a lot depends on how you do it. The time scale that you negotiate to achieve with, either with your board or with your stockholders as opposed to with your manager, goes a long way toward determining success or failure.To achieve some of those things in terms of internal human scale often requires a longer commitment than might be available in terms of an external financial scale.There is probably an underlying sentiment that says, satisfy those external audiences and see if you can't sit on top of the internal ones ... and,yes,if these guys don't like it,presumably there are others that are prepared to operate within that kind of a changed culture.
But I believe that,in parker's instance,they probably put an impossible time scale on themselves to achieve the desired degree of change in acceptable human terms without precipitating unnecessary turnover. you see,a certain amount of turnover is not only to be expected but is probably necessary because the kinds of values and skills that you,ve looked for and rewarded in the truly decentralized operation may not be as vaild or as useful in the more integrated approach. Particularly if you give the pendulum a big yank and a swing towards the other end you can expect the sheer momentum to throw people off from side to side. It's really a question of how many people did you lose that you didn't want to or that,at the end of the day, you couldn't afford to? This is more the measure of success or failure in implementing that kind of strategy.
And,finally,by what audacity do you believe that your insights,analytical abilities,creative talents,administrative skills and business acumen combine to make such a decision failure-proof? For the decision to come from an individual or a very small group of individuals, some of whom might be very new to that industry and to that marketplace
...you've got to have a lot of reasons to justify having self-confidence in that small a pool of talent than what might have been available out of a goodly proportion of your previously successful decentralized managers.But if you have a French operation,for example. that had been losing money for quite a period of time or about whose management you have questions concerning their capability,you would have those questions whether the company was centralized or decentralized.The question is:How flexible are some those domestic managers? They may learn,grow,and develop in some extraordinary ways by being exposed to the international world.SO it's not that they're always right and the center is always wrong either.