Gore: Developing Global Teams to Meet 21st Century Challenges at W.L. Gore & Associates

Gore: Developing Global Teams to Meet 21st Century Challenges at W.L. Gore & Associates

Background of the case

W.L. Gore & Associates is a global fluoropolymer technology and manufacturing. It focuses its efforts in four main areas which are electronics, fabrics, industrial and medical products. As the company emphasizes on discovery and product innovation, its organizational culture is unique and nonhierarchical in order to foster the innovative spirit of individuals and small teams. During the first four decades of its existence, Gore became famous for its products and for its use of business teams located in a single facility. However, due to the globalization, business teams are no longer in a single facility, therefore Gore face with the challenge to coordinate its virtual teams across the world and this may affect Gore’s unique flat lattice organizational culture as many people argue that it is not effective to control teams across the globe.

Problem 1: Growth and globalization present significant challenges for W.L. Gore as it strives to maintain a family-like, entrepreneurial culture

Analysis: Due to the external factors, there are many factors that influence Gore to expand the business in global scale. The favorable governments’ policies that aim to attract foreign investment, the increase in income and consumption, the trend of consumption of people around the world become more similar, and the improved technology and infrastructure in many countries are factors that would benefit Gore to operate in different countries around the world.

W.L. Gore & Associates is a diversified company that operates in a wide range of industries. Some of the industries are chemical processing, automobile, telecom and energy. Most of the industries that the company operates in are attractive. This is because the industries require special technologies and knowledge as well as large investment, so there are not many players in the industries and it is difficult to new entrants to enter these industries which will eventually result in lesser bargaining power of the buyers.

The competitive advantage of Gore seems to be its knowledge and technology of PTFE as it is rare, valuable, costly to imitate and nonsubstitutable. One of the strengths of the company is that the company has four very diverse divisions, electronics, fabrics, industrial and medical, which protects against swings in any one industry. Its unique flat lattice organizational culture is also Gore’s another strength as it enhances the innovation throughout the organization. However, this culture may become weakness if the company does not look into it carefully especially when the company is operating in larger scale. Such lattice structure could be a lack of quick response times and decisive action.

The leadership structure that works