個案總覽

George Marlow, a manufacturing vice president at SportsGear, had been looking forward to this month's companywide meeting. Martin Griffin, SportsGear's CEO, was going to announce a new era of empowerment at the company. And as Martin gave his speech, he seemed to fill the entire auditorium with his enthusiasm. But Harry Lewis, a SportsGear veteran of more than 20 years, was not so sure. "What in the world does empowerment mean?" he asked. And indeed, Harry's concerns proved well founded. George led the team from manufacturing that was to be the test case for implementing empowerment at SportsGear. The team began the project in high spirits, eager to accomplish its goals. But when the time came to present their reports, the members were shocked: Martin was called away from the meeting, and the department heads formed a wall of resistance. It appeared that the team's efforts had been a waste of time. Can empowerment work at SportsGear? In 95111 and 95111Z, J. Richard Hackman, Elios Pascual, Mary V. Gelinas, Roger G. James, and W. Alan Randolph offer advice on this fictional case study.

Supplements Background Note: GM-UAW Negotiations--1984.

A compensation case about Visionary Design Systems (VDS), a small, high-tech full service systems integration firm based in Silicon Valley with eleven offices throughout the country. All employees, including engineers, administrators, and receptionists, received a significant portion of their income from commissions and bonuses, and all were shareholders. The company espoused a philosophy of empowerment, under which all employees were given substantial decision-making authority, and were expected to act in the interests of the firm. This case examines one group that, although it had both the authority and the incentives to exploit a new market opportunity, continued to wait for top management's instructions and approval before making decisions or taking action.

Defines "diversity" in organizational terms and provides a descriptive framework for understanding the ways organizations identify and respond to its challenges and opportunities. The four components or lenses of the framework are: motivators, mindset, methods, measures. Teaching Purpsoe: To be used as an overview note in a course or module on diversity in the workplace and customer base.

The new but now familiar techniques of corporate communication--focus groups, surveys, management-by-walking-around--can block organizational learning even as they help solve certain kinds of problems. These techniques do help gather simple, single-loop information. But they also promote defensive reasoning by encouraging employees to believe that their proper role is to criticize management while the proper role of management is to take action and fix whatever is wrong. Managers focus so earnestly on "positive" values--employee satisfaction, upbeat attitude, high morale--that it would strike them as destructive to make demands on employee self-awareness. Yet employees dig deeper and harder into the truth when the task of scrutinizing the organization includes looking at their own roles, responsibilities, and potential contributions to corrective action.

Virtually everyone agrees that the old covenant between employer and employee--under which companies offered at least a measure of job security in exchange for adequate performance and some exhibition of loyalty--is dead. Some management thinkers argue that instead of the traditional focus on employment, the focus should now be on employability. That means having the competitive skills required to find work, when you need it, wherever you can find it. Some companies, such as Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, Raychem Corp., and 3Com Corp., are already moving in this direction. And from the progress they've made so far, the authors have been able to discern basic ingredients all programs should include and pitfalls to avoid. The company that embraces career resilience will have a huge strategic advantage. By encouraging people to grow, to change, and to learn, it will do those things better itself.

The new general manager of Warner Cable's Medford, Massachusetts complex faces a number of turnaround challenges in 1985, including service deficiencies, customer complaints, high turnover, and low employee morale. By 1988 he has turned the situation around, but some employees and superiors question his turnaround style. Their concerns have broad implications for career systems at Warner. Teaching objectives include the understanding of human resource management tradeoffs in a turnaround situation, and the appropriateness of individual management styles over time as a company improves its productivity and communications.

S.K. Ko managed Motorola's Penang, Malaysia factory, producing telecommunications components and equipment. As a female manager of a multi-ethnic and labor-intensive plant in Asia, Ko faced a number of challenges. She had already promoted quality circles and quality competitions to meet Motorola's raised standards. Extensive training gave workers the skills to solve problems and to troubleshoot equipment. But Ko was skeptical of empowerment efforts at other Motorola sites that aimed for much greater worker participation in decision making. She thought empowerment inappropriate to the Asian context. She also thought that many operators would have trouble upgrading their skills as the world became more information intensive. Other Southeast Asian nations with lower labor costs were a competitive threat to Penang's labor-intensive processes. She envisioned Penang transformed by the year 2000 into a fully automated manufacturing operation and a design center for all of Motorola's Asian operations.

Motorola's old automative electronics plant in Arcade, outside Buffalo, New York, faced the prospect of closure in the mid-1980s, but leading customers persuaded Motorola to give the plant a second chance. The new plant manager, Dennis Fiehn, recognized that existing practices had to change if the plant was to remain competitive. He pushed for fewer supervisory layers, flexible job boundaries, cross-training, team-based production, and more active problem solving. The move to a modern plant in nearby Elma (1989) coincided with a new corporate-wide push for higher quality and cycle-time goals and more participative management. Soon operators were performing functions previously restricted to supervisors, technicians, and skilled workers. Supervisors, now team leaders, delegated more responsibility and became more like coaches. The plant was now recognized as a strong performer and slated for expansion.

Motorola became a recognized quality leader in large part by becoming a leader in employee education and by encouraging "participative management." Through the Motorola Training and Education Center, later Motorola University, the company invested substantial resources in improving workers' skills and establishing a common language of quality across the corporation to support its ambitious quality improvement goals. Through quality circles, its Total Customer Satisfaction quality competition, and its potentially more far-reaching empowerment initiative, Motorola encouraged its employees to apply their new knowledge and skills in innovative and proactive ways. The growing interest in empowerment raised a number of organizational issues that led many to wonder how best to achieve its stated goals.

