Asda: a New Way of Working

ASDA: A New Way of Working

James C. Soriano

Management 616 Term 4

Professor Troy Roland

May 26, 2013

Introduction

ASDA, originally founded as Associated Dairies and Farm Stores Limited, is an American owned, British supermarket chain. It was the fourth largest grocery chain in the United Kingdom that catered to “blue-collar” areas (Spector, 2012, p.17). However, it’s strategic renewal to venture into wealthier suburban locations and non-food retail operations negatively impacted profits. In addition, top management represented a lavished corporate profile, which increased overhead spending and price of products. By 1991, ASDA was nearly bankrupt.

When Archie Norman took over as Chief Executive Officer, organizational change was necessary. His approach or response to effective change can be characterized by the underlying theme of his actions directed toward change implementation, strategic renewal, organizational capabilities and discontinuous change. This paper provides an overview of the necessary changes that Archie Norman implemented to position ASDA away from financial disaster, his application of the three faces of change, and the attempt to apply the sequential model of effective change to define what actions Norman and his top management 
team took to build employee motivation to engage in change.

Strategic Responsiveness

Organizational change is typically initiated in response to a trigger event – a shift in the environment that creates a need for altered strategies and new patters of employee behavior (page 14) More importantly, to execute a strategic response, organizational leaders can apply four organizational methods for effective change (Spector, 2012, p.3):

Change Implementation: the action taken by organizational leaders in order to support strategic renewal and achieve outstanding results in a dynamic environment.

Strategic Renewal: a change in an organization’s strategy...