Gene One Benchmark Analysis

Gene One Benchmark Analysis

The complexities of organizations in today’s business world face challenges more difficult to resolve than those of the past. In order for companies to succeed, they must look at their leadership and management styles and evaluate their internal systems, especially: communication issues, conflict, empowerment, and goal setting. Some questions they must ask of themselves: Are my employees committed to the success of the company? Is the environment motivating? And are the employees inspired enough to reach the company’s mission and vision? A company’s mission and vision statement must clearly state goals and objectives. Effective leadership and management styles build work environments which inspire and empower while producing measurable results and creating profits.

We examined several industry leaders, truly US-flagship corporations, whose economic resources exceed many third-world countries’. Starbucks Coffee has successfully used conflict-resolution to grow business and increase profitability through teambuilding and cohesiveness concepts. Coca Cola and Apple Computers are two companies which clearly illustrate how leadership style of management can influence individual performance and behavior, especially through times of change. A brief look at Jenss on the other hand, illustrates how leadership styles influence performance and behavior with a decision to close its doors instead of growing to compete with bigger, national department stores. Gene One can learn from these examples in its decision-making process to modify its systems to fulfill internal and financial requirements to become a publicly-traded company through the proposed IPO.

Starbucks

Gene One is a biotech company that is struggling to deal effectively with the challenges related to the company’s growth and its upcoming initial public offering (IPO). In my analysis, I have identified the problems of Leadership Styles faced by Gene One and Starbuck’s, how they responded to the issues, and the outcome of the strategies they used.

Similar to Gene One, Starbucks was founded by a small group. In 1971, three friends; Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegel started the company in Seattle, Washington. The firm originally did not sell coffee drinks. Selling the highest quality of whole gourmet coffee beans, selling coffee accessories and educating their community on the pleasurable experience of whole roasted domestic and international gourmet coffee beans were the core values.

An executive named Howard Schultz was a supplier to Starbucks. He visited the company one day and was impressed and wanted to be a part of the experience. In 1981, he eventually became the marketing manager. During one of his business trips to Italy, Shultz discovered a Milan coffee house and decided that he wanted Starbucks to follow their pattern. He had vision for Starbucks to be a place where people could come to and socialize over a cup of brewed coffee, cappuccino, or espresso. The partners of Starbucks did not agree with Schultz’s vision. In fact, they saw it as a threat to the company’s core value of selling whole coffee beans and coffee accessories. In 1985 Schultz decides to leave Starbucks and open his own coffee bar. He had an investor by the name of Jerry Baldwin from Starbucks.

In 1987, the partners of Starbucks, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker put Starbucks stores and name up for sale. In August 1987, Schultz put a team together and financed 3.8 million for purchase of Starbucks. He then developed management, real estate, architect and design teams and spread his vision of the Starbucks Corporation across the country and the world. Starbucks now have over 8,000 stores in 30 different countries.

The difference between the power and influence Don Ruiz had as a CEO and the power Schultz had as a marketing developer was Schultz initially; he wasn’t the head of Starbucks, but a transformational leader. Initially Baldwin had rejected Schultz’s vision but became inspired an invested into Schultz’s company. One year later he was able to convince the Starbucks partners to sell him their entire company. The partner’s of Starbucks rejection of his vision never stopped him from reaching his goal. In Gene One organization, Don Ruiz who is the CEO should develop the leadership style of directive like that of Howard Schultz. Ruiz should develop an experienced team to obtain the Initial Public Offering (IPO) for capital growth, marketing and research. His vision must be clear and totally understood through communication to the team in a way that they are inspired and motivated to reach their goal of obtaining the IPO and 40%. He can do this by clarifying performance goals by giving the team the means to reach them and the standards against which their performance will be judged, using rewards and disciplinary actions. Through inspiration they are more likely to stay focused on innovated strategies to reach the goal. This will strengthen team building and cohesiveness concepts ensuring the success of Gene One.

Coca Cola-Karine Inoue

Gene One found a great deal of success in just 8 years. CEO, Don Ruiz, believed that in order to keep pace with demand Gene One would need to go public within 3 years. The issue is the lack of experience, knowledge and leadership to make this expectation happen. The main threats to team effectiveness are unrealistic expectations leading to frustration. Frustration, in turn, encourages people to abandon teams. Both managers and team members can be victimized by unrealistic expectations (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2004, p.12).

During this transition to meet goals, Gene One’s executive board left the company due to lack of belief and confidence in Gene One. Coca-Cola is a Fortune 500 company with a tremendous reputation and brand recognition. When Coca-Cola started to lose ground, the financial loss was attributed to leadership. According to Morris (2004), the management layer: a roiling six years of public blunders and musical chairs in the executive suite, unsettling at any company but especially so at Coca-Cola, where impeccable leadership was always considered critical to maintaining the integrity of its brand and its reputation on Wall Street. Partly as a result, Coca-Cola’s stock has been trading in the $50 range, well off its high of $88 in 1998.

Both Gene One and Coca-Cola went through leadership changes on the executive level. In just six years this group has installed one CEO, ousted him and installed another so inexperienced that he needed constant shoring up, and finally, after a very public search that found no outside