Question - Indicates 7 to 12 relevant theories, and explains how thesetheories relate to the case.

Bridge Software Company David Meacheam, 1999

Simon Ryan let out a long sigh and stared out the window. In front of him on the table in the makeshift boardroom lay the business papers. Nobody had bothered to take their copies with them. He couldnt believe that Bridge Software made any money at all, let alone the $12.7 million profit in the last year, up from the hard-earned $3.1 million of the previous year. The place was utter chaos, he thought, with even less apparent order now than when he had joined the company 3 years ago.

In the Beginning

Bridge Software was an offshoot of the Westbury Bridge Company. Jeremy Wilkes was the creative genius behind the company. Employed initially as a draughtsman for the Westbury Company, Jeremy quickly became bored with the creation of plans for bridges. In his spare time Jeremy developed project management software that proved very popular with the Westbury Bridge Company engineers and project managers. Through word-of-mouth, Jeremy developed a ready market amongst the NSW engineering community.

In his final year with the Westbury Bridge Company, Jeremy recognized that his software had delivered a much better return on investment than any of Westburys bridge building contracts. Jeremy sensed an opportunity. He approached Philip Westbury with a proposal to buy out the software business. Philip also saw an opportunity, and for a 30% equity holding in Jeremys new company, he sold the ownership of the software to Jeremy, at a very reasonable rate.

Two years after this, Jeremy recruited Simon Ryan to Bridge Software. In these first two years, Jeremy had built up a substantial client base, not just in Australia, but throughout the world. The software had initially been marketed through engineering trade journals, and was sold in the then traditional form of floppy disks with a paper instruction manual. At about the time Jeremy recruited Simon, the company had broadened its marketing, offering the software via the Internet, with a significant saving for customers who appreciated the convenience of downloading both the software and the instruction manual. Customers would unlock their software package with a unique encryption key after they had paid for the software.

Simons background was quite similar to Jeremys. He also had been a draughtsman, employed in local government. Simon had come to know Jeremy when Simons employer, Hornsby City Council, had bought a copy of the software from the Westbury Bridge Company. Simon had considerable operating system knowledge that he had shared with Jeremy when Jeremy was developing a new version of the software. On a visit to Hornsby Council, Jeremy had been impressed with Simons apparent administration skills. Recognizing that the Bridge Software Company had grown to the point that it needed more than Jeremys occasional attention to administration, Jeremy recruited Simon. Simon resisted being employed on the same basis as the rest of the Bridge Software staff, an industry standard rate of pay with a guaranteed share of profit, settling instead for a higher salary based on a 38-hour week. Jeremy had felt a bit uneasy about this arrangement, all other Bridge Software staff had been happy to accept the standard wage and profit- sharing arrangement, even those who had joined Bridge when profits had been slim or even non- existent. Jeremy attributed Simons reluctance to take the lesser wage and profit sharing to the age difference, Simon was 37, the next eldest staffer was Vicky Roberts, the longest serving of the customer service staff, she was 30, the rest of the staff were in their early 20s, Jeremy was 29.

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When Jeremy recruited Simon he hadnt put a name to the position he wanted Simon to take. It was Simon who had first referred to his position as Administrator. Jeremy hadnt particularly liked the term. He felt it was commonly applied to the role of someone taking over a firm in liquidation, but he went along with Simons request. He was pleased with Simons performance, he brought a great deal more reliability to the organizations financial systems. Jeremy recognized that the few organizational hiccups that had occurred over the last year were the result of many of the R&D and customer service people being too busy, rather any lack of organization on Simons part.

Simons great success had been to organize the accounts system so that all clients were promptly billed for both the purchase of the software and whatever service option, if any, they took up. To almost everyones surprise, it was the client support side of the business that had come to deliver ever-larger slices of Bridge Softwares profits. That growth in business had now just started to level out, and there was a widespread appreciation in Bridge software that the project management applications market was nearly exhausted. Sales of both service and upgrades in that area would doubtless continue to deliver good profits, but a new product direction was sorely needed.

Simons Goals

Simons troubles with his colleagues had started when he attempted to better organize the customer support service. The majority of customer queries now came via e-mail, often with an accompanying file from the customer that was the subject of the clients troubles. All clients knew that they could phone for on-the-spot assistance, but recognized that they would get a better solution if they e-mailed their query and gave the Bridge Software people the chance to come back with a more considered response. Simons initial concern had been that neither Vicky nor the other customer service staff seemed to ever work the 38-hour week that they were employed to work. Simon viewed the customer service staff as Vickys responsibility because she was the eldest, held shares in the company, had the most experience and seemed to command the respect of her colleagues. Yet she never used any job title, never gave any staff explicit instructions and seemed to spend as much time as possible working alongside Jeremy, developing program enhancements and new project management applications.

The telephone help service was relayed to a mobile phone that was shared by Vicky and all the customer support staff. The only way Simon could properly determine who was delivering telephone support at any particular time was to ring the support line number and simply see who answered. On a couple of occasions in the last year there had been nobody on phone duty, and this had led to several customer complaints. Many of the support staff, and even some of the product development people, didnt bother coming into Bridges premises on many work days, preferring to pick up their e-mail and files remotely and working on them from home. Some of the staff had developed clever macros to log service calls and respond to e-mail queries.

To Simons annoyance, Jeremy didnt seem concerned by this lack of attention to regular work attendance by many of the staff. On several occasions Simon confronted junior staff who hadnt come in for a number of days and asked what they had been doing. He was further annoyed to find that those confronted could usually only point to either service logs or other electronic records of their work, and not to any evidence of the amount of time they had taken to respond to the service requests. Several of those he confronted had spent the bulk of their time writing code for new product, part of an informal arrangement with either Jeremy or one of his R&D colleagues. Simon had then started allocating the costs of the labour back against the R&D budget, as a result R&D was almost constantly over budget. All of those staff Simon confronted had in fact worked well in excess of 38 hours, but they didnt seem to care when Simon coldly told them that they werent

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about to be paid overtime for the extra hours they had worked. Overtime had rarely ever been paid to anyone, and most employees never asked for it.

