Executive Summary
Avon Products, Inc. (Avon) is based in New York. The firm engages in the manufacture and marketing of beauty and complimentary products primarily in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific (Yahoo Finance, 2005). Avon's products are classified into three product categories: Beauty, Beauty Plus, and Beyond Beauty. The Beauty category consists of cosmetics, fragrances, skin care, and toiletries; Beauty Plus includes fashion jewelry, watches, apparel, and accessories; and Beyond Beauty comprises home products, gift and decorative products, candles, and toys (Ibid). The company sells and markets its products through a combination of direct selling, marketing by independent Avon representatives, and via its consumer Web site, avon.com.
This paper will explore how the company is fairing under the leadership of its current CEO, Andrea Jung. There are two opposing views regarding the company's current and future success. One group feels that the firm has a promising future with Jung at the helm while the other group does not. This paper will analyze the pros and cons uncovered by each team member and discuss which view prevailed in the debate and why.
Pros and Cons
Pros of Jung and Avon
Andrea Jung became president and CEO of Avon in 1999 and has totally revamped the company. Under her leadership, the company has updated its product line, launched new advertising, and created a new image (Fact Monster, 2005). Avon's sales have increased by 30 %, profits 40%, and the stock price has dramatically improved (Ibid). Jung's has been able to align the firm's core capabilities with its strategic targets which has lead to phenomenal results. It appears that Jung has been able to establish a clear vision for the firm that has been incorporated in every aspect of the firm's operating system. This vision is shared by all employees and representatives of Avon priming the company for continued success.
Under Andrea Jung's direction, Avon is focusing on developing nations especially China. Many developing countries are more receptive to direct selling by women since jobs with Avon are opportunities for women who want to be independent in the male dominated cultures. Avon has also recognized that the demographics has changed and recruiting younger women to sell to the younger customer base.
Other strategies of Jung include cost cutting by reducing number of raw material suppliers, shifting production from smaller plants to larger ones, moving manufacturing from high cost nations like Great Britain to lower cost countries such as Poland (Tarquinio, 2004).
After thirty years as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Fortuga Artisans, Peter Fortuga is retiring from the company he started to manufacture home decor. As a result, the company conducted an extensive search and found an ideal candidate Doug Jeffers. However, two years into his tenure as CEO Jeffers and Fortuga experienced a high turnover rate with numerous key resignations. During a resignation of his executive assistant, the employees and managers at Fortuga determined Jeffers is the cause of the organizational concerns. Consequently, Jeffers became introspective, and he questioned his ability to lead. In fact, Jeffers would be astute to conduct a personal assessment of his leadership style, capabilities,
When Jim Kilts showed up at Gillette in 2001, the first outsider to run the Boston-based company in more than 70 years, he found a business with great brands losing market share. Its acquisitions of Duracell and Braun were not delivering. Sales and earnings were flat, the company had missed its earnings estimates for 15 straight quarters, the stock had plummeted, and Wall Street had lost patience. Yet two-thirds of the top managers were getting top ratings. People were being rewarded for effort; performance, under Mr. Kilts regime, became the new measure.
Based on the case, Lawson Cosmetics has an unresolved issue. They cannot decide on whether they should take the new branding initiative global, which is brought up by Gupta. Lawson is obviously a multinational company. In my opinion, they should develop major elements to market locally, and regionally and globally at the same time with a consistent brand image, but they need to adapt its brand to different markets by different ways carefully.
That’s a hard question to answer because each of them had different goals, Stringer wanted to be a respected businessman and Marlo only cared about his power and reputation. And none of them achieved their goals. I will try to compare them anyway.
According to the text, “Control is defined as any process that directs the activities of individuals toward achievement of organizational goals. It is how effective managers make sure things are going as planned (Bateman, pp 520, 2007).” The combination of these two concepts, leadership and control help formulate an ideology that becomes an integral part of the success or failure of any business entity. This paper will give Team D an opportunity to delve into Sears Holdings’ leadership and control mechanisms. The focal point of this paper will be to identify the current CEO of Sears Holdings, and gain insight on his background, i.e., training, education, and previous employment. To identify his style of leadership, evaluate the effectiveness of this leadership style based on Sears Holdings’ performance, and to explain the various control mechanisms used in the organization to determine the effectiveness.
This summary report will provide an overview of the decisions we made as a team, the strategies we used and an evaluation of the final results. This report will also reflect on the learnings on how to successfully manage an organization.
