You are a top manager who was recently hired by an oil field services company in Oklahoma to help it respond more quickly and proactively to potential opportunities in its market. You report to the chief operating officer (COO), who reports to the CEO, and you have been on the job for eight months. Thus far, you have come up with three initiatives you carefully studied, thought were noteworthy, and proposed and justified to the COO. The COO seemed cautiously interested when you presented the proposals, and each time he indicated he would think about them and discuss hem with the CEO cause considerable resources were involved. Each time you never heard back from the COO, and after a few weeks elapsed, you casually asked the COO if there was any news on the proposal in question. For the first proposal, the COO said, "Mike" [the CEO] reminded me that we tried that two years ago and it wasn't well received in the market. I am surprised I didn't remember it myself when you first described the proposal, the COO simply said, "We're not convinced it will work".

You believe your three proposed initatives are viable ways to seize opportunities in the marketplace, yet you cannot proceed with any of them. Moreover, for each proposal, you invested considerable time and even worked to bring others on broad to support the proposal, only to hae it shot down by the CEO claimed they wanted "an outsider to help them step out of the box and innovate." However, your experience to date has been just the opposite. What are you going to do?

Consider a time when you were faced with a similar situation in your life.

What did you do?

How did that work out?

What do you believe the top manager in this situation should do?

Evaluate the pros and cons of your direction.