Building Your Management Skills Portfolio Your Management Skills Portfolio is a collection of activities specially designed to demonstrate your management knowl- edge and skill. Be sure to save your work. Taking your printed portfolio to an employment interview could be helpful in obtaining a job.The portfolio activity for this chapter is Managing 11-14. What are four organizational changes you would Change-Related Stress. Read the following about the like to make at Ericson? Ericson Manufacturing Company and answer the questions that follow.5 For more than 80 years, the Ericson Manufacturing Company has been an industry leader in manufacturing temporary electrical power products. The company has built a reputation of manufacturing safe, high-quality prod- ucts. Products the company manufactures are varied and include electrical plugs, extension cords, and hand lamps. 11-15. Why would you like to make each change? For most of its nearly nine decades in business, man- agement saw no need for extensive sales forecasting. Recently, however, Ericson's business world began to change. Rising costs of the domestic materials used to make its products began to rise sharply. As a result of this price increase, the company began buying materials and parts from overseas vendors. Naturally, these parts and materials took longer to arrive than the same goods pur- 11-16. What is a stressor inherent in each of your pro- chased from domestic vendors. This delay in the delivery posed changes that could affect worker productivity of materials and parts significantly disrupted Ericson's at Ericson? customary production process and related work schedul- ing of employees. Manufacturing began to be delayed and customer complaints began to increase significantly. Management soon found that as predicted delivery times from overseas vendors became more unreliable, ware- house managers began to order more parts than necessary to keep extra on hand, just in case. Therefore, too much money was tied up in inventory, and the company was becoming less profitable. 11-17. What will you do to try to eliminate the negative Assume that you are the president of Ericson Manu- impact of each stressor? facturing Company. You know that you must make some changes within the company and that you'll need a well- reasoned strategy to do so and also to minimize the nega- tive effects of the employee stress related to the changes. Answering the following questions will help you develop this strategy