ABSTRACT
USA Home Products (a pseudonym, which we will abbreviate as USAHP) is a highly successful multinational corporation that has been in operation in the United States for more than a century and a half. Today it employs more than 100,000 people in manufacturing plants in eighty countries, which produce home products sold in one hundred and forty countries. Selling more than three hundred product brands, it has a presence in over 75% of the globe and annual revenues of more than US$40 billion. It has operated in Mexico since the end of World War II, with a large and increasing market share for each of its nine divisions. In 1997 it purchased a state-of-the-art production plant from a local company (which we will call MEXCO) in one of Mexico’s most distinctive provinces, Tixtlan (also a pseudonym; true name was changed for confidentiality reasons). The plant currently employees five hundred people and produces a million cases of products each month. A key element of USAHP’s global vision is maintaining consistent operations across all of its plants, regardless of what they make, who they sell it to, or where they are located. Its management believes that competing in a global marketplace requires a company to have low costs and high quality. Making certain that all of its plants use the same production processes is USAHP’s primary strategy for achieving those goals. Consequently, whenever it acquires a plant, distribution center, or office, it quickly moves to install the “USAHP way.” This strategy means that employees in an acquired operation immediately experience rapid change, and all of the uncertainties and anxieties that accompany change. Dealing with change, and with resistance to it, is the story of this chapter.
