The leo burnett company

1) There were several problems that OBC team faced through the launch. First of all the two markets of the products were different in culture and different type of advertising was needed to reach them. This was costly and lead to budget problems. Another problem was that of communication. They were unable to communicate properly because of no direct contact. They resorted to Video Conferencing since they were situated in different parts of the world. Another problem that affected them was the fact that all the instructions had to be routed and finalized through the London Head Quarters. This created creativity problems as idea developed by one team needed some time to be understood by the team in another country headed by someone else. Website Creation also caused problem because it had to be approved by the London Head Quarters. All in all creativity problems were caused by lack of de-centralization. Budget problems were caused by additional members of creativity teams that had to be hired to serve the different markets of Canada and Taiwan. Communication problems were caused by communication routing structure as everything had to be passed through London Head Quarters.
2) The autonomy given to Chinese team was much greater than the Canadian Team. This resulted in lack of creative effort by the Canadian Team. Their ideas were also not understood well by the Team in London. Even though everything required approval, Carmichael was not around as she was travelling so much, so getting approval before every major decision posed a big problem. There were also misalignments in technology and budget goals. The budget allocated was far less than the technology that the sub-teams were supposed to use.
3) Virtual Team is extremely difficult to manage as everyone is working on his own and coordination is pretty less. This leads to lack of synergy and team efforts and often the results are less than expected. In case of OBC, the headquarters in London sometimes rejected the idea of Canadian brochure of using ‘ three-piece’ advertising flier. They were thinking about their own ideas. This lead to a problem as there was little or no coordination between the two teams just like it happens in a team working physically close to each other. However, the benefit of the strategy was that decisions were made by people of the respective markets who had knowledge about the market and hence more realistic decisions were being made while working in a virtual team.
4) Centralization is an old policy now and OBC should look to decentralize its work. They should give more autonomy to the regional teams to handle their own creative works so that their ideas are implemented in the product launch of Forever Young. If the headquarters would require constant approval taking policy than the creativity would be lose and effective decisions would not be made by people who are closer to the action. One benefit of centralization policy of OBC is that both Taiwan’s team and Canadian team were on the same page and pretty uniform policies were being developed for both markets.
References:
Daft, R L, (1995). Management. The Dryden Publishing