Organization & Development

1. INTRODUCTION

There are various reasons on why there is an organisational change. It could be due to the external factors, internal factors, political issues, economical reasons, social trends, technology and change of management. It is important for organisation to understand the objective of the change so that the company will be able to operate effectively and efficiently by using the appropriate resources and achieving sustainable competitive advantage (Koh, 2014)

Frequent change in an organisation can result in change-fatigue. But change is especially essential in order to succeed in a unstable, uncertain, and unclear environment. It would not have a huge impact for an organisation to change at a slow and uncertain pace if the effect of external environment is temporary. However, it will be a different story if changes affecting the environment are permanent. Powerful forces in the environment are pressuring public and private organisations to alter permanently the existing structures, policies, and practices (Bolman & Deal, 1991).

The following discussion will be focusing on the downfall of Kodak, an organisation which refused to change with time and the reasons for not undertaking changes.

1. DISCUSSION

For decades, Kodak was the dominating figure in the film based business, especially for the black and white films. However, the emergency of digital photography affected the company badly. They were faced with addressing the strategic decision-making difficulties, yet they failed in making the right strategic choices. Refusal to change, coupled with other factors contributed to the downfall of the organisation. There were four interrelated factors which attributed to the collapse of Kodak.

Firstly, change is often said to be impossible unless there is active and on-going leadership from the top management. Therefore, it is important that the top management has the mindset to consider more options before entering into the decision making process. This is the first phase to the decision making, else the decision-making process will soon get distorted if the top management are not open for new ideas. Kodak’s management has made a serious mistake by not considering to replace film based photography to digital technology unlike the founder, George Eastman, who tired adopting disruptive photographic technology twice.

An organisational should think and act holistically.  It will not be effective if the management try to enhance each of the function in a separate function similar to the case of Kodak. The management only tried to understand the interaction on how parts of its organisation interacted within the framework of the existing technology but they failed to show much concern for the research team effort with digital technology.

Next, change is crucial to its survival and development in an organisation. An organisation must be able to adapt their business design to suit to the ever-changing conditions. Change could be either to reorganise the organisations’ internal structures and processes to keep up with the economic changing conditions or it could be due to a crisis affecting the organisation and needs it to be changed. Kodak has missed the opportunity to anticipate to the changing environment that could have secured the leading position in digital image processing. This was mainly due to their unwillingness to change. The management felt that the digital technology will not bring any threat to their business as they were confident that their products  will still be the preferred choice for customers. This was the direct cause of Kodak’s decades-long decline as digital photography destroyed its film-based business model.

Lastly, despite having a very effective decision support process in place, they did not utilize this tool effectively. They failed to incorporate a variety of decision support tools when undertaking complex business problems. Hence, there was no noble solution to address the treat of the digital photography.

1. EVALUATION

To maximize productivity and shape a positive culture within the company, it is important to emphasise on good leadership. In the case of Kodak, their leadership strategy was inconsistent with each appointment of new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Every new Kodak CEO had their own set of strategy and they failed to anticipate the pace of the technology change. As a result, instead of being innovative, the Kodak’s culture has turned into a culture of complacency. 

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