Gene One

Gene One Leadership Change

Kelly Williams

LDR/531

October 6, 2010

Dr. Iffat Kahn

Tragedy struck in the Gene One organization. CEO and founder Don Ruiz has passed away during the critical implementation of a strategy to move Gene One from a private organization to a publically traded company. Prior to Don’s passing the executive team at Gene One developed a vision of where they see the company in the next 3 years. The new vision for Gene One is “To become the global leader in the bio-agriculture industry by committing to cutting edge research and development that will ultimately be used to create innovative products that will feed the world.” As Don’s sister it is necessary to look at the remaining members of the team and analyze their commitment to Don’s vision of becoming a publically traded organization. Gene One has experienced substantial growth in the 8 years of being a private organization making it worth over $400 million dollars and with money from investors has the ability to achieve the 40% growth.

The culture of Gene One is still fairly young, but according to Yukl (2006) “The culture in young, successful organizations is likely to be strong because it is instrumental to the success of the organization, the assumptions have been internalized by current members and transmitted to new members, and the founder is still present to symbolize and reinforce the culture” (p. 294 para. 4). Yukl also goes on to say that as the company matures the culture will al evolve, especially when new leaders are brought in. With the passing of Don Ruiz Gene One will definitely go through a major leadership change and the company culture will change.

As with all change there is going to be resistance from some employees. Converting Gene One to a publicly traded company is a planned change. According to Robbins and Judge (2007) there are two goals associated with planned change “first, it seeks to improve the ability of the organization to adapt to changes in...