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Employer Expectations Identify and analyze potential risks…
Employer Expectations
Identify and analyze potential risks within a company’s corporate strategy, as well as how to propose precautionary steps to mitigate these risks.
Identify causal factors that limit organizational performance.
Breakthrough Technologies: Business Story
Breakthrough Technologies:Business Story
Breakthrough Technologies
EST. 1988
SCROLL
Breakthrough Technologies was founded in 1988 by the current CEO Ron Black. The company is currently headquartered in Madison, WI and employs an estimated 29,300 full-time employees.
Industry/Sector: Technology
Products & Services: Computer peripherals (e.g., keyboards, mice, printers, microphones, webcams, joysticks, and speakers)
Financial Data: Annual
Total Revenue: 12.5 million
Cost of Goods Sold: 10.3 million
Gross Profit: 2.2 million
Total Expenses: 1.9 million
Net Income: 300,000 thousand
Mission, Vision, & Values:
Mission
“Breakthrough Technologies is committed to providing the highest quality computer peripherals at the best price that meet customer expectations.”
Vision
“Breakthrough Technologies strives to be the industry leader in computer peripherals and be the company of choice.”
Values
People
Quality
Commitment
Integrity
Processes, Procedures, & Infrastructure:
Business model canvas: key partners (suppliers, distributors, technology alliances), key resources (electronic components, patents, technology, experience personnel), key activities (marketing, R&D-build, management, quality control), value propositions (performance, reliability, well respected brand, high quality manufacturer), cost structure (people, R&D, manufacturing, technology), revenue streams (product sales), customer segments (individuals, wholesalers, online retail, small companies), channels (shop online, public sector purchasing), and customer relationships (shop online, support and troubleshooting).
Business model overview: Breakthrough technologies’s business is transactional to develop computer peripherals for direct sale to customers.
Infrastructure: In-house manufacturing within own facilities, distribution with own fleet.
Internal environment processes and procedures: sales platform is direct sales to customers with no intermediaries and in-house product development.
The company’s design and manufacturing facilities 2 are located throughout the United States, which has created some challenges for Breakthrough Technologies in delivering computer peripherals to its overseas customers in a timely manner and recently resulted in the loss of a key global account worth over $500,000 in revenue to a competitor. Clayton Bell (VP Ops) and Helena Blackenberry (VP Manufacturing) had a recent meeting 2 with Ron in which they concluded Breakthrough Technologies’s lack of localized manufacturing and distribution presence in Europe and Asia will continue to stifle growth for the foreseeable future. Breakthrough Technologies 3 has also suffered missed opportunity costs and lost market share as the company thus far has been unable to pivot toward the digital device market nor achieve Ron’s goal of the company becoming an industry leader in the Digital Age. Christine Wilson (Director of Product Development and Acquisition) and Betty West (CIO) attribute the lack of progress 3 in this regard to Ron’s limited technology experience and his general unwillingness to trust his team to take the lead.
Breakthrough Technologies’s senior leadership 1 team has remained consistent over the years, which has been a factor in the skyrocketing turnover costs associated with emerging mid-level leaders, who feel they have limited internal development and career pathways, leaving the company to find better external opportunities. Ron has always believed 1 in the philosophy of maintaining the stability and consistency of his executive team and does not have any desire to shake things up, even at the expense of losing some of the younger emerging leadership talent who he believes are more easily replaced. Frontline employees 3 who have yet to fulfill their aspirations of becoming first-time supervisors have also been a source of increasing turnover costs, with exit interview data 3 showing the root cause being Ron’s refusal to invest in new leader skill development programs and support. In a related matter, 2 Breakthrough Technologies’s Employee Advisory Board (EAB), whose executive sponsor is Jerry Whitman (CFO), determined that the “revolving door” of younger employees who are seeking green pastures elsewhere, in the midst of more seasoned employees reaching retirement age, has reduced the company’s competitive advantage of human capital and escalated recruitment and hiring costs by an overrun of 15% of budget. The EAB cited 2 the overall lack of awareness of the financial impact of failing to effectively lead and retain Breakthrough Technologies’s multigenerational workforce is a central cause of the problem.
In addition, the competitive landscape has become fiercer over the last five years for Breakthrough Technologies and as such Jose Morez (VP Marketing) and Eileen Whalen (VP Sales) have been working closely with Ron to identify proper strategy and innovation adaptations to ensure sustainability and viability. However, as a result of an ongoing power struggle 1 between Jose and Eileen – both of whom have hopes of once day being Ron’s successor – the strategic innovation process has slowed down and in turn resulted in a 2% loss in market share against the competition, which has been aggressively innovating with new product lines and adding computer peripherals. Jose and Eileen’s inability 1 to work through their issues and advocate their recommendations as a united front has deeply diminished their ability to influence the future direction of Breakthrough Technologies in a timely manner. Moreover, the company’s attempted strategic acquisition 1 of PicIt Inc., a smaller player in the industry, has not materialized after PicIt’s negotiation team gave feedback to Ron that Jerry Whitman and Christine Wilson’s presentation lacked a professional tone and did not convey the confidence they needed to sign the deal. The failure to complete this acquisition has resulted in a lack of Breakthrough Technologies’s ability to grow. Ron recently met 1 with Jerry and Christine to address the matter and concluded that the root cause of the problem was a lack of executive presence and communication skills.
In recent weeks 2 Ron has tasked Eileen Whalen to assess the emotional intelligence of her sales teams based on the drop in Breakthrough Technologies’s sales revenue and lack of new account development while other competitors are seeing broad gains. After a preliminary evaluation 2 of the new accounts’ regional team leaders using a well-regarded emotional intelligence survey, Eileen shared with Ron that there is indeed a deficit in self-awareness and other-awareness for these leaders compared to national normed data. Eileen then presented Ron 3 with the company’s latest employee engagement data, which showed two out of every three sales leaders did not see themselves working for Breakthrough Technologies a year from now, equating to over $300,000 in costs to recruit, hire, and train new sales leaders annually in order to stem the tide. It was becoming clearer to Ron 3 that the continued lack of a companywide initiative to engage and retain these leaders clearly would be the source of further pain for the company if no further action was taken. After considering the current state of the business, Ron had multiple concerns about the long-term sustainability and viability of Breakthrough Technologies and realized there was a dire need for improved leadership practices to mitigate current and future business issues.
Choose one problem and its matching gap
The three topics addressed in this assessment are as follows:
Advocacy, Influence and Power.
Communication Strategies: Developing Leadership Presence.
Developing Emerging Leaders.
Instructions
Within your selected business story, choose from the three linked pairs of problems and gaps in practice labeled for this assessment, which relate to the assessment topics. A problem is something that is adversely affecting the business and must be fixed, and its related gap in practice is the cause of the problem.
State the specific business problem. Then state the gap in practice that is causing your identified problem to occur.
Explain why the gap in practice you identified properly aligns with the selected specific problem. Why is this the right gap instead of another? (If your research leads you to a conclusion about the gap other than the one paired with your problem in the business story, you can provide the rationale for a different gap.)
Based on the topic of your problem and gap, identify a project of interest addressing a need (versus a want) that you might observe in your workplace.
Describe why removing your personal biases in the topic and project discovery process is important to identify a need versus a want.
Reflect on your experience with this assessment and share what you learned
