A Type A Reputation

    When I was reflecting upon my reputation I began by listing a bunch of positive traits about myself. However, the more I thought about it peoples external repuation can be marked by good or bad categories. Therefor I wanted to touch upon part of my reputation that can be eitther good or bad.

    I am an incredibly Type A person. I like to be proactive, I like everything perfect, and I constantly challenge myself. On the otherhand, I handle change poorly, I'm not a "go with the flow" kind of person, and not excelling is the most disappointing thing I can think of. Whether this reputation is good or bad is in the eyes of who is judging and what their personality is.

   This reputation has served me incredibly well in getting leadership positions or in the work place. I would like to attribute success in my internships or extra curriculars do to me constantly challenging myself to do better and work harder and harder to make sure I am producing the highest quality outputs. For example, I was cross country captain in high school because people knew I would go above and beyond to plan team bonding events or orchastrate extra practices. Being Type A has leveraged me with a type of intrinsic motivation that most other people do not have.

    Being Type A also has its disadvantages. I'm never the person that people want to plan social events because if anything goes not as planned I stress out about it. A time that comes to mind was when we planned my roomate a birthday party, when people came 15 minutes late I thought I was going to have a melt down. This lack of flexibility can make me a difficult individual to work with sometimes.

    Being Type A has served me well in most regards, but it sometimes faults me. There are a lot of times where I wish I could step back and relax. I always take on too much and have tons of things to do. I am currently sitting around watching the Michigan // Penn State game which feels like wasted productivity as opposed to a relaxing Saturday afternoon. Its a reputation that wears on you because people expect you to get things done and to excel and when you don't they are disappointed and you begin to loose face. I never want people to think I am not composed or don't have it together so I constantly work hard to make sure that I excel at what I am doing.

Triangle Principal Agent Model - Who Am I Responsible To?

    Since being in college, one of my proudest achievements is being a part of Illinois Business Consulting (IBC). This is the largest student run consulting organization and is sponsored through tge University of Illinois' College of Business with an office on the second floor of BIF. The program is unique in that it is meant to simulate real life consulting project that someone working for a top firm such as Bain or McKinsey may engage in. The following are the parameters of a project:

• Team: Each team has 5-7 consultants, one senior consultant, one project manager, and one senior manager
• Engagement: Each engagement lasts 12-14 weeks and are confined by the terms of the semester
• Organization: The organization is IBC and is representetd by leadership who are three directors that are hired by the College of Business
• Client: Your client is who hired IBC to put together a team for your project and they are usually one of the main stakeholders in the project
• Cycle: There are midpoint (6-7 weeks) and final (12-14 weeks) presentations that are the equivalent of a "busy season" in consulting

    There are good projects and bad projects, good clients and bad clients, and good team members and bad team members on each project. However, the principal of working for a service firm introduces many important points, but the most being responsibility. Those who work for service firms as an employee are employed both by the firm as well as the client which can sometimes result in a struggle over whose direction should be taken.

     As the Internal Manager, I oversee projects and work with some of the Senior Managers on over-seeing how their projects are going from a peer perspective. A few weeks ago I sat down with a Senior Manager who was having difficulty with the exact issue- whose input should she be taking into consideration. Following her internal midpoint presentation, which is when the IBC directors review the deliverable before taking it to the client, the directors said that she was behind in her project and they ultimately demmed the project a failure. This is because she was staffed on a highly technical project and they felt that she had put far too much time into having her team develop the survey as opposed to moving on to the analysis and formulating recommendations. However, this is exactly what the client had wanted : heavy focus on the survey.

    As a Senior Manager, she is paid by IBC, however IBC is paid by her client who is working on an energy and utilities project. She didn't quite understand who she was responsible to:

• Directors: The directors thought she needed to move on and send the survey out as is, collect and analyze the results, then formulate a recommendation for a client
• Client: The client wanted a really well developed survey that they would send out for results

     In this situation, there really was no way for her to compromise and serve both. She needed to choose one agent to be responsible to and figure out a justification for the other. In this case, she decided to serve the clients need since ultimately they are the highest form of authority as they employ the organization that employs her and her team. She continued to develop the survey with the client much to the dismay of the directors who considered her project to be a failure. 

    In triangle principle models like this, there was no way to compromise and be responsible to both. They had to choose one or the other in the end. This is because the distribution of power and responsibility is not even. If the directors and the client had had even stakes then they would have had a harder struggle determining who to be responsible. An example of this may have been if they had two different stakeholders at the client site who wanted different things. 

    The decision made by the Senior Manager was not necessarily a failure just because they chose only one agent to satisfy. She made a decision to maximize the chance of success with the client which is a judgement call the must be made in the business world. If she had chosen to have taken the directors side and not follow the clients request she might have lost follow up work with the client in the future and damaged that relationship, which demonstrates long term strategy in maintaining the Triangle Principal Agent Model since she was able to justify to the directors why she made the decision she did.