Story Case

Story

Two years ago, I worked at sales department of X factory which was medium scale cloth manufactory as soon as I graduated from university. X factory was established by Ming Li in 1985. At the beginning, There were only 26 people who worked in this factory. Ming Li graduated from a middle school in Wen Zhou, and he had been a tailor for twenty years . In 1984, he planed to establish a cloth factory with his relatives. In 1988, Ming Li did a very successful job under a specially economic environment. During that period, Chinese government gave many preferential policies for encouraging private entrepreneurs. X factory belonged to this family till now. Moreover, when I worked at this factory, Xiang Li who is the son of Ming Li was in charge of this business. Xiang Li began to deal with some problems of production to help his father as soon as he finished the courses of high school. He was able to handle all kinds problems of this factory step by step. Eventually, he replaced his father to manage their family business.

When the first work day I found one thing that Xiang Li was in everywhere. I was really curious about that, and then my colleague told me that Xiang Li would like to monitor his employees to make sure whether they were doing a good job. In addition, he told me Xiang Li learned management from his father. However, the relationship between Xiang Li and the employees was cold and detached. I saw that he seldom talked with department managers except there were something came up. For example, Yu Zhang was manager of sales department. Every time, Mr.Zhang came back from the meeting room, he always looked like apathetic. Once he said that this decision was really unreasonable by Xiang Li, and all of staff who worked sales department got same feeling.However, no one talked about this with Xiang Li, even department managers did not complain it. Furthermore, most of staff thought that Xiang Li would not change his mind, because he thought that employees were only responsible for doing assignments. And he did not share any of the information with them, not even department managers. In this factory, each staff realized that Xiang Li trusted the opinions of his family members more than his department managers'. Moreover, my direct boss Mr.Zhang told me that Xiang Li made agreement with his relatives, especially his father, before he made a decision for his business. Therefore, nobody was willing to share their own idea with Xiang Li.

The main customers of X factory were some schools that needed this factory to manufacture over ten thousand of uniforms each year. X factory had a long term and stable relationship with those schools. One day Mr.Zhang told us that we would renegotiate with those schools immediately because they didn't want to cooperate with X factory anymore. We all were shocked, because they worked really well before that happen. As a consequence, hearsay showed up. Employees thought the style of the uniforms which X factory made is out of fashion. That's why those schools didn't want our products anymore, and they cooperate with Y factory which was our biggest competitor. In fact, even trough young staff of this factory did not really like the clothes they made, the old staff who worked for factory enjoyed these. Besides, my colleagues always talked something not about the work. When I had just been there, I can not totally understood that. To be honest, I work hard in that time, but all of I felt was that it was really hard and tired to do an excellent job without the support from other people. Therefore, my choice was to do things as my colleagues as did. After we lost the main customers, X factory began to suffer a difficult period, but I still saw that Xiang Li discussed with his relatives only. The circumstance of X factory was getting worse with the decisions he made. It seemed that the employees of X factory did not really care about it. The most of old staff talked about what they will do after they retire and the most