Abstract
Andy’s Parties emerged as a successful startup for eight years from an unexpected uncovering of a robust and growing market for children’s birthday party. The business operates in a large market of working women with no time to arrange and manage their children’s birthday parties and who are willing and capable of paying the price for party services. While working mothers are getting more aware of their motherhood and marital obligations, their careers remained essential to their selfhood, making forcing them to choose both and balance the demands from either. The full service offer that Andy’s Parties provides aptly fill this market need. However, the business paradigm in Andy’s Parties describes the predominant command and control paradigm in Western corporations today, which limits their capacity to handle the changing tides of contemporary markets. The concept of learning organizations provides practical critique into the current condition and offers a solution to the quandary.
Introduction
A fluid mindset in managing the unpredictability of consumer markets today is intuitively necessary to bring out business successes. However, experience indicates that corporate flexibility is an ideal that remains difficult to resolve due to the many barriers for its adoption. Bureaucracy, for instance, can dictate the speed at which new information travel from the trenches of the corporation to the top management and then back down to the trenches with the management solutions ready for implementation. The situation becomes more difficult when it involves multinational companies with operations in all continents globally. Thus, the larger the organization, the less efficiency it can behave in resolving its ongoing but unpredictable business challenges. The case study of Andy’s Parties provides a simplified look into the complexity of business management at its basic level and its potentials to become a highly flexible group. Meanwhile, Seddon and O’Donovan (2010) provides a critical look into the barriers facing contemporary organizations in transforming themselves into an effective and efficient learning organization. Exploration of these sources constitutes the bulk of this work.
Part 1: Andy’s entrepreneurial mindset
Andy Ross had one of the best that contemporary employment can offer. However, the cost of their home alone had already stretched his financial resources (Andy’s parties, n. d.). That gave him a gnawing discontent, seeking to be resolved, that unsettled him. He decided that his only option was to go into business himself even if he had no prior experience in running a business or an existing business model to rely on or an adequate capital to fund the new business through its early years. He apparently assumed that going into business automatically means getting into a successful and profitable enterprise.
The first-time venture became a quick success though, which Andy and his wife managed to sustain for 8 years against the statistical odd wherein newly launched business fail within the first few years (Andy’s parties, n. d.). Henry Blodget (2013) of Business Insider reported that around 93 percent of startup companies eventually fail. In Andy’s case, this statistics turned out to be irrelevant.
There are three reasons for Andy’s business success: (a) a robust children’s party market; (b) a full-service convenience to parents; and (c) low operating costs.
A robust children’s party market: Stumbling into this market can be considered a chance luck for Andy and his wife. They simply happened to attend a friend’s birthday party, after which the business idea just came up strongly in their minds. They noticed a demand for a themed children’s birthday party. The felt the demand must be strong and wanted a share of it.
Without Andy’s or his wife’s awareness, the contemporary consumer culture around the world has fueled the economic growth in the market of providing children’s party services (Clarke, 2007). Working mothers had been a large component in the global workforce despite their specific domestic responsibilities and obligations. However, the longer hours at work often leaves the mothers a limited time for time-consuming family activities, particularly their children’s birthday parties. Traditionally, nonworking mothers handled their children’s birthday parties at home from cooking the meals to organizing the party games.
That is no longer feasible in the highly career-oriented motherhood lifestyle today. Mothers no longer have the time to arrange a birthday party, call for clown services and bounce house providers, or design and cook a menu for the party. They need help from someone who can provide a quality birthday party with much less time to spend for it. And they are willing and capable of paying the price. This fueled the growth of the themed children’s birthday party services. Expectedly, this growth is also accompanied by, or perhaps even the result of, a sustained decline in family-based birthday parties with home-based provisioning instead of hiring service providers from outside. This trend is expected to continue as more mothers remain engaged in their careers while still having an option to fulfill their motherhood responsibilities, such as organizing a birthday party for their children. Although Andy and his wife had tapped at the children’s themed party market by accident, they, nevertheless, tapped at an evidently robustly growing and profitable market.
A full-service convenience to parents: The need for a full-service children’s birthday party service has been mentioned earlier. The fact is, more than half of the women (57 percent) highly value their career even after marriage (Miley & Mack, 2009). They consider their work as a means of living, of achieving personal and professional fulfillment, and of keeping in touch with who they are. Although parenthood and marriage became largely the center of the woman’s life when they reach age 30 and get married, their desire to work continues. Thus, balancing their career demands and family obligations becomes critical. Mothers do not want to miss the important milestones in their children’s life, like birthday parties. Thus, hiring a full-service themed birthday party for their children fits perfectly to their need for time efficiency and event planning and managing convenience. Career-oriented mothers had avidly embraced market goods and services that engender or maintain a culture of sameness for their children – although not as close to the traditional home-made birthday parties in the earlier decades – without risking their obligations to mothering (Clarke, 2007).
