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Surviving Plant World's Hard Times: Case Questions

Medha Sharma founded Plant World as a one-person nursery business that grew into the largest landscaping business in the area over ten years. Sharma maintained an open, friendly culture even as the company expanded by paying attention to employees' personal lives and needs. However, a large unpaid landscaping project for a new mall that failed caused financial trouble. Sharma gave employees the option to not get paid for a month or for the company to close. Despite being able to find other jobs, employees chose to continue working unpaid to help the company survive due to their strong attachment to the unique culture and each other.

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347 views1 page

Surviving Plant World's Hard Times: Case Questions

Medha Sharma founded Plant World as a one-person nursery business that grew into the largest landscaping business in the area over ten years. Sharma maintained an open, friendly culture even as the company expanded by paying attention to employees' personal lives and needs. However, a large unpaid landscaping project for a new mall that failed caused financial trouble. Sharma gave employees the option to not get paid for a month or for the company to close. Despite being able to find other jobs, employees chose to continue working unpaid to help the company survive due to their strong attachment to the unique culture and each other.

Uploaded by

reema mohanty
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Surviving Plant World’s Hard Times

In ten years, Plant World had grown from a one-person venture into the largest nursery and landscaping
business in its area. Its founder, Medha Sharma, combined a life long interest in plants with a botany degree
to provide a unique customer service. Sharma had managed the company’s growth so that even with twenty
full-time employees working in six to eight crews, the organization culture was still as open, friendly, and
personal as it had been when her only "employees" were friends who would volunteer to help her move a
heavy tree.

To maintain that atmosphere, Sharma involved herself increasingly with people and less with plants as the
company grew. With hundreds of customers and scores of jobs at any one time, she could no longer say
without hesitation whether she had a dozen rose bushes in stock or when Mrs. Mehta’s estate would need a
new load of manure. But she still knew when Seema had been up all night with her baby, when Girish was
likely to be late because he had driven to see his sick father over the weekend, and how to deal with Paula
when she was depressed because of her husbands behavior. She kept track of the birthdays of every
employee and even those of their children. She was up every morning by five-thirty arranging schedules so
that John could get his son out of day-care at four o’clock and Martina could be back in town for her afternoon
high school equivalency classes.

Paying all this attention to employees may have led Sharma to make a single bad business decision that
almost destroyed the company. She provided extensive landscaping to a new mall on credit, and when the
mall never opened and its owners went bankrupt, Plant World found itself in deep trouble. The company had
virtually no cash and had to pay off the bills for the mall plants, most of which were not even salvageable.

One Friday, Sharma called a meeting with her employees and discussed with them: either they would not get
paid for a month or Plant World would have to close. The news hit the employees hard. Many counted on the
Friday paycheck to buy groceries for the week. The local unemployment rate was low, however, and they
knew they could find other jobs.

But as they looked around, they wondered whether they could ever find this kind of job. Sure, the pay was not
the greatest, but the tears in the eyes of some workers were not over pay or personal hardship; they were for
Sharma, her dream, and her difficulties. They never thought of her as the boss or called her anything but
"Medha." And leaving the group would not be just a matter of saying good-bye to fellow employees. If Girish
left, the company’s cricket team would lose its best bowler, and the Sunday cricket game was the most
awaited moments of everyone’s week. Where else would they find people who spent much of the weekend
working on the best jokes with which to entertain one another on Monday morning? At how many offices
would everyone show up twenty minutes before starting time just to catch up with friends in other
departments? What other boss would really understand when you simply said, "I don’t have a doctor’s
appointment, I just need the afternoon off"?

Sharma gave her employees the weekend to think over their decision: whether to take their pay and look for
another job or to dig into their savings and go on working. Knowing it would be hard for them to quit, she told
them they did not have to face her on Monday; if they did not show up, she would send them their checks. But
when she arrived at seven-forty Monday morning, she found the entire group already there; ready to work
even harder to pull the company through. They were even trying to create new jokes to tease each other.

Case Questions

1. How would you describe the organization culture at Plant World in terms of the seven primary
characteristics?

2. How large can such a company get before it needs to change its culture and structure?

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