4. Review Chapter 16A - Help for Hip People and answer the following questions:

a. How might an organization development consultant work with Hip People to address its two central concerns?

Designing a virtual global team where some members of the team work for different companies but need to collaborate.

Organizing a sustainability council where multiple stakeholders must address the growing importance of environmental practices.

b. How do trends in virtual work, sustainability, technology, and workforce demographics relate to this case study? What practices have you seen employed in other organizations?

c. What opportunities and challenges exist for the future of organization development in these areas?

Please include references. Thank you!

Hi, I'm reaching out to you because I think you can help me with a unique situation. First, let me introduce myself. I'm Antonio Rodriguez, and I'm the global marketing manager for Hip People Footwear. I'm based in Spain, where our company was founded in 2010. Our headquarters are now located in Frankfurt, even though we have ofces in 40 countries worldwide and I manage a staff of more than 400 marketing professionals globally. Marketing is based at our Asia Pacic central ofce in Hong Kong with about 200 of our employees there, and 50 or so employees work in our other geographic divisions of North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. I'm surprised you haven't heard of us, but we may not have arrived yet at your location. Stay tuned, though, because we are expanding quickly and you'll probably see a Hip People store soon at a mall or shopping center near you. What's different about Hip People shoes is that we have the most up-to-date fashion and great prices. We produce inexpensive shoes that are very fashionable so that customers can actually buy a new pair of shoes every month to stay on trend. Our customers always want to be up to date with the latest styles. They may see a celebrity on the red carpet and want to own the same style, so they rush out to stores with an inspiration. We nd that almost three quarters of our customers are in the 16 to 30 age range, and they are very loyal to our brand. Even our employees are mostly 22 to 32 years of age and almost everyone comes to work here because they love our shoes of all types, from boots to sandals to athletic shoes. There's a reason that \"hip people\" is our name! Since you haven't heard of us, let me give you a little background about how we operate. Most shoe designers and manufacturers produce their lines annually, because it takes a long time for them to come up with their designs, produce prototypes, make any design alterations, get the right raw materials in the factory, manufacture the shoes, and ship them to stores. As you can imagine, that's time-consuming. Take your favorite athletic shoe, and you probably see that the manufacturer produces a new version once each year. Would you believe that we can do all of that in a matter of a few weeks? Our designers are always watching for the latest trends in each geographic market that we operate in. They can produce prototypes in a few days, and our design teams can make any alterations within hours and send off the design to the factory. A few weeks later, the shoes are available for our customers. Because we expect that our fashionable designs will quickly go out of style as the next trend hits the market, we don't produce very many of each model. That makes them rare, which drives up the demand. Fortunately for us, almost every model sells out quickly. We are really proud of how we have become the most agile footwear company in the industry. It's our competitive advantage. You might have seen some of the negative press lately about us, because more and more people are complaining about our \"throwaway\" shoes. It's true that our shoes are not made to last for multiple seasonsithey are trendy, remember? Who would be caught wearing last season's model? We do use inexpensive materials, but that is so that we can keep our shoe prices low and our customers can keep coming back for more. They are made to last for about 20 wearings, which probably works out to a few months if you don't wear them every day. Some people say that we are contributing to hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes tossed in landfills every year, but it's what our customers want. I hope you can see how challenging the situation is for a fast fashion company like us, especially for me in marketing. Consider spending millions of euros to produce a television commercial that you can only show a few times because after a month, the shoes are no longer produced. How can we run an advertisement in a women's fashion magazine showing our latest designs when we have to get them our ad layout months in advance? We can't even predict what shoes will be on store shelves then. But that's my job to gure out, and while it's tricky, it's not really my biggest problem. My biggest problem is coordinating among the network of store owners, distributors, and marketing employees around the world. While we have hundreds of stores and store owners to work with, we also have about 100 global distributors who are the ones that purchase our products. You see, some people are surprised to learn that we don't own our Hip People stores. Anyone can start up a franchise and work with a local distributor to get the shoes in their stores. The distributors then buy the inventory from us and we ship our products to the distributors\" warehouses. Neither store owners, nor store employees, nor distributors are our employees. They all work for different companies, in fact. But they are all important stakeholders. For example, store owners log on to a website where my team sells them shoe displays and instore marketing materials. Store owners often complain that the displays are out of stock or that the size or messaging is not applicable for their store. Similarly, distributors can go to our marketing website to purchase advertising brochures and ads in different sizes for their local market. Our team will pay for advertising across a whole country or region to ensure that there is consistency in our brand messages, but distributors and store owners might want to place an ad in a local newspaper to promote a certain small geographic area of stores, and in that case they pay for that themselves, but they have to use our materials. After all, the local marketing team and the local distributors know best about what trends are happening in football shoes in Brazil, boots in Finland, or sandals in Argentina. The problem is that lately, the distributors have stopped using our marketing materials. I've heard complaints that our marketing is out of touch with the local market. In some cases they are printing their own advertising, which is causing inconsistency in our image. Other distributors work with a dozen other companies like ours, so why should they invest in us? We need better collaboration with store owners and distributors so we know what their needs are. We want them to participate in developing our strategic plan and vision so we can support them appropriately. Even though we are all part of different companies, we have the same goal to sell more Hip People shoes. Ineed them to help me understand their needs so I can help them in turn to achieve their goals to increase sales. Ifthey have a great idea that other regions can use, then I want to know what that is, and we will consider using it. I'm hoping you can help me gure out how we can have a collaborative global virtual team with hundreds of marketing employees, store owners, and distributors in multiple languages and time zones. Here is my second problem. Lately, our customers are pushing us to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly. We all know that climate change is a signicant problem and that there is a growing recognition of how companies today need to be socially responsible, which includes being \"green\" and measuring our impact on the earth. Some of the glues and dyes used in our product manufacturing are chemicals that are toxic in large quantities, endangering our employees and contaminating local water supplies. We all felt bad last year when we discarded 10,000 pairs of sandals because customers complained that the straps broke the rst time they put them on, but even worse, it was a public relations nightmare. Experts told us later that those shoes would take dozens of years to decompose. More executives in our company are acknowledging that we are part of a global ecosystem, not just an independent company, and that we have a relationship and responsibility to the communities that supply our raw materials or host our manufacturing sites. We have designed a sustainability task force with members of my team in marketing but also including customers, store owners, distributors, engineering, manufacturing, shipping, designers, nance, and executive management. So far, each group has made few strides in becoming a more sustainable company, and everyone says that it's someone else's problem. It is our goal to reduce the number of shoes that end up being thrown away, but how can we do that without compromising our mission to produce fashionable low-cost footwear? We are also looking at some of the other ways that we can become a more sustainable enterprise as an organization, such as recycling programs and smaller shoe boxes. I think we all know that there is more we could do. We might be a little unusual compared to other types of organizations that you've worked with as an OD practitioner, but I'm hoping you can help. We are part of today's networked, agile, virtual organizations that have to be sustainable and yet financially secure. How can organization development help us