Two weeks later, Mark Ryan arrives at the office early. Today is the one-day education session on sales and operations planning for the senior management team. He wants to make a few phone calls and review the latest financial report from Janis Novak before heading to the hotel in the foothills where the session will be held.

While walking to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, Mark thinks about the events of the past two weeks. The weekend in Vail seems a long time ago. The problems at Universal Products have consumed Mark these past two weeks.

The performance of Universal Products has not improved; in fact, it may be worse. Deliveries continue to be late. Manufacturing is fighting with engineering, and sales is fighting with manufacturing.

In trying to deal with these problems, Mark found that the context of his thinking has changed. The assessment presentation by the Effective Management, Inc. consultants sensitized Mark to certain conditions and behaviors, which were presented as being classical in a manufacturing environment.

When manufacturing was blaming engineering for the late deliveries and sales in turn was blaming manufacturing, Mark asked all three managers to bring him their plans. Each manager brought Mark a different plan. Engineering's priority was the Anderson design changes. Manufacturing's priority was producing the Kendall order, not the Anderson order. Engineering did not even have the Kendall order in its plan. And sales was promising delivery in two weeks on four orders that were not in the engineering...