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What was your primary learning from the chapter reading? Explain.

What is one question that remains as a result of the reading? Explain.

The reading:

It is important for supervisors to build flexibility into their plans by preparing contingency plans. Contingency planning means having anticipated solutions in advance for problems or changes that may arise and being prepared to deal with them smoothly when they do arise. You might think of contingency planning as the responses to the What if . . . ? questions that describe serious events. Thus, contingency planning separates effective managers from ineffective ones. Proper anticipation of a problem may prevent it from happening. If you are to be a good contingency planner, you will need to ask yourself the following questions and find answers to them: What might happen that could cause problems within my area of responsibility? What can I do to prevent these events from happening? If these events do occur, what can I do to minimize their effect? Have similar situations occurred in the past? If so, how were they handled? Assume you are a department supervisor of a major retail store chain, and sales in your store are down 10 percent from last year due to the poor economy in your area. What options do you have to reduce costs and improve your departments numbers? While you cannot directly control the local economy, you can choose how to respond to the downturn. You could lay off personnel, reduce staff hours across the board, or put a hold on the internship program with the local collegeall of which are valid contingency options. Or imagine you are the store manager of a local shoe retailer and your supplier of girls Oxford saddle shoes just went out of business. How would you respond? What could you have done to prevent this supply disruption and loss of sales? You might have begun offloading some of your orders to another supplier to begin developing a relationship with a secondary source. Conducting business with two suppliers rather than putting all your eggs in one basket with one supplier has the advantage of providing you with contingencies should supply issues arise. However, every contingency will have different impacts, so remember to consider the long-term effects when deciding on the most appropriate courses of action. For instance, if you choose to add an additional supplier, doing business with two rather than just one might result in an initial cost increase because you are buying smaller quantities from both suppliers. Yet, the incremental cost increase may be worth the potential loss of sales and customers because other suppliers manufacturing schedules would likely be full. You could offset some of this initial cost increase by developing a plan to grow this segment of your business over the next 12 to 24 months to increase the quantities purchased from both suppliers. A variation of contingency planning is scenario planning, which involves anticipating alternative future situations and developing courses of action for each alternative. Scenario planning has a long-term focus and is typically associated with planning at upper levels within organizations. Front-line managers are becoming more involved with this type of planning, with the continuing emphasis on utilizing collective or participatory management approaches. Thus, scenario planning is a necessary tool for most managers today.Footnote Consider municipal managers in the public sector. The public sector has to deal with expectations that are different from those in the private sector. A municipality must aim to accommodate and assist all citizens, which involves proactively developing an emergency response plan for the worst scenario imaginable and devising alternative options based on that position.Footnote Many municipalities use disaster planning control tools similar to a yes/no command flow chart when planning for future critical incident scenarios. Once a possible scenario has been identified, such as a gunman on the loose in the citys hospital or at one of its schools, the disaster planning command center is used to establish responsibilities, devise reporting relationships, identify assigned areas, preset critical contact information, and allocate vehicles for transportation. Next, critical incident drills are performed to simulate a gunman on the loose