CONFIDENTIAL

OPEN BOOK ASSESSMENT

DECEMBER SEMESTER 2020

MANAGING CREATIVITY AD INNOVATION

(MGMT5711)

(TIME: 3 HOURS)

MATRIC NO. :
:
IC. / PASSPORT NO. :

LECTURER : SHOBA SAPKOTA

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS

1. This question booklet consists of 4 printed pages including this page.

2. Answer ALL questions in the ANSWER BOOKLET.
3. Please refer to following format while answering the Questions:
a. Answers should be in Font: Times New Roman and Font size: 12.
b. Write the Question number clearly.
c. Start new answer on a Fresh Page.

CONFIDENTIAL

Page 1 of 6
INSTRUCTIONS: TIME: 3 HOURS

(80 MARKS)

There are FIVE (5) questions in this section. Answer ALL Questions in the ANSWER
BOOKLET.

1. “Creative ideas translated into innovative practices and careful management leads to
competitiveness.”
To what extent do you agree with the above statement? Justify.
(20 marks)

2. You have just been promoted to a Manager for Q&C Pvt. Ltd. Company after working as
a department head for the last three years. Many of your coworkers are happy for you, but
you have heard that a couple of them are not pleased. You have decided to create “Creative
Environment” for your organization but seem to be divided as to how this can be done.

a. Explain each of the leadership style that you can use to change the work environment
using the Four Framework Approach.
(12 marks)

b. From all the styles identified in question 3(a), explain which the appropriate style in
managing the above scenario
(8 marks)

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3. Read the following write-up on Ma Jun. Using the Big Five Personality Explain Ma Jun’s
personality that made him to be a creative person.
"Beijing was such a different city," says Ma Jun, China's preeminent environmental
watchdog, remembering the capital as it was during his childhood. "There were so few
cars; I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted
swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles." The 44-
year-old pauses. "I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.
Today, the sky is different."

An environmental researcher by trade, Ma spent years chronicling China's ecological

catastrophes. Some of what he witnessed was inexorable and slow, like the graying of the
Beijing sky; last December, the World Health Organization ranked Beijing 1,035th, out
of 1,100 international cities, in air quality. Other results of his country's unfettered growth
were horrific, like the massive flooding of the Yangtze in 1998, after years of
deforestation and soil erosion. Eventually, he decided that merely telling the story was
not enough. "As a media person, you look to expose the problem," he says, "but you can't
stop there-—people are looking for answers."

Ma founded the not-for-profit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) in

2006. Since then, more than anyone else in China, Ma has channeled the power of the
Internet and the optimism of China's younger generation into a force for environmental
change. Working with a devoted national network of young volunteers, Ma and his nine
full-time staffers have compiled an open-source online database of water, air, and
hazardous-waste pollution records—-in the country that generates the world's highest
emissions. Those records are damning: Over five years, IPE volunteers have helped hunt
down some 97,000 records of factories operating in violation of China's green laws. And
those efforts lead to change.

"When I look at China's environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology
or money," he says. "It's lack of motivation. The motivation should come from regulatory
enforcement, but enforcement is weak and environmental litigation is near to impossible.
So there's an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of
motivation." Ma has become expert at using his database to create that motivation,
especially when it comes to helping global companies police their suppliers.

His methods have won over a number of name-brand global companies that rely on
Chinese manufacturing. Megan Murphy, Walmart's international corporate-affairs
manager, says, "As a result of using this database, we identified factories that need
improvement and proactively worked with them to make positive changes." After
Walmart signed on with IPE, back in 2008, other large manufacturers were quick to
follow. European and Japanese brands are the most avid consumers of Ma's data, but U.S.
companies including Coca-Cola, GE, Levi's, Microsoft, and Nike also rely on IPE. "He
has pushed local officials to report their environmental data and forced multinationals to
be accountable for their environmental practices," says Elizabeth C. Economy, the
Council on Foreign Relations' head of Asia studies and author of The River Runs Black,
a book that chronicles how China's environmental problems imperil its future. "In the
process, Ma Jun has become one of the true pioneers of China's environmental
movement."

MGMT5711/Dec.2020 Page 3 of 6
 In "The Other Side of Apple," Ma intercut images of launch events and happy consumers
with the largely hidden repercussions of manufacturing iPads and iPods on the
environment and factory workers.

A couple of years ago, Ma began what would prove to be a long and difficult journey to
push one particularly significant corporation to confront problems created by its Chinese
suppliers: Apple. In 2009, his team began to notice several cases of health problems due
to heavy-metal pollution being reported in local newspapers. "To our surprise, the source
wasn't mostly mines or government-operated smelters," he says, "but factories
manufacturing global IT equipment."

Around the same time, reports began to surface about factory workers suffering nerve
damage after exposure to a chemical known as n-hexane, which was used in a solution to
clean touch screens. Since most Chinese factories working with international corporations
are operated by contractors, Ma and company had to do some sleuthing to connect the
plants with their global brands. (Not every time required Sherlock Holmes's powers of
deduction: Some factories brag of their supplier relationships on their websites.) By April
2010, Ma had discovered 29 major tech brands using factories with hazardous operations.
Eventually, Ma's team learned that the factory with n-hexane health issues was operated
by a Taiwanese company called Wintek, which had been contracted to manufacture touch
screens for Apple.

