John Clendenin's Career

John Clendenin is in dilemma at a very crucial point of his career. Even though he has achieved a good reputation and progress in his career in a brief amount of time at Xerox, he is now faced with two career options which appear lateral in nature. Clendenin's boss, Fred Hewitt has offered him two choices: first, to continue his position as a head of Xerox’s Multinational Development Centre (MDC) but with two year commitment, or shift laterally to staff position on Hewitt’s staff.

Although, Clendenin’s success at Xerox is credited due to his role and work at MDC sector, but the additional two year commitment doesn’t make any justice to Clendenin’s advancement in position at Xerox. For this, he had to deal with sheerness from Hewitt to cut down

the MDC budget and sending the workers on lay-off eventually.
Clendenin had always strived for his clear career goals and objectives. He had always looked upon “to be successful enough to be a corporate officer in a Fortune 50 corporation and on the boards of several others, and eventually to be appointed to a cabinet-level position in our government.” [1] Thus, the constraints and barriers John Clendenin was facing to achieve his objectives were as follows: taking up the position of head staff is a total shift for Clendenin but it is not aligned with his career objectives. Based on his past work experience, there doesn’t seem any fairness to Clendenin’s work and what he is being offered. Moreover, it’s not clear that new job position will meet the Clendenin’s urge of personal and career growth.
But, John Clendenin had a leverage which made him standout and a distinguished personality at Xerox. His progress and accomplishments at various projects helped him to gain the position of administrative manager at supply & parts division. Also, he took up the challenge to redefine and recreate the MSDC (Multinational Systems Development Centre) to meet the needs of ROA (Return on assets). Along with this, he was appointed as director of MDC (Multinational Development Center), where he was working to develop and maintain multinational logistics computer systems. What made Clendenin successful as compared to his peers was that he was very good in maintaining the relationships with his staff and sub-ordinates. He always believed that success of any company depends upon the quality of the supporting staff. Thus he took the responsibility for recruiting and identifying the right candidates for MDC. He went through the process of recognizing and encouraging people who were able to execute their duties in a suitable manner. From his days at Harvard Business School, he strived for ambitious goals he had set up for himself like “to become a successful corporate officer in Fortune 50 Company. He had always lived his life on fast track and on his own terms, that’s why previously he rejected the most lucrative job offers in investment banking sector for job position as “Productivity Consultant” in Xerox’s parts and supply chain organization.
Clendenin had always appreciated the corporate culture of Xerox because of this company’s definite and explicit way of working style, similar to the working style of Marine Corps. And that’s the reason he was so successful in Xerox Company because he had passion for the company and was always ready to work on different sectors of the company simultaneously so as to make the company the most successful one in United States.
John Clendenin is an amicable and charismatic personality. These traits helped him to align with the cultural environment of Xerox Company with his unique working style. He enumerated the reasons of why he rejected the lucrative offers from other companies as he felt comfortable with the working style at Xerox. Because it was similar to the style of work at Marine Corps where he had served as Major for 12 years. Moreover, one of the important things which helped John Clendenin was his risk-averse trait, as the number of risks he took during his job at Xerox had produced phenomenal results for the company.
Also, the Clendenin tried to reconcile the relationships between the co-workers who were serving at Xerox for long term and the co-workers who just joined the Xerox. For example, he tried to contact the Tom Gunning, who had worked for Xerox’s part and supply group for a very longer period of time. And Clendenin was able to maintain a good professional and personal relationship with him, as it was necessary for John to share the knowledge and make new contacts so as to expand the business. He was also able to establish the guiding vision for the MDC (Multinational Development Center) so as to form a strategic group which can embrace co-operation, unity and innovation. This helped in aligning the thinking of various operating managers world-wide as a whole. He also added the staff to Xerox’s quarters at Rochester from multinational subsidiaries so as “to improve the overall management of inventories throughout Xerox’s operating units” [2].
Clendenin went against the “close-knit society” culture prevailing at Xerox.

He hired what we call eccentric individuals which can bring some uniqueness and are willing to accept the change and innovation. While the perception of people who were not part of MDC was that group consists of “stray cats and dogs”. But this doesn’t affected Clendenin as he hired those people for “intelligence, readiness to learn new things and an involved nature”. He reinforced his style of working by empowering the team with trust-building, focus on goal setting and highlighting the team as a whole rather an individual.

Looking at the Clendenin’s model of MDC working style, we can see that he tried to negotiate between the team-members and to reconcile their relationships. He was able to produce magnificent results at the company due to the changes he was able to make at the formal and informal level within the organization.

Clendenin found out that MSDC (Multinational Systems Development Center) was not in alignment because of small amount of people were associated with the group and overall had very low influence. Moreover, Clendenin experienced some sensitive issues from his peers, such as clashing of egos between the committee members regarding the money usage for benchmarking. Thus to maintain the relationships, Clendenin worked in the background by listening to each members query and solving it by acting as a

lobbyist.
Being of an adjusting nature, Clendenin also cut off the budget from $4.3 million to $3 million on the insistence of Hewitt, which proved to be beneficial to the company later on. Therefore, Clendenin adjusted a lot during his tenure at Xerox so as to accomplish his objectives which he had set for him while being student at Harvard Business School.