Week 4 Dicussion Responses - Org Behavior

Week 4 Discussion Responses – Organizational Behavior

Week 4 Discussion - Hiring Ron Johnson

By I,H

Hiring Ron Johnson as CEO for JC Penny Company seemed like the ideal solution to the organization’s struggles. Unfortunately, bringing on the former Apple executive led to a lack of evaluation of other alternatives. McShane & Von Glinow (2015) mention that when decision makers find an opportunity like being able to hire Ron Johnson, there is no need to consider several alternatives because this opportunity is the solution. JCP stakeholders believed that Ron could fix the company and his work at Apple only made him that much more attractive. JCP’s largest shareholder, William Ackman confirms this when he said, “Ron Johnson’s record of retailing success makes him the ideal leader to fix JCP” (McShane & Von Glinow, 2015, p. 187).

A lot of what we see in the text about JCP’s miss with Ron Johnson is derived from Ron’s previous strategies not being applicable at JCP. Considering his approach on JCP’s issues, the actual issues remained vague and what resulted was a solution fixed problem identification rather than a solid problem being revealed. As described in the text, Ron and his team looked at the JCP problem in terms of solutions that worked at Apple (McShane& Von Glinow, 2015). There was never any investment in customer feedback, employee insight and opinion, or prototyping by testing his no coupon and no sale idea in select stores. From the marshmallow challenge Ted clip, we can see how even the top executives are blinded by thinking there is only one answer and focusing all of their energy on that can lead to an oh-oh moment (Wujec, n.d.).

Defending his approach with the notion that his solutions and ideas worked at Apple proved to completely backfire on Ron and his team. The missing piece here is creativity. Linda Hill points out that innovation is all about collective genius through a paradox that can unleash talents and harnesses them to be useful (Hill, n.d). Ron needed to allow those who know and understand the JCP customers to engage in the creative process of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification (McShane & Von Glinow, 2015). This would have of allowed those closer to the everyday detail that runs the retail department store to prepare and think about what the actual problem is and thoroughly think about what decisions can be made. Spending time on what matters and not focusing so much on the issues would have of led to the illumination, the ah-ha­ moment where the real problem could have of been identified and then realistic solutions could be experimented that would work for JCP not necessarily Apple.

 -Isamar

References

Hill, L. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/linda_hill_how_to_manage_for_collective_creativity

 McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. (2015). Organizational Behavior emerging knowledge, global reality (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.

Wujec, T. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower

Discussion 2

By J,N

While a few different mistakes were made by Ron Johnson in his attempt to turn JC Penny around, his first and foremost mistake was thinking that everything that worked for Apple in the past would work the same for JC Penny. As Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is quoted saying, "The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'we've always done it this way'", and that is exactly the mentality Johnson had for this situation. He wanted the stores to have the same general setups, same sales philosophies, and did not even both testing new ideas before implementing them in stores. While it is understandable why he thought this steps would work since Apple has been so successful, he forgot that the same strategies may not work across all industries of business. 

The first change Johnson should have made was not bringing on six executive team members that were all previously employed by Apple. By doing this, he narrowed the diversity of the think tank that was supposed to turn around the company, thus decreasing the chance of more creative and effective solutions from being brought to the table. When everyone is of the same mindset, they will fail to see potential faults and complications in a plan, which is exactly what happened in this situation. 

The second change that should have been made would be to actually talk to employees and customers about their experiences with JC Penny, learning where they were excelling and what they felt could be improved. Without completing this step, Johnson and his team of executives skipped the first step of the rational choice decision-making process of even gathering information to establish what the exact problems were. 

Finally, doing test runs of the new business strategy of eliminating discounts would have been an intelligent step to take since the consequences of this strategy would have exposed themselves almost immediately. For retail stores like JP Penny, having sales and discount events is what draws customers into the store since there are numerous stores they have to compete with in order to sell products. In contrast, Apple's products are unique to their company, with only a select few of other retailers that are able to sell their products, so they can get away without discounting their products on a regular basis to draw customers into their stores. 

McShane, S.L., & Von Glinow, M. (2015). Organizational Behavior (7th ed.) New York, Ny. McGraw-Hill Education