Need a perfect paper? Place your first order and save 5% with this code:   SAVE5NOW

Case Study on Microsoft Success and Nokia’s Failure

Introduction

Organizational culture is responsible for shaping the climate in which businesses are run and may significantly influence their long-term success or failure. In the hotel business, as in any other, this is as true as any other. As they are developed and maintained, all staff employees should be made aware of their core values, vision, and purpose. Having a strong business culture may assist influence the conduct of workers towards each other if it is developed properly across the firm. Additionally, it may encourage tourists and sellers alike to exhibit more nice conduct toward each other, producing a more welcoming atmosphere that will encourage repeat visits. An organization’s culture is described as a collection of common understandings that impact decision-making and are transmitted to new organization members. In addition to the stated principles, vision, and purpose, an organization’s culture comprises its employees’ shared values, ethics, and conduct. I think it’s more about creating a sense than implementing certain programs. It is influenced by the leadership style of the company and is a major factor in its success.

Organizations use HR strategies to integrate their culture, workers, and systems to achieve their business objectives. HR strategy is all about ensuring that an organization’s people, procedures, and operational philosophies align with its overall plan. Strategic human resources management may be seen as a force multiplier pursuing larger corporate objectives in this approach (Kini, 2013). In this way, the internal HR strategies that enable firms to design their goals become intimately linked to their capacity to define and accomplish them.

Microsoft Success Story

Microsoft’s history dates to April 4, 1975, when Paul Allen founded Redmond, Washington, United States (Buble, 2012). Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm, was founded by Harvard College dropout Bill Gates and his boyhood buddy Paul Allen. One of the most valuable corporations in the world, it is a global leader in its field. Several factors contribute to Microsoft’s ability to adapt to the ever-changing computer hardware and software products market. The ideals, traditions, and behavioral expectations of a company’s workers are referred to as the company’s corporate culture. It is Microsoft’s corporate culture that facilitates customer happiness and innovation. As one of the top companies in the IBM PC-compatible operating system industry, the organization must preserve cultural qualities that support innovation and high-quality production (Lowdermilk, 2020). A large portion of Microsoft’s long-term success may be attributed to its organizational culture and people resources.

How organizational culture, structure, and management style affected its success

The corporate culture of Microsoft supports the company’s commercial objectives to maintain worldwide success. Such success may be attributed to its ability to innovate and respond to its consumers’ needs. Microsoft will need to capitalize on these corporate culture advantages to sustain its leading position in the computer hardware and software industry. A company’s culture is shaped by its business model, the industry in which it operates, the labor market, and internal business procedures (Belleghem, 2012). Microsoft’s organizational culture is characterized by the following:

Accountability

Microsoft’s corporate culture is described as one that places a high value on personal responsibility. Every employee should be aware of the ramifications of their conduct in the context of the firm because of this cultural element. Employee surveys and recognition programs are two ways Microsoft’s corporate culture encourages employees to take responsibility for their actions. For example, customer Partner Experience (CPE) criteria and associated comments may be used to assess a worker’s level of responsibility. The effectiveness of the corporate culture to drive employees to follow Microsoft’s norms and goals for its computer hardware and software business is enhanced by such institutionalized responsibility.

Innovation and quality

As a corporation in the technology sector, Microsoft must constantly innovate to remain relevant in the face of competing companies making computer hardware and software. Innovation and quality are part of the company’s corporate DNA. For example, Microsoft devotes a large portion of its resources to research and development to enhance and create new products. A focus on quality standards and staff innovation is a part of the company’s corporate culture. Microsoft also rewards customers and business partners for their unique contributions. This corporate culture trait helps the business achieve its goal of innovation-based competitive advantage (Buchan, 2012). This cultural trait aids Microsoft’s general approach for competitive advantage.

Responsiveness to customers

Microsoft’s corporate culture emphasizes timeliness to achieve customer happiness. Training helps staff respond to customers and partners succeed. For example, Microsoft has feedback mechanisms to let staff know what consumers think and feel about its computer hardware and software. The organization also educates staff to provide feedback rather than read it. Microsoft employs technologies like product support services and social media to guarantee that this cultural element is embedded in its human resources. The collected data is used in cutting-edge products like Windows and Bing. This feature links the corporate culture to Microsoft’s goal and vision of empowering customers and partners.

Growth mindset

Every firm needs to grow. Software and hardware giant Microsoft leverages company culture to develop. For example, the organization teaches staff to find new ideas and solutions for corporate development. Workers are rewarded for their efforts in this area. This organizational culture trait influences Microsoft’s growth and resilience in the worldwide market.

Inclusion and diversity

Diversity and inclusion are increasingly considered critical to company growth. Microsoft incorporates these elements into its corporate culture via training. Also, the company’s recruiting, and employment strategies assure a high degree of diversity and inclusiveness. This corporate cultural trait allows Microsoft to maximize human resource competency via employee diversity and unity.

