Pressures for Change

Manager, CEOs, Supervisors are expected to make their organizations prosper, if not,

they, themselves risk being history. Organizations need to stay up to the latest “trends” in order continue to exist. In order to keep businesses moving; managers are forced to make changes in the organization. Many of these changes can have either positive or negative impacts.

In the case study of Intel, in my opinion, there were environmental pressures that lead the manager to make drastic changes within the organization. Fashion, mandated, geopolitical, market decline, hypercompetition, reputation and credibility, are the environmental pressures that can lead a manger to act and make the necessary changes. In Intel’s case, at first, I thought it was more of an internal pressure, however, as I read the case again, I can see that it was more on external pressure. Reason for this is that Intel was staying behind due to the creation of a newer chip that was faster. Additionally, Intel had other problems that added to the troubles, such as recalls, product delay and shortages.

An environmental pressure Intel was facing a market decline. This can be seen by the “slowing economy; the potential threat of war with Iraq”. Additionally, “there was weak demand and over capacity in the semiconductor industry with some researchers expecting a 34 percent fall in global sales of chips” (Palmer, Dunford, Akin, 2009, p. 72). Furthermore, Intel also faced geopolitical pressures, this can be seen by the cut of jobs at Intel, which were over 5,000 by attrition and there were more in line to be cut.

Intel was also facing hypercompetition pressures. As mentioned above, Intel Pentium III chip was slower compared to their long-time rival Advanced Micro Devices, who had produced an Athleon processor chip and was much faster than Intel’s. This of course, attracted people to a better faster product, which shows that technology is not only being improved but moving faster than Intel expected.

With Intel there were not only environmental pressures and external pressures but it also suffered from internal pressures. For example, over his tenure, Barret thought that he had the need to reorganize the organization in order to make it more nimble. He, Barret created a new wireless unit; he also created the Architecture Group, which combined development and manufacturing of core processors. Later on this third year, he reorganized the Architecture