Written Case Analysis

For the case

Roaring Dragon Hotel

Submitted by:
Group 5 -Section B
Tatsat Pandey (2011IPM112)
Shreeya Maheshwari (2011IPM100)
Prastish Singh (2011IPM071)
Navale Dinesh Ashok (2014PGP222)
Gokul Maran T (2014PGP120)
Ram Rajesh J (2014PGP290)
Raj Thilak Ra (2014PGP286)
Akshay Kohade (2014PGP024)

Overview:

The Roaring Dragon Hotel

(RDH) was a State Owned
Enterprise and one of the original three star hotels in
Southwest China.
The management practices were still of the Planned economy
era with minimal concern for development or expansion
In order to bring the much needed modernization and arrest
the declining fortunes of the Hotel, the provincial govt.
brought in Hotel International (HI) to take over the
management of RDH.
The challenge was to transform a large group of relaxed
family-based employees into a professional group of dynamic

employees operating within a structured organizational

culture.
Within 7 months, i.e. by mid January, a Termination contract
was signed to cease the management agreement with HI and
things were brought back to the same level.

Situation Analysis:

According to the reading Are You Change Ready there are

three conditions, which are a pre requisite for a change to be
undertaken in any organization. In our opinion, out of those
three, two conditions were not being fulfilled in this situation.
As it is mentioned in the case, Paul Fortune was not able to
convert RDH into a self-funding, five star hotel as per the
expectation of the owners. Also, while sending some of the
oldest employees out of job, he didnt even care to foresee
that they were at least thanked properly for their services to
RDH. This wasnt a sign of an effective leader and the one
who would earn respect of his fellow employees. Also, it is
mentioned that since the beginning of this project, the
existing employees were not motivated to bring any further
development and changes in the organization since they were
happy in their own comfort zone. This contradicts the second
need of a change ready organization i.e. the people must feel
personally motivated to change.

According to another reading Leading Change by John P.

Kotter, one of the 8 reasons why transformation efforts fail is
because of a failure to establish a sense of urgency towards
change in the organization. As it was mentioned in the case,
still some of the senior employees were found to be playing
cards and watching TV in the rooms and were indifferent to
the need of bringing about any change. Here, the
management was at a failure to convey the sense of urgency
to its employees, which resulted in their indiscipline as well.
Another of the reasons, according to the reading, why
transformations fail is that there is a lack of a powerful guiding
coalition. It was observed in the case that majority of
management was done by HI without a proper guiding
coalition with the others at the top i.e. Erhi T and the
provincial govt. Since the pre-existing Chinese culture of work
was different from what was usually experienced by HI, help
from these two entities could have been beneficial to the
overall management.
When it becomes clear to people that major change will take a
long time, urgency levels can drop. Without any Short term
wins, too many people tend to give up and actively join the

ranks of those people who have been resisting change. This is

what happened in the case of RDH where in order to prove
their strong intention of change, they lost one of their biggest
clients i.e. Nu Fu Travel whom they needed the most at a time
when they were at a transformation stage.
Also, it was mentioned in the reading that a renewal process
takes years not months and the same should have been made
clear to each and every employee of the company. What
happened in the case of RDH was that HI, since the beginning,
saw the target to be achievable within months. This led them
to bring some harsh changes which were then not accepted
by the employees and owners, thus leading to overall failure.