1-1 Evaluate current creative and innovative management processes in your organization (if not choose a company) by using the Innovation assessment checklist given to you by Tutor. Describe the procedures and make comparisons with other departments/organizations?
eBay was founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar and is headquartered in San Jose, California in the United States. Its strategy and goals are aligned to its mission, which is to reach every customer in the world by providing them with a global platform. It is an e-commerce company that provides platforms and services that enable the conduct of buying and selling transactions for individuals and companies via auction sites, shopping sites, and others. It provides marketing, advertising, analytical services, and facilitates payment via payment gateways. It has an innovation strategy in place as users can now conduct transactions using mobile devices. It has a range of products, which include apparel, beauty products, general merchandise, antiques, toys, electronics, and others.
The marketplace is very competitive and customers are always asking for more. In such a scenario, a company must be creative and innovative in its products, services, and processes. In this regard, eBay is successful due to the fact that there are many creative and innovative processes within the company. For example, knowledge management is different in eBay. eBay brings together the knowledge of employees across the world, leading to value creation through the knowledge of diverse individuals. This helps knowledge management as knowledge keeps people informed and it increases when shared. For example, when Napster created the music swapping system, peer-to-peer architecture over the Internet assumed a new dimension.
eBay is a big company that operates out of various countries and that has customers all across the world. It is tough for such a large company to be agile. However, the leadership team encourages employees to take calculated risks and try new things. For example, eBay Germany has the concept of micro projects, which allows developers to follow their own specifications and ideas in developing services and products. This was against the worldwide company's project development process, which required acceptance from key stakeholders in various departments, as well as approval for resource allocation from business units, and the finance and HR departments. However, eBay realized that employees enjoyed these micro-projects. It gave them the freedom to think outside the box. As such, these micro projects were not stopped but were structured and brought under the purview of the worldwide headquarters. This step helped in the management of resources such that there are people and resources available for the business’ critical projects and at the same time, employees have the time and resources to work on their pet projects. This resulted in many innovative ideas, such as a treasure hunt for a holiday sales promotion, which brought close to 10 million users on the site; the Easy Lister feature; and the separate registration processes for individual sellers and businesses (Hill, Brandeau, Truelove and Lineback 2014).
eBay is focused on customer needs right from the beginning. Pierre Omidyar saw a potential business idea when he realized that he could sell his broken laser printer via a notification on the web. He realized that more people would need things that were not easily available in the market and the classifieds. He then connected the two issues and came up with the idea of an online auction site where anyone from anywhere in the world could trade with anyone else from anywhere else. It was successful but he did not stop there. eBay constantly connects with customers by adding innovative services and features to the portal (Perfetti 2001).
Unlike eBay, RIM (now called Blackberry Ltd.) literally invented the smartphone market and was the leader In that industry. However, it failed to keep up with customer demands and its competitors who provided innovative and user-friendly features. Customers wanted apps and software features. However, Blackberry Ltd. was slow to provide them and their software and apps were not engaging enough for customers. This resulted in the company ending up as a bit player in the smartphone market (Silcoff, Mcnish and Ladurantaye 2013).
In eBay, however, the leadership team was competent enough to realize that the market for online and mobile retail in Latin America was expanding. Since eBay has a customer- centered culture and knows what the customer wants, it launched websites in local languages, which enabled it to tap into this growing pool of customers. In addition, the IT platform in eBay is such that it encourages innovation by the employees. In particular, employees are provided with market- and technology-related information and are involved in the resolution of the problems that eBay faced. This innovation process helped in employees coming up with constructive suggestions on the features for the website and on ways of improving the mobile app.
As the online auction market matured and sellers complained of poor support services and high fees, the employees knew that customers were not happy. This helped the management team realize that the mobile revolution was the next big thing, leading them to building an m-commerce platform. They also realized that customers needed a secure, transparent but easy payment method. As such, they acquired Paypal and worked on making it a robust payment system. With it, customers can now easily buy and sell on eBay's mobile platform and payment transactions run very smoothly for m-commerce transactions. This has helped retain customers and has enabled the company to continue generating revenue and profits. In turn, the employees who work on these projects are recognized and rewarded with monetary and non-monetary incentives.
It should also be noted that being an employee in eBay is no easy task. Normally when a person makes it to the shortlist of potential employees, they have to succeed in two rounds of technical interviews, two techno behavioral rounds that involve the practical aspects of the eBay business, and the Human resource round. This hiring process results in a high performing team in eBay.
