Becton Dickinson

Becton Dickinson VACUTAINER Systems (BDVS) is a division within Becton Dickenson (BD) that makes blood collection systems for hospitals and doctors in various markets around the world. They made the transition from their historical culture of an “international” style to a “transnational” style of management. Historically, the US division was in charge of developing strategy, conducing R&D, and the international operations were seen as sales and marketing appendages, rather than as strategic assets. The result of this “international” structure was that BDVS was very slow at responding to changing market conditions around the world, and they were losing market share as a result. To counter this weakness, they established a group called the Worldwide Blood Collection Team (WBCT) which provided an informal communication forum in which various managers from around the world could meet and try to direct global projects. This WBCT group played a major role during the launch of two products for BDVS; the HEMOGARD which was based on a European request, and the PLUS TUBE which was based on a Japanese request. This team was seen as a great success at BDVS in the way in which they helped to facilitate the collecting and sharing of information globally, and the integration that it helped to create between marketing and R&D in the various countries. In their effort to shift to a transnational management style, BDVS was wise to avoid the formal “matrix” approach of rapid structural change, but instead were quite successful at utilizing task forces and committees to build informal relationships across the globe. They tried to build the informal relationships (and changing the psychology of the managers) before implementing any formal organizational structural changes. They also helped to create multiple layers of competitive advantages on both the global and the local dimensions.

In the future, one of the areas of concern will be the way in which R&D assets will be distributed, and whether BDVS should keep the R&D efforts centralized in the US, or whether the R&D efforts should be dispersed in order to better capture local inputs. One interesting compromise BDVS came up with was to have foreign “liaisons” work in the US to make sure the R&D department captured the needs of the foreign subsidiaries. I believe that this approach is good up to a point, but that BDVS will need to continue to disperse R&D activities as foreign markets continue to grow in importance. BDVS might be able to use new communication technologies to link “centers of excellence” at a minimal cost.

A second major issue is how to manage the human resources function in the transnational environment. They needed to figure out how to match the HR structure with the new strategies, and how to evaluate employees in terms of contribution to global business. So far, they have been good about making WBCT team members roles a central part of their job descriptions, and not just a side role for which they would not be evaluated. In my opinion, the company will need to make a number of HR adjustments in the future; they will need to find a way to both encourage managers to take on new global assignments without the fear of having their careers side-tracked for doing so. They will need to encourage managers to think in terms of global strategy without taking their eye off of local priorities. They will have to encourage their leaders to travel to the various offices around the world on “fact-finding” missions, without encouraging wasteful or excessive travel expenses. All of these items will be a challenge for the HR department in the future. Another department that will be highly impacted is the IT department that will need to invest in information systems to better help this new organization to gather and properly evaluate the wealth of information coming from the field.

Finally, there is the major issue of whether or not WBCT is the right forum for leading BDVS in the future for global projects. At this point it is hard to say, but my suggestion is that the company should remain flexible by not engraining the WBCT in any formal reporting structure. Leave it as an informal forum. For now, it appears as if WBCT is a good group, but it may not be in the future. They need to be prepared for adjusting circumstances in the future, and be ready and willing to change as new conditions arise.