1. You have been hired to manage a 20-person staff for Nightlight Travels, a travel agency in Las Vegas. For a full year, sales have been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and staff morale has plummeted as key employees left for positions in more secure industries. The few remaining key customer relationshihave been damaged by the sloppy and unprofessional work habits of the remaining staff members. Your first responsibility as a new manager is to create next year's budget for all planned expenditures. But first you must decide if you will adopt a hierarchical approach or a decentralized approach to control. Which would you choose, and why? 2. You're a manager who employs a participative control approach. You've concluded that corrective action is necessary to improve customer satisfaction, but first you need to convince your employees that a problem exists. What kind of evidence do you think employees will find more compelling: quantitative measurements or anecdotes from your interactions with customers? Explain your answer. 3. Describe the advantages of using a balanced scorecard to measure and control organizational performance. Suppose that you created a balanced scorecard for a Walmart Neighborhood Market. Which specific customer service measures would you include? 4. In zero-based budgeting, every account starts at $0, and every dollar added to the budget is supported by an actual, documented need. Identify the possible advantages of zero-based budgeting. 5. Most companies have policies that regulate employees' personal use of work computers during work hours. Some even monitor employee e-mails and track the Web sites that have been visited. Do you consider this type of surveillance to be an invasion of privacy? What are some advantages and disadvantages of restricting employee use of the Internet and e-mail at work? 6. Think of a class that you've taken in the past. What standards of performance did your professor establish? How was your actual performance measured? How was your performance compared to the standards? Do you think the standards and methods of measurement were fair? Were they appropriate to your assigned work? Why or why not? 7. Some critics argue that Six Sigma is a collection of superficial changes that often results in doing a superb job of building the wrong product or offering the wrong service. Do you agree or disagree? Explain. 8. What types of analysis can managers perform to help them diagnose a company's financial condition? How might a review of financial statements help managers diagnose other kinds of performance problems as well? 9. Why is benchmarking an important component of TQM programs? Do you believe a company could have a successful TQM program without using benchmarking? Explain. 10. As algorithmic control becomes more common in organizations, how might it affect the roles of managers and employees? Can you think of ways algorithmic tools might be used to decentralize control? Explain.