Managing Across The Organization

In today's highly competitive business world, companies face new challenges everyday. Good Sport is not the first company to have to change their strategy to adapt to their ever-changing industry. Upon researching the issues Good Sport faces, it is not uncommon for companies to experience conflict in leadership and organizational structure due to miscommunication. When a company restructures, it should utilize known practices of emotional intelligence, knowledge management and team development. Once the problem and the course of change are identified, it is important for Good Sport to communicate their progress with the employees. In order to prevent future conflict and miscommunication, Good Sport will need to implement team building strategies to recreate the company's culture and mission. Companies throughout the paper identified organizational issues that drove them to develop and execute improvement plans.

Team building, conflict management, power, knowledge management, external environment, and internal communication were the issues that the research was based upon. These are only a few of the important concepts that leadership of any organization must pay attention to in order to stay successful.

The research on Boeing and Wal-Mart was done to show the how team building can affect the bottom line of an organization. Both Boeing and Wal-Mart used team building in different areas of the company. Boeing used it to motivate its workers in the plant to produce more. The strategy Boeing used to motivate its employees was to have the employees themselves set the goals and work together towards those goals. This strategy allowed the employees to make the commitment and as a team give their buy-in towards the commitments. The employees worked together in teams to get the job done.

It was a game that worked well both in production and the employees had fun doing it.

Wal-Mart revamped its Information Technology department used it to help keep the products on the shelves for the customers. In order to keep the popular products on the shelves, Wal-Mart formulated a very thorough IT department which kept the inventory like clock work. As soon as item was sold, a supplier like Proctor and Gamble was able to see that and ship the item out to Wal-Mart thus enabling the company never to run out of supplies for the customers.

Conflict management and power were the issues identified in the researched for IBM and Dell. IBM did not inform their employees when they changed their pension structure and it caused employees to be dissatisfied. The employees had worked with the company for years and were waiting for the benefit of their pension checks when they retired. There was conflict because there was a lack of communication between the decision makers and the employees.

In studying Dell Corporation, the company tried to show that its stock was worth more than it actually was by inflating the value of the company. The leaders of Dell used power to get the employees of the accounting department to change the figures on their accounting books thereby giving misleading information.

CMP and Information Today were studied to find out their use of Knowledge Management to create successful companies. Knowledge Management is any structured activity that improves an organization's capacity to acquire, share and use knowledge to improve its existing condition and to succeed. For CMP to be successful they had to incorporate strategies such as improved software which alleviate the company from having more personnel to do the job that a software program answer any questions that customers might have. This saves the company money from having to hire more employees and also the program was available to the customers twenty four Ð'-seven. The sole purpose of the software was to answer customer questions quickly and accurately.

Information Today, which is a technology company, improved their process by creating a list of action items which must be avoided and also a success check list. They realized that in order for them to be successful they had to revamp their internal processes.

Toyota, a Japanese company, looked at the external environment when they realized that sales of their Toyota Corona in the United States came in as the third best selling import in the United States in the late 1960. As a result of that Toyota decided to have a joint venture with General Motors and establish a manufacturing plant in the United States. This saves the company a lot of money in exporting costs. Toyota also developed a hybrid power plant to help save the environment with low emission of pollutants as well as saving the consumer money in the consumption of gasoline.

Comcast is another example of a company using the external environment to increase sales by providing service to customers in remote mountainous areas. The customers in remote areas could not receive signals so antennas were installed in hills with the cable running to the homes of the customers. With this technology customers can have internet access, telephone and television by one provider.

Internal communication is very important for an organization to move forward. In the absence of internal communication, one department would not know where or what the other department is doing. For a company to be successful all personnel must be on the same page with one mission and having the tools and resources to get them to success. Primerica Inc., an insurance company offering insurance services to all senior citizens joined Citi Group by expanding their business by offering retirement services and products. Soon Primerica/Citi group were offering a conglomerate of products, much more than their 100,000 licensed agents can sell or even become familiar with. The aim of the leaders of the corporation was to sell on the dreams of the customers, but this was never communicated to the agents. The agents did not do a good job in convincing the customers on the products which resulted in poor presentation and little sales for the company. This led to an improved process to inform agents on products and changes in plans so that everyone was working for the same company reaching for the same goals.

Sears and K-Mart merged into one company however there was one problem in the merger in that one company sells a product that is more inferior to the other. The customers were getting different caliber of items thinking that it was the same value. Both companies saw a decline in sales and as such had to communicate on how to get both companies selling comparable items both in value and price.

In our individual papers, each one of us identified a company that had a similarity of Good Sport. Our research helped us discover the values and troubles of our companies that suffered their leadership skills.

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