Penney's Strategy: A Case Study

Larry Bossidy, former CEO or AlliedSignal, and Ram Charan, a business advisor to senior executives, describe three core processes of business which determine “a company’s overall ability to execute” (Kinicki, 2013, p. 178). Those three processes are people, strategy, and operations. Of these three processes, the people process is believed to be the most critical due to the ultimate need to involve humans in each step. I’ll evaluate each of the three core process and how they impacted J. C. Penney’s strategy. The first core process, people, is again considered the most critical process to get right (Kinicki, 2013). Bossidy and Charan go on to say that “If you don’t get the people process right, you will never fulfill the potential of your business” (Kinicki, 2013, p. 179). According to a 2013 article published by Forbes, the

Bossidy and Charan stated that the operation plan defines the path that people are to follow and should address all actions that a company is going to take while executing their strategy (Kinicki, 2013). Not only did Johnson move too quickly, he was also starting with a new team who may not have been fully integrated with their new company, let alone it’s new mission. The Forbes article stated that most of the senior employees that were at J. C. Penney’s prior to Johnson’s leadership, either left or were dismissed by Johnson (Denning, 2013). Since Johnson was only chief executive for 17 months, it meant that most of his senior employees were either there that period of time of less. I would find it hard to believe that he could effectively get a team built and integrated fast enough to be successful with such a large scale operational change in such a short period of time. The article reinforced this belief when David Cush, Virgin America CEO, stated that Johnson dismantled his previous business model before a revised model could be put in to place (Denning,