Simons reproaches to these junior staff members were the cause of growing unease, Many staff resented Simon questioning their work, and actively avoided him. One relatively new staff member, Christine Brock, was particularly outspoken in her belief that Simon should mind his own business. Chris was a very knowledgeable programmer, who, though new to the company, seemed to be able to command the respect of her colleagues. Despite what he saw as her low status, Simon was surprised to see that many of the junior staff seemed to share Chriss view. When Simon tried to take this and his other concerns higher he was never certain if he should be talking to Jeremy or Vicky. In many instances the junior staff seemed to be simultaneously answering to both of them.

When Simon had first come to Bridge Software, Jeremy had offered extra wages to him to maintain and develop specific software design solutions. Simon had not taken up the offer, and in time others in the R&D section took up those tasks. Simon found with administration work taking so much of his 38 hours, and few opportunities to use his technical skills, increasingly he could not understand, let alone solve many of the service support questions he saw coming in on the e-mail system. Simon progressively found that he had less and less in common with the people he worked with. Privately, he started to refer to them as nerds. While he liked most of them individually, collectively they behaved in ways that Simon didnt understand, joking amongst themselves in a language he now scarcely understood, and conforming to their own informal dress code.

Simons next major source of frustration was the management meetings. These were supposed to be held every six weeks, but in practice the gap between them was often two or three months, and sometimes more. As Simon saw it, the only people who should be attending the meetings were the seven shareholders, Jeremy, Vicky and four other staff who had invested in the organization on an equity basis, plus the Westbury Bridge Companys nominee. In practice, the meetings were commonly attended by most of the staff. All those who worked for the company except Simon were employed on a profit-sharing basis, but in theory only those who had equity in the company could vote.

Jeremy held 40% control of the company, Westbury retained a 30% share, Vicky and four other staff held the remaining 30% equally. Yet when it came voting on any matter, everyone seemed to participate on an equal basis, irrespective of whether they held shares. For the most part though, matters were agreed by consensus, and often these agreements were reached in informal meetings in the workplace rather than at the management meetings. Instead, the meetings seemed to be used to merely ratify decisions that had already been taken. Only in the instance of a major issue would Jeremy contact the Westbury nominee. With Bridge Software delivering an ever-growing return to Westbury, the nominee was quite happy with this arrangement. Neither Jeremy nor the Westbury nominee seemed to have any interest in ensuring that their votes carried the extra weight that would naturally reflect their bigger stake in the company.

One of the results of this process was that there was often some confusion amongst staff over what the current plans were and who was responsible for their implementation. This situation was made worse by Simons belief that decisions werent to take effect until they were ratified by a full management meeting. Anyone who tried to implement an interim decision would have to do so without Simons support. Further, with 27 people now on staff, the approach of discussion and resolution of issues in the workplace with later ratification at the management meeting was starting to take up increasing amounts of time.

Change is Initiated

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Simon used the third anniversary of his appointment to Bridge Software to present to the management board his grand plan. He didnt discuss his work with anyone, preferring to rely on the comprehensiveness of his recommendations to persuade all at the meeting of the merit of his plans.

Everyone in the company was to have both a title and a job description, starting with the CEO, Jeremy. In deference to Jeremys position, Simon made Jeremys job description very brief, writing in terms of setting the organizations strategic direction. Jeremy was no longer to have a direct role in R&D. Instead Nicole Clark, one of his most experienced staff was designated Manager, Research and Development. One of Simons greatest difficulties had been that aside from Jeremy, the most capable person for the role was Vicky, but he didnt want to see her torn between managing two functions. Vicky was to be designated Manager, Customer Services. Her job description included responsibility for properly rostering client support staff. Simon had designed an elaborate array of performance indicators that Vicky was to report against, including prompt responses to queries and achieving a significant reduction in annual staff turnover. To Simons surprise, when he checked these indicators against the performance of the client support service over the previous 2 years he found that in every instance the goals had been exceeded, without Vicky even trying.

For each member of Jeremys and Vickys staff, Simon devised job titles and elaborate job descriptions. All duties were specific to the section in which they worked. Simon included the first ever Bridge Software organizational chart, with Nicole and Vicky reporting to Jeremy, and with their staff in turn reporting to them. On the chart there were straight lines of authority. The board, included on the document was depicted above the organizational chart, immediately above Jeremy. It included only the seven names of the equity holders listed.

The Board of Management Meeting

As usual, the meeting was held in the cramped common room that passed as a boardroom. The meeting was a disaster. Upon reading Simons recommendations, many of the junior staff burst out laughing at the titles proposed for their positions. Chris Brock was the first to express her contempt at the job title and description proposed for her, saying that she hadnt joined Bridge Software to fill such a narrow role. After a fiery debate, in which an increasing number of junior staff voiced their concerns, Chris led a walkout of staff. Although as surprised as everyone by Simons proposals, Jeremy pleaded with them to give Simons ideas a fair go. After the walkout only Simon, Jeremy, Vicky, the Westbury nominee and one other equity holder remained in the room. Jeremy quietly asked of Simon what he hoped to achieve with the proposals he had put forward. Simon replied that he was only seeking to bring a bit more certainty and stability to the way Bridge Software operated. Jeremy said a few polite words, by way of formally closing the meeting, and asked Simon if he could come to his office in the morning to discuss a few matters.