e volatile and competitive environment it found itself, its cultural values need to be revised to a certain extent. It started to become necessary that the top management understood the major changes that the company was undergoing and the need for refining of thinking processes and general management values.Though it is clear from the case that the new cultural values were widely communicated, it is not very clear about the levers for change that had existed in the organisation and the way they were used. The commonly identifiable levers could deal with the areas of performance, commitment, quality, learning and values among others. From the initial response by the organisation, it appears that the organisation did embrace the new values, but only as a short-term response to the ensuing financial crisis and not really through an understanding of the business’ long term strategy.Though the Core Management Programme (discussed later in the essay) managed to eventually address the long-term strategic need for cultural change, a criticism may be levelled that this approach should have been adopted initially.Decentralization:One of the biggest changes made to was to the organisational structure of the company. ICL’s structure had traditionally been based on the concept of functional grouping i.e. dividing the organisation on the basis of the distinct functions they were aligned with, for example Marketing, Production, Finance etc. Though this concept did foster good communication and co-operation skills within the functional units, there was the disadvantage of very little or no co-ordination across these functions. In the case of ICL, it was highly apparent in the lack of communication between the product development and marketing functions and the ensuing financial crisis brought about by it. The developers were into designing advanced and very high technology equipment for which marketing had failed to capture a market. With ...
