Hewlett-Packard Company case

Synopsis- The case relates with the H-P company’s share of challenges in terms of the contingency factors of organizing and necessary adjustments in the structure and the contingency factors to solve the structural problem.

CASE FACTS

Hewlett-Packard Company (H-P) faced its organizing challenges over the times .Initially when the first woman CEO at H-P Ms. Carly Fiorina (1999) acquisition and subsequent difference in opinion with the BOD members of the company caused the company to suffer performance wise degradation. Due to this Ms. Carly Fiorina lost her designation to Mark Hurd, CEO of NCR.

Even after Mr. Mark Hurd was chosen H-P did face organization challenges. As stated by the company’s sales force as well as the employees inside H-P didn’t know who to call at H-P because of the company’s confusing management layers. The company’s head of corporate technology told the CEO that once he had to wait for quite long time to get the approval in order to fire sales specialists.

The CEO analyzed the root organizational problem by delving into sales structure .He found through his analysis that there were way many organizational layers (broader), .The involvement of sales persons were way more than typically employed in rival companies.

After analysis CEO resolved the organizational challenge by firing underperformers and eliminating three layers of management. Additionally the CEO eliminated one sales group entirely and merged them with other sales groups. Also sales representative were assigned to only one customer in order to help them to know who to call.

After these amendments the company had accelerated decision making power and the statistics showed that salespersons spent 40% of the time with their customers as opposed to 30% time before the new sales structure was implemented.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1.      Planning is the backbone of the organizational function..So in order to bring out the best result proper planning is essential before making any organizational move.

2.       No design or structural elements are good or  bad. The most important thing is the best match according to the aspects of the organization. For e.g. - Organization with 2000 or more employees should be more mechanistic than Organic.

3.      The top level manager of any company shouldn’t take the designation as a means of power practice but should understand the responsibility that comes with the power. The major responsibility of the company’s CEO (say) is to remove his/her decision bias and focus on the research , training and  lastly keeping aside of ego and  instead ask for help if the CEO  is not well equipped with handling the particular decision .For e.g. –Confirmation decision bias of  former CEO ,Ms. Carly Fiorina cost the company major performance lapses.

4.      In today’s world of free market and Globalization  and change, be it small organization or big organization every organization should be a learning organization .The learning organization  is the organization which has enough capacity to continuously change, adapt  and move towards best results through collaborative efforts.