Corporate Pressure Cooker

Organizational Behavior case study;

Corporate Pressure Cooker

SANDHYA Kumar was alarmed. She could hear the angry exchange between her son and husband in the adjoining room. Never before had Naresh shouted at the boy. It was Sunday morning -- a time when the two were usually out playing cricket. But today they were arguing over the boy's maths scores.

Sandhya was worried. Naresh was increasingly losing his temper over trivial matters. He had lost the ability to enjoy himself and laugh. This was not the man who had led a team of 150 people at Lentiz India. This was not the man who played shadow cricket when he watched a match on TV. Sandhya's mother who was visiting noticed the change in Naresh. "He was never like this. What's the matter?" she asked. "Doesn't he like his new job?"

Six months ago, Naresh had joined Denver India after having quit as marketing head of Lentiz. The shenanigans that preceded his resignation had taken a lot out of both Naresh and Sandhya.

When Lentiz CEO Vrajesh Vardhan decided to take up a senior position in the industry ministry, he had named Naresh as his successor. But his plan came a cropper when the government collapsed. However, Lentiz International decided to resurrect his career and find an opening for him. Finally, it was decided that Jim Calhert, who headed the Singapore operations, and Vardhan would swap places.

But this move was not revealed to the others in the Indian office. Even Naresh was given no inkling of what the future held in store. The day his successor Praful Prasanna joined Lentiz, Naresh got a call from Lentiz headquarters saying that Calhert was to head the Indian operations.

Naresh was shattered. Then a dull anger took over. He didn't expect this from Vardhan. Why hadn't Vardhan discussed the dilemma with him before negotiating with headquarters, wondered Naresh. But there was little he could do. When he told her the bad news, Sandhya was shattered, too. "Why don't you make a noise? How can you keep quiet?" she asked.

"How can I be a leader and a rebel at the same time?" asked Naresh. "What kind of image would I project? Vardhan is still the leader," he said.

"I think it shook him," recounted Sandhya to her mother. "Vardhan was his hero. It was he who groomed Naresh." While Sandhya had raved and ranted about Vardhan's selfishness, Naresh had said: "What is right and what is wrong? In today's corporate battlefield, people can even hurt their own to get ahead. Survival requires tact, growth requires strategy. Organisations are also more demanding today, and they do pay fabulous salaries and perquisites to match that demand," Naresh had said.

Sandhya could see that now. Naresh's new job with Denver had enabled him to smother her household with white goods of every kind. All the furniture was new; everything looked so beautiful. Surely it wasn't any different for Vardhan who was moving to Singapore. But as Naresh observed wryly: "It's a tradeoff between values and value for money!"

But joining Denver wasn't an easy decision for Naresh. The consumer electronics company was looking for a vice-president (sales). It had recently acquired two smaller Indian companies as part of its entry strategy. Naresh was a little sceptical when he was approached by a head-hunting firm for the position. He did not really want to go back to sales, although the position was very senior and Denver was much larger than Lentiz. He also discovered that Denver had another vice-president (sales) and there was a move to differentiate them by regions.

Naresh was in a dilemma. Should he share the centrestage with another vice-president? Should he go back to sales? He had only one week to decide. If he hesitated, the job offer would go. His doubts vanished when the CEO of Denver, Ranbir Nanda, called. "We are in the midst of reorganising our company. A year from now there would be a new position -- sales director for all of India. If you deliver well, you could be in the running for that position," he said. Naresh took the job. The money was good, the perks even better. Sandhya was delighted. It was such a relief. They would have a place to live, the children could continue their schooling in Bangalore.

When Naresh joined Denver, he walked straight into a pricing meeting. It was unnerving. For one, he did not know the office layout too well. Two, he came from a telecom company where the pricing dynamics were quite different from that of a consumer electronics company.

Over the next couple of days, the fabric of Denver unfolded further. Denver had acquired a couple of component manufacturing companies and medium-sized audio and video product manufacturers for its long-term survival. While the smaller ones had been integrated, the two larger ones -- Sheela Tubes & Televisions and Caparo Electronics -- had remained external operations.

Within a month of these acquisitions, Denver had decided to integrate the sales operations of all three companies. Both Caparo and Sheela had vast sales teams and naturally the integration led to massive retrenchment and a lot of bitterness.

Even the few who had been retained nursed a deep resentment against the company for the way it treated their colleagues. Many of them also contemplated leaving. It was an opportune moment, since several global players had entered the country and were setting up their own sales and distribution teams. Denver had not bargained for this.

Naresh discovered that Denver's original integration plan was not based on a clear strategy. It was simply based on the reasoning that the distribution outlets for TVs and audio products were almost identical. Consequently, it handed over the sales and distribution of audio products to Sheela.

But the Sheela team had no clue about audio products. Why, it didn't even know the outlets that sold audio equipment. So, the Sheela team took the Denver audio products to the TV outlets, which were not the best place to sell them.

At the same time, Denver had disbanded the audio sales operations at Caparo. The audio team was partly retrenched and partly absorbed in other parts of the company, so that Denver hardly had a core audio sales team. But when audio sales began to drop drastically and the penetration of video products remained abysmal, Denver realised its mistake.

It was Denver vice-president (sales) Aadesh Bari who recommended that the sales organisation be dismantled to rebuild the audio sales unit. That was when Naresh came in. His brief was to set up two distinct and effective sales and distribution teams -- one for video products and the other