The main strengths of eBay’s innovation capability are their focus on customers and
their technological innovation. Low cost local online retailers will know the market better. They are also smaller and therefore will be more agile in getting innovative ideas to the market faster; thus, leading to cost advantages. They help eBay overcome the main barriers for maintaining their innovation capability.
In comparison, Yahoo also started an auction site to compete with eBay. It attracted many visitors but did not have a proper plan. At first, it did not charge fees for the auction. Then it changed its strategy and started charging a high fee, which led to the loss of customers. It then reversed its strategy by removing the fees, which led to customers becoming confused. In this regard, Yahoo was not an effective competitor to eBay as eBay was way ahead of them in technological innovation and business processes.
1-2 Explain how to lead others to positively embrace innovation and change in your organization. Fill out the «Leadership Style Inventory» and evaluate your style with pros and cons?
After answering the questions in the Leadership-Matrix-Self-Assessment Questionnaire, I got a score of 7.8 in both the People and Task categories, which mean that I have a Team Leadership Style. This is reflective of my leadership style as I believe that two heads are better than one and that group goals are achieved more easily and efficiently if all the group members contribute to the goal’s achievement In this regard, when introducing innovation and change in my organization, I try to get my team members’ buy-in by first explaining to them what the change or innovation is and why it is necessary. I will then try to answer any questions they may have to ensure that the change initiative is clear to them and to ensure that they understand its purpose. This will prevent possible resistance from them. In addition, I will ask them for feedback or input and will try to incorporate this input or feedback into the change initiative to make the employees feel that the organization values their contributions. In addition, this will give them a sense of ownership of the change initiative, which will help ensure their cooperation in the initiative’s accomplishment.
The advantages of this style of leadership are that it fosters teamwork, employee motivation, and productivity. However, its disadvantage is that getting the entire team’s consensus for every decision may delay the decision-making process. It is also not possible to always get the entire team’s buy-In where the leader will need to take a stand on a specific decision. However, this may lead to decreased employee morale. Task 2
2-1 Give details of your organization’s «mission» and «vision» statements. Assess the influence of vision and mission on generation of creative and innovative management processes in your organization. Explain your thoughts and compare with benchmark organizations’ mission and vision statements?
“eBay's mission is to provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything” (Gleeson 2014). This indicates that eBay wants to reach a wide consumer base and facilitate the buying and selling of all kinds of products across the world. They aim to connect the buyer and seller.
In this regard, it can be said that eBay has lived up to its mission. It started off as an online auction website for individual buyers and sellers in 1995 and then started selling plane tickets and other travel products. It formally ventured outside of the United States through its purchase of IBazar in Europe. It also extended its capabilities through its acquisition of the online payment gateway Paypal in 2002 (The history of eBay 2011).
eBay understood that the next big wave would be m-commerce. In this regard, they built a solid m-commerce platform with a smooth payment facility. This ensured that eBay stayed ahead of its competitors. eBay was an innovative startup and has remained innovative in its processes. It also continues to launch innovative products and services.
In comparison, Nordstrom the retail giant, is known more for its customer service than its products. Its mission statement is "At Nordstrom, our goal is to provide outstanding service every day, one customer at a time." They focus on their customer. Similarly, eBay wants to reach out to all of its customers and give them the best service possible, particularly by enabling as many buyers and sellers as possible to connect with each other and by providing them with easy-to-use features and hassle-free transactions.
eBay does not have a formal vision statement, but a vision statement declares what the company intends to become in the future. In this regard, eBay, in its 2010 Annual report (Ragu 2011) states, “We seek to create a global platform that provides individuals and businesses of all types and sizes with access to broad markets” (eBay, 2010). The company considers this as its vision.
2-2 Use analytical tools to identify potential creative and innovative management ideas which you or your employees suggested.
In eBay, employees are encouraged to put forth their ideas as a way of increasing employee motivation. The company takes various steps to promote creativity and innovation. This results in many ideas, mini projects, and others, which are evaluated through the evaluation matrix (Evaluation Matrices, n.d.). As an example, the development team or the customer focus team comes up with many ideas that can be translated to features on the website. These features are listed and an expert team comprising of members from the customer focus team, development team, solutioning team, and management team classify them into 3 categories, namely Mandatory, Desirable, NotImportantfornow. The second level of evaluation gives a score and a weightage to all of the features in the mandatory and desirable categories. The score and weightage are numbers between 1 and 5 and the total score for each feature is arrived at by multiplying the score and weightage. The features with the highest scores are taken further ahead for feasibility study, design, analysis, and development (Evaluation Matrices, n.d.).
