In 2005, Dr. Roy Garcia retired as vice president for R&D from a small pharmaceutical company. Having been in R&D for more than 30 years, Dr. Garcia was confident that he could start up his own R&D company to produce medical equipment rather than drugs.
By 2014, Garcia Sciences Corporation employed 120 people and generating $65 million in revenue. The R&D group had developed a family of new products that was well accepted by the medical community. The manufacturing groups were using state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques and were producing high-quality low-cost products.
Financially, Garcia Sciences Corporation was doing quite well. Internally, detrimental culture issues and problems were coming to the surface. Dr. Garcia was now having second thoughts about whether the culture that he had created in the late 2005s was still acceptable.
Since a large percentage of the employee population had advanced degrees in engineering and science, an overabundance of freedom was given to these employees in order to keep them motivated. Dr. Garcia strongly believed that scientists wanted “freedom” to be creative. Project sponsorship did not exist and project teams were empowered to set their own objectives for the projects.
Almost every project was carried through to completion. Cancelling projects was unacceptable. Status reporting was infrequent and management often had to meddle in projects to find out what was happening .
Within the last six months, Dr. Garcia and several senior officers had cancelled projects because either the objectives were not acceptable to senior management, or the marketplace had changed. In either event, the morale of the organization was weakening because the team members were extremely unhappy when their projects were cancelled in midstream.
Dr. Garcia realized that what motivated project personnel was the ability to see a project through from beginning to end. Through the grapevine, Dr. Garcia was informed that the employees felt that decisions to cancel projects were being made on the basis of personal whims of management rather than on sound business principles.
Questions: Based on your experience and prior formal education, please provide thoughtful, creative responses to each of the following questions into a narrative essay format.
1. Describe the culture Dr. Garcia instituted.
2. Can this culture be effective, and if so, under what conditions?
3. Were the project teams given too much freedom? Explain.
4. Why was senior management cancelling projects?
5. What was the real cause of the problem at Garcia Sciences Corporation and what can be done to minimize the recurrence of these issues?