It's the late 90's and two corporate cultures clash when the forward thinking American Musicweb obtains the traditional and German direct-to-mail music retailer Bernberg. Musicweb workers are young, educated and at the cutting edge of technology. Bernberg employees are older, less-educated and using a 30-year-old business model. Emerging technology force Bernberg executives to take a long hard look at their-business-as-usual approach. Downloading music from the internet is taking off, and Bernberg is losing customers to online retailers. That's where Musicweb steps in. The American company was an early adopter to this new way of obtaining music and has had considerable success since they entered the scene about three years ago. After much …show more content…
(366)" Bernberg's driving external change isn't the takeover. It's the realization that the technological environment is shifting business to a new medium. The company has been a mail-order business for music since the 1970s and had largely ignored the digital movement. After the chairman concedes that the technology isn't going away, he agrees to the …show more content…
The German company had to get use to a new boss; they had lost their "identity" as direct-mailing services, and were now going to have to "collaborate" with Musicweb incumbents to redefine business practices. This catapulted Bernberg into transformational change. (TEXTBOOK) says organizations can face "second order change" which completely turns the organization in another direction and nothing stays the same. Textbooks says creating a happy medium between first order, a slow methodical approach to change and second order change is what makes change manageable and less likely for workers to resist. For Bernberg, there was no smooth transition to second order change. The CEO jumped right in to making changes. He did not consider the German work culture or the amount of change he was attempting to make in a short amount of time. The leaders did not take any steps to assess how ready Bernberg open to change was, nor did they communicate the change in a timely fashion. It was only after the changes began and resistance began to build, that the leaders made an attempt to communicate the changes they were making by distributing a newsletter. By the time the newsletter had been distributed, a major amount of trust had been lost. (choi and roi article
An “analyst” was quoted in the case (in 2002) as saying that “people will pay for music on the Internet, eventually.” This person was skeptical of the willingness of consumers to pay for
S, Rawat 2001, Organisational Change and Forces Prompting Change, Academic Paper Review, Shovoong viewed on 2nd April 2011, on http://imgs.shvoongstatic.com/images/2011/_v_070420111027/scp.PNG">
This one-two punch has left the industry experimenting with different ideas trying to find their next revenue stream. No one is sure where the music industry will be in the next five years, but things are already changing. Musicians have more and more avenues to reach fan bases, and huge record companies no longer dominate the scene. This is good for musicians and even better for fans...
In his book, Leading Change, Dr. John P. Kotter communicates why organizations fail or succeed based on ten years of conducting research on more than 100 companies to see what contributed to their successful transformations and what hindered those transformations. “In October 2001 Business Week magazine reported a survey they conducted of 504 enterprises that rated Professor Kotter the number one “leading guru” in America.” The two significant aspects I took from this book were the reasons why change initiatives fail and an eight-stage process to lead the organization through a successful transformation.
Bill Bailey, chairman of the board of the Utah Opera Organization, could use McClelland’s need theory to support the merger with the Utah symphony based on the three principles that are entailed in the theory; need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010, p. 215).
Kotter, JP 1995, Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. In Harvard Business Review on Change, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Drivers for change come in two categories, internal and external. In the simulation, "Organization Structure", the pretence was that the stagnating system integration market, lead the CEO to get the engineers trained in networking techniques. This training, once put to use resulted in a 20% increase in total revenue for the company. This is an example of an external force for change. The company was faltering behind the staggering systems integration market, so change was imperative if the company was to maintain its profitability.
The change process within any organization can prove to be difficult and very stressful, not only for the employees but also for the management team. Hayes (2014), highlights seven core activities that must take place in order for change to be effective: recognizing the need for change, diagnosing the change and formulating a future state, planning the desired change, implementing the strategies, sustaining the implemented change, managing all those involved and learning from the change. Individually, these steps are comprised of key actions and decisions that must be properly addressed in order to move on to the next step. This paper is going to examine how change managers manage the implementation of change and strategies used
Kotter, J. P. (2007). ‘Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail’. Harvard Business Review, January: 96-103.
In the past, music has been a costly business, where only people with a lot of money could enter and be successful in the industry. Changes in the music industry coupled with new computer technology have made it much easier for people without a lot of money to compose, produce, and distribute their creation. In order to get a better understanding of the music industry in comparison to 2014, one has to look at its history. There were many things that happened from the 1980’s onward, and they brought on a significant impact towards the music industry. Development in computer technology has also made a big impression on music. Many things within these fields have enabled artists to connect with their fans in a way they couldn’t before, and on a lower budget. In this paper, the discussion will be about all of these topics, and about the factors that help transform the music industry into something altogether easier for new people to contribute.
This paper will be broken down into six sections profiling each critical part of implementing and managing change in an organization. The sections included are; outline for plan creating urgency, the approach to attracting a guiding team, a critique of the organizational profile, the components of change, and how to empower the organization.
Change is a fundamental element of individuals, groups and all sorts of organizations. As it is the case for individuals, groups and societies, where change is a continuous process, composed of an indefinite amount of smaller sub-changes that vary in effect and length, and is affected by all sorts of aspects and events, many of which cyclic are anticipated ones. It is also the case for organizations, where change occurs repeatedly during the life cycle of organizations. Yet change in organizations is not as anticipated nor as predictable, with unexpected internal and external variables and political forces that can further complicate the management of change (Andriopoulos, C. and P. Dawson, 2009), which is by itself, the focus of many scholars in their pursuit to shed light on and facilitate the change process (Kotter 1996; Levin 1947; et al).
“Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” is an article written by John P. Kotter in the Harvard Business Review, which outlines eight critical factors to help leaders successfully transform a business. Since leading requires the ability to influence other people to reach a goal, the leadership needs to take steps to cope with a new, more challenging global market environment. Kotter emphasizes the mistakes corporations make when implementing change and why those efforts create failure; therefore, it is essential that leaders learn to apply change effectively in order for it to be beneficial in the long-term (Kotter).
Middlebrook, B., Caruth, D., & Frank, R. (1984, Summer 85). Overcoming Resistance to Change. Management Journal, 50(3), pp. 23.
The music industry started in the mid 18th century with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Through the decades there has been a great increase in this industry; however, the revenues for this industry have declined by half in the last 10 years. This has been caused by music piracy, which “is the copying and distributing of copies of a piece of music for which the composer, recording artist, or copyright-holding record company did not give consent” . After 1980’s, when the Internet was released to public, people started to develop programs and websites in which they could share music, videos, and information with...