Corning is a decentralized company currently being plagued by both external and internal threats, such as market uncertainty and poor communication and planning systems. The company has just recently started to recover from a large layoff in 1975, which reduced worker job confidence. The Houghton family has a preference for an informal workplace with an ambiguous leadership style that contradicts the formal and strict resource allocation system designed for their international strategy. The current strategy being employed differs with the owner’s philosophy, which is important, since the President must buy into the plan to understand and communicate it effectively. This miscommunication creates goal incongruence, which is exemplified by the confusion of corporate divisions about whether they should be focusing on reducing cost or being an innovator. Also, each officer has been described as having work that overlaps, showing no focus and a lack of efficiency. The fact that each of the over 150 businesses groups have to write up a resource allocation request and business strategy creates the issue of finding time to read each report.
Suddenly, some companies become extremely successful, while rest of them unfortunately remains a failure. There can be off-course a lot of reasons for this failure but one of the main reasons is lack of leadership qualities. There are many s...
L’Oreal is the largest beauty company in the world and in the past 100 years that it has expanded, it has supplied to 130 countries with offices in 58 different countries. This global company is the number one premium cosmetic product in the world today and has taken the core and beauty of people’s everyday lives since 1907, the beginning of L’Oreal. The superior leadership of a guy named Eugene Schueller started this strategic company with basic products such as hair care and also the first man-made hair color product. Five years later you could find these products in Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands. In 1934 Eugene invented the first mass market of soap less shampoo and this led the success of L’Oreal in the country of Europe which soon recognized them as the leader in body care and hair coloring products. Finally soon after World War II L’Oreal moved into the United States and the company seemed to change. When L’Oreal expanded the competition was more involved and more growth was needed in order for the company to be more successful. With problems like this, the strategy and planning that has been applied in L’Oreal has been huge for the success of the company. L’Oreal realized they needed to expand in other fields of the beauty market and target markets in order to stay alive and successful. This would mean that L’Oreal would need to acquire other companies as part of their expansion and through this they have kept the constancy of the leading company with acquisitions of many small companies. Finally in the 1980s they started their globalization into new markets all around the globe by acquiring new companies that would form the cosmetics that we know today. Although the role of acquisitions has never been the main focus of the company, internal growth and strategy was the number one reason for L’Oreal becoming such a big name. The main strategy was to adopt new companies and expand it from within believing that the brand could be taken globally and benefit their overall brand portfolio. The main role of acquisitions was to increase and lengthen the internal growth rate. L’Oreal started acquiring companies from the beginning of their name. They started with the basics of their own brands such as L’Oreal Professional, L’Oreal Paris, Kerastase, and Club des Createurs de Beaute.
In this paper, we have examined our company of choice, TM Berhad, utilizing each of these four frames as a “spectacle” to determine the leadership approach of its management, and then detailing the more prominent of the frames used.
As all organizations are striving to meet goals and objectives of the business, so must any comprehensive staffing strategy. Applying this to Tanglewood, the leadership realized that the business must remain competitive with their rivals of Kohl’s and Target. Even so, the company’s culture and values has set them apart, where employee involvement, engagement, and recommendations have been truly valued.
In 1984, new CEO Owen-Jones began pushing for L’Oreal to become the largest cosmetics firm in the United States. In order to accomplish this, the company began assessing acquisition opportunities that would broaden L’Oreal brands throughout the U.S. The first tw...
Jack Welch was considered to be a man of his vision. He believed in his vision for GE and he passed that belief down throughout the company. He passion for his vision changed the culture and structure of GE. In this paper we will analyze how Jack Welch developed his strategic plan, how he used his personal, political and positional power to shape GE. We will also look at how Jack Welch organized, built and planned his teams in keeping with his vision. In the end will look at how this all affected the culture of GE.
The Strategic Analysis will show some of the steps that have been taken to overcome some of the difficulties that Sears has had. The newest CEO, Arthur C. Martinez, has been a motivating leader for the company. He has implemented many changes that have increased sales and moved Sears back up to the top of the retail chain. These changes would include store remodeling, Internet strategies, differentiation, and human resource management.
However, during the 1990s, Philips and Matsushita both faced major challenges to sustain their position in the market. Changing profile of the industry and globalization forces made Philips and Matsushita’s organizational models and competitive advantages obsolete, and brought up the need for drastic actions. At the brink of a new century, the battle of two giants unraveled with CEOs from both sides implementing another round of strategic initiatives and restructurings. The pressure put on new CEOs was enormous – wrong st...