2. What should Morales recommend? What should chairman Ben Fisher decide?
While Morales is the president of Kent Chemical International(KCI), the international arm of Kent Chemical Products (KCP), Ben Fisher is the CEO of KCP as well as a board chairman. This gives them different constraints and incentives. Ben Fisher also had the additional complication of dealing with the familial relationship with his son, Kent’s vice chairman.
Given the first two failed attempts to change, Morales should recommend ways to overcome the initial problems he was faced with: the company could not manage changing pressures and demands; overseas subsidiaries’ long history of independence led managers to protect their self-interests; and even within his international division, the regional organization had difficulty coordinating issues with global implications. The suggestion of Sterling Partners to use the Decision Matrix is a step in the right direction, whose advantages can be seen in the previous answer. Furthermore, Morales should make sure that all stakeholders (overseas included) need to be engaged in the change. A solution which has become increasingly popular for dealing with resistance to change is to get the people involved to “participate” in making the change. But as a practical matter “participation” as a device is not a good way for management to think about the problem. The key to the problem is to understand the true nature of resistance. Actually, what employees resist is usually not technical change but social change—the change in their human relationships that generally accompanies technical change. Management can take concrete steps to deal constructively with these staff attitudes. The steps include emphasizing new standards of performance for staff specialists and encouraging them to think in different ways, as well as making use of the fact that signs of