Welcome to the Business Blunder Blog! This first post is simply an introduction to bring readers into the “loop”. Everyday businesses large and small make decisions, implement new strategies, or continue past strategies. Some of these decisions and strategies are successful, many are not. Our focus is to highlight the failures of businesses in current news, analyze the situation, and ideally make suggestions to avoid making the same mistakes. Rather than focus on the failures, our focus is to help readers stay away from these “business blunders”. Thank you for joining us-please visit again soon, our first posts are coming within the week.
Authors: Sheena Bedi, Yin-Chin Huang, Tamar Khechoian, and Kelsey Umbarger
Authors: Sheena Bedi, Yin-Chin Huang, Tamar Khechoian, and Kelsey Umbarger
http://blogs.forbes.com/frederickallen/2011/04/08/what-went-wrong-with-cathie-black/
ReplyDeleteA recent article of April 8, 2011 named “What went wrong with Cathie Black” talks about the newly appointed New York schools chancellor Black, who was dismissed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York after her three months holding the position. The explanations of what went wrong has broadly fallen into tow camps: inexperience and personality.
To start with, I should mention that Black proved herself as being a top notch leader. Her record of success as a President of USA Today, The Newspaper Association of America and then Hearst magazines as well as her contributions on the boards of the Coca-Cola Company and IBM attest to that.
Despite of the fact that Cathie Black was quite a successful leader in business realm and was motivated to succeed in her new job, she could not fit the realm of public sector. One of the main differences in the leading government and private sectors is that leadership in government requires diplomatic skills, which leaders can often get by without in business. It is obvious from the mentioned article, that she had a lack of the required skills. First of all, in her previous positions she was used to actively participate, make decisions, control the organization as a whole in a different way than she was required to do while working in public sector. Secondly, she was used to communicate differently with others, differently solving conflicts, rewarding her staff for good performance, and she was required to change her ability, skills, attitude toward the routine on a daily basis facing the problems of the NYC schools. Thirdly, probably she failed while trying to understand the culture of the local community of how people see each school's goal. Those views, the whole environment might have been different from what Black was used to. And as a result, after just three months of working she was dismissed by the Mayor who appointed her to the current position and hoped she would would have been a great fit to the organization.
Tamar Khechoian.