RandomTex and Sayah: A Case Study in Change
RandomTex is the name chosen for this analysis to represent a real company which was observed in 1998. The company's business, when it was founded in 1945 by Ayhan Unal (also a fictitious name for a real owner), was to repair typewriters. Located in Queens, Unal, who was an immigrant from Turkey, ran the shop and did the repairs, while his wife Tarina did all of the paperwork. Unal had four sons, and when the eldest, Sayah, was 7 (1953), the company obtained a contract with an insurance company to maintain all of its typewriters.
By 1965, when Sayah was 21, RandomTex had grown and developed to 19 retail stores, specializing in selling used and refurbished electric typewriters and office machines. Sayah went to work in the main office upon graduation from Queens College and soon began applying new marketing ideas to the chain, and made the family wealthy.
By 1995, when Sayah was ready to retire, he turned the operations over to his eldest son, Bara. Bara was a poor manager, an even worse strategist and a very poor manager/leader. RandomTex had grown successful because the founder Ayhan, and his son Sayah, had believed in sharing the wealth with the individual managers. Sayah and Ayhan both made a point of knowing each employee, and asking after their families. Because of this, employee loyalty was strong, and of the 200 employees, more than 80 percent had been with the operation for more than 10 years.
When Bara, who was a cold and distant man and quite hard to get to know, took over the company, he closed himself off from the group of men who had been serving as senior management and began making all decisions on his own. Rather than discussing with his senior management what steps should be taken to solve a problem, Bara made all decisions unilaterally.
In 1996, he changed a major organization policy that gave each store manager a certain amount of autonomy, an...