However, often those steps are performed well and the failure results as a failure of leadership.
Leadership was a major issue at Xerox. When the company was collapsing, the managers responsible for leading the company were putting out fires instead of inspiring their workers to great heights. When Mulcahy arrived, the leadership style at Xerox underwent a dramatic change. One of the leader's key activities is to instill vision. Xerox had no vision in the early part of this decade, but Mulcahy's team created one. The workers all had goals, but with no vision they had lost sight of those goals. What Mulcahy did was restore that vision, so that she could successfully lead the employees towards the goals she was setting (MIT Sloan, 2009).
The final role of management is controlling. This refers to tracking the progress of the plans that have been made, to ensure that they remain on track. Even the best plans will tend to deliver results that were not intended, due to unforeseen changes in the internal and external environments. As a result, it is imperative that the management team always have a sense of where the company is in relation to where they should be at that point in the process. If they do, they can make adjustments to their plans, to the way they have organized the resources or to their leadership initiatives.
In the 2007 Annual Report, Mulcahy wrote that she believed Xerox to be at an "inflection point" in the company's turnaround. That she could make such a statement speaks to...
Such inflection points occur during all processes, not just major turnarounds. Control is the process of continually evaluating the firm on the basis of such inflection points, and making whatever adjustments necessary. With Xerox, a series of such points had led the company to make different adjustments to their recovery plan. They had been forced to respond to rapidly changing technology and to shifts in customer demands. The failure to make these adjusts - to implement these controls - was what had led to the firm's downfall in the 90s. That they were able to make these moves in the 00s shows that management at Xerox has implemented stronger controls than their predecessors had.
Pakhare, Jayashree. (2007). Management Concepts - the Four Functions of Management. Buzzle.com Retrieved February 6, 2009 at http://www.buzzle.com/articles/management-concepts-the-four-functions-of-management.html
Xerox Corporation 2007 Annual Report. (2008). Xerox Corporation Retrieved February 9, 2009 at http://www.xerox.com/Static_HTML/annualreport/2007/index.html?&Xcntry=USA&Xlang=en_US
Ackerman, Ruthie. (2008). Xerox's Nifty Turnaround. Forbes Retrieved February 6, 2009 at http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/24/xerox-office-closer-markets-equity-cx-ra-0124markets30.html
No author. (2009). Behind the Scenes of a Great Turnaround. MIT Sloan. Retrieved February 6, 2009 at http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/2006-mulcahy.php
