The Wallace Group, Inc

The Wallace Group, Inc. is a diversified company dealing in the manufacture and development of technical products and systems. The company consists of three operational groups and a corporate staff. The three groups include Electronics, Plastics, and Chemicals each operating under the direction of a Group Vice President Electronics offers competence in the areas of microelectronics, electromagnetic, sensors, antennas, microwave, and minicomputers.

The most important problem facing the Wallace group is leadership. Mr. Wallace has created a company of leaders with no empowerment. A management team without empowerment is not agile and will usually be behinds its competitors instead of leading them. The other issues that face the company are as follows: This company has many problems the most apparent being morale of the employees, on review this is largely due to the management style of the president. Also the underperformance of two of three groups especially the chemical group. The apparent problems are only the symptoms of the real problems. One of the primary issues is the lack of management training; the managers were grown with the company and lack previous experience in management. There seems to be no strategic planning in place, no clear marketing strategy, no cooperation between corporate and the divisions, and they don’t have a common goal.

An example of this is that Mr. Wallace’s own employees are demoralized due to the lack of action by upper management. Since management is not empowered they do not communicate to their subordinates about their concerns or ideas without Mr. Wallace’s approval. Mr. Wallace should consider making himself the Chairman of the Board. He should find a new President/CEO who can make this company more stable for the future and create a stronger management team that will help to continue to provide a growing EPS for the shareholders.

Strategic management consists of these four basic elements environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation and evaluation and control. (Wheelan & Hunger, 2004). Environmental scanning will be important because it monitors, evaluates and disseminates information from the internal as well as the external environments and provides this information to the right people within the organization. This is currently needed since there is currently some problems within the Wallace group with obtaining needed information by department. Evaluation and control will be important to the Wallace group because it monitors actual performance and compares it to desired performance. It is through this process that management is able to take corrective action and resolve problems. The strategy formulation will provide the Wallace group a much needed long term plan which will help management to define achievable objectives, develop strategies and set policy guidelines.

A clear strategy which involves, a mission statement that reflects the direction of the company, develop a strategic plan and culture from top to bottom will need to be developed. The company is spread very thin this is due to its inability to attract quality employees, advertise the company’s strengths, aggressively recruit an experience quality applicant to replace the outgoing high level employees, research salary levels of similar companies and offer completive salaries. Develop comprehensive training programs for management and their employees, encourage the three groups to work together, to mentor each other, and although the groups are separate divisions invoke a team spirit that everyone is working for one team with a common goal.

Grow your manager as you grow your employees. Managers are the linchpins of the organization. While they may be adept at their core competency, they need to learn the skills of management, such as planning, delegation, and evaluation. Keep them learning and they will pay for their salaries many, many times over. Send the manager to school. Most business schools have fine executive education programs. Many successful organizations, such as General Electric, 3M and the U.S. Army, have very