Human Resource Management

Call a Truck

Dragan Z. Milosevic, Peerasit Patanakul, and Sabin Srivannaboon

CAT, Inc. was a powerful company. They provided their customers with the goods to transport, the food to eat, the gas to drive, and a place to sleep overnight. In fact, they provided everything that a driver would need on the road. What kind of company was that? CAT, Inc. was a broker between companies that transport the freight and the owners of the freight. And they were the premier broker of the market.

In the 1980s, the technology wasn’t very complicated or advanced. “Computer” was a fairly new term that was just recently becoming known to this business. Most requests and information were handled by fax or telephone. CAT, Inc. was one of the many companies that used this technology.

THE NEW CEO

CAT, Inc. just got a new CEO, James Carter. James was voted and selected by the majority of managers who were former drivers. To the surprise of the majority of the employees, the new CEO was not a former driver. He was a businessman who viewed CAT, Inc. as a dinosaur, an about-to-be-obsolete business that used fax and telephone.

The new CEO had a new vision. The vision was to be in touch with custom- ers by a new means that radically changed the way people communicated. The means was known as a computer. This required massive investments. Luckily, CAT, Inc. was in a position that could afford the changes. So, to make his vision possible, he launched a number of operative and strategic changes.

Among the operative changes, James ordered a stop to many fax-based communications between his people and customers and changed them to be fully computer-based. In that manner, CAT, Inc. became the first company in its industrial history that was able to provide everything a driver would need on the road, ordered by request through a computer system. However, because not many people had computers at the time, the company also maintained a fair use of the traditional means of fax and...