extreme financial losses that were not expected due in part because of poor forecasting. Everything seemed to be going wrong within the company before they even started the year. The author of their most popular children’s book series had just retired, music sales were down do to the boom in the music industry in the 90’s, and other markets Aston-Blair once dominated were becoming more and more competitive. The company needed to get out of their old ways of running the business and start changing their strategies to keep up with new companies. It was only after the first quarter of 2004 when Peter Casey, the vice president of marketing, and Chris Trott, the vice president of corporate planning decided to set up a task force to deal with the forecasting of product demand so Aston-Blair can better control all other aspects of their business such a finacial planning, inventory control, and production scheduling. Trott and Casey made the decision to put Michael Bacon, Trott’s assistant with an impressive résumé, to run the new task force. This task force would consist of eight members from four different departments within the company.

A task force, like in this case, is generally a small group of people with expert skills that are put together to complete a specific task, such as coming up with a forecasting model. A task force is similar to a team in that they both have members that work together to achieve a common goal. However, a task force is set up with the expectation of breaking up upon completion of the task, whereas a team does not necessarily disband. A team may receive a new goal to achieve if they complete the first one.

A week after receiving his assignment as leader of the task force, Bacon called his team together for a meeting. Start up activities are extremely important for a task force’s success because it gives the members of the group a chance to meet each other, which is especially important in this case because the members of Bacon’s group were from four different departments within the company. Additionally, this initial meeting was important for coming up with a plan for dealing with the forecasting problem and bringing all group members on board with a common goal or soultion. In this case, the plan was to work on finding information on of each individual department and the goal was to use