Introduction
The world of business develops according to its own rules and laws. The importance of management and planning in this world is crucial, and the Tyco International Company obviously understands this fact. Being one of the world-leading companies in the spheres of producing digitized solutions for fire and security, electronics, healthcare, and engineered products and services, Tyco has faced numerous challenges in its development (Tyco International, 2010). However, going through those challenges, the company managed to become even stronger and to learn valuable lessons from its own controversial actions and mistakes. These facts allow speaking about the properly developed management planning at Tyco.
Tyco Management
Background
As such, Tyco International is a worldwide company operating in more than 60 countries and employing over 100,000 employees globally (Tyco International, 2010). The manufacturing line of Tyco International includes digitized solutions for fire protection and detection products, valves and controls, and other products and services. According to its mission statement, Tyco International is the company valuing its customers and employees above all, while the goals of Tyco include overall development, providing its customers with the highest quality products, and excellence in every single aspect of the corporate performance (Tyco International, 2010). Accordingly, the company attributes great importance to management planning.
Planning Function of Management
Thus, the planning function is one of the major functions of management at Tyco International. According to Bateman and Snell (2009), in any company “planning is a formal expression of managerial intent. It describes what managers decide to do and how they will do it. It provides the framework, focus, and direction required for a meaningful effort” (p. 132). Therefore, the management at Tyco International is assigned the tasks of strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency management. These tasks are acquired especially great importance in the light of the legal, ethical, and corporate social responsibility issues that Tyco International has faced in its recent developmental stages.
Tyco Management Planning Developments
Legal Issues
The first challenge Tyco International faced in 2002 was the corporate scandal, the essence of which was the improper use of the company’s funds by its managerial staff (Verschoor, 2006). As a result of that scandal, according to Verschoor (2006), the “former CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted in 2005 on 22 of the 23 counts he faced”, while the company faced the need to restore its completely destroyed public image and respect from both customers and partners. The major effect of this legal issue was the appointment of the new CEO Ed Breen, who reformed Tyco at all the levels of its organizational structure.
Ethics
The same corporate fund usage scandal of 2002 made Tyco International face an ethical issue that resulted in a positive developmental outcome. After the former CEO of the company was convicted in 2005, Tyco faced a negative public attitude and the task of the new CEO was, besides dealing with the effects of the legal issues, to introduce new ethics to the company. What Breen decided to do was to fire 290 of 300 of Tyco’s managers who were in this or that way involved in the 2002 scandal, and appointed the new ones together with the newly elected Board of Directors (Verschoor, 2006). Thus, an ethical issue facilitated Tyco’s restructuring, which was long needed but could not be done with the forces of former managerial staff and the CEO.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Finally, the 2002 controversy over Tyco management allowed the company to drastically improve its corporate social responsibility standards. This became possible again thanks to the committed work by Ed Breen, who ingrained the eternally new philosophy of corporate responsibility. The latter was to be perceived after Breen’s appointment as the personal responsibility of every Tyco employee. In sum, every worker formed the total corporate social responsibility of the whole company by ensuring the highest standards of his/her performance (Verschoor, 2006). Thus, the issue that concerned Tyco’s corporate social responsibility was turned into an opportunity to reform the corporate philosophy and restore the company’s image in the market among both customers and partners.
Strategic, Tactical, Operational, and Contingency Planning at Tyco
Company’s Goals
Further on, the issues of strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency planning at Tyco International have considerable importance. The analysis of the company allows singling out three main factors that affected the change that followed in respect of those planning initiatives after the 2002 change in the corporate governance. These three factors are the company’s goals, market conditions, and the social image of Tyco (Tyco International, 2010). Concerning the first factor, Tyco International has always claimed its goals to be the provision of the highest quality products and services to the customers and valuing its employees. The reforms carried out by Ed Breen prove that the management planning at Tyco is set to help the company achieve its strategic goals.
Market Conditions
The second of the above-listed factors is the condition of the market that is constantly changing. In conformity with this change, Tyco International claims to structure its strategic, tactical, and operational planning initiatives (Tyco International, 2009), while the contingency planning of the company is the attempt to prepare for dealing with occurrences that other planning varieties are designed to help avoid. More specifically, Tyco International is set to provide the products in the highest demand in the market and be ready for sudden and unpredicted changes in the market and in the global economic situation.
Social Image of the Company
Finally, the social image of the company, or more specifically the need to restore and work on it after the 2002 controversy, is the third factor that determined and still determines the directions of the strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency planning at Tyco International. As Verschoor (2006) argues, Tyco’s rating by GovernanceMetrics International (GMI) in 2002 was 1.5 of 10, while the middle of 2005 saw its increase to 9 points. This fact allows stating that the importance of the positive social image drove the restructuring of Tyco International.
Conclusion
The above discussion allows seeing that Tyco International is one of the world leaders in providing digitized solutions for fire protection and detection products and services, valves and controls, etc. In its development, Tyco faced a lot of challenges in the form of legal issues, ethical and corporate governance controversies that seemed to destroy Tyco but actually turned out to make it stronger. The new CEO Ed Breen reformed Tyco and used the challenges as opportunities for bringing Tyco to new levels. Obviously, management planning played a crucial role in the success of this reformation process. Tyco International changed the whole managerial staff and even the Board of Directors to make sure that the old corrupted views are no longer valued, and after this, the company managed to reach the highest level of its corporate governance development over the 50 years of its existence.
References
Bateman, T. and Snell, A. (2009). Management: Leading and Collaborating in a Competitive World, Eighth Edition. The McGraw−Hill Companies.
Tyco International. (2009). An Annual Report. Web.
Tyco International. (2010). Official Web Site. Web.
Verschoor, C. (2006). Tyco: An Ethical Metamorphosis. Web.