North America

The North American presentation consisted of several topics. They first compared the American and Canadian culture and how theses cultures influence the way they do business. They described Canada with the Canadian backpack flag metaphor and United States with the American football metaphor. They also talked about the different values that each country has and how they are reflect within society.

They brought the case of Disney which is an American company and how it has adopted the national culture of United States. One of the main similarities between the company and the country are that they identify with dreams. United States is famous because everybody wants to go there and achieve the American dream while Disney is well known because guest and employees live their dreams with the company.

Another similarity is that both of them always work to the continuous improvement, they learn through mistakes and they do not believe in perfection. They work not just for money, work recognition is very important for them, work defines who they are.

Last but not least, diversity plays a fundamental role in both parties. They say that managerial diversity brings innovation and creativity. Disney and Unites States also share the value of aggressiveness. They give a lot of importance to competition; they always want to be the best. Disney has a philosophy of “aggressively friendly” which means helping customer when they need it and always do more than what it is expected.

Questions:

List and explain 3 strategies used by HP in order to develop and sustain a strong organisational culture - "The HP Way".

The first strategy that I identify in the paper was used by HP in order to build and maintain a strong organizational. The stories are told during trainings, management meetings, speeches from company leaders and through all the global operations. The purpose of the stories was to make employees know more about HP and receive a message of how the company does things.

Another strategy is the open door theory, in which the company encourages employees to communicate and look for advises from any HP manager. The communication can be formal or informal, about a personal or work issue, and between the most new employees and the senior managers. For example the informal communication takes place during the coffee breaks and “beer bust”, where managers and employees talk, knowing more about each other. With this communication strategy, values can be communicated and the corporate culture is transmitted and maintained.

The last  strategy was implemented in order to assure that all the values are shared through the organization and preserve the strong corporate culture, giving to employees the same terms and conditions of employment and establishing flexible hours, casual outfits and first names. Hence, HP wants to reach close relations between managers and employees because they don’t want to create divisions among different sections that could damage the company’s culture.

 By 2001, Carly Fiorina was facing a huge dilemma in terms of organisational culture.   "Should Fiorina try to revitalize the HP way or attempt to replace it with a “better” culture than the one established by Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett in the 1940’s?" Explain your answer.

Replace the organisational culture won’t be a good idea because the one established by Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett brought a lot of benefits to the company and the employees, everybody interiorized the corporate culture and feel identify with it. So trying to replace it would be time costly and unnecessary. The culture was successful and has brand knowledge so she should continue with the same organizational culture.

References

• Forster, Nick. 2002. “Managing excellence through corporate culture: the HP way” The Management Case Study Journal 2(1): 13-25.
• Photo taken from http://www.census.gov/econ/www/natf/cover.gif May 12th 2010