Low operating costs: The primary benefits in resource utilization efficiency is better economics (Lawton, et al., 2013). Efficient operations can generate substantial cost savings compared to less efficient businesses. In Andy’s and his wife’s themed children’s party management business, many components are involved in its low-cost operating structures. First, Andy and his wife outsource the capital-intensive non-core services included in its package. For instance, they rent bounce houses instead of raising additional capital to produce different designs of bounce houses, which could be costly. Instead they can choose from any bounce house design that fits the parent’s preference for only a small rent. Moreover, it will not be costly if parents prefer not to have a bounce house in their child’s party. They also do not have to maintain a team of professional entertainers (e.g. magicians, balloon-twisters, etc.). Furthermore, they can provide high-end adult catering without having to maintain equipment, personnel, and supplies simply by paying for the service on a per-party-basis. By focusing their business on managing a children’s party, they had cut their operating costs significantly.
The case document, however, did not indicate any future plan that Andy and his wife had designed for their business.
Part 2: The Seddon-O’Donovan Findings
Seddon and O’Donovan (2010) noticed a starkly disheartening situation: the predicted growth of learning organizations did not materialize as of 2010. Other findings can be concisely described hereinafter.
First, the predominant cause of the failure in the adoption of learning organization concepts today is the prevalent command and control management paradigm. This paradigm sees the organization as essentially a top-down hierarchy with works designed as functions and where managers make work decisions and workers simply follow those decisions without contributing into it in real-time situations. Its management ethics is essentially budget and people management. Budget management approach aims to reduce costs per function, while people are managed by regulation and controls, such as procedures, service rules, specifications, work inspection, etc. The obsession revolves around shortened work activity as an efficiency and cost control measure. According to Seddon and O’Donovan (2010), it is the dominant paradigm in the Western corporations.
The way Andy and his wife manage people is not clear in the case. However, the manner they manage their costs provides hints that they too follow the dominant command and control management paradigm. Subcontracting their noncore services as a cost efficiency measure inevitably results to serious limits in implementing generative learning because of the specialized nature of the transaction. Specialized service providers can only provide what they specialize at doing and cannot address the overall concerns of the customers. Essentially the approach still reflects a functional design wherein one specialist stay in performing his specialized job and cannot help provide solutions for the party service issues, which only the management can make.
However, despite the inherent limitations brought by the subcontracting strategy they adopted, Andy and his wife still have opportunities to manage their regular staff outside the command and control management paradigm. For instance, the staff who handles the booking of orders for themed children’s birthday parties can provide non-default solutions to customer demands. However, it is easy to understand if Andy and his wife will require the clown to seek their approval for a non-standardized solution to a customer’s nonstandard service demands.
Second, Seddon and O’Donovan (2010) also observed the difficulty of command and control managers to shift from single loop learning to double loop learning without external help. This limitation makes it difficult for them to notice the underlying governing variables in their current system, a system which they assume to be perfect and needs no fundamental change.
However, only through double learning can management have the chance to uncover counterintuitive truths existing in their businesses. Seddon and O’Donovan (2010) identified some of these truths, such as: demand acts as the greatest improvement tool; corporate system as the sole predominant determinant of performance; and failure to observe demand variety as cost drivers. Conversely, in Andy’s case, the subcontracting strategy provides a natural barrier towards double loop learning because it is intuitively incongruent to let a subcontractor define the solution for Andy’s customers. Moreover, customers will naturally seek Andy’s solution to their demands or at least act as bridge between them and the subcontractor. In fact, as demand increases, Andy’s capability to absorb demand variety will largely depend upon the flexibility of the subcontracted clown, for instance. Training the clown for full and flexible servicing, which the article proposed, is essentially the task of the clown’s employer (the subcontractor), not Andy’s. Moreover, it is intuitively indefensible for Andy and his wife to train a subcontractor’s employed clown; unless, perhaps, the clown is his own subcontractor. Thus, they may have to look for trainable and freelancing clowns to handle the clowning role.
Summary paragraph
The operational success that Andy’s Parties experienced in the last 8 years epitomizes the capability of the command and control management approach in driving businesses to success. Perhaps these successes, like Andy’s Parties, are important factors that made this management approach currently dominant in Western corporations or even globally. However, the size of Andy’s Parties business allowed it the advantage of a less complex business operation, which does not necessarily mean the managing couple did not face difficult issues associated with command and control management. Seddon and O’Donovan (2010) proposed a framework for Andy’s Parties to adopt for their operations at this early age with visible advantages, such as establishing a strong foundation for a learning organization while still young. If Andy and his wife can successfully establish this organization, then the future will be much easier to handle.
References
Andy’s Parties. A small business mindset. [Case study]
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Clarke, A.J. (2007, July). Consuming children and making mothers: Birthday parties, gifts, and
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Lawton, M., Carter, C., Lee, J., Tan, A., Trigo, A.P., Luscombe, D., & Briscoe, S. (2013,
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Miley, M. & Mack, A. (2009, November 19). The new female consumer: The rise of the real
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Seddon, J. & O’Donovan, B. (2010, May). Why aren’t we all working for learning
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