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Essay / Investigating the Discursive Community of a Small Business Startup
The discursive community that I will be discussing throughout this essay is a small business startup located in my hometown of Batesville, IN named The Morel Company ( Morel) where I completed a high school mentorship 2 years ago. Through my mentoring experience, interactions and observations with the management team, I have developed an understanding of the product they make and sell. Their organizational texts, as well as a general overview of the different social media and marketing tools used to promote their products, in addition to participating in meetings and completing various documents, increased my understanding and interest in this discourse community. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay I want to provide a little more information about Morel so that my discussions can be elaborated and digested with some of the terms of Intermediate Composition 2089. According to Bill Hillenbrand, President and CEO of The Morel Company, the Innovation is one of the symbols of successful health care businesses and has been an obsession of the Hillenbrand family since 1929. He credits his grandfather, William A. Hillenbrand, with being an enterprising force in the field of health care. the health sector. Her push to make patients more comfortable, safer, and reduce the burden on the nurse led to the development of many revolutionary products that fulfilled her aspirations with her company, Hill-Rom. This family ingenuity in health care continued with his father, W August “Gus” Hillenbrand, who also always focused on developing products that could reduce caregiver workload and improve outcomes. patient outcomes. He also had a fervor for continuous improvement, seeking to create simpler and more effective products, including a clear focus on patients and caregivers in health care settings (Hillenbrand). Bill Hillenbrand's literacy sponsors' drive for innovation and continuous improvement (Brandt), as well as his learning the importance of affinity groups and design grammars (Gee) while occupying various positions and departments at Hill-Rom, have left an indelible memory. brand still visible in the market today and in the spirit and mission of Mr. Hillenbrand for The Morel Company (Our History). Morel has conducted ethnographic research in natural settings, such as hospitals, conducting interviews, observations and surveys with hospital staff and patients around the world. countries willing to use the preliminary product, similar to the approaches discussed by Mike Rose in The Mind at Work (Rose). Nurses and patients at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, were key participants in this ethnographic research. The participants were also met and interacted personally, the objective being to design and develop a new innovative product. Through their ethnographic research, Morel began marketing and selling the Hercules Patient Repositioner to its customers in early 2014. This unique new product A first-of-its-kind patient repositioning device allows a single caregiver to lift patients into beds hospital in less than 10 seconds with the press of a button. Morel has already obtained more than 15 process and design patents on its products, both domestically and globally. Morel has several affinity groups established within its structureorganizational (Gee). It has a management team of 4 people, an engineering and product development group of 4 people, an administrative support staff of 3 people, and 18 people in its sales organization. Communication in each semiotic domain is defined by the learning and use of design grammars specific to their domain. Through affinity group literacy sponsors (Brandt) and growing knowledge of their specific design grammars (Gee), communication up and down and across the organization is critical to ensuring success . This speech community additionally has extensive social media, marketing materials and other sales collateral that are used as key methods of communicating with its customers. Rhetorical Situation Guidelines, referencing Grant-Davie information relating to requirements, rhetoricians, audiences, and constraints, are used for their relevance to potential client groups, service providers, and suppliers (Grant- Davie). Documents are regularly shared with customers and suppliers, such as quotes, purchase orders, invoices and delivery notes. Overall, Morel is aimed at 3 main audiences who require regular attention and appropriate forms of communication; its employees, suppliers and customers, each of whom I will discuss further below. I chose to write about this discourse community for several reasons. First, my goal is to complete and obtain a law degree. Much of the practice of law deals with businesses within the framework of corporate law. It is therefore extremely important to have a general understanding of how businesses operate. Morel, through its management team, maintains relationships and utilizes the services of several external law firms in matters of intellectual property (patents and trademarks), corporate law and business contracts. The second reason I consider it an applicable discourse community is due to my experiences during my mentorship 2 years ago. I learned that the company, although small, is a diverse speech community that includes aspects of business, engineering, healthcare, marketing, sales, administration and law, as well as audiences of customers, suppliers and employees, giving me many analysis options. and discuss for this report (Swales). Finally, Morel uses several means and methods to communicate and reach its varied audiences, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Email, Linkedin and its own website. These various communications, following Bartholomae's ideas about discourse and the commonplace where your language and style must be altered and modified depending on what and for whom you are writing, give Morel options for documents, texts and additional communication methods to use to connect with one's audience (Bartholomae).Overall, through my analysis, I came to the following conclusion about my speech community, Morel. I believe that Morel, although a small entrepreneurial start-up, is an exceptional speaking community with its extensive social media network and wide range of marketing and sales brochures/materials/documents. Like Rose, through my interactions, observations, and discussions with Morel, I learned that Morel uses these elements extensively to communicate with its audiences of employees, suppliers, and customers (Rose). These elements, interactions and communications are