An Analysis of the Dick Spencer Case
The career of Dick Spencer presented in the assigned case offers several opportunities for the business student to examine principles of management using a realistic example of the modern business environment. This paper undertakes to perform an analysis of Mr. Spencer’s career in order to identify and explore those factors that contributed to his early career success as a sales person as well as those factors that contributed to significant challenges experienced by Mr. Spencer as he transitioned into the operations side of his company’s business and began to progress in his career up through the ranks of middle management. The paper concludes by offering recommendations that could have helped Mr. …show more content…

Among these are; an inauthentic and meddling management style that came across as bordering upon micromanaging (White, 2010), difficulty building trusting relationships with his subordinates, and issues with work-life balance. These will be explored in the following paragraphs.
The Tri-American Corporation, with over 22000 employees distributed world-wide through subsidiaries within the United States and fifteen foreign countries, would be categorized as a multi-domestic corporation (Robbins, Cenzo & Coulter, 2013). With its decentralized corporate governance structure in which the individual branches and subsidiaries operated as independent units, Tri-American was operating in an environment that both required a large amount of resources and presented a significant level of risk (Robbins et al., 2013). A large portion of the responsibility for successfully managing the business and ensuring profitability rested upon the local management at each of the subsidiaries.
After fourteen years with the company and various positions with steadily increasing responsibility, Mr. Spencer was promoted to junior vice president and appointed as the plant manager at the Modrow branch, a Canadian Subsidiary of the Tri-American Corporation. He inherited a complex management situation. The plant was in the middle of a major renovation and expansion project that was running behind schedule and with mounting