1. Karen just got promoted to general manager of her restaurant, which is part of a chain. Her restaurant is located in Northern British Columbia. When she applied internally for the job, she was told by the regional manager that she would be doing something different everyday. Her regional manager was right.
2. Karen had lots of time to observe her old general manager and saw plenty of inefficiencies. She told herself that if she ever became the boss, she would execute a bold vision of what her restaurant could be. Karen thought things would run themselves and she could sit back, relax, and enact her vision. Instead, she's discovered that looking after her restaurant is something quite different entirely. She gets call after call of emergency, something going wrong, or someone needing something outside normal daily routines. Between the constant interruptions, Karen is reporting to her regional manager superiors, communicating initiatives with employees, and dealing with customer complaints. Not only that, but the emergencies don't happen conveniently inside her regular working hours.
3. Every day, it feels like Karen gets a new challenge. One day, a cook forgot about his shift and left the kitchen short staffed, causing a lot of employee stress and the restaurant got bad customer reviews. Northern BC has numerous unique challenges that arise as a result of being outside a major urban center such as Vancouver. For example, a shipment of food never arrived because the highway between her suppliers and the restaurant closed down, leaving her business without key ingredients and needing to find alternative sources as soon as possible. She has chronic kitchen vacancies for employees with technical cooking skills because anyone with those skills was snatched up by companies to cook for $30 an hour on large-scale projects, including Rio Tinto Alcan's Aluminum Smelter or LNG Canada's port.
4. In the few moments of quiet Karen gets, she calls meetings with employees to remedy human resources concerns, conduct training, and maintain performance standards. She also tries to enact local marketing plans to grow the company. She finds that her supervisors are receptive, but inevitably face their own struggles, leaving them unable to do Karen's marketing efforts justice. Further, food and beverage costs have been creeping upwards. She had a suspicion one day that some food was being stolen and, sure enough, when she checked the cameras, she caught one of the few kitchen workers stealing. She fired the cook, but this left her short-staffed for the next week, so she had to get in the kitchen herself - leaving her other duties neglected. Yet, this didn't entirely solve her costs problem. She needs more time than she feels she has to analyze the issue. One day before work, she was having her morning coffee. If she'd known management was this hard, she's not sure she would have made the career move. Being an employee and leaving problems at the door when going home seems a lot easier right now.
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6. 1. What level of management is Karen? First-line, middle, or executive management? Justify your answer.
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8. 2.There are three kinds of skills that a manager must have: technical skills, human relations skills, and conceptual skills. Rank the order of importance these three skills have in Karen's organization, and justify your answer.
   
    
9. 3 Discuss how Karen engages in each of the following management activities:
10. Long-range planning
11. Controlling
12. Environmental scanning
13. Supervision
14. Coordinating
15. Customer relations and marketing
16. Community relations
17. Internal consulting
18. Monitoring products and services
    
    4. This case and other content in the open textbook discuss how managers tolerate frequent interruption and move from task quickly to quickly. Has this changed your personal view of what the responsibilities of a manager are? Explain.