Xerox Case Study

Xerox is famous for many of it's technological breakthroughs, such as the first mouse and the user interface seen in Mac's and Windows operating systems. However, Xerox did not always capitalize on their ideas, and many employees kept leaving and joined other firms, bringing their acquired knowledge with them. In 1999, Rick Thoman replaced Paul Allair as chief executive officer, and immediately began fixing problems. Barry Romeril was the chief financial officer, and he did a very poor job at managing the corporate finances. He was to be fired, but he was an old friend of Allaire who did not want get rid of him. Xerox's global sales division was to be revised, but Dolan, president of Xerox's global sales, disagreed and got away with it for being friends with Allaire. Dolan also had a sister, who was Anne Mulcahy. In May of 2001, Thoman was fired and Mulcahy replaced his position.

In summary, I think that the main problem as to why Xerox was not as successful as it could be was because employees, esepecially those who were experienced, kept leaving the company, and the ones who were not contributing as much could not be fired.

EMI12 "The Costs of Employee Turnover" Article Summary

This article talks about employee turnover, and how it can become very costly to the business to replace employees. There are many direct and indirect costs when replacing workers, such as using money for advertisements, using time to interview applicants, and opportunity costs. Many factors contribute to the total costs of employee turnover, and they are pre-departure, recruitment, selection, orientation/training, and lost productivity. They also did some detailed studying, and found that the higher the job complexity, the higher the cost of turnover. The total cost for low-complexity jobs were ~$5700, and ~10,000 for high-complexity jobs. They have also found that the factor "lost productivity" was the biggest contributor to the total costs associated with turnover. In general, the cost of turnover is highest for the more complex jobs in large upscale hotels that operate in high cost of living locations. In order to succeed in the competitive hotel environment, you must understand the costs and factors of employee turnover and use that knowledge to create better policies and procedures for keeping your employees.

-Jimmy, Deepak