developed to create visual, simple, effective andcompelling arguments that ultimately persuade or inform Morel's audience to take action and ultimately grow the business. Although Mr. Hillenbrand claims not to know individuals like Swale or Rose and their ethnographic research, Grant-Davie and his rhetorical situations or Bartholomae and his articles on discourse and commonplaces, it is obvious that the sponsors of literacy , affinity groups, semiotics The domains, design grammars and research methods he learned during his life were strong and impactful. From my research, I learned that communication with its employees is important and essential for Morel's management team. In discussing this with Morel leadership during my mentoring and other recent interactions, it has become abundantly clear how important literacy sponsorship, creating affinity groups, and designing grammars for Communication with employees is important to them to ensure they understand and are aligned with the company's strategy, especially with most salespeople located all over the United States and not in Batesville. One of the first things I learned about ensuring strong affinity groups and designing a grammar is that the Morel leadership team has a standing meeting every Monday morning at 10 a.m. I had the opportunity to attend this meeting. Although Mr. Hillenbrand said he does not know Brandt or Gee, he definitely applies their principles. I learned that the purpose of the meeting was to ensure coordination among members of the management team. At the meeting, topics covered include a review of each person's schedule, a review and update of the status of key engineering and development projects, a review of current open orders, customer quotes and current forecasts with expected delivery and installation dates, an update on orders we have with suppliers and the estimated schedule for receipt of products, a review of financial statements, an overview of the status of current marketing-related projects and a detailed review by Morel's regional sales managers of last week's activities of their direct sales representatives. . As Mr. Hillenbrand told me: "Overall, the goal of this meeting is to ensure that our leadership team is 'on the same page,' to address any key questions or concerns that have impact the business at the moment and get key updates on projects. and potential customer orders. It's important that we are all involved and hear the same from other team members. » With sales representatives all over the country, and therefore not at the head office, I discovered that Morel also had a permanent call with all these sales. representatives at 3:30 p.m. every Monday. This call is important to Morel because they want their sales reps to be “on the same page” again and to hear consistent messages from management. They want these people to focus on the epistemologies of the people in their sales area and meet the perspectives of their customers in their unique region of the country (Nunley). Additionally, during the call, sales reps act as literacy sponsors by sharing best practices and how they win and close orders with customers so they can learn and use these same techniques where appropriate. appropriate (Brandt). Again, Mr Hillenbrand said: “It is really crucial to ensure that our staff, wherever they are, receive simple and consistent messages and communications toensure alignment and understanding. » In addition to formal meetings, there is a large amount of informal communications through Morel. . These include emails, phone calls, walking into another person's office, or simply passing someone in the hallway and chatting or talking about a problem (Howarth). These informal communications or meetings are also important because they take place in a non-formal setting where business matters or even private personal matters can be discussed. Ultimately, communication with employees is an absolute must. A second audience for Morel is its suppliers. Morel obtains key parts and components for its repositioning products from suppliers located in Illinois, California, Montreal and China, while other smaller parts are sourced from other regions. Obviously, one can see how communication with this supplier base would be important, given the need to manage different time zones and different worldviews. Therefore, considering different cultures, Morel must know what is acceptable or unacceptable in places like Montreal and China (Eldred). They don't want to offend the suppliers they rely on to run their business. Therefore, Morel must focus on epistemologies and the UNESCO model, shared by Eldred, so as not to offend its suppliers. It is truly critical to ensure accurate communication and coordination of these deliveries to Batesville so that Morel can assemble completed products on time and meet its customers' delivery expectations. To ensure this, Joe Kummer, Vice President of Operations, has a weekly call with these key suppliers to discuss current orders, manufacturing issues, quality or parts issues and upcoming forecasts for the weeks and the months to come. Mr. Kummer is someone at Morel who must understand the importance of epistemologies and what form of literacy may not be desirable for a certain group. I learned that a key document used with suppliers is called a purchase order. The Purchase Order is a formal document detailing the quantities ordered, price, payment terms and estimated delivery dates. It is therefore a key document when communicating with these suppliers so that Morel can meet the expectations of its customers. As Mr. Kummer said when I sat down with him during my mentorship: “Our supplier relationships are an important cog in our business processes and require attention to detail and review at least weekly. » Customers are what a business is because they ultimately determine its success. Without the customers who buy its products, a business would not exist. The first point of contact with our customers are our sales representatives throughout the country who visit hospitals and meet with nurses and various members of hospital management on a daily basis. Sales Representatives are the front line and voice of Morel to customers, continually conducting ethnographic research as they meet with them daily to discuss any repositioning issues and how Morel's product will help them solve that issue and will bring benefits to their customers. patients and caregivers (Rose). To assist salespeople, using data obtained through ethnographic research methods similar to those conducted by Rose, Morel designed and created a significant amount of marketing materials and sales materials that visually show and describe the benefits of its products..