2-3 Choose an improvement idea of your own related with your job and assess its risks/benefits and feasibility using analytical tools.
Today, when technology and business are so well integrated, the CIO is expected to bring vision and direction to the organization and use IT as an enabler for growth and expansion. With the percentage of sales via mobile shopping continuously increasing for the last couple of years and with 15% -- and potentially 25% by 2017 (eMarketer 2013) -- of online retail sales taking place via mobile devices, it was important that eBay had the necessary infrastructure in place to meet these numbers. This would prevent its competition from driving away all of its customers. In this regard, a strategic plan was created to assign the highest priority on mobile retailing. As a result, the Research, Design, Application Development, and Marketing departments became focused on mobile retailing. An important goal was to make mobile buying really simple. eBay developed a solution, which allowed the user to make a purchase in one click, without any input of PIN or Credit card number. It was a major contributing factor in the profits being doubled and in the revenue increasing by 23% in 2013.
Customers embraced the eBay mobile application wholeheartedly, with 90 million users having downloaded the eBay mobile app. In the first quarter of 2014, eBay’s sales volume across the world was $58 billion, $11 billion of which was through mobile commerce (eBay 2014). However, the disadvantage of focusing on mobile commerce was that the e-commerce business was getting less attention. If the mobile commerce wave did not take off, eBay would have been in trouble. The e-commerce business on which eBay was built could be overthrown by the m-commerce business. In the same manner, the shift led to other changes such as the need for different skill sets and different training programs, which in turn led to increases in cost, effort, and time. The risks and benefits were assessed using the force field analysis.
Figure 1
Source: Sullivan, 2013
The Force Field Analysis helped in arriving at the decision to go ahead with m-commerce. An organization has to constantly change, adapt, and evolve so that it survives and thrives. In this regard, eBay’s shift to m-commerce was an innovative idea as most companies of that size were indecisive about such a move at that time. This resulted in a massive change process within the organization, which enabled all employees to embrace the change.
2-4 Use one of the change models to support the implementation of creative and innovative management idea of your own.
For this, Kurt Lewin's change model was applied. The first step in this model is Unfreeze, which means to create readiness and to motivate people to accept the change. People in different units were informed about the change and there were open forums where employees could ask questions and get their apprehensions cleared. This was a chance for the leadership team to know how people felt about the change. People had questions about changes in the required skill sets, training, and layoffs, particularly of people who were not in the mobile technology field.
The next step is Change, which means to implement the change. The entire organization implemented the change. The solutioning and the development teams were reinforced with mobile technology specialists while the marketing team focused on mobile commerce. Training needs were identified and imparted to employees while public messages on mobile commerce via eBay were broadcast.
The third step is Refreeze, which means that the change is well integrated within existing processes like Quality Management and Application Software Change Management. After the successful launch, there was a team event to celebrate the successful delivery. The efforts of the stakeholders were also recognized in a public forum.
The change process involved in increasing eBay’s focus on m-commerce can be compared to Kotter's Change Process.
2-5 Evaluate the change process you experiences in near past according to the change models you are taught in class.
A change process I implemented in XYZ was when I imposed a new rule for my team about delayed project deliverables. The rule indicated that delays in their project deliverables would affect their performance evaluation. Timely delivery was one of the KPIs I used for evaluating my team and I try to give them numerical ratings for each project based on these KPIs. The new rule also indicated that they should provide advanced notice of potential delays in their deliverables so that I can find a workaround that would be fair to the other team members who may be asked to take over the task.
Using Kotter’s 8-step change model (Mind Tools 2014), the first step I did was to
create an urgency, which I accomplished by providing my team members with a clearly explained rationale for the new rule. I explained how the old process was negatively affecting me as the team lead, their fellow team members, and the project as a whole. By explaining the rationale for the change, I am also able to form a powerful coalition, which is the second step in Kotter’s change model. This was especially affirmed by the positive responses that I got from my team members. In the same manner, by making them understand the reason for the change and by showing how this benefits the team and the project, I am able to create a vision for the change, which is the third step in Kotter’s change model. The fourth step is to communicate the vision, which I did by sending information about the new rule to my team members via email and by holding a meeting with them where I was able to personally explain the change and where I could answer my team members’ questions and concerns. Incidentally, this also allowed me to complete step 5, which is to remove the obstacles. The sixth sep is to create short-term wins, which I accomplished by being generous with compliments whenever a team member submits their deliverable early or on time. I even call out these small achievements during group meetings. By consistently applauding and complimenting positive behavior and by showing that inexcusable violations of the rule won’t be tolerated, I was able to build on the change and anchor the changes in the team’s culture, which are the seventh and eighth steps of the Kotter change model.Task 3
3-1 Choose an improvement idea of your own that is implemented at work in near past and make your evaluations for below questions:
- Who were the stakeholders and how were they affected by this implementation?
