Charlotte Beers Case Study: Ogilvy & Mather

Charlotte Beers excelled in developing her vision and strategy when she took over Ogilvy & Mather. She had a her own concepts, and suggestions on where she wanted to direct the company in the future, but she gathered a guiding coalition to develop a vision and strategy for the future Ogilvy & Mather. Kotter explained a vision as “a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future” (Kotter, 2012). Developing a vision for Beers was important to keep Ogilvy & Mather a world renowned advertising firm. “The Thirsty for Change” Group, Beer’s guiding coalition first met in May to brainstorm their ideas for change, and create a new vision (Ibarra & Sackley, 2011). During their retreat they focused on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of

However, it seems that their diversity may have caused issues surrounding the development of the company’s vision statement. In the planning stages there was many disagreements pertaining to the priorities of changes, where the brand focus was suppose to start, and concerns behind the route to competitive advantage. I believe the initial problem was that none of the members had met each other before, the reason being was that everyone was from different parts of the company from all around the world. To correct the differences in the group, I suggest that Charlotte Beers use the SPLIT framework established by Tsedal Neeley. Neeley’s framework was identified to successfully manage social distance. The five components of the framework include structure, process, language, identity, and technology. In the process stage, it is important to remind the team members that the team is a single entity, even though there are individual team members that have different views from one another. Those differences should be used to build a bridge and create unity, not cause disagreements (Neeley,