Many managers fail to realize that traditional measures, which focus on results, may help them keep score on the performance of their businesses but do not help a multifunctional team monitor the activities or capabilities that enable it to perform a given process. Nor do such results measures tell team members what they must do to improve their performance. Senior managers play an important role in helping teams develop performance measures by dictating strategic goals, ensuring that each team understands how it fits into those goals, and training a team to devise its own measures. But managers must never make the mistake of thinking that they know what is best for the team.

Riding the crest of recent artistic and organizational successes, this self-governing symphony orchestra now confronts the challenge of engendering a culture in which, in the words of the managing director, "everyone in the orchestra is constantly thinking, how can we make this better?"

As a manager and executive with Johns-Manville, Bill Sells witnessed one of the greatest management blunders of the twentieth century. This blunder was denial, and in the end it took thousands of lives, destroyed an industry, and wiped out as much as 98% of stockholder equity. From today's perspective, it hardly matters what and when Manville knew about asbestos. Modern liability standards seem to hold that the company should have known. When the author was promoted to head Manville's fiberglass division, with asbestos virutally banned, fiberglass had become its chief source of revenue. When fiberglass too came under suspicion as a health hazard, the author used the lessons he had learned in asbestos to implement a policy of product stewardship; intensive workplace monitoring; full disclosure; assiduous communication with customers, workers, regulators, and the media; and an active scientific research program. Studies now indicate that fiberglass is safe. Sales and profits indicate that product stewardship is a source of competitive advantage.

The authors have seen North American and European companies make improvements by implementing lean production techniques. The authors now argue that linking these individual breakthroughs up and down the value chain, creating a lean enterprise, is the next step in achieving superior performance. The lean enterprise is a group of individuals, functions, and legally separate but operationally synchronized companies that creates, sells, and services a family of products. Few companies have created a lean enterprise. Individuals, functions, and companies have needs that conflict with each other and with those of the lean enterprise. The strengths and weaknesses of the German, U.S., and Japanese industrial traditions suggest that trade-offs between these three entities are inevitable.

Today's managers feel that a once clear separation between public and private sectors has broken down. Specifically, managers are spending heavily on education and training and wondering if this is their responsibility. In answering this question, the author looks back to Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and industrial capitalism's first social compact. As work became increasingly simplified under what Smith called the division of labor, the level of education that management required of its workforce declined. According to Smith, business managers were only responsible for providing the most rudimentary elements of education. Avishai goes on to examine business's social contract in a competitive environment that has superseded the division of labor. In the foreseeable future, virtually every business will focus on continuous learning and will therefore have both an obligation to support teaching and an opportunity to profit from it.

In this fictional case study, Diane Bryant, who is pregnant, is up for a significant promotion at Hunter Peripherals, a director's position overseeing environmental testing and product compliance. But Jim Serra, vice president of engineering at Hunter, is concerned that Diane won't be able to handle the combined challenges of her new job and new baby. Hunter is planning a critical product launch in six months, and Diane is due in four months. Jim isn't sure he can rely on Diane to put in the time necessary to ensure the product's successful entry into the market. Jim must make a recommendation to the executive committee, either supporting Diane's bid for the job or not. Six commentators offer their solutions to Jim's dilemma and discuss related family and work issues.

Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian industrialist whose company, Semco, manufactures marine equipment, food-service machinery, and other highly differentiated products. Semco has long practiced unusual but successful management innovations, but when the Brazilian economy took a turn downward in 1990, empowerment, profit sharing, self-set salaries, and other policies were no longer enough to ensure survival. The only solution was to cut permanent staff and contract out more work. But instead of contracting it to strangers, Semler gave the contracts to his own workers, setting them up in business with generous severance settlements and an offer to lease them Semco's equipment, on- or off-site, and to defer lease payments for two years. The transition was painful, but only one satellite has failed, while most ex- and semi-employees do very well with ad hoc compensation systems.

Examines the recruiting process of Bowles Hollowell Conner & Co. (BHC), an investment banking firm known for its work with middle market companies. Specifically, presents a profile of the firm and its recruiting process and then examines that process through the firm's recruiting efforts at Harvard Business School (HBS). Includes the resumes of 17 second-year HBS students who sought interviews for an associate position with BHC and raises the issue of how interview selections were made from those resumes.

Managers need a new way to think about managing change in today's knowledge organization. Instead of breaking change into small pieces--TQM, process reengineering, employee empowerment--and then managing these pieces, managers need to think in terms of overseeing a dynamic. Managing change is like balancing a mobile. Achieving this critical balance means managing the conversation between the people leading the change effort and those who are expected to implement the new strategies; creating an organizational context in which change can occur; and managing emotional connections, which have traditionally been banned from the workplace but are essential for a successful transformation. One tool that companies can use is the Transition Management Team, a group of company leaders that oversees the corporate change effort and ensures that leaders and followers work together to create their future.

Reinvention is not changing what is, but creating what isn't. When British Airways declared itself the world's favorite airline, it faced the challenge of becoming a different company, not just a better one. When Europcar decided to become the most efficient rental-car company in Europe and Haagen-Dazs chose to make a visit to its European shops an exciting event, they didn't just need to focus on doing things to improve their competitiveness. When a company sets out to reinvent itself, it must uncover and then alter the invisible assumptions and premises on which its decisions and actions are based. This organizational context is the sum of the past and dictates what is possible for the future. When managers reinvent themselves and their companies, they create a new context that leads everyone to embrace a seemingly impossible future. Reinvention includes assembling a critical mass of stakeholders to do an organizational audit, create urgency, harness contention, and engineer breakdowns that reveal weak spots.