Case Study: After the Layoffs, What Next?

Corporations booming affected the Americans in different ways. The industrialized cities begin to attract more people. Urban transportations were improving and this led to the making of department stores. Document I talks about a novel where a woman talks about the department stores in a city. How department stores were the most effective retail organisation. how

Of course, the board does not confess to satisfying the greed for higher profits by taking these unpopular steps; they present all the process as catching up on the competitors. “GM has to do what it has to do in order to stay competitive, even if it means laying off thousands of people”, says a member of the board, and thus makes it more than clear that in a capitalist society the managers and the directors are concerned only with the profit maximization and with their own welfare, whereas the employees have to fight for their jobs in more and more unfavorable conditions. More than 30 000 workers have now lost their jobs, whereas the company’s chairman Roger Smith has just made $2 millions himself. The unions are no help at all in this moment. Supposed to increase the workers’ bargaining power, the unions have now become useless, since “too many people in the unions friends with the management”, whose interests, in this case, are completely the opposites to those of the workers.

The industry we have chosen is the department store-retail industry. Within this industry, we have chosen the department stores of JCPenney and Macy’s. We find this industry, as well as these two companies, interesting from a strategic perspective. JCPenney has recently undergone a massive strategic restructuring in regards to its pricing, brand offerings, and store layout, pushing it away from the typical department store strategy of discounts and coupons. Its new strategy has become much closer to Wal-Mart’s strategy of every day low prices. Macy’s, on the other hand, has restructured with a push from the economic

Patrick Lencioni is an American writer, who focuses on writing books particularly in relation to business and team management. He is best known for ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, an allegory following the journey of DecisionTech’s new CEO, Katheryn Peterson. In this tale, Lencioni revels the basics of teamwork by creating a fictional business, in which is struggling to grow as a company, due to lack of commitment by its employees. The company fails to accept responsibilities and to come to any agreements, ultimately, resulting a plummeting disposition. Furthermore, throughout the fable, the five dysfunctions of a team become more evident, in which are, absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment avoidance of accountability and

Ideally, his decision must maintain the firm’s no-layoff history, encourage the tight-knit company atmosphere, and draw as little negative attention as possible. As a new employee in his grandfather's business, he must prove himself worthy of the position he was recently controversially given. His first challenge is dealing with the declining performance of veteran employee, Russell Campbell, a strong-minded subordinate with a significant amount of influence within the firm. To make his dealings even more complicated, Russell is a

Tanglewood, founded in 1975, has undergone rapid growth over the years. The rapid growth, however, has caused issues across the organization. Each store manager has their way of doing things when it comes to running the store. Because of the differing of attitudes across stores and the unstructured staffing process, Tanglewood has experienced significant turnover and financial loss. Tanglewood primarily hires internally because they feel “individuals who are promoted from within the organization to the department manager level are typically viewed by other employees as very qualified and integrated into the corporate culture and mission of Tanglewood (41).” Tanglewood

A "reality check" at the annual stock holder's meeting where many employees voted to have Harold Wallace removed prompted him to call in a consultant by the name of Frances Rampar to find out what exactly is going on within the company. The information gathered from interviews with key employees within the Wallace Group screams for change.

Department stores are not easy to manage, and take a whole team of individuals to run daily operations smoothly. Dillard’s success at the turn of the century came from balancing finances properly, incorporating a friendly atmosphere, and building its reputation as a welcoming upscale department store. In recent years, however, Dillard’s Inc. has surfaced in headlines for being listed as one of the worst companies in the nation to work for. With stiff competition and acquisition factors, the department store industry is not one to lag behind in and

The setting of this case study was the Texas Plant. The Texas Plant produced excellent quality goods, but it was not competitive because of its slower speed of product changeovers, higher costs, and environment of “bureaucratic status quo” (Pryor et al., 2011, p. 111). In addition, the plant’s union leaders, management, and employees lacked positive, working relationships. Corporate leaders hired a new, aggressive vice president, David, to transform the plant by empowering employees and establishing continuous improvement processes (Pryor et al., 2011). David, in turn, bypassed the plant’s Human Resources (HR) and hiring director, Harvey, and hired Paula

