Beth Cronin is a licensed mountain guide. She also has a degree in management. About five years ago, she started her own consulting firm called Rocky Mountain Leaders in a suburb near Denver, Colorado. She arranges training sessions for executives and man-agers at small to medium-sized firms, teaching them interpersonal and leadership skills. Cronin uses the great outdoors as her class-room and arranges hiking, camping, and occasional backpacking or rock climbing trips for her clients, creating scripted challenges for participants designed to help them build their management skills. She also finds that the time preparing dinner over a small camp stove, setting up a tent, and packing gear for a hike can be great team training exercises. Currently, Cronin has two assistants—part-time employees with backgrounds similar to hers. One is in the process of earning an MBA, while the other majored in psychology. Both employees are skilled outdoorspeople, and both will need full-time jobs in the near future. Cronin wants Rocky Mountain Leaders to grow. Cronin wants to begin offering workshops and seminars designed to help client organizations become responsive organizations in a fast-paced, competitive business environment. She wants to be able to help them organize around their core competencies, create strategic alliances, develop superior customer relationship management, and evaluate their organizational agility. To accomplish this, she needs to evaluate her own company, making sure it emphasizes its own core competencies as it grows. She knows she will have to turn her two part-time positions into full-time, and potentially hire more employees. She will have to create alliances with other companies—possibly training firms, campgrounds, climbing instructors, transportation companies, GPS satellite device providers, and the like. She will have to focus on her own customer relationship management as she enters new markets. In short, Cronin knows that the next phase for Rocky Mountain Leaders will be challenging—but no more difficult than climbing a mountain.
1. Describe Rocky Mountain Leaders’ core competencies.
2. What steps can Beth Cronin take to make sure Rocky Mountain Leaders is a responsive organization as it grows? Is Rocky Mountain Leaders better off as a big company or a small one? Why?
3. Create an exercise or challenge that Rocky Mountain Leaders could use to help a client firm become a high-involvement organization.
