Big Shoes To Fill

BIG SHOES TO FILL
¿Qué debe Stephanie hacer: iniciar una reorganización básica, o volver a crear el Jack Donally con modelo de liderazgo fuerte?
The memorial service was a sellout. Jack Donally had been a colossal figure who commanded a lot of respect, if not affection. He will be a hard act to follow, Stephanie Fortas thought as she strained to make sense of the eulogy, delivered in a thickirish accent by the same priest who had married jack and Moira Donally 40 years ago. Moira must be feeling especially lost, Stephanie thought. A deferring, uncomplaining woman, Moira had apparently taken second place to Innostat all her married life, and just when it seemed that she would soon have Jack all to herself, he up and died.
But it was not just Moira and her five children who lookedlost, Stephanie thought. Everyone seemed bewildered. As the CEO appointed by the board to succeed Jack just before his untimely death, Stephanie knew that a lot of people would be looking to her for answers. She edged forward to pay her respects to Moira, aware that a lot of curious eyes were fixed on her.
“I have heard so much about Jack”, Stephanie said, offering her condolences to Moira. “Iam going to do my best to protect his legacy”.
A One Man Show
That legacy was formidable. Boston based Inostat war very mucho Jack Donally’s creation. He had transformed the company from a small local manufacturer of scalpels and other surgical equipment into the world’s best known maker of prosthetic limbs and surgical implants. Sales had reached more than 2 billion dollars, with thecompany employing more than 5,000 people at locations in Boston, L.A. and Dublin Ireland. Innostat also had sales and marketing country organizations around the world. A pharmacist’s son from the rough and tumble Irish American stronghold of south Boston Southie to the locals Jack had joined Innostat as a salesman right after completing a tour of duty in Vietnam as a medical orderly. His unit hadbeen in the thick of some of the worst action, and he always said afterward that his passion for the company and its products came from that experience.
Under Jack’s leadership, Innostat built a reputation for technological innovation and manufacturing quality. That was, on the face of it, surprising, since Jack had majored in history at the University of Massachusetts and liked to say that he hadno head for science talk. But the truth was, he loved to spend time talking to surgeons and researchers. He had that special skill that merged an interest in technology with an understanding of what customers needed and wanted. He typically came back from his travels full of ideas for new products. He would go straight to the head of R&D and get him started on a project, rarely engagingInnostat’s senior team in discussions of these ideas and how they fit in to the company’s broader strategy. Consequently, marketing never developed as a strong function, and R&D, though technologically sophisticated, never developed marketing savvy.
Despite his primary focus on new product ideas, Jack was also acutely conscious that health care products had to be error free, and he had always kept aclose eye on manufacturing. Frank Timoshotsky, the self effacing head of production recruited from Toyota, had introduced many of the car company’s quality practices, which had helped the firm win a Baldrige prize.
But in the three years before Jack’s retirement, Innostat’s performance had declined dramatically, and the company was facing strong competitive challenges in its key markets. Thefirm’s once generous margins had narrowed as other companies found ways to engineer around Innostat’s patents and develop competitive products of their own. Worse, the company seemed to have lost its innovating edge. After a string of new offerings in the 1990’s which delivered annual growth in revenues and profits of more than 15% a year, Innostat had not launched any major new products for the...