Question

ABC Company, Inc., has been in existence for 10 years. It has 50 employees and currently only one location. ABC Company manufactures one product: widgets. It has managed to stay in business by holding onto a small portion of the widget market, but it is far from the market leader. Over the last five years, ABC Company’s market share has stayed more or less stagnant. The president of the company is an older gentleman who mostly works from home. He makes decisions through meetings with his managers over the phone and is rarely seen at the company. Mid-level managers don't have much contact with each other and basically focus exclusively on their individual departments. The rest of the staff members are very distrustful of management, and there has recently been a lot of turnover. Outside of interoffice griping, there is rarely any company wide communication.
Recent economic developments and technological advances in the widget industry have resulted in a greater demand for widgets in emerging markets, as well as in the United States. In order to stay competitive, ABC Company is considering expanding its operation globally. ABC has come to you, an expert on organizational change, for consulting advice.

For this assignment, you will write up an overview of the company scenario above. You will also answer some overarching questions to identify the problems/challenges the company is dealing with, as well as who the key people and teams would be to successfully implement a potential change for the company to expand globally.

Feel free to use this template to help structure your case study analysis. Each of the required sections is listed below: Give a brief overview of the company. Identify several problems/challenges in order to better position ABC Company in the expansion of its operation globally. Who are the key people in making decisions and what are their roles? Why are they important? Explain. What teams/staff will need to be involved in the day to day work of this initiative? Why are they important? Explain. What does the team collaboration communication plan need to incorporate in order for the effort to expand globally? What does the timeline leading up to completion of an operation expanding globally look like? Identify 2–4 solutions that ABC Company will need to successfully implement in order to expand its operations globally. What assumptions did you use in providing for the solution(s) to expanding globally?

Answer 1

ABC is not a new player in the widget business. They have been operational since last 10 years. The company clearly has functional structure where the people are divided into different departments. The hierarchy in the company is to down where there is one President who has the highest power and then all the departments have mid-level managers and employees. So, it can be inferred that the employees report to the department managers who further report to the President. There is no inter-department interaction at ABC, neither the people in the organization have proper communication that has led to lack of trust among the employees. Also, the president of the company does not interact with the employees and mostly works from home. The culture of ABC overall has a lot of loopholes. Taking about the company position in the market, despite of being in the market for 10 years the number of employees is just 50 and there is no expansion seen.

Looking at the current situation one of the most prominent problem in the company is the lack of communication. For any firm to function properly and succeed the employees must be really motivated, happy and confident about their work and have trust in their company and co-workers. But, at ABC the employees don’t have any of the above. To make the employees connect to the company the vision and mission of the company must be communicated to them very clearly. The first thing that ABC needs to do is to strengthen the company wide communication and bonding. For this, they can start by the president personally visiting the company and interacting with the employees to convey the core values. The management should encourage information and idea sharing within the departments and also among different departments. This way when the employees start trusting their managers they will work in a better and productive way. Once the communication in the company is strengthened ABC can look upon expanding the company’s employee base. To expand globally, ABC first needs to increase its local reach. The company can start revamping its business and marketing strategy and start targeting local markets first and then expanding to global markets.

The key people to bring in this change are the mid-level managers as they are a point of contact between the employees and the higher authorities. They can start up boosting the communication by launching programs like departmental meetings and other informal activities. To expand globally, ABC can try collaborating with some of the prominent players in the market they want to enter. ABC can also use social media to market themselves and reach to their potential customers. They can also try to market themselves in the global market by hosting some events so that they can reach to the potential customers.