Using History for Strategic Problem-Solving: The Harley-Davidson Effect

This article is about how Harley-Davidson used a different technique when faced with major morale issues with their employees. The issues laid mainly with the labor crew's t their famous plant that served as the "model environment" Incidentally; this would not be the case. The problems were mainly because of the lack of productivity and between the middle and upper management. The question here was why the morale had changed so much. Back in the 60's, Harley workers were remembered to be productive, happy, motivated and enthusiastic. Harley-Davidson was determined to figure out why the major morale struggle was happening (Hopkins, 1999, para 1).

To find some kind of answers, Harley-Davidson hired a social scientist to construct a history of the plant that showed some very interesting facts. When Harley-Davidson was growing, it was also upgrading their technology to keep up. Meanwhile, no-one was watching the possible issues that would later be a result in the Operations department. Undoubtedly, as this plant continued to grow larger and add more employees and become corporate, a certain kind of management has to be established. New upper management started to implement this new way of managing on the employees. According to the article, some of the decisions that were made ended up violating the hourly employees ways of working as well as their expectations regarding how to act on the floor, how and what to make decisions about, processes, priorities and tasks (Hopkins, 1999, para 2,3).

I thought it was really insightful to learn in this article that once the employees learned the history of the changes and growth and the effects it and in the company and employees opened their eyes to it. In the end, it had a positive effect on them. The employees started to really understand the issues at hand and realize why management had to change the way the business was being ran. Once the economy turned and the employees could see for themselves the depth of the problems, they knew that the changes were all for the good of the company. On the flip side, the managers also could see how they and why they lost their employees trust and how what they expected was different and how their rights had become violated in some way (Hopkins, 1999, para 3,4).

This article for me was really intriguing because I was employed with Harley during the endless months of lay-offs and downsizing and re-organizing. I have been there for five years and can honestly say it feels like almost a completely different company as far as the management goes. It's more structured now and there are more processes in place. It is still hard for most of the long-time employees to adjust but if it means keeping sales up during this economy and keeping the current jobs, it indefinitely is the right decision. I am all for it.

This article was chosen from Business Source Complete in the EBSCOhost database. It is a scholarly source because

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