Case Study No

Chan 1

Mgmt 5 Prof. McLaughlin Joseph Chan Student ID# 13486917 Case Analysis 1: 3M

Chan 2 1) What patterns did McNerney and his senior managers want to unfreeze with 3M? What patterns did they want to refreeze, and why? McNerney and his senior managers brought many new elements to 3M, the entry of McNerney itself has already unfreeze the tradition of 3M 100-year history of never bringing a new CEO from another firm. In a macro level, McNerney and his senior managers unfreeze 3M in three major areas: expense, quality, and view of future. Under expense, the new CEO lower the company’s expense by shifting production overseas instead of their traditional local production. McNerney also centralize purchase process and cut the supplier roster to eliminate the extra expenses under the formal system. In quality, McNerney setup new trainings to unfreeze the internal inefficiencies, new knowledge past to employees turn out to have better quality control. Under future view, McNerney want to unfreeze the heavy rely on traditional production development by using new products to speed up the new market. He unfreezes the traditional view of employees by giving them more reality based of looking at the world and the idea of unfreezing the forecasting plans for marketplace to select winners and losers by evaluating their business potential before they work on it. One major point that McNerney mentioned is that he wanted to unfreeze the thoughts of culturally not okay to say “no” by encouraging employees with special award to those whose idea were turned down. At last, he unfreezes the slow pace of new product with speeding it up at a fast pace in research and pushing manager being more involve in the service area. McNerney and his senior managers want to refreeze the concept of performance before seniority by abolish company’s seniority based compensation plan in favor of a merit – based structure that offered more pay and promotions to outstanding employees and

Chan 3 manager. They also reinforce the change of the impotency of manager by establishing leadership development school preparing up coming managers for more responsibility and refreeze employee’s sense of urgency to ensure high performance as result to receive award. By awarding high performance and leadership, the company were able to reinforce their desire to improve the quality of their employees, not only that, it also encourage them to keep moving forward, as the chapter describe as creating high impact and making employees believe they can also benefit from the change on the way to achieve the goal. 2) If you were a manager at 3M, what kind of outcomes should you look as evidence that the company is embracing change? The first thing I believe will stand up is the increasing profit of the company, implementing changes lead to high performance from employees, manager are able to handle more responsibility, lower expense is used in the firm. On workers attitude, employees are more willing to accept “no” from managers, a fast pace of movement in production, manager are capable to lead their team which teammate are able to confront concerns, employees would be willing to change their routine and early wins that represent early and consistent reinforcement to overcome the gravitational pull of past pattern and moving forward will be seen as evidence that the company is embracing the change. 3) How would you apply the 80/20 rule fostering change at 3M? The 80/20 rule can represent in different meaning in varies context. In generating profit, focusing on 20% of the potential plan instead of using full capacity to develop future product is going to generate 80% of the company’s profit. The rule also apply to the

Chan 4 internal operation of the company, putting 20% of its resources on managerial position highly affect the manager to lead their team to accomplish 80% of the work load. In terms of awards, by compensating 20% of its outstanding employees encourage them to produce 80% of better quality work done. With all these rule, it doesn’t only improve the efficiency of the company, in fact, it actually smoothen the change in 3M. 4) Did McNerney and his senior managers try to change too much, too quickly? Should he have accepted the status quo at 3M for a longer time period before implementing his change? I believe the change is not too much, according to the case, there are hints to show that McNerney actually has considered how much he is going to change in different stages. That means before he start the whole change, he has planned the different things that he progressively want to change. A hint that shows this point is that as he mentioned, “More changes are ahead. McNerney pushed managers to move 3M into services, an area where the company has little experience, and senior managers now provide more direction on budget allocations to ensure that departments working on higher-potential products receive sufficient resources”. (68) By examining in certain pace, McNerney didn’t push all his plan at once, but he actually have further plans for the next step. On the other hand, I don’t believe that McNerney is changing too fast too. Within the chapter, the author talks about the key success of change are the matter of having a clear desire to those that are expected to achieve such as employees, enable employee to see and believe in the benefit of the change, have tool skills, knowledge, and resources to achieve the goal. Although there are chances where changes can be too fast, but as McNerney said, “More people told me to change things than told me not to change, more change is

Chan 5 coming”. (67) That reflects the change isn’t adaptable, moreover, the more important point is to get employee to be more receptive as to believe in what it takes for them to succeed. I believe a status quo at 3M would definitely help to smoothen the change but I disagree that there should be for a longer time period before implementing his change. The concept of high pace in the company actually generate a momentum that leads to innovation, status quo will be very helpful if it runs on a bases of evaluating while the change is actually occurring, therefore, I believe ultimately, not everything will be perfect, but by adjustment within change refer to the statue quo will benefit the most to the company.