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Changing Culture at Pizza Hut

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Changing Culture at Pizza Hut and Yum! Brands, Inc.

The concept of corporate culture has captured the imagination of executives for years. For executives struggling to manage organizational change, understanding their organization’s culture has become paramount before undertaking such a change. They realize that significant strategic and structural realignment cannot occur if it is not supported by the organization’s norms and values. Organization cultures are created by leaders and, therefore, one of the most important functions of a leader is the creation, management, and sometimes the destruction of a culture. An organization’s culture reflects the values, beliefs and attitudes of its members. These values and beliefs foster norms that …show more content…

Its personnel planning system, shepherded by a set of organizational psychology Ph.D. consigliore in each of PepsiCo’s operating divisions, produced a stellar cast of professional managers. This system, layered on an existent Pizza Hut founding culture, was far from a natural fit for the quick-service restaurant industry. PepsiCo was what Kerr and Slocum would call a market culture with a performancebased reward system. PepsiCo’s very fast moving, individually focused, consumerpackaged goods, entrepreneurial culture would prove not a great fit for the relatively mature, slow-moving, team-oriented, quickservice restaurant business.
320 ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS

The integration of these two companies, PepsiCo and Pizza Hut, resembled a failed vinaigrette: a large amount of oil slowly churning in one direction, overlaid by a thin layer of vinegar, a whirlwind of speed moving in the opposite direction. The vinegar represents the high-potential PepsiCo general managers rapidly moving among the many divisions and corporate offices of PepsiCo. Smart, ambitious, competitive and results-driven, they were attracted by PepsiCo’s ability to move them up fast and give them a breadth of management experience in different PepsiCo businesses. A rising star might spend two years in field marketing at Pepsi Cola North America, a year and a half in product marketing at Frito-Lay, an additional 18 months as a product brand manager there, two years at Pepsi Cola International, followed by a

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