- How did you motivate them to change their way of working with your new idea?
- How did you produce an appropriate rationale to persuade stakeholders about the benefits of your creative and innovative management idea?
An improvement idea implemented at work was when I was working as the lead for a project where I had to have a virtual meeting with the Development team with regards to the system fixes they implemented. However, there was a separate meeting for each system fix, which meant that I had to attend several of these meetings in a day, which was highly disruptive of my own work. As such, the improvement I suggested was for one of my team members to also attend these meetings on my behalf so that I would be responsible for attending all of the morning meetings and the other team member would attend all of the afternoon meetings. This way, both of us can work uninterruptedly for half a day at least.
The stakeholders were the Development team members, my team member, and my superiors. The change would affect the Development team members in that it would mean that they would coordinate with two different people, which may require some adjustment on their part. My team member would have to make adjustments in her work schedule and my superiors may need to make adjustments in my and my team member’s work load and work schedules. To motivate them and persuade them to agree to the change, I explained how it was affecting my work productivity. I also gave them several options for the solution to the problem and I showed that among these options, the solution I proposed was the most feasible one.
3-2 How did you communicate your idea with stakeholders?
3-3 What were the key goals and targets of your plan? How did you establish your key goals and priorities for implementation? How did you get feedback from stakeholders?
The key goals and targets for the plan was for me and my team member to be able to work productively by minimizing the work disruptions caused by the meetings. My team was working on multiple projects at the same time, so the goal was for my team to efficiently work on all these projects without getting sidetracked by a single one. Another goal was also to allow the Development team to continue with their own work processes and to minimize the change’s effect on them. To establish these goals and priorities, the change in the work process was first communicated to all the stakeholders, ensuring that everyone buys in to the change and ensuring that all of their questions and concerns were addressed. I then made sure that I coordinated well with the development team with regards to the daily or weekly schedules of the meetings, which also allowed me and my team to arrange our work schedules accordingly. Feedback was obtained either via email or during the meetings.Task 4
4-1 Choose one of your experiences related with change in which you took part directly or led.
- Assess the barriers to the implementation of a creative and innovative management idea in your organization?
The barriers to the implementation of a creative and innovative change management idea in my organization include resistance to change, either from my team members or my superiors, and the lack of resources. In particular, if my superiors will not approve the change or if my team members will not cooperate with me in the implementation of the change then it cannot be implemented. On the other hand, even if I have the support of my superiors and my team members, if we don’t have enough resources for implementing the change then it cannot be implemented.
A specific change I led was when I proposed holding mini-training sessions for my team regarding a system that the company would be implementing in the near future. In our team, I was one of the few who had knowledge about the use of this system so I thought that holding the mini trainings would allow my team members to become familiar with the system so that they wouldn’t have too much difficulty in learning how to use it when it does get implemented. The main barriers was that my superior did not think the initiative would be helpful and he was concerned that the time spent on these mini trainings would be time taken away from the team’s projects. Although my team members supported the idea, they had no courage to back me up on my proposal.
4-2 How did you plan your strategy to overcome identified barriers to the implementation of a creative and innovative management idea in your organization?
4-3 Explain how a strategic plan for overcoming barriers will ensure innovative change to relevant stakeholders in an organization?
A strategic pan helps in overcoming the barriers as it provides the stakeholders with all the pertinent information about the change, in turn making them buy into the change. The strategic plan also shows how the initiative is aligned with the company’s objectives and it serves a guide for the project’s implementation, ensuring that it is completed on time and within budget.
References
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Silcoff, S., Mcnish, J. and Ladurantaye, S., 2013. Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt. [online] Available at: <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-inside-story-of-why-blackberry-is-failing/article14563602/?page=all>[Accessed 2 October 2014]
Sullivan, C., 2013. Mobile web growth: 1 in 5 internet users don’t use a computer. GoMoNews. [online]. Available at <http://www.gomonews.com/mobile-web-growth-1-in-5-internet-users-dont-use-a-computer/> [Accessed 2 October 2014].
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I confirm that this is my own work and that I have not plagiarized any part of it. I have also noted the assessment criteria and pass mark for assignments.
