Change

There are a few instances were a company tried to institute a large-scale organizational change effort and failed. One recent one was with the FedEx purchase of Kinko's. FedEx had decided that Kinko's would complement its business since they had many mutual customers. The shipping company also felt that if it could professionalize the information Kinko's it would improve the company's profitability. That was not to be. Kinko's had a strong organizational culture that was a bad fit with the FedEx culture. Kinko's culture was informal in nature, while FedEx has a formal culture based on a high level of professionalism. After years of failing to integrate Kinko's into the FedEx culture, FedEx ended up taking a massive writedown on the transaction and rebranding the subsidiary as FedEx Office in an attempt to kill off any remaining Kinko's culture within the organization.

The change was radical, not incremental. FedEx...
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