Change management initiatives of HP, IBM, Kodak, and McDonald's
Kotter's Model
Although it is said that the only constant in business is change, the need for change has thwarted many potential corporate superstars of the recent past, including Hewlett Packard, IBM, Kodak, and McDonald's. Although these companies were able to deal with the changes demanded by exterior economic circumstances and internal corporate pressures with varying degrees of success, all met with roadblocks on their way to pursuing change. Kotter's model for successful change suggests that all change entails a certain amount of urgency; a period of coalition building during the pre-change process; the need to create a vision for the change; communicating that vision; removing obstacles; creating short-term wins; building on the change; and permanently anchoring that change in the corporation's culture (Kotter's 8-step change model, 2013, Mind Tools).
HP: Three significant errors
However, in the case of HP, critical errors were made during the change process. The first and most serious one was creating insufficient urgency about the need for change: when HP merged with fellow computer company Compaq, significant organizational players were resistant to the merger, dooming it from the start. Rather than building coalitions, HP CEO Carly Fiorina strong-armed the merger with little concern about generating buy-in amongst other members of the company. Her reorganization of company divisions also generated resistance and even though her principles for doing so were sound, she did not clearly communicate her vision for why this was necessary.
Recommendation
Creating goodwill by proceeding more slowly with the merger (or not undertaking it at all if there was profound organizational resistance and instead attempting to improve what was wrong with HP alone) would have been the wiser task in hindsight.
Change image
HP's strong-armed model of change ultimately failed to generate buy-in
IBM: Three significant errors
In the case of the stalwart computer company IBM, IBM was initially slow to react to the development of the Internet. However, as a result of internal...
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