Charlotte Beers Essay

Charlotte Beers became CEO at Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide in the late 1980’s and decided the company needed to be asses by the progress made after she became CEO. What she quickly realized was that clients loved the Brand Stewardship concept (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995). However, most employees below executive level had not fully embraced the newly created vision. By demonstrating why communication can be crucial to success, Beers is able to show how essential communication can be through her disappointment.

Some of the reasons that this may have occurred was due to the hostile takeover in 1989 which lost key accounts and credibility of the company (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995). As a result of this within two years many key senior employees left

She wanted Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide to be known as the “agency most valued by those who most value brands (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995).” This focused on four core disciplines: sales promotion, public relations, advertising, and direct marketing. She created this vision by first gathering the individuals in the company that were inspired by an ingenious pressure. This enabled her to get a fresh perspective on how the company was viewed. Next, she educated these individuals on the main problems and the reality the company was currently facing. Finally, she stimulated an open conversation in order to exchange opinions and experiences in order to come up with a common set of ideas that could be incorporated into a single vision statement (Sackley & Ibarra,

Since only a minority population of the workers understood Brand Stewardship, it made it difficult for the majority to embrace the concept. This was largely in part due to a lack of education on what the philosophy was (Sackley & Ibarra, 1995). A second fail when it came to the new vision was that many employees felt by being given a new vision, it meant that the prior vision demonstrated they were doing things wrong. This meant resistance to change was certain. Ultimately, the overall lack of interest towards the new vision was due to a lack of communication on Beers part (Sackley & Ibarra,