Case study analysis: Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide.

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Case study analysis: Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

        The presence of Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather must have been quite a shock to the “Gentlemen with Brains”. She is a woman, for a start, and held no value for a culture that she described as “grotesquely polite.” Beers quickly developed her own ideas of how to get the company back on its feet and wasted no time in implementing them. Her crucial mistake was that she did not achieve internal consensus before acting, and did not take steps to ensure that this new way of relating to the client and new way of doing business was implemented throughout the company. During the process of change at Ogilvy & Mather, Beers switched among several different leadership styles to achieve results, but didn’t always choose the best style for the environment or situation. She is now at the helm of a newly revitalized organization as perceived by clients, but highly divided and contentious on the inside.

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        After immediately focusing first on investors and clients, Beers decided the best course for the company to take. Having decided to differentiate the company in terms of its branding capabilities, her second move was to bring together a group of insiders that would support her vision. At this point she falls neatly into the “leader-member exchange (LMX) theory” by her Machiavellian approach to forming a team. She chose people on one criterion – that they shared her opinions. This meant that she ignored many people in the upper echelons of Ogilvy & Mather in favour of people that would go ...

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