Jwi 555 - Organizational Change and Culture

JWI555: Organizational Change and Culture

Assignment 3: Verizon Business Brief

Professor Giglio

March 5, 2016

Provide a brief background of the company, industry, and culture.

Verizon provides communications, information, and entertainment products and services to consumers, businesses, and governmental agencies mainly in the United States.  The wireless division provides wireless voice and data services, messaging services, Internet access, location-based division provides high-speed Internet, Fios Internet, and Fios video services, local exchange voice services, regional and long distance calling, voice messaging, Voice over IP services, private Internet protocol (IP), public Internet, Ethernet, and optical networking services, managed hosting, cloud computing, storage, backup, recovery, and business communications services.

The communications industry is fiercely competitive and maturing.  The goal is to win is to change the company from a basic commodity service to a technology company.  Leadership is vehemently trying to accomplish this tact by taking superfluous actions while cutting budgets and staffing.  To their credit they are making the acquisition choices in the near term to accomplish this task.

Describe your change initiative according to Kotter’s eight stage framework.

According to Kotter, management is a set of processes that make things function in planning, budgeting, staffing, measurements and controls and help individuals behave in new and different ways with new outcomes.  My change initiative is to empower management to develop parameters to drive revenue acceleration. The current structure is perfectly designed to promote this goal but the execution and the plan is flawed and is blocking the ability to achieve the full potential.  By implementing new risk management processes and product and service development oversight in a team oriented manner we could quickly assume a dominant position in many of the new markets such as internet of things.  

Under Kotter’s eight stage framework (see Appendix A) management must develop and enforce new guidelines, create new dashboards, monitor progress and reward short term wins. Once the underlying elements are in place we must start by training everyone at every level and gain buy-in and acceptance using a “what’s in it for them” approach.

How will you create a sense of urgency?

To create a sense of urgency, all employees will go through the training program on the new guidelines, explain why it is important, what’s in it for them and how a failure to meet objectives could result in a dire outcome.   Holding town hall type meetings and engaging employees at all levels is key.  Changing the culture by disruption and intervention early on will also be key.  Getting teams to work more closely together is essential.  Rather than laying off people and cutting budgets we should encourage lengthy meetings, late night sessions and working in unison rather than patting everyone on the back for completing a 9 to 5 workweek.