THE AES CASE ANALYSIS
The paper analysed the AES case by Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in 1997, from the
company's strategy to the product, from corporate culture to human resource
practices, discussing underlying success and risk of corporation development, finally
focus on some conclusion of suggestions for future.
Background
The AES Corporation (NYSE: AES) was founded in 1981 by Roger Sant and Dennis
Bakke, who used to serve in government for a long time. Originally supplying
consulting service to the energy industry, the company began operating its first
power plant in Houston in 1986 and went public as AES 1991, by the end of in 1995
fiscal year, AES was selling electricity to customers in the United States , England,
Northern Ireland, Argentina and China. Over the years, to expand its territory and
resources, AES continued to acquire a number of power generation plants using
different fuels, like coal, natural gas, oil and hydro systems. In addition to that, AES
also established some joint ventures with local companies to enter into local
markets. By the end of 1996, AES almost had 25,000 employees located virtually all
over the world as it was getting larger and increasingly geographically dispersed.
The company saw itself as “the global power company” and had its mission
“supplying electricity to customers world-wide in a socially- responsible way.
Mostly you would deem that it must have a systematic organization and process to
lead to success, people did their jobs specific, and there must be a top down
operation way throughout the company. That was not true. Actually, AES was a
totally different company, and it had no any specialized departments, like legal,
public relation, environment or strategic planning, as well as an HR department. You
might call into questions, how it operated over the years? Could what work for so
long and continued to work as a corporation grew and operated increasingly on a
global basis? How different should or could it remain?...
