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Abstract
This paper asks and answers the question: What are the intervention options for driving culture change in a company that continues to benefit from success, and lacks a burning platform for change? The answer: Focusing on employee motivation in the context of career opportunities while directly linking strategic business changes to employee behavior, provides a basis for integrating culture change with people systems to yield steady, sustainable change that meets future business opportunities. Employee engagement provides a bottoms-up approach, while an integrated approach to leadership development provides a basis for educating leaders.
Introduction
An obsession with technology and competitive drive describes the Microsoft culture that contributed to tremendous company growth during its first 30 years in business. In 2002, as competition increased through movements that included open source programming and software, innovations in Internet search and services, and customer expectations for security, privacy and convenient file sharing of copy write materials increases, shareholders demanded an articulate roadmap for new market development that complemented and augmented the Windows and Office revenue bases. Moreover, the severe competitive landscape for technical talent, and an established market base contributed to the perception of Microsoft as a 'has been.'
The business strategy focuses on the value proposition of products and services that work well together, from enterprise platform to pocket devices as the user moves across a dynamic work and play lifestyle. Executing such a strategy demanded the culture shift its focus and place higher priority on skillful internal collaboration and a focus on customers and services. To execute this strategy, the company reorganized functional units of product group, operations group and sales group into business units organized around product portfolios with individual profit and loss statements. This reorganization increased the need for general management talent to run business units. Capitalizing on this shift, the company turned its focus toward building a broader range of leadership talent, and implemented a career model framework that also addressed the underlying culture change needed to execute the business strategy.
Current State Analysis of Career Development and Culture
In order to provide an understanding of the focus areas for developing general managers, a study of the company culture was conducted in 2003.
This analysis resulted in a current state definition. Leaders were...