HR strategy planning, recruitment, and selection strategy of Microsoft

The correct quality of human resource management is critical, depending on the business’s demands. Human resource processes like planning, recruiting, and selection are applied to guarantee the business receives the appropriate people at the right time. These mechanisms guarantee that the company receives the appropriate human resources. A human resources planning system is necessary to get the most out of the current workforce and prepare for the future. As part of a human resources planning system, an individual employee’s development needs are considered. Human resource planning begins with comparing current resources to anticipated future needs, including projected growth, expansion plans, skill and competence gaps, and other factors, before formulating strategies for securing the human capital the company will need in the future. Human resources, including future skills and competencies, are taken care of throughout the process.

Selection and Recruitment

Bill Gates is the driving force behind Microsoft, and from the company’s inception, he believed in recruiting extremely intelligent staff, prioritizing intelligence over experience. “His preference for hiring extremely intelligent, not necessarily experienced, new college graduates dates back to Microsoft’s start-up days, when he and co-founder Paul Allen recruited the brightest students they knew – their’ smart friends. Microsoft maintained the same fundamental principles as they grew but had to adapt their hiring practices when the requisite number of new workers could no longer be acquired exclusively via colleges. Microsoft’s recruitment processes remained active rather than passive, with the company actively seeking top talent. Over 300 recruitment gurus discovered, watched, and recruited these employees from other firms. “Once someone was recognized as ‘hard core’ – Microsoft’s term for the extremely skilled and motivated individuals they wanted – the pursuit was relentless, albeit discreet. Regular telephone calls at discrete intervals, chats at business conferences, invitations to formal dinners – members of the recruitment team used all available methods to maintain contact.

Microsoft’s recruiting methods are distinct from those of many other firms, owing to the company’s need for the greatest talent. Microsoft aggressively recruits qualified candidates and places a premium on the appropriate sort of person above skill level. Human resources are a significant source of competitive advantage in ‘Human Resource Management: An Experiential Approach.’ Microsoft leverages human capital to gain a competitive edge, relying on the industry’s top employees and motivating them to be the greatest. This explains why Microsoft’s recruiting processes are so distinctive.

Nokia failure Story

Nokia was the first brand to enter the market when the first mobile phones were announced. Nokia continued in the market for a decade, sometimes introducing new phone models. It caters to all parts of society by offering phones at a variety of pricing points. A millennial would have a greater understanding of me. With a rosy background, it’s difficult to accept that Nokia is no longer important in the mobile phone sector. In 2013, the same Nokia Company with a 50% market share fell to less than 5%. This was a moment when the company’s management, stockholders, and consumers were fearful about the company’s insolvency. Although bankruptcy was almost likely, Microsoft’s participation in the market aided the firm in regaining its footing.

How organizational culture, structure, and management style affected Nokia’s failure

Nokia’s decline in mobile phones cannot be explained straightforwardly: management decisions, dysfunctional organizational structures, growing bureaucracy, and intense internal rivalries contributed to Nokia failing to recognize the shift from product-based competition toward platform-based competition. Nokia’s status-based culture fostered an environment of mutual dread, which shaped how workers interacted with one another. When the human component is combined with economic and structural considerations, a situation of “temporal myopia” results, impeding Nokia’s capacity to innovate. According to employees, senior management and executives have abandoned Nokia’s fundamental principles of Respect, Challenge, Achievement, and Renewal.

The following failure characterizes Nokia organizational culture:

Lack of strategic plan

Nokia was unable to grasp the brilliant game plan that Apple and Samsung had implemented. For both Apple and Samsung, this is their most important product. They produce a new edition of these items with new features every year from these firms. Consumers and prospective customers of these companies maintain tabs on new releases even before they hit the shelves. Consumer interest in a product might rise due to the expectation of a new release with improved features, which is exactly what is occurring. A new version of the phone still elicits public interest even though the market for smartphones has grown saturated. It wasn’t developed in the instance of Nokia, which contributed to the company’s demise.

Poor organizational structure

Nokia used a mechanical organizational structure until it had an epiphany and switched to a matrix model. To increase agility, this rapid adjustment was implemented. Nevertheless, the company’s senior executives began to depart as a result of this choice. It wasn’t simple to run the company without the individuals that made it successful. And Nokia’s demise may be directly attributed to this.

HR strategy planning, recruitment, and selection strategy of Nokia

Many of the company’s divisions were unable to communicate effectively with one another. More problems arose due to this lack of cooperation, such as internal disputes among the company’s senior executives. While these issues were not directly responsible for Nokia’s demise, they did play a factor. It helps keep the organization on the same path if the top management is steady. However, this was not the situation with Nokia, where the CEO was removed twice in five years. As a result of the continuous turnover, staff could not adapt to the new CEO’s vision and objectives. Employees and other stakeholders were unhappy as a result.

In addition, the decision-making process was too protracted for the top management. In 2006, the company’s previous vice-president and main designer, Frank Nuovo, resigned. Because of the lack of urgency, the management was hesitant to make choices, he added. This resulted in the loss of several possibilities (Jia, 2015). Nokia’s research group came up with the notion long before the advent of the iPhone. Because of corporate culture, it was never realized.