In the case of “Thomas Green: power, office politics, and a career in Crisis”, it describes the dilemma of Thomas Green who works in a company called Dynamic Display. Thomas was recruited as an account executive, and then five months later, he was promoted as a Senior Market Specialist directly by the President Shannon McDonald. Thomas’s boss Frank Davis hadn’t expected to choose Green as the new senior market specialist, and he was very dissatisfied with Green’s work style and performance three months after the promotion. After being informed that Frank Davis had emailed McDonald about his concerns about Green’s performance, Green was getting really worried about his situation and not sure how to explain his perspective to

The company’s structure was said to be an inverted pyramid : the customers and store managers on the top and the top management at the bottom. This showed how everyone’s beleifs and opinions were aligned towards customer satisfaction and extreme personal involvement with the customers and the store.

Zappos has tackled some serious challenges, handling them with quickness, strength, and accuracy. The first was the 2008 Layoff. Due to the economic times, Zappos had to lay off 8% of their cherished employees. This was a hard choice as the company treasured every staff member. They were straightforward and open about their financial circumstances and the employees fathomed why they needed to take these actions. Employees who were laid off received six months of COBRA health insurance coverage, paid for by the company. The second ethical challenge was the union with Amazon in 2009. Customers were puzzled on why Zappos had decided to join with Amazon. Instead of leaving their devoted customers speculating, they openly articulated the circumstances. Tony Hsieh shared the motives on why Zappos made this decision, guaranteeing that is was to the advantage of the customers. The existing board of directors did not want the company to focus on their clients but to alter attention entirely to product sales. Hsieh did not want to abandon the customer-centric model that Zappos was originated upon, and decided he must take action. In order to buy out the board, Zappos needed to come together with Amazon, a company that not only accepted but endorsed their value to customers. In the end, Zappos and its customers benefitted from the unification. Soon after, the company faced some of its major challenge concerning technical

The book is written by two authors: Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins. Mimi Swartz is a journalist who graduated from Hampshire College. She has written for many publications. Her work has been included in Slate, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Currently, she serves as an executive editor for Texas Monthly. Ms. Swartz is a long time resident of Texas, and was able to use her experiences and insight into the Texan psyche to highlight the personalities of the Texas company and the attitude of its employees. Sherron Watkins has a Bachelor 's in Business Administration from the University of Texas and a Master 's in Professional Accounting, also from the University of Texas. She went to work at the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, which was the accounting firm that handled Enron 's books. After Arthur Anderson, Watkins worked for three years at MG Trade Finance, a division of Metallgesellschaft AG, a large conglomerate that specialized in mining, chemicals, and finance. Watkins went to Enron after MG, where she stayed from 1993 until 2002, following its infamous bankruptcy. Sherron Watkins worked at many different portions of Enron, eventually becoming a vice president. She was one of the whistleblowers regarding Enron 's failure,

At 4:30 p.m. on December 6, 2010, Meredith Collins, VP of Marketing for Reed Supermarkets, walked down the sidewalk of the 10-store strip mall that housed Reed’s Westgate Plaza branch in Columbus, Ohio. Collins didn’t shop; instead she took mental notes about store traffic, first at the Reed store and then at an indirect but increasingly worrisome kind of competitor—a dollar store. The Reed was predictably well lit and inviting, and Collins could see three registers open and two or three customers in line at each. “Not too bad” she thought, “but not what I would hope for at this time of day, this close to the holidays.” She’d felt the same way at two other Reeds

The evening of December 11, 1995, was a special time for Aaron Feuerstein, CEO of Malden Mills. A small surprise 70th birthday party quietly was held in his honor at a local Boston restaurant. But Feuerstein’s life took a dramatic turn that evening for a different reason: A boiler at his company’s plant exploded, setting off a fire that injured 33employees and destroyed three of the factory’s century-old buildings. Malden Mills was a privately owned firm, with Feuerstein owning a majority share. The firm was located in a small Massachusetts town, Methuen, and employed nearly 3,000 people in the economically depressed area. The fire was a devastating blow for the community. According