CASE ANALYSIS
BA 2 – HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

(Author’s note: The following script has been taken directly from its source. However, this has been altered as seen fit. Questions have been added for academic purposes .)

“THE BEST LAID INCENTIVE PLANS”

FAT AND HAPPY
It was true. Hiram Phillips, CFO and chief administrative officer for Rainbarrel Products, a diversified consumer-durables manufacturer, was in a particularly good mood. He was heading into a breakfast meeting that would bring nothing but good news. Sally Hamilton and Frank Ormondy from Felding & Company would no doubt already be at the office when he arrived and would have with them the all important numbers – the statistics that would demonstrate the positive results of the performance management system he’d put in place a year ago. Hiram had already seen many of the figures in bits and pieces. He’d retained the consultants to establish baselines on the metrics he wanted to watch and had seen various interim reports from then since. But today’s meeting would be the impressive summation capping off a year’s worth of effort.

It was obvious enough what his introduction should be. He would start at the beginning at Rainbarrel Products a year ago. At the time, the company had just come off a couple of awful quarters. It wasn’t alone. The sudden slowdown in consumer spending, after a decade-long boom, had taken the whole industry by surprise. But what had quickly become clear was that Rainbarrel was adjusting to the new reality far less rapidly than its biggest