Eurasia Electronics is a large high technology company in the consumer electronics industry. It has ten plants in six countries and employs about 7000 people. Its headquarters are located in Singapore with production facilities in Europe and South East Asia. Eurasia's initial success was due to its excellent record of innovation and in developing close links with its customer base through its association with a major European retail outlet and clever marketing strategy. It growth strategy has been to concentrate particularly on computer games, personalised music systems and to develop products for the emerging digital market.
However, over the past two years each of Eurasia's plants has suffered from a marked downturn in profits and a decrease in their market share. The main reason for this has been the turbulent business environment in which rapid product obsolescence and increasing competition affected the company's profit and market share.
Eurasia recognised this turbulence in the market and put forward a strategy aimed at maintaining tighter controls over production costs. Although production costs were substantially reduced, the result was that managers focused entirely on costcutting measures with little attention being paid to innovation and product development.
At a recent seminar you all attended, the Chief Executive (CE) called you (the Company Secretary) and a Singapore director over to discuss the problem of the group's poor performance. The CE is convinced that the poor results were as a direct result of the strategy to control costs and in doing so this sent the wrong messages to each of the Regional Directors.
The CE is aware that if the situation in each plant is not rectified quickly, the Board is likely to take steps to restructure the business or to sell off parts of it which will result in job losses on a large scale.

Questions

a. The CE has read about the merits of introducing 'Organisational Learning' in a multinational context. He asks you to prepare a brief report on how this concept could be used in improving the current performance across the group.
b. The CE feels that the regional management teams in each plant are isolated from the thinking of the main Board. The CE is also concerned that the main Board itself does not know what the operational teams in each plant think. He asks you what action might be taken to remedy this lack of corporate communication.
c. It is apparent that in order for Eurasia to improve its market share, many changes need to be made in order to restore the innovative culture Eurasia was once so famous for. You have been asked by the CE to prepare a presentation for him for a multinational management seminar on 'Managing Cultural Change at Eurasia'.