Focus on: OUBLE INDEMNITY

Reading a movie script reminds us that the mode of telling that story on screen—the images and sounds—can only be approximated or suggested by the written word. With that caveat, we will look at an excerpt from the screenplay for Billy Wilder’s 1944 crime film, Double Indemnity. It is the climactic scene of the movie where the insurance man, Walter, confronts the treacherous ‘femme fatale’ Phyllis. They have conspired to kill her husband for an insurance payoff, but after that deed was performed, Phyllis has played Walter for a sucker, a fairly typical 1940s crime film plotline.

Earlier in the film, Walter compared acting out a murder to riding on a trolley … that when two people conspire to commit such a crime they need to stay on the trolley and stick by one another (and one another’s stories) to the bitter end. Both characters have gotten off the trolley at this point. Note on the script page included in your text book, how the hard-boiled dialogue maintains the noir, crime-film milieu and yet also manages to pack an emotional punch.

Respond to at least two of the following questions:

1. Film narratives often refer directly or indirectly to a contemporary issue. How does DOUBLE INDEMNITY refer to a larger political, social, or economic reality?
2. Genre. What elements of story, plot, character, setting and/or emotional effect are associated with Film Noir? How are conventions and expectations fulfilled by the movie? Is the genre narrative used to offer a social commentary?
3. Do some research into the biography and filmography of the film’s director. How might his or her biography and filmography inform your reading of the film?

If you would like like a visual of traditional memo, click here (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Requirements:

1. Format: Your memo’s body paragraphs should be single spaced. Do not indent. Use Times

New Roman, 12 pt. font.

1. Length: At least one full page.
2. Body Paragraphs: Please compose full sentences when responding to the following prompts. Your answers will serve as the content of your memo’s body paragraphs. Do NOT number your answers and do NOT include the questions anywhere in your memo. You do NOT need to use the ‘Summary,’ ‘Discussion,’ ‘Recommendation’ format. Create three paragraphs that respond to each of the paragraph directions below:
3. First Body Paragraph: Introduce yourself and explain what you hope to learn from our course and its real-world, workplace writing emphasis.
4. Second Body Paragraph: Discuss your writing experiences up to this point. How many other composition courses have you taken? What did you learn? Do you like writing? What aspects of writing give you the most trouble? Have you used research in any previous courses?
5. Third Body Paragraph: What would be your ideal future job? Why? What kind of writing could you expect to do in this future career field?
6. Proofread your work multiple times. Check for spelling and grammatical errors. It only takes one or two sentence-level errors to damage a writer’s credibility.

Thank you!

Scenario: You are an employee of Cabot Nutrition, a company that manufactures various vitamins, minerals, and other supplements including infant formula. An employee was found to have tampered with infant formula during production, and has since been terminated. On his termination day, the employee became violent and struck his supervisor. Several infants have become ill as a result of the tampering, but all injuries have been reported as non-life-threatening. Two of your employees used this infant formula with their infants, and both infants are ill. You have been tasked with creating a response to this product-tampering crisis.

Create a 12- to 15-slide presentation with speaker notes to senior management detailing your response.

Include the following in your memo:

• Describe the crisis in detail, including additional facts that you create and the results of your investigation.
• Create a Crisis Management Taskforce, and list the job titles and responsibilities of each member.
• Develop a Crisis Management Plan to address this incident and help mitigate/prevent this type of crisis and workplace violence in the future.
• Summarize key components of a Workplace Violence Prevention Policy.
• Explain how you will communicate your response to this crisis both internally (to the company) and externally (to the public), and include any support or recompensing plans.

Click on the Assignment Files tab to submit your plan.

Overview:

Create a 27–30-slide PowerPoint presentation for training others on effective leadership and building trust in virtual teams, based on a provided scenario.

The challenges of leading virtual teams are not terribly different from leading co-located teams, but the virtual aspect can amplify those challenges. A competent and effective leader knows how to build trust across geographic and cultural boundaries to tap the talents of each team member, resulting in virtual team success.

Competency 2: Apply the principles and practices of effective virtual team collaboration.By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following course competencies and assessment criteria:

• • Describe behaviors that build trust in virtual teams.
  • Describe behaviors that undermine trust in virtual teams.
  • Describe principles of effective leadership in virtual teams.
• Competency 4: Participate in a virtual team.
  • Apply real-world examples to illustrate effective and ineffective behaviors for virtual team leaders.

Instructions:

Consider the following scenario:

You have been asked by executive leaders in your organization to use your experience and research to develop a training program for a group of newly-promoted middle-managers. This is a group of experienced and successful front-line supervisors who have been promoted, and now have front-line supervisors reporting to them. Almost all of the supervisors reporting directly to this group of middle-managers are located in centers across the United States. The middle-managers have very limited travel budgets and large areas to control, making in-person meetings very infrequent.

Two areas you have been asked to specifically address in your training program are building trust and defining the principles of effective leadership. You have decided to approach the trust issue by identifying some of the behaviors that build trust and some of the behaviors that undermine trust. You will use examples from your own virtual management experience to illustrate each.

You have decided to use the same approach with the issue of defining the principles of effective leadership. You plan to identify a number of leadership principles (especially as they apply to virtual team leadership) and illustrate each principle with examples based on the successes and failures you have experienced or observed in virtual team collaborations.

As you begin to develop the training, you receive one last instruction from your executive leaders. You are reminded that these managers are not new to supervision and already have significant leadership experience. They will not be engaged by training that treats them as if they are naïve about leadership or trust in the workplace. Recognizing the sincerity and genuineness of the hard-earned lessons they have already learned is more likely to have a positive effect on their behaviors as virtual managers.

Create a PowerPoint presentation of your training on effective leadership and building trust in virtual teams. The more specifically you are able to include examples that demonstrate the principles of virtual leadership and building trust in a virtual environment, the more effective your training will be.

Formatting Requirements

Your PowerPoint deck should contain the following slides:

• Title slide. (What will you call your training?)
• Table of contents. (What is the agenda for this training?)
• Introduction. (Why are you providing this training?)
• Behaviors that build trust in virtual teams:
  • One slide for each of seven behaviors (include examples on the same slide as the behavior).
• Behaviors that undermine trust in virtual team:
  • One slide for each of seven behaviors (include examples on the same slide as the behavior).
• Principles of effective leadership in virtual teams:
  • One slide for each of ten principles (include examples on the same slide as the principle).
• References slide. Include a minimum of three research resources. Adhere to APA guidelines for citing resources.

You may use the Notes area of each slide to capture talking points or add information that supports the slide. Strive to make the presentation easy for your target audience to view. The use of graphics is not essential to this assessment, but you may choose to include charts or graphs that enhance or support your points. Your PowerPoint deck should contain at least 27 slides, and no more than 30 slides.

Resources:

Duarte, D. L., & Snyder, N. T. (2006). Mastering virtual teams: Strategies, tools, and techniques that succeed (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

• Chapters 3, 4, 7, and 10.

• Gignac, F. (2004). Building successful virtual teams. Norwood, MA: Artech House.
  • Chapter 3, “From the Traditional to the Virtual Team.”
• Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Leidner, D. E. (1999). Communication and trust in global virtual teams.Organization science, 10(6).
• Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007, February). Leading virtual teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(1), 60–70.
• Leonard, B. (2011, June). Managing virtual teams. HR Magazine, 56(6), 39–42.

Thank you!