Abstract

The following hypothetical human resources issue has, like so many of its ilk, no correct solution. To help your colleagues deal with such a situation, please tell us how you would resolve it. We'll print as many as space permits. The Editor It had been a busy six months for Sympson, XYZ's new R&D vice president. Brought in to head R&D after Tom Evers retired, Hank had been charged by corporate management with revitalizing XYZ's research efforts, expanding the use of new technologies and stimulating the creation and development of new products. Hank felt he had made considerable progress. Some R&D departments had been reorganized to improve their effectiveness, and the newly created technical ladder organization had been urged to make a concerted effort to bring in promising new technologies (see RTM, May-June 2007, p. 67-68). Good ideas for several new products had emerged. As a result, Hank decided it would be appropriate to present a formal review of progress for corporate officers and key marketing personnel. Together with the R&D department heads, Hank picked the new technologies to showcase. The procedure agreed on was that each new technology would be introduced and explained by the member of the technical ladder responsible for bringing it into R&D at XYZ. That report would be followed by one on the R&D effort toward a product application resulting from introducing the new technology. Each of these application reports would be given by the project leader responsible for developing the application of the new technology, who would show what the new technology could subsequently mean for XYZ products. Hank instructed his staff to make sure the presentations were well prepared. Hank opened the review with a challenge, particularly to the marketing people present. He urged them to look seriously at opportunities to bring the proposed new products to market quickly and to pay attention to the reports on new technology that could lead to further new product developments. Hank was confident that the marketing people would be pleasantly surprised at what they would learn. Weak Presentations As the meeting progressed, however, Hank began to realize that several of the presentations left much to be desired. He noted in particular that some of the presenters were poor speakers and quite nervous in front of the audience. Some of the presentations on new technologies were full of technical jargon and mathematical equations, and had little clarity about what the applications of the technology might be, in many cases relying instead on a series of bulleted items presented by Power Point from the speaker's laptop. Some of the visual aids were crudely done, with print too small to read easily and slides overloaded with information. Moreover, several sincere questions from marketing people were answered in technical language or with an onslaught of equations that were not all comprehensible to the questioner. Presentations on possible new products resulting from the influx of new technologies were somewhat better but still lacked the polish Hank would have liked to see. Visuals were poorly done and the hardware prototypes marketing hoped to see were not ready. Realizing he had overestimated the ability of many of the R&D personnel to make adequate presentations, Hank resolved to address this in his next staff meeting. Blunt Words for R&D Hank opened his next staff meeting with some blunt words: thought our performance in the marketing review was very weak. Obviously, our people need training in making presentations. I'm going to give you some pointers from my experience which I want you to pass on to your departments: To prepare for a technical presentation, the presenter must know the subject, must know the audience and must know him or herself. Our presenters seemed particularly not to know the audience or how to communicate with them. …

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