個案總覽

Startup companies face a difficult tension: they need the best managers, but they lack the resources or financial stability to match the compensation and benefits these managers can get elsewhere. Evaluate compensation and benefits choices from four perspectives. How do they affect cash flow? What are the tax implications? What is the accounting impact? What is the competition doing?

Leaders and followers are often the same people, since most managers have both bosses and subordinates. But while companies often nurture leadership skills, they ignore good followership skills. Four steps that can develop good followers are: 1) redefining followership and leadership roles as equal but different activities, 2) teaching the skills that make effective followers, 3) carrying out performance evaluation on the basis of followership capacities, and 4) building organizational structures (like leaderless groups and rotating leadership assignments) that encourage followership.

Mike Blumenthal, CEO of Burroughs, successfully executes the merger of Burroughs and Sperry in 1986. The case discusses the putting together of the two firms in a fast time period in order to achieve cost savings, high earnings, and an integrated culture. Blumenthal calls in two post-merger consultants to assist in the process as well as a large consulting firm. After one year it appears the new company, Unisys, is off to a good start, yet the integration of the MIS systems seems to remain as a looming concern.

Today corporate education is a vast and complex undertaking that costs U.S. business $30 billion a year and occupies most workers for a significant part of their lives. Unfortunately, much of this time and money is thrown away. To carry out effective corporate education, companies must: have a clear strategic vision; analyze their needs and priorities; learn to distinguish between training and development; learn how to choose teachers and locations for instruction; involve top executives in T&D; and conduct a continuing evaluation of educational worth and cost-effectiveness.

Students will read the case and prepare an action plan for class. In class the students will discuss their action plan for the formation of a new company.

The old performance appraisal system at American Cyanamid Co. had so many detractors it became a target in the company's effort to find ways to improve employees' quality of life. An experiment in the Medical Research Division substituted three ratings for the ten in the old review procedure and called for no recommended distribution. The new plan assumed that almost all employees perform capably and conscientiously at their jobs, though in a few cases performance is so impressively good or egregiously bad that it should get special recognition. Supervisors were now encouraged to stress positive instead of negative aspects of each subordinate's work.

A manager is confronted with a choice between promoting a man, recommended through a careful evaluation process, or a woman, who scored slightly lower in the same process, and who is seen as a trouble maker. Appendix summarizes legal issues in affirmative action decisions.

Describes manager's decision from the (A) case and resulting court decisions, culminating in landmark 1987 Supreme Court ruling.

Presents a conceptual framework for understanding the process of leading organizational change. Change leaders must create dissatisfaction with the status quo, develop a vision of the future state, and manage a process that sequences and orchestrates events and changes in such a way that internal commitment is developed and resistance reduced. Practical suggestions for developing these conditions for change are provided.

Twenty years from now, the typical large business will have half the levels of management and one third the managers of its counterpart today. Work will be done by specialists brought together in task forces that cut across traditional departments. Coordination and control will depend largely on employees' willingness to discipline themselves. Behind these changes lies information technology. Information-based organizations pose their own management challenges: motivating and rewarding specialists; creating a vision to unify an organization of specialists; devising a management structure that works with task forces; and ensuring the supply, preparation, and testing of top management people.

When an employee is discovered indulging in unorthodox, immoral or criminal behavior while off duty, can the employer discipline or fire the person? What are the rights of the company, and what are the rights of the worker? The company may argue that its reputation has suffered but unless it can prove a clear link between the off-duty conduct and the job, it will lose its case. The worker's life away from the workplace is protected constitutionally by a right to privacy and a right to associate freely with others. An unorthodox, questionable, or even immoral private life is usually no grounds for disciplinary action.

Material on 1984 negotiations between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, background for a film on the negotiations. Film available from California Newsreel in San Francisco.

Many U.S. corporations are shedding operations that are doing poorly, are superfluous because of mergers, or are obsolete because of a strategy of streamlining and returning to the "core" business. Often the human element is forgotten. The plight of white- and blue-collar employees who have lost jobs because of a management decision is not considered a top priority. When the Stroh Brewery closed a 70-year-old facility in Detroit after acquiring Schlitz and its five modern plants, 1,159 jobs were eliminated. The company set up an elaborate job-search and placement apparatus to help ease the trauma for employees who would be turned out.

Describes Ruth Linsky's charges of sex discrimination against Triton, where she is a sales manager. Ruth believes that she has been denied promotion because of an institutionalized system of sexual discrimination. Barbara Smith, Triton's personnel director, must weigh the issues: Where does the law draw the line? Does the company personnel policy favor men? Why didn't the affirmative action policy work? A panel of experts from business and the law discuss the case.

United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1987 faced serious challenges to its long-standing policies of on-the-job training and promotion from within. Increased competition in its traditional business of ground transport found UPS lagging in computerization and in need of technical expertise it could not simply cull from within its ranks. Whether, when, and how the new people were to be hired and assimilated, and to what extent the UPS culture and/or the new people would have to adapt, were the key questions.

With expansion into other countries (Germany), new areas of service (air express), and new ventures (two small acquisitions), UPS had to decide how to adjust its human resource policies to businesses and people which were substantially different from its traditional ones. The objective is to examine the tradeoffs in changing strong cultures and well established hiring, promotion, and reward practices to meet business needs.

More than eight million workers now participate in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in approximately 8,100 companies. The tax incentives designed by Congress since 1974 partly explain the growth in the number of ESOP companies, but most ESOPs reflect the view that worker ownership and participation have real advantages. Over 73% of the ESOP companies significantly improved their performance after setting up their plans. Moreover, there is a strong correlation between corporate performance and worker participation: ESOP companies do best when they set up programs that permit workers to have a say in corporate policy. With ESOPs performing so well more American managers should consider adopting this approach.

Most great organizations are great because of the way they recruit and groom good people. It is necessary to muscle-build the organization: institute tough, aggressive, companywide upgrading. Start with some frank questions. What are hiring standards? Is there a nucleus of excellent talent to draw from? How are high-potential people identified? What are the performance problems?

Traditional compensation systems that value status instead of contribution do not reward the entrepreneurial activity U.S. companies need. They're also unfair, costly, and inefficient. Now U.S. employers are changing their pay practices to forge better links between compensation and performance. Traditional ideas about hierarchy come into question every time one of these changes is made, so attacks on pay that look like fine-tuning are actually revolutionary in what they portend for organizational design.

This "Innovations in State and Local Government" case begins in January 1983, when Ellen Schall is appointed commissioner of New York City's Department of Juvenile Justice, an agency in upheaval. DJJ was established to detain seven- to fifteen-year-old children between arrest and adjudication. Most of DJJ's charges are held in a 25-year-old secure detention facility called "Spofford," a notoriously violent and dilapidated facility in the South Bronx. The case describes the situation as Schall walks into it. In addition to internal tensions and significant operational problems in every division, the agency has a history of bad press and feuds with City Hall. The department is also struggling with deep-seated racial and class tensions among employees, and with great confusion over its mission. The case ends with Schall planning to speak to a new group of juvenile counselors, trying to articulate her vision for the agency. The case offers students the chance to diagnose the ills of the agency and to chart a strategic course of action. Among the topics for debate: How should Schall go about assembling an executive team? How should she address the confusion over agency mission? What should she do about racial tensions? How involved should she get with the nitty-gritty operational problems of her agency's divisions? HKS Case Number 793.0