Ma is a natural problem solver, dedicated and coolly rational. Those are critical
personality traits for effective advocates in China, where aggressive tactics like sit-ins and
demonstrations are quickly met with government crackdowns. Ma's strategy is calmer.
His first step is to contact corporate decision makers, show them the data, and make an
energetic argument about the benefits of proactive change. He's naturally cooperative,
more of a Paul Newman–style activist than Ralph Nader.

In the case of the tech polluters, Ma helped organize a coalition of Chinese NGOs known
as the Green Alliance to pressure the 29 companies with letters to their CEOs, including
Steve Jobs. Many of the violators, including big firms like Siemens, were willing to
engage with IPE. Apple, however, repeatedly refused to even confirm that it had any
relationship with the factories cited, claiming that details of its supply chain were
proprietary information. As part of his efforts, Ma even penned a second letter to Jobs
that was coauthored by Jia Jingchuan, a twenty something worker in Wintek's factory
who was hospitalized for 10 months following n-hexane exposure. This missive, too, was
ignored.

There is, of course, a point at which Ma's patience ends—and Apple had triggered it. In
response, Ma unfurled all his weapons, starting with social media, which, especially in
China, can be a powerful way to direct outrage at companies ignoring their
responsibilities. "If you publish something in traditional media, it's one way," he says.
"With social media, we get all this info coming back from those who read our posts." But
Ma also knows the power of traditional media; in January 2011, he released to several
newspapers a report called "The Other Side of Apple," in which his coalition unveiled its
data on factories that manufacture for Apple, as well as the company's reluctance to

MGMT5711/Dec.2020 Page 4 of 6
 address those practices. Ma also released a video he had produced, which in true
muckraking fashion, interspersed clips from Apple launch events with footage of young
workers suffering from n-hexane poisoning. A few weeks later, Apple published its own
supplier-responsibility progress report, which for the first time confirmed the case of the
poisoned workers. It did not, however, respond to Ma's reports of environmental
pollution. In turn, Ma and his coalition of environmental organizations launched a special
investigation into pollution in Apple's supply chain.

When I look at China’s environmental problems . . . the real barrier to change is lack of
motivation.
Apple's stonewalling abated just one week after Tim Cook's ascension to CEO last
August. Hours before Ma was set to release "The Other Side of Apple II," the results of
his follow-up investigation into the company's factories, an Apple VP told Ma's group
that it was open to a phone conference. Two weeks later, in mid-September, Apple reps
met with IPE for the first time; ultimately, they agreed to work together. Through the fall,
subsequent meetings in Cupertino, San Francisco, and Beijing hammered out details of
Apple's oversight of its suppliers, culminating in its 2012 supplier-responsibility progress
report, which named more than 100 suppliers and cited environmental audits into 14 of
them. Ma's Green Alliance will independently verify that suppliers comply with
environmental laws.

IPE's campaign raised pressure on Apple throughout the world and earned Ma the
prestigious Goldman Prize, for his grassroots efforts to protect the environment, for 2012.
Apple also consented to inspections of some of the factories in its supply chain by an
industry-funded group called the Fair Labor Association. The FLA released its report in
late March, assessing problems with the dismal working conditions at assembly factories
operated by Foxconn. "People cannot get involved in a significant way without data and
transparency," says Ma, who finds Apple's moves promising, none more than its
agreement in April to a joint audit of a circuit-board factory with IPE.

One Sunday evening in late March, a casually dressed crowd, mostly graduate students
and NGO workers in their twenties and thirties—-about half Chinese, half expats-—waits
patiently for Ma to speak inside the auditorium of the Institute Francis in Beijing. A slim
French woman in a black suit introduces him as "courageous and influential" before
handing him a microphone. The topic of his presentation, coinciding with World Water
Day, is "Water Challenges and Green Choices."

As a speaker, Ma is no Mike Daisey, for better and for worse. His voice carries a touch
of sadness, and his appeal is not highly emotional. He tells no singular tear jerking stories,
and his slides are factual: "300 million rural Chinese don't have access to safe drinking
water," reads one; "12 million tons of crops are contaminated by heavy metals," says
another.

MGMT5711/Dec.2020 Page 5 of 6
 But afterward, one-on-one, he comes alive. Two-dozen people with questions form a line.
Ma bows slightly in greeting, then listens to each with absolute intensity. Alternating
between Chinese and English, he fields questions about supply-chain management,
student environmental groups, and sewage treatment. This is not a corporate boardroom,
but one day some of these young people may go on to do extraordinary things. If that
happens, Ma will have made meaningful connections. He stays for 45 minutes, energetic
and unhurried. The local papers sometimes call Ma "a warrior," but in person his
gentleness, thoroughness, and attention to small things shine through. He can't wait until
the brilliant sunlight shines on Beijing with regularity again.
(Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/most-creative-people/2012/ma-jun)
(20 marks)

4. Like many other industry, Apple too faced many challenges that became their push factor
towards where they are today. Demonstrate some of those challenges and its seriousness.
(10 marks)

5. “A survey of 2,020 workers, part of Vodafone UK's Working Nation series of reports,
reveals that more than half (54%) of the respondents are not encouraged to be creative, or
to present ideas to managers.” (Daniel Thomas 14 June 2005)

Formulate FIVE (5) different strategies that you would think are BEST for these workers
to participate in presenting ideas and be creative.
(10 marks)

*** END OF QUESTIONS ***

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