Case I Analysis Report

Prepared by
Yujia Zhang

January 1, 2015

Prepared for
Aditya Simha
Ph.D.
MGMT 301

NutriSelect is a food giant that makes every kind of food a person can eat in between. Dan
Sestak, the new CEO of NutriSelect, is facing some problems and challenges because of his
latest promotion which should have happened five years later.
Currently, NutriSelect is still struggling with the huge hit in 2008. Good investments in
technology and R&D implemented by the former CEO Michael Botolph have not improved the
companys performance as expected. While Dan was confounded by the companys financial
situation, the confidential financial information was leaked to public. The media reported that
Dan is lack of experience and ability to lead the company fight against its serious financial
situations. At the same time, NutriSelects employees were worrying that the new leader will
conduct downsizing to reduce costs.
Facing both inside and outside queries, Dan also had a hard time to manage his relationships
with his senior executive team. Rena, the COO of NutriSelect, criticized Dans guess of the
person who leaked the information, and directly opposed to his idea of looking at staffs carefully.
Also, Rena has different opinions with Dane on choosing the different supplier for the frozen
dinner lines. I consider Rena has a Big Five Personality profile with relatively high extraversion,
relatively low neuroticism, low agreeableness, high conscientiousness, and relatively high
openness to experience. It is quite obvious of Renas low agreeableness as she almost criticized
or denies Dans every statement, and looks unsympathetic about Danes tough situations even
though she is the member of his executive board. People with high extraversion usually
predisposes individuals to experience positive emotional states and feel good about themselves.
Rena shows relatively high extraversion as she feels good about her decision to choose a new
supplier, and dismissed Dans worry about the potential quality issues of the low-priced supplies.
At the same time, Sam, the CFO of the NutriSelect, kept reminding Dan of his abundant
experience managing the company and showed a strong need of power. Only Cybil, the head of
public relations showed her sympathy to Dan, and gave the pertinent suggestion to help relieve
Dans stress from the outside media. Thus, I consider Cybil has a personality with high
extraversion, and agreeableness. She also has need of achievement as in her suggestion for Dan,
she expressed her plans on how to change the medias view of Dan in a short time, which means
she really desired to challenge herself on dealing with the stickiest issue of the company now.
And she shows the need for affiliation as she stood out to relief the tension between Rena and
Dan during the meeting.
Dan is a resourceful and creative person as we can see from his business acumen in organic food.
He is relatively high in neuroticism, slightly low in agreeableness and open to experience. From
his reactions to the media pressure, the currently situations of the company and the supplies, we
can see his tendencies to experience negative emotional states as he easily got distressed after the
meeting with the executive board and he did not believe that he had that ability to handle current
problems. And these are what a person with low in extraversion and high in neuroticism will act.
Besides his strongly disagreement with Rena choice of suppliers, he did not show his agreements
of any suggestion from any executive member like Cybil and Sam. While we can easily see his
stubbornness, he was not mistrustful, uncooperative or rude, so he has only slightly
disagreeableness. Dan is open to experience because he was willing to take the risks of
transferring the companys products to organic food. He is also a Type A person with high selfmonitoring and a little low in self-esteem. He cares what other people think of him and has a lot
of goals on his list, but he is lack of confidence.

People use a combination of sort of perceptions when harboring about Dan. Sam uses his
experience and knowledge, which is called schemas. He thinks that Dan is too young to fit for
the CEO position as he stated that he had been already in the industry before Dan was still in BSchool. In addition, Sam kept warning Dan using his experience when Dan wanted to deal with
the employee issues. He may also use motivational states if he desires to gain more power and
control of the company. Different from Sam, I think Rena used motivational states more than
schemas. Rena thought Dan was too ideal for his ambition in organic food and rejected his idea
to change to a better supplier. She was quite straightforward and held a skeptical attitude towards
Dan all the time, which can be considered as a sign of not wanting Dan to interfere her job too
much. And she must generate a negative feeling about Dans distrust in them after Dan said that
the person who leaked the information must have access to their final data. This negative feeling
will also affect her way to percept Dan.
Before the bad news was pressed, Dan already had many things on his to-do list, which made
him feel overwhelmed. Now he not only needs to meet quarterly budget numbers, set strategic
goals for the next five years, bolster employee morale, but also has to deal with bad press.
Everything seems to be urgent for Dan, but he can still rate priorities and the time frame for each
task. In this way, he will be able to focus on the most important thing that should be done in a
short period while have other tasks slowly but smoothly going on. As is stated in the textbook, a
person can raise his/her self-efficacy by referring to his/her past performance. Thus, once Dan
successfully complete one of these tough tasks, he will be able to raise his self-efficacy. As
people with a high level of self-efficacy tend to take more challenging tasks, a raise of selfefficacy will help Dan gain confidence in leading the company out of financial troubles.
Besides gaining his own confidence, it is also important for Dan to raise employees' morale in as
soon as possible. Work values, work attitudes, and word moods are highly correlated to the work
performance and outcomes of employees. I suggest Dan to take Cybil's advice to have an
interview with a press to rebuild a positive impression in the public. This will not only make the
customers of NutriSelect trust the company more, but will also let employees value more of their
company and their work. In addition, if Dan is sure not to use downsizing to reduce the costs of
the company, he would better to say this in the press and insist that the company is going towards
a better and better situation under his guidance. An employee evaluation program should be
conducted by the human resource to reward employees with outstanding performance and fire
those do not have a qualified work outcome. This strategy will induce more series and
competitive work attitudes among employees and increase their morale. The anniversary
ceremony is optional but recommended, because it will be a good time for employees to realize
the value of NutriSelect, and their work value to help improve people's health by producing
organic food.
Building a good relationship with the executive board members will be the next important thing.
However, Dan should be aware that it may take long to finally make all the member trust and
support him. At this time, the most effective way is to have one-on-one conversation with each
member and tell them how he value their work and the importance for them to work towards the
same goal, which is improve the company's financial situations. Dan should also be open to any
advice from the executive members, but he may need to think carefully of what sort of
perception they have used against him, and then decide the way to change their way of
perception or change his own behaviors.

Every new CEO has a tough time to deal with the relationships with executive board members
and other department managers. And it takes some time to prove himself/herself and win people's
trust. Dan should believe his ability to become a good CEO, or he will not be selected. He has no
time to hesitate, but can only take immediate action to deal with all the problems.