Case Study on Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Essay

Being successful in change implementation, the change strategist should understanding the need to change, able to develop a direction that lead the crowd to move forward, obtain support from implementers and recipients and set up plans and structure that facilitate change and encourage continuously improvement. ! Able to understanding the need to changes Charlotte Beer as the change strategist successful understood the challenges facing by O&M externally and internally. Advertising industry was going globalized and customers demand â€Å"better service at lower cost†. Strong competitions in the market threatened O&M business by taking away their important clients. Internally, O&M was unable adapt to the changing demand. Operating cost and agency fee was high while quality of work diminished and cooperation was limited among staffs. Therefore, Charlotte Beer adopted â€Å"Re-creation†, change the Company values and strategy to tackle threats. ! Successfully set up a common vision and encourage moving forward Beers worked out a vision with a group of change leaders and set up a clear direction focusing on brand stewardship. The vision â€Å"To be the agency most valued by those who most value brands† imbed the belief of brand stewardship and visualize how excellent O&M should be in future. It is encouraging, easily remembered and it leads employees’ direction to brand-orientated. However, there should be more elaboration and it was good that Beers provided some ideas on how to achieve it as well as the culture and behavior the company appreciated. This made a good start for the change program. ! Implementation plan can hit the objective and remove O&M from urgent threats. Beers had set some objectives which help to tackle the most urgent problems. Besides setting up a new direction, she needed to gain back the clients by improving the output emphasizing value of brand as well as made better use of resources. No doubt, Beers and her appointed implementers had successfully worked out brand stewardship and gained back the support from multinational clients which not only secured O&M business but also brought encouragement to the Company. By setting up WCS, hoping centralization leads to better use of resources and provide better and standardize service. Structure and system hinder the practice of Brand Stewardship Beers’s plan able to release O&M from immediate threat, but in long-run the change was not fully implemented and substantive. Beers should urgently addressed the tensions between WCS and local agencies due to job allocation, resources distribution and reward system as it discouraged the change recipients to practice brand stewardship and perform well in their job. This would affect the efficiency, waste of resources as well as affect the clients. Beers should refine the structure and redesign the work process to encourage cooperation by better define of duties, enhance flexibility, and impose a compensation system that reward contribution on brand stewardship. Limited support from implementers and recipients One person cannot make the change happen. During vision set up stage, Beers  successfully created a change team and appointed some implementers to carry out her plan. However, Beers needed to go further in communicating and enhancing commitment of the change team so that they could fully understand brand stewardship and to cultivate this culture in O&M. Furthermore, brand stewardship was not fully translated to employees, as they don’t have a structure and policy to guide them and not enough role models they can look up to as executives are not fully committed in brand stewardship either. More training or promotion campaign should be organized. Reinforce brand stewardship To walk the talk is important. Beers could continuously reward and recognize the behaviors that demonstrated brand stewardship so that people mindset would change gradually. To conclude, Beer’s change implementation was successful in short-run but to sustain the change and correct the defect, she needed to institutionalize the change continuously. Reference Todd D. Jick & Maury A. Peiperl. (2011). Managing Change Cases and Concepts (3rd ed.).New York: McGraw-Hill Education