Case Study- Proctor and Gamble

1.Proctor & Gamble’s business strategy seems to be to find creative ways to maintain the popularity and marketability of their current products as well as to continue to progress and cater to the needs of the “Facebook Generation” by creating newer, more modern brands. Collaboration and innovation play an integral part in that business strategy. As stated in the case study, Proctor & Gamble is a huge company with over 100,000 employees. This means that there are over 100,000 ideas for how to maintain and improve the marketability of the current product line and just as many ideas for new products. This seems that it would present an issue in sharing ideas quickly and efficiently. According to the text, Proctor & Gamble employees were using email to communicate and essentially share these ideas. That means over 100,000 emails were being sent at any given moment, multiple times a day. Email is the way most companies prefer to communicate but when you have thousands of them coming every day, it becomes a very ineffective communication method because I’m quite sure that most of those emails don’t get read. So finding better ways for employees to communicate and collaborate to share those hundreds of thousands of ideas and be able to provide feedback. Eventually those 100,000 ok ideas will become 20 or 30 great ideas that Proctor & Gamble can use. Innovation is the piece of the puzzle that will allow Proctor & Gamble to take those ideas and find ways to realize them.
2. Proctor & Gamble is using a number of different technologies to increase their collaboration efforts including a variety of products from Microsoft. As stated in the text, the standard for communication at Proctor & Gamble has been email, specifically Microsoft Outlook email. The key to making employees comfortable with the switch was to provide them a way to make the change gradually. Proctor and Gamble used Microsoft products primarily because they wanted to make sure the new systems were compatible