Fluent Essays

You will read the assigned case discussion at the end of the chapter and use the questions as a guideline for each submission. All case studies should include an introductory and concluding paragraph, as well as headings. All Case Studies should include an introductory and concluding paragraph, as well as headings. All Case Studies should include a biblical perspective with scripture included relevant to the topics covered in the Case Study scenario. Case Studies 2, will be in current APA format, 4–5 pages in length, not including the cover, abstract, or reference pages.CaseCase DiscussionRead “Transferring Innovation across National Borders” and prepare answers to the following questions:What triggered the new product strategy at Minnesota Biolabs (MB)?What prediction would you make for the success of getting the country general managers in Europe and Japan to adopt the new product? Explain your prediction.What changes might MB make in its design in order to better promote the transfer of new products across national borders?Transferring Innovation across National BoundariesImagine entering a hospital for treatment of a medical condition only to come down with a far more serious, perhaps even life-threatening disease caused by that very treatment.30 That, unfortunately, is an increasingly common experience in hospitals located in the United States and elsewhere. The culprit is often an infection transferred to the patient through a tainted “injectable”: that is, a needle, an IV drip, and so forth. This is known as a sepsis infection: an overwhelming infection of the blood stream resulting from toxin-producing bacteria (endotoxins). National health regulatory agencies seek to limit such negative outcomes by requiring that products intended for injection be tested.Minnesota BiolabsTraditionally, tests for sepsis infection were performed on live animals—rabbits, for the most part—lead to the animal’s death. Minnesota Biolabs (MB) was one of the companies that supplied rabbits to the producers of injectable devices. Headquartered in suburban Minneapolis, MB served customers—mainly pharmaceuticals but also university and private laboratories—in over 20 countries. Europe was divided into three MB national units, MB-France, MB-Germany, and MB-United Kingdom. A fourth country unit, MB-Japan, served Asian markets.Each of those four units—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan—was managed by a country general manager. That general manager was typically left alone to operate his or her unit autonomously. Corporate headquarters set annual growth goals for the units and measured their profit and loss. As long as the units performed according to those goals, the managers were paid a bonus and mostly left alone. Strategies, product decisions, and acquisitions were determined by corporate executives in the States and communicated to these country managers.MB’s CEO frequently said that he liked this approach to management because it delineated clear lines of authority and responsibility. Country managers also preferred this autonomy. They were allowed, they believed, to decide on local strategies that best served their customers while maintaining good relationships with the national regulatory agencies to which they needed to respond. MB’s exceptional history of sustained, profitable growth reinforced the belief of managers that this was a well-designed organization.The Search for an Alternative TestIn the early years of the 21st century, MB began to look for an alternative method of testing for sepsis infection in injectable products. As animal rights became increasingly important,MB sought a methodology that would leave the animals alive. Because most of MB’s growth over its history had come from acquiring other businesses and integrating their products into the company’s offering, that is what MB executives sought to do now.An opportunity arose when a small, Rhode Island-based company received government approval for a test known as Sepsis Detection Test (SDT). Instead of conducting tests in live rabbits, SDT used blood extracted from horseshoe crabs for the tests. After extraction, the crabs were returned to the ocean where they were able to regenerate lost blood. MB purchased the company, and horseshoe crab-based testing quickly became the standard for the United States. In addition to leaving test animals alive, SDT was both less costly and more profitable for MB than the previous rabbit tests.After several years of rapid growth in its home market, MB executives urged country general managers in Europe and Japan to move from rabbit-based tests to SDT. At the annual strategy meeting in Minneapolis, corporate executives presented the business case for SDT and urged the country general managers of MB-France, MB-German, MB-United Kingdom, and MB-Japan to switch over their product line. The country general managers agreed to move forward as quickly as possible.Endnotes1. Quoted on the CARE website: CARE.org © Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Inc. (CARE).2. Quoted in Rasika Welankiwar, “Conversation,” Harvard Business Review (Apr. 2009), p. 22.3. Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector, The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1990).4. Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell, “Do You Have a Well-Designed Organization?” Harvard Business Review (Mar. 2002), p. 5.5. Ibid.6. Danny Miller has documented the tendency of once-successful companies to avoid design change. See The Icarus Paradox: How Exceptional Companies Bring About Their Own Downfall (New York: Harper Business, 1990).7. Information on SAP America is from “ASAP’s a Wrap,” Managing Automation (February 1998); Colleen Frye, “SAP Soothes Implementation Worries,” Software Magazine (1997); and David A. Garvin, SAP America (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 1996).8. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration (Boston, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration Division of Research, 1967).9. These quotes come from a consulting engagement by the author.10. Richard E. Walton, “From Control to Commitment in the Workplace,” Harvard Business Review (Mar.–Apr. 1985), pp. 5–12.11. Stephen P. Robbins, Essentials of Organizational Behavior (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2005), p. A-3.12. www.sunhydraulics.com.13. Ibid.14. Nitin Nohria, Note on Organization Structure (Boston, MA: Harvard Case Services, 1991), p. 2.15. Ibid., p. 3.16. McDermott is quoted in Thomas Teal, “Service Comes First: An Interview with USAA’s Robert F. McDermott,” Harvard Business Review(Sept.–Oct. 1991), p. 119.17. Jay W. Lorsch, Note on Organization Design (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 1975), p. 15.18. Nicola Clark, “Turnaround Effort Is Challenging at Airbus, a Stew of European Cultures,” New York Times (May 18, 2007), p. C1.19. Jay W. Lorsch and Stephen A. Allen III, Managing Diversity and Interdependence: An Organizational Study of Multidivisional Firms (Boston, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration Division of Research, 1973), pp. 53–79.20. Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), p. 118.21. Robert M. Marsh and Hiroshi Mannari, “Organizational Commitment and Turnover: A Prediction Study,” Administrative Science Quarterly 22 (Mar. 1977), pp. 57–72; Walton, “From Control to Commitment in the Workplace”; Gary J. Blau and Kimberly B. Boal, “Conceptualizing How Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment Affect Turnover and Absenteeism,” Academy of Management Review 12 (1987), pp. 288–300; Stephen L. Fink, High Commitment Workplaces (New York: Quorum Books, 1992); Mark A. Huselid, “The Impact of Human Resource Management Practices on Turnover, Productivity, and Corporate Financial Performance,” Academy of Management Journal 38 (1995), pp. 635–661; Julian Gould-Williams, “The Effects of ‘High Commitment’ HRM Practices on Employee Attitude: The Views of Public Sector Workers,” Public Administration 82 (2004), pp. 63–81.22. J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham, Work Redesign (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980).23. Morten T. Hansen, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009).24. Erik Sherman, “Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph,” Electronics Design Chain, accessed Oct. 27, 2010.25. This account from Hansen, Collaboration, is based in large measure on the Wall Street Journal reporting of Phred Dvorak. See particularly “Out of Tune: At Sony, Rivalries were Encouraged, Then Came the iPod” (June 29, 2005), p. A1.26. Hansen, Collaboration, p. 8.27. The notion that coordination across functions, units, and divisions lies at the core of organizational effectiveness has received a great deal of attention in recent years. See, for instance, Edwad E. Lawler, III, “Substitutes for Hierarchy,” Organizational Dynamics 17 (1988), pp. 5–15; Christopher A. Bartlett and Sumantra Gloshal, Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1989); D. Keith Denton, Horizontal Management: Beyond Total Customer Satisfaction (New York: Lexington Books. 1991); John A. Byrne, “The Horizontal Corporation,” Business Week (Dec. 20, 1993), pp. 76–81; Jay R. Galbraith, Competing with Flexible Lateral Organizations (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994).28. David Nadler, “Ten Years After: Learning About Total Quality Management.” A paper delivered at the Total Quality Management conference sponsored by the Management Centre Europe, Brussels, Oct. 1993.29. International Quality Study, Best Practices Report: An Analysis of Management Practices That Impact Performance (Cleveland, OH: American Quality Foundation and Ernst & Young, 1992).30. This case study is adopted from the research conducted by the author and his colleagues under a grant from the National Science Foundation. See Bert Spector, Henry W. Lane, and Dennis Shaughnessy, “Developing Innovation Transfer Capacity in a Cross-National Firm,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 45 (June 2009), pp. 261–279.