Course Project: Assignment 2

Course Project: Assignment 2

Introduction

Nokia was the market leader in the mobile phone industry for decades and proved to be a stiff competitor to beat for the rivals. The products manufactured by the company were highly regarded by the customer due to their high build quality and brand value of Nokia. However, with a lack of focus on product development and innovation, Nokia lost the dominant position and has to introduce a new strategy that calls for massive changes in the organization.

Discussion

Change is perhaps the only thing that is constant in the dynamic business environment of the twenty first century. There are increasingly economic, social and technical pressures and challenges that force organizations to rethink and redesign their business strategy around the new environment (Cisco 2008, p3-5). Similar is the case with Nokia which has not been able to keep pace with the changes in the mobile phone industry and has left behind the lights of Apple and Samsung. This has resulted in many new strategies being introduced in Nokia.

There are many factors that call for effective change management during the change effort because of the following factors:

Bringing change into an international organization like Nokia is a long process and every step needs to be performed with perfection before later steps could proceed

There is going to be a lot of resistance which would require efficient communication with all the stakeholders

The organization needs to develop risk management plan that can help it to overcome the overhead costs of reactive planning.

To make sure that the change is effectively in its place and is in synchronization with the business strategy

Strategies for Sustaining Change

When organizations begin to initiate change that can have significant impact on the business operations, it has to adopt a strategy that begins slowly and is incremental in nature. The process progresses by considering the facts and information that is gathered from the step that it proceeds. Thereby, allowing the management to fine-tune the strategy in order to culminate the desired results. Many of the stakeholders of the organization are not aware of the changes that are being proposed by the management and their possible effect on their relationship with the organization.

This calls for an effective and well sought out communication strategy to initiate and sustain change at each and every level of the process. This is important because when the management goes on with implementing the change, the major participants of the organization would have changed their attitude regarding it. Therefore, the following strategies should be adopted by Nokia to effectively manage the attitudes of key stakeholders that can impact the real benefits realized.

Communication Strategy

Reinforce the message as often as possible

Research has proved that if the message is delivered to the recipients by utilizing different mediums then they are more likely to remember it for a longer period. However, the important thing to make sure is the integrity and consistency of the contents of the message. All the mediums should be giving the same message and the ...