The following are some of the Human Recourse management failures:

  • Middle managers were terrified of their bosses, and the anxiety permeated the organization.
  • Because they dreaded getting fired if they told the truth, middle management was reluctant to do so.
  • They were worried about not reaching their quarterly goals and the external environment.
  • They were scared to admit that Nokia’s operating system, Symbian, was inferior;
  • By criticizing intermediate managers for not being ambitious enough to fulfill their objectives, top managers swayed their subordinates.
  • Managers at the top were lied to by lower-level employees who feared expressing the truth would be futile.
  • As a result, top managers’ ability to accurately analyze technology limits during goal-setting was hindered. Apple’s best engineers, on the other hand, were all trained in their respective fields.
  • With long-term aims like building a new operating system, Nokia management focused on short-term market needs by manufacturing new phone products.

Recommendations for failures in Nokia

More careful control of emotional processes would have enabled senior managers to acquire more accurate information about Nokia’s software capabilities and development pace. To better manage emotional processes, top managers might have shared their fear of losing against the new competitors with a small group of key middle managers, and these middle managers might have worked with the top managers to counteract the rising threats, creating healthy external fear and reducing maladaptive internal fears that made telling unpleasant things to one’s superior difficult ( Calrsson, 2014). Another way to increase healthy external fear might have been to require middle managers to use the new competitors’ products extensively, like Samsung did, to ensure that the middle managers developed a sufficient understanding of their strengths over Nokia’s products along specific dimensions, such as usability.

Nokia’s demise again reaffirms our belief that organizations rise to the top because they do something better than their competitors. The problem was that they didn’t do simple things like regulating collective emotions and establishing organizational emotional capital during disruptive period’s things that should have been obvious. If you want to avoid things from going downhill, you have to establish a culture of honesty, humility, and collaboration in the workplace. This is especially true when it comes to managing a huge organization. Nokia’s lesson applies to many successful and unsuccessful businesses. The most crucial function of a successful CEO is to motivate and mobilize diverse groups to work together to create value for their consumers. Large, profitable companies can afford cutting-edge consultancy counsel and market information. The strategic aim is often apparent, but the implementation is complicated. Strategy is typically described as 5% thinking, 95% doing. We propose that strategy implementation is 5% technological and 95% people-related ( Rooiji, 2015). Managing collective emotions is important to strategy implementation success.

Conclusion

In conclusion, they believe that the bottom line will take care of itself when everyone is dedicated to and practices managing quality. By reducing and removing perceived inconveniences, challenges, and defects, this approach demands knowing client desires. Long-lived hospitality enterprises foster a superior culture. The culture impacts the long-term strategies that propel the company towards its goal. The organization’s culture determines daily policies and procedures. Business success is inevitable when all of these aspects are unified under the organization’s culture.

References

BOUWMAN, H., DE REUVER, M., HAMPE, F., CARLSSON, C., & WALDEN, P. (2014). Mobile r&d prototypes — WHAT is hampering market implementation? International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management11(01), 1440003. https://doi.org/10.1142/s0219877014400033

Brownlow, G. (2015). Back to the failure: An analytic narrative of the de Lorean debacle. Business History57(1), 156-181. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2014.977875

Kini, R. B., & Basaviah, S. (2013). Critical success factors in the implementation of Enterprise resource planning systems in small and midsize businesses. International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems9(1), 97-117. https://doi.org/10.4018/jeis.2013010106

Lumby, J. (2012). Leading organizational culture. Educational Management Administration & Leadership40(5), 576-591. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143212451173

Martin, M. (2015). Effectiveness of business innovation and R&D in emerging economies: The evidence from panel data analysis. Journal of Economics, Business, and Management3(4), 440-446. https://doi.org/10.7763/joebm.2015.v3.225

Olsson, H. H., Alahyari, H., & Bosch, J. (2012). We are climbing the “Stairway to Heaven” — A multiple-case study exploring barriers in the transition from Agile development towards continuous deployment of software. 2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. https://doi.org/10.1109/seaa.2012.54

Ovseiko, P. V., & Buchan, A. M. (2012). Organizational culture in an academic health center. Academic Medicine87(6), 709-718. https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0b013e3182537983

Putting your social media strategy to work. (2012). The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, 121-122. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119200796.part3

Successfully creating a customer-focused culture throughout your organization and effectively managing the change. (2012). Evaluating Teacher Quality in Higher Education, 95-99. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203209202-13

 

Don't have time to write this essay on your own?
Use our essay writing service and save your time. We guarantee high quality, on-time delivery and 100% confidentiality. All our papers are written from scratch according to your instructions and are plagiarism free.
Place an order

Cite This Work

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

APA
MLA
Harvard
Vancouver
Chicago
ASA
IEEE
AMA
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Copy to clipboard
Need a plagiarism free essay written by an educator?
Order it today

Popular Essay Topics