First off, it is cool to see Raleigh-Durham getting
represented in the video. The research
triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill combine to provide companies with
a fertile ground for developing future technologies. Secondly, it’s also cool to discuss the workings
of 2 former Navy men. Now for the
questions: I am not sure that punishing people for not coming up with new
practices will be effective. If the person
failing to come up with the culture change was getting paid to do so, that is
one thing, but in my opinion, that is exactly what leadership should be doing –
dissecting the two different companies, analyzing the parts, and deciding which
piece was doing better to move forward with.
Additionally, this type of reward/punishment system might create an
atmosphere of competition between the merging companies – something that I
would imagine would be the exact opposite of what you would want (I would think
you would want to concentrate on brining the companies and the people together
to form 1 as opposed to creating a rift between them by having them argue over
who is doing what better). Ultimately,
if I was working on the merger, I would bring in outside personnel to analyze
the two companies in an objective manner that way whatever was decided; someone
would have very little credible complaints as to which one was selected or not
selected. Considering that this video is
11 years old and the merger went down in 1999, one could argue that it was and
was not successful. As mentioned in the
video, Honeywell missed its earning in the summer of 2001, sending the shares
of the company falling. They fell so
much that it took up until 2007 for the company to reach its pre-merger price –
I would say this was an indication that the merger did not go as well as it
could have. Additionally, the CEO during
the merger stayed on with the company for another year following the merger,
another indication that his policies might not have been well liked (purely
speculation though). On the other hand,
the company did survive and is now valued at $39bil so the system he used
during the merger has to be considered somewhat successful.
There are a couple lessons learned from this video, however
they are not breakthrough thoughts.
First, both CEOs mentioned that communication was the key. Specifically, Honeywell’s CEO stated that he
met with employees for lunch and other meetings like that so that he could hear
what was going on in the lower levels of the organization in an unfiltered
manner. I can understand this – often critical
feedback that is fed up the chain of command tends to get filtered/watered down
a bit so that by the time the information reaches the top, it is just a shell
of what it used to say/mean. Secondly,
punishment and reward systems are not the only thing that motivates
people. There are many things other than
explicit items that can make people work harder – establishing a sense of
teamwork, working for a higher goal, for the better of mankind – all things you
can spin other than the carrot/whip routine.
Finally, greed can only take you so far in life, and don’t ever forget
that whatever you make in this world monetarily speaking will not carry on to
the next. Honeywell has seen its upper
executives increase their pay up to $50mil for the top 15 people in the company
whereas they have laid off thousands of people during the same time span.
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