Our Client: Farmland Industries

Case Study-Farmland Industries.pdf
(get acrobat reader)

Challenge:

• facilitate the turnaround of a low performance culture (more than $152 million in losses the previous year)
• breathe new hope into a discouraged work force
• assist a new CEO, brought in from "the outside," in making meaningful and strategic change

Solution:

• perform culture diagnostics, with special attention to systems, styles and practices that undermine good performance
• provide individual "effectiveness profiles" for scores of managers
• provide one-on-one and team coaching of managers
• rollout a custom-tailored, principle-based leadership development program, first to 1,000 managers, then cascaded downward to hundreds more employees
• assist with a range of strategic alignment issues

Result:

• a $207 million improvement in profits in 12 months (now a case study at the Harvard Business School)

     NOTE: Several years after this case study, another management     team at Farmland abandoned the sound leadership principles followed by our client CEO (since retired) and ran the company into bankruptcy. The lesson? Culture is elastic and can “snap back” into previous states. Sound principles are timeless, and must be followed relentlessly over the long haul.