Reinventing the Cookie

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Reinventing the Cookie.
What were the organizational differences (e.g., people, process, interactions, systems) between the three teams vying to “reinvent the cookie”?
Gundrum decided Project Delta would come up with the best cookie everyone wants. In his research, he got his first idea from Steve Jobs who got him to relate generation of new recipes and the creation of new codes to upgrade software. Gundrum derived his second idea from Linus Torvald the hacker from Norwegian. He decided to build a free version of UNIX by posting it online and inviting people to contribute to the concept, and he called the final Linux. Linus believed that a thousand people working for an hour on a job are more productive compared to one person working for a thousand hours. Gundrum supported the idea with information about Kent Beck who was a great programmer and believed in breaking down a problem into the smallest increments then solving them systematically. The final approach was the use of open-source revolution principles in the food industry and inspired by Mitch Kapor (Gladwell pp.1-3).
Gladwell explains that Gundrum decided to use all the three methodologies by forming teams. The XP team consisted of Peter Dea, a food scientist, and Dan Howell, a culinarian. Barb Stuckey headed the second team who is an executive vice-president of marketing at Mattson and Doug Berg who runs a product development team in Mattson. Carol Borba led the third team as manager and the group comprising of some talented people in the food industry.

How did these differences influence the eventual outcome of the bakeoff, which Team Stuckey won by a small margin?
The XP team focused on a kind of oatmeal-chocolate-chip hybrid cookie with applications of roasted soy nuts, toffee, and caramel. Their cookie, according to Gundrum, the XP cookie, was sweet, and you can feed it to your kids, but it did not meet the required health content. Team Stuckey made a tea cookie that tasted like a cup of chai, and no one wanted to have more than one, and that was a problem. Their next idea involved strawberry shortbread to the strawberry cobbler. Dream team came up with thirty-four ideas which were good until Chef J tried to take control of the discussion causing tension in the group (Gladwell pp.3-8).
At the end of the project, fourteen percent of the households voted for the XP oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookie. Forty-one percent voted for the Dream Team’s oatmeal-caramel cookie. Forty-four percent voted for Team Stuckey’s strawberry.
Work Cited
Gladwell, Malcolm. “THE BAKEOFF.” The New Yorker, 5 Sept. 2005, p. 000. Academic ASAP,http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A137759744/AIM?u=miam11506&sid=AIM&xid=d8ba2232.