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Case 2 - Chief Executive Officer
The latest quarterly results spread out on his desk made
the situation clear. The aviation division continued to
post losses and this quarter was the highest yet. The
meeting with the aviation VP had gone the same as the
last few times, with Carl insisting that the
cost-cutting measures to date were beginning to take
traction and that the industry was due for a
turn-around. The problem was that the financials didn’t
support either of those assumptions.
Given the lackluster results for the company overall, he
knew that neither the Board nor investors would be
pleased with the results and he would once again be
under pressure to slash costs in the aviation division.
In the last Board meeting, the idea of exiting the
aviation field completely had been raised and it was
likely to be put forth again. While analysts would love
to see a round of deep cuts and lay-offs, he wasn’t
convinced that retracting would solve the problem. In
fact, he wasn’t certain that aviation’s recent slide was
primarily caused by inefficiencies within the division
or industry problems. Other companies had posted some
gains in the sector recently, indicating that some blame
for the numbers fell in-house.
Since the merger two years ago, the
organizational structure had continued to settle and
though the result seemed logical, he couldn’t shake the
feeling that it was harder to accomplish certain tasks
now and that things that were once simple were
increasingly more convoluted. Divisions that used to be
consistently strong earners for the company were down
one quarter and up the next, and more and more the
explanations seemed to focus on internal factors.
He needed to track down where the
current organizational structure was getting in the way
of the company’s strategy, he needed to fix it, and he
needed to do it fast.
This is a
problem that the Surje Integrative ProcessTM
was designed to solve. |