Putnam Investments: Rebuilding the Culture

The founders of the Lincoln Electric Company left a legacy of an organization culture that promotes high productivity through sound management policies which have stood the test of time. The exponential growth of the company after the death of James F. Lincoln was a direct result of the establishment of a rich culture mix based on values that were widely shared and accepted by the members of the organization. Management empowered employees to become part of the decision making process through the contribution of ideas through the Advisory Board which was elected by the employees from amongst themselves. Reward management systems and all the other artifacts of the Lincoln Electric’s distinguished strong organizational culture will be analyzed in greater detail in this essay.

The Yale Endowment is known in the financial industry as a pioneer in using a combination of innovative asset allocation and active management to produce impressive long-term performance. In fact, the Endowment produced a 17.8% average annual return, net of fees, in the ten-year period ending June 30, 2007.1 This performance is particularly impressive given that, in recent years, the Endowment portfolio has carried less than a 40% weighting in equities. Instead, under the leadership of Chief Investment Officer Dave Swensen, the Yale Investments Office

A healthy organizational culture can be done with two different strategies. The first strategy being an action plan for developing a company that gives back to the employees. A good company understands the importance of building a positive morale and disposition among the staff. Regions Bank has developed a "team works" incentive plan that rewards good sales behaviors for the branches. This has given the employees an opportunity to not only make a base salary, but reap rewards for attainable quarterly sales goals as well. When an employee takes control of their production it gives a sense of ownership to the staff member to take pride in their company and help them develop on a larger basis.

Every organization has values and beliefs that define what they do and how they do things in the organization. These values have significant influence on how the employees behaves and the general performance of the organization – it is these set of values and beliefs, rooted deep in the company’s organizational structure that depict the “dos”, “don’t” and the “hows”, of the organization and these unequivocally represents the culture of the organization. This concept became popular in the 1980s when Peters and Waterman in their book: “In search of Excellence” presented the profound argument that, the success of any organization is inextricable linked to the quality of its culture. (Carpenter, M., Taylor, B., Erdogan, B. 2009 p183). The purpose of this paper is an attempt to analyse the impact diverse cultures played in the success of the Lincoln Electric Company.

“A big part of achieving success, according to Barnes, has been moving the corporate culture towards one based on teamwork and integrity. As a leader, I need to instill the right culture and values that will stand the test of time” (Routson, 2009).

The mechanisms for changing organizational culture that Mr. Marchionne used at Chrysler were to change the workflow and the structure of the organization. The old ways of Chrysler were not working as the company was forced into bankruptcy. In a reaction to failing sales, the previous management at Chrysler slashed prices, which was not a valid solution to the problem. However, Mr. Marchionne has a different approach. When he took over, he fired top executives, took away the layers of bureaucracy, and injected fear into those that were left. The hierarchy model was no longer working at Chrysler, so Mr. Marchionne got in the trenched with those he select as his management team and together they worked together to bring Chrysler out of bankruptcy. In return, the culture at Chrysler moved to an adhocracy in that leaders were empowered to seek innovation to create sustainable growth for the organization (Kreitner & Kiniski, 2013).

Potential benefits of moving the current culture toward the ideal culture would reduce departmental employee turnover because job satisfaction and job commitment would increase due to management relieving the pressure of the job by acknowledging ALL employee efforts. This would mean rewarding for progress even when progress is slight and don 't meet up to expectations. This overall will increase self-worth on the job. The increase in self-worth on the job will enable consultants to further develop and maximize their contributions. However, the shift toward the ideal culture may present some conflict in the organization because this change takes some of the focus off making numbers and management may feel that sales might decline and may be reluctant to continue the change. Nevertheless, management has to realize that the employees are important too, and this change will only facilitate teamwork and better interpersonal relationships that will enable employees to recognize and work toward the common goal of achieving great success.

ABC Corporation has a culture that is based on providing award winning after-sales service to ensure it has repeat customers (WCM 620 Final Project Case Study, 2017). Thomas prides himself on creating a culture that produces high-performance numbers by encouraging his employees to handle a high volume of calls. Thomas believed that each employee should be clear on company protocol and performance expectations with a focus on high productivity (WCM 620 Final Project Case Study, 2017). During the conflict, Thomas believed that his front-line manager,

3. Lincoln’s culture could not be imposed but must be nurtured. “Willis retained the existing managers of most of the acquired companies to take advantage of their local knowledge, but directed them to implement [underlined by author]Lincoln’s incentive and manufacturing systems [p 6].” While Willis appreciated the benefits of implementing Lincoln’s systems, he did not consider James Lincoln’s caveat that “All those involved must be satisfied that they are properly recognized or they will not cooperate – and

The combination of five factors in Yale’s investment philosophy plays an important role to Yale’s successful investment performance. However, among the five factors, the most critical and non-replicable factors are Yale’s ability to identify and invest in inefficient markets and to hire superior managers with aligned incentives; all of which came from expertise and years of experience in the industry. David Swansen’s expertise, in particular, plays a big role.

In today’s dynamic business environment leadership must understand the value and importance of their organizations’ culture. While it may never be formally defined, leadership must have a vision of their intended culture and a plan for creating and maintaining it. This vision will serve as the potter’s clay that determines everything from the dress code to the organizational structure. This paper examines two methods organizations can choose to create and maintain a healthy culture.

From September 3rd, 2015 to October 28th, 2015, our group was given the opportunity to manage an investment portfolio, with the goal of maximizing the value of the portfolio through acquiring, holding, and selling stock. The beginning cash balance of the portfolio was $100,000, and our group had the ability to make up to 500 trades. During this time period, our group made 20 stock purchases and sold stock twice. At the close of business on October 28, 2015, the value of our group’s portfolio increased from $100,000 to $106,785.33, yielding a return of  6.78% (((106785.33/100,000)-1) x 100)). In comparison to the S&P 500 returned at 7.16% and the Dow Jones having a return of 8.65% (Yahoo).

The important implication of this is that investors cannot consistently outperform the market, and if they do it is purely through luck. With competition for information reaching new heights, professional managers face greater difficulties in attempting to outperform each other. If these professionals are unable to consistently beat the market, there remains little hope for the average investor.

The main aim of every organisation is increase demand for the goods and services it offers. To achieve this goal, organisations employ certain ethics that control their attitudes, beliefs, experiences and values. This ethical characteristic of an organisation is known as its 'organisational culture'. In their book Strategic Management, Hill and Jones (2001) define organisational culture as the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organisation, and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organisation. In their opinion, it also includes beliefs and ideas about what kind of goals members of an organisation should pursue, and ideas about

The competing values framework represents a theory, based on the crucial indicators of an effective organization. It revolves around four major components of organizational culture, which measure the organization's leadership style, institutional bonding, strategic emphases and general cultural characteristics. Leaders and managers benefit from this conceptual framework as it offers teaching tools and helps interpret various organizational functions and processes. In order the examine the organizational culture more in depth, this framework has been extended (Quinn and Kimberly, 1984, p 298). They identified the two main dimensions upon which the competing values framework of cultured is based : the competing demand of change and stability, and the conflicting demands created by the internal organization and the external environment. These dimensions were reflected by other scholars as Thomson