The Cuban Missile Crisis Essay Example for Free

The Cuban Missile Crisis Essay The Cuban Missile Crisis on October 14, 1962, marked one of the highpoints of the Kennedy administration.   The scandal caused widespread panic and indignation to the American people due to the surrounding environmental factors brought about by the cold war.   It revolved around the building of Russian bases on Cuban soil and the staging of nuclear weapons from these said structures.   One such depiction of this event is the movie Thirteen Days which is a most ample goldmine of organizational communications beautifully recreated on the silver screen. The crisis is viewed from the eyes of one Kenny O’Donnell, a Special Assistant to the President, who begs, barters and steals the information he needs to keep his friend and superior abreast of the volatile situation while not selling out his own ethics in the process.   This film depicts an excellent display of organizational communications in one of the most important and influential social groups during a time of trial and tribulation which brings out the best and worst in people. Organizational communications stems from the fact that large companies need to coordinate efficiently in order to achieve the goals set out.   For example, if a firm with 10,000 employees had to go to the president for each of their issues with work, he or she would never be able to do the tasks set out on the institution of the company.   The president’s plate would always be full and it would keep piling up with the new problems which spring up during operations.   The key to solving this problem is delegation.   The leader gets people he can trust to get the job done and specifies which fields to focus on.   This paper will show examples as based on the movie Thirteen Days and will provide an example in today’s modern setting. Communications can be defined as the meaningful interaction of people exchanging knowledge.   Good communications in business is the flow of information from the lowest employee to the person with the highest position in order to achieve objectives and vice versa.   The head can address the company as a whole but not all the information from each worker goes straight to the top otherwise there would be an information overload. Information gathering techniques can be in the form of feedback or focused group discussions.   The movie showed this as a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba taking reconnaissance photos as part of America’s regular monitoring of the region. In the film, when Russian rockets are discovered in Cuba, the information is sent up the pipeline because it was deemed important enough.   If the intelligence was about how the Russian prime minister drank his tea or whether he lights a cigar the proper way, it would be filed under miscellaneous information which would be pulled up only when the need arose.   The CIA analysts forwarded the pictures and interpretations to their section chiefs who make the decision whether the buck stops with them or not who then forwards it to the Director of the CIA who makes the call if it should be sent up the chain of command.   This signifies efficient leader-member exchanges. To find a solution, both cognitive and affective conflicts often come into play.   Cognitive conflict focuses attention on assumptions that may underlie a particular issue and which are often ignored.1   It was done by Adlai Stevenson, ambassador to the United Nations, when he voiced an option to the president which all of them as advisors were thinking but would not voice out since it would be political suicide.   This type of conflict allows the decision makers to weigh all their options before coming to a decision.   Affective conflict on the other hand deals with input which is detrimental to the solution process.   It lowers effectiveness with the input of distrust and controversy. The joint chiefs of the military acted as such towards the president since he would not give permission to execute the action they deemed to be the â€Å"only† option.   Even when the generals knew that the commander-in-chief would never agree with them, they tried to box him in by aggravating the situation.   For example, they ordered a low level intelligence gathering mission which would attract an armed response from the Russians.   JFK could not hinder them without a valid reason but he did work around them by getting in contact with the pilot who was flying the mission and asking him to not do anything or report instances which would force America to a nuclear war. The contradiction to this crisis was that the US stationed Jupiter missiles in Turkey near the Soviet border.   If this had not been done, they could have prevented the predicament they were in.   There was also a lot of bargaining going on from the president asking his advisors for other options to the ultimate solution which was the compromise reached by both superpowers to end the escalating conflict. In my opinion this movie is a goldmine of organizational communications reference.   It concretely depicts what to do and what not to do when decisions need to be made during â€Å"crunch time†.   It might not characterize every scenario but with a little stretch of the imagination, we can get and expound new ideas which we can utilize in our daily operations. We can learn a lot from this movie and apply it to any organization especially an engineering services firm.   As an example let’s use the solid waste disposal department and that the dump trucks did not come on time.   The men loading the trucks or the foreman even notices this and decides to kick it to upper management since the whole timetable for the project was delayed.   Now the manager has to decide where to get the trucks.   He or she could either, call another company then penalize the contractors with the cost of hiring another firm plus damages and never work with them again or be lenient with the firm and just deduct the penalty from what was supposed to be paid out for the usage of the vehicles. Advisors are called in to weigh options before a decision can be made.   Now if the trucks were delayed within an allowable amount of time, this information can be sent up the ladder depending on the foreman’s judgment.   If it is still within his scope of responsibility, he can give a warning to the trucking company that tardiness would not be tolerated or send it to one of the manager’s advisors or his corresponding supervisor. The chain of command ideally should work this way to achieve goals but other factors come into play.   In some cases the information does not go to the right person or nothing is being done.   We may not have the perfect structure for organizational communications but we can strive and learn from past errors in order to make decisions which the organization can count every time. References: 1 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1650/htmlcognitiveconflict.html last checked 08 March 2008