Leaders
Essays

Self-directed work teams are becoming increasingly popular in both manufacturing and service organizations, because of their positive characteristics of focusing on team contributions and solutions, collaboration,…

Having perfected the relatively complex process of make-to-order and precisely cooked hamburgers to customers' specific requirements, Burger King established itself as a leader in the Quick Serve Restaurant (QSR)…

International Law consists of customs, principles and rules legally binding upon sovereign states and other participating international entities (Joyner 2002). It derives from treaties and international conventions,…

¶ … Changing Role of Women in the 18th and 19th Centuries

The expansion of telecommunications via fixed-line networks depicts a significant contemporary, credible concern, not only in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world as interactions with the Middle East…

To what extent does the larger context (i.e. A business setting, an educational setting) affect the dynamics of the leadership of a multicultural group?

New developments in an industry are as disruptive as the fundamental re-ordering of their economics with a corresponding shift in the balance of political power that defines boundaries of influence. Organizational change and its many dynamics take on added significance in the study of how disruptive technologies re-order organizational cultures with significant cultural, economic, social and political implications (Bordum, 2010). The role of transformational leaders in successful change management initiatives is that of stabilizing force for employees on the one hand, and visionary defining the future direction of the enterprise on the other (Boga, Ensari, 2009). One of the most volatile industries today is enterprise software, and the transformational change that is happening at a strategic level in this industry today. This transformational change at a technological level is revolutionary, as is evidenced by the rapid $1B+ market valuations of companies including Salesforce.com and others on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. SaaS-based software is bringing rapid transformational change to the business models of enterprise software companies with increasing intensity, shifting long-standing evolutionary business models based on recurring software revenue streams in the process. Within these dynamics of revolutionary change are ample examples of how organizations are structuring and executing their change management initiatives. Implementing key parts of their Organizational Change Models, and averting resistance to change through effective transformation through change management participative leadership and planning (Herold, Fedor, Caldwell, Liu, 2008). While there are many enterprise software companies struggling with this aspect of their core business models, the subject of this analysis is privately-held Cincom Systems, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio with operations throughout seventeen nations and employing over 700 associates globally. What makes the study of Cincom Systems relevant to organizational change management is the high level of dependency the company has today on its core enterprise software companies, who in most cases for decades paid maintenance fees, contract amounts, and despite the value of SaaS-based economics and the potential to gain even greater leverage and value for their investments, continue to hold onto their on-premise licensing models. Cincom Systems is facing the urgent challenge of change management with its customer base, and secondarily, with its engineering, services and support teams as well. The resistance to change that emanates from the customer base permeates parts of the organization, making the disruptive nature of SaaS applications and platform economics even more abrupt, and if unanswered, severe in the coming years. This analysis will concentrate on how change management can be implemented within Cincom Systems to bring both customers and employees into a more transformative role. Second, how the leaders at Cincom can overcome resistance to change, and hwo the lessons learned from using the Force Field Analysis Model can be applied to Cincom specifically and enterprise software vendors strategically. The Culture Web is used as a means to analyze the current climate within Cincom and provide prescriptive guidance for the future. Finally the role of transformational leaders is also assessed. The enterprise software industry is going through a massive level of change today as the collection fo SaaS- and Cloud-based application technologies and the economic advantages they offer customers continues to increase. The economics of Cloud computing and SaaS applications are having a reverberating effect throughout Cincom Systems and the entire software industry. The impacts of this disruptive, transformational change are the primary catalysts of this analysis.

¶ … Social Policy: KiwiSaver as a Social Policy

That schools in the United States in particular have generally experienced a decline in standards, in performance and in personnel commitment is evidenced throughout the field. To many theorists in the last decade, this…

The Indian government has expressed a commitment towards education for all in their country and yet India still has one of the lowest female literacy rates in Asia. In 1991 only about 40% of the 330 million women aged 7…