個案總覽

In 2016, Roche, then a 120-year-old global leader in healthcare, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, was in growing need of reinventing itself to become faster and more adaptable. It was facing disruption both from nimbler rivals and new competitors. The organization was sometimes likened to a "tanker" - a collective of 100,000 employees around the world that had become slow-moving and weighed down by bureaucracy and too many processes. Cris Wilbur, the incoming head of People & Culture, was tasked with articulating and orchestrating what she termed a cultural evolution towards agility, empowerment and self-directed leadership. One of the transformation's primary goals was to channel more funding into the company's R&D pipeline. This required that Roche should not only reengineer its ways of working but also uphold its long-standing commitment to science and innovation, its newly articulated core values and its purpose of "Doing now what patients need next." The case examines the difficult choices that executives at Roche had to make in order to anchor and sustain the change for its workforce around the world, including tradeoffs between: Autonomy and alignment, top-down and bottom-up initiatives, quantifiable business outcomes versus employee engagement and professional growth. And, more specifically, the demands placed on Roche - a manufacturer of PCR tests - by the Covid pandemic while it was simultaneously battling a sense of transformation fatigue among employees. The case raises questions about segmenting and signposting the change process, and about the next phase in the process, likely more stable and, by comparison with the starting point in 2016, less defined by immediate and existential external threats.

The case presents a multilayered story of long-term cultural transformation taking place within a large enterprise and an increasingly strategic industry sector. Global developments, including Europe's energy crisis, have placed renewable energy high on policymakers' and business leaders' agendas. They herald green energy as a catalyst that can accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, intensify the fight against climate change, and lead to the creation of entire new industry sectors. Statkraft is Europe's largest producer of renewable energy. From its roots in hydropower, it has expanded into solar, wind, offshore wind, hydrogen and biofuels. In recent years, Statkraft has repeatedly ramped up its production targets, continued its ongoing spate of company acquisitions, and penetrated new geographies on several continents. It has also reorganized its general management into four market-oriented business units. To tackle this unprecedented complexity while living up to its ever-growing aspirations, Statkraft has had to redefine and invigorate the way its employees collaborate, particularly across silos. "We grow together" has now been upheld as one of the organization's core values. The stakes are high, and so are the obstacles - chief among them the deep-seated resistance to change, especially within the business areas that are accustomed to a high degree of autonomy. To date, Statkraft has begun shifting its governance model towards a matrix. It has explored a number of avenues that lead to empowering people, encouraging experimentation, and instituting rewards that are linked to improved collaboration. Nonetheless, there are powerful hurdles to overcome and tradeoffs to be made as the company implements and deepens the collaboration agenda.