Generic Benchmarking

The companies, IBM and Toyota Motors, have had to address similar issues that Global Communications is experiencing in becoming more profitable while competing globally in their respective industry. IBM's challenge is to retain key talent while downsizing staff and outsourcing jobs to India so they can increase market share to the approval of the shareholders. However, an IBM employee has shared that his creative approach to remain with the company by offering to pay his own relocation costs to India to remain with the company has fallen on deaf ears. He attempted in various electronic forms and phone call attempts to all levels of management to present his idea and was pretty much given the so-called runaround. This is an excellent example in identifying problems with hierarchical communication within a company and their avoidance management techniques. The Global Communications Senior Leadership team did offer in their solution to pay relocation costs to retain key talent as long as the employees were willing to take a 10% cut in salary. However, this was offered without any employee and/or union leadership in the planning stages.

Toyota Motors addressed their global competitive issues in more of an open environment approach by following their vision and principle statements of trusting and respecting all levels of labor and management in the planning and decision making process. By following these basic principle tools of communication, Toyota Motors has become number one in the world in sales with the approach of all stakeholders being able to provide input in problem solving. Global Communications can utilize this valuable lesson and place it into practice so that they can increase their market share and profits. This will provide all stakeholders a win-win and not a win-lose situation