What’s Stifling
Creativity
At

September 20, 2008

Case One

Team Three
Pauline Respress, Denise Wilson,
Matt Harden and Allen Linton Executive Summary

CoolBurst is a conservative company which undermines creativity in an effort to maximize production and control. The company values its traditional culture, has a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” philosophy, and does not view innovation as a normal part of business. By not capitalizing on the ingenious creations by Sam Jenkins and Carol Velez, CoolBurst missed the mark of the changing needs of its current and potential customers, and lost some of its market share to competitors. Its’ structure, culture, policies and practices, reward …show more content…

Its’ structure, culture, policies and practices, management style, and lack of a reward system paralyze creative innovation and motivation. Structure
CoolBurst has been an independent company since 1975 and retains much of its old organizational culture and traditions. The company has operated on the same formula until its inception and fails to progress with the changing needs of society and its customers. It primarily focuses on producing its current products instead of creating new and improved products.

Culture
CoolBurst has a non-diverse workforce of 200 employees who joined the company after high school or college. Even Garth LaRoue, the company’s former CEO, had worked at CoolBurst during his entire career. Since CoolBurst is basically the only place that the employees have worked, they do not have a diversity of knowledge, skills and expertise to create new ideas. They are satisfied with the company’s traditional culture, and do not have a fresh perspective on solving problems from new angles.
CoolBurst does not welcome and support new ideas. New ideas are met with skepticism instead of open minds and exploration of reasons to make the ideas work. For example, when Sam Jenkins approached Roger Blatt, Director of Distribution, about opening up new channels for distributing CoolBurst drinks, Roger gave many reasons why the ideas would not work.