SERVICES

STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS Manufacturing Faced with a perfect storm of declining earnings, increasing competition, and organizational problems, ALCOA hired Winthrop to conduct an analysis of its strategy, structure, personnel policies, and technology management as it had evolved in the past 100 years. Based on company records and interviews with dozens of ALCOA executives, employees, customers, union officers, and community officials, Winthrop delivered key findings that shaped ALCOA's understanding of and response to the crisis: Historically, cycles of economic pressure never required management to retreat from the company's core business, and yet ALCOA's deeply rooted self-image as a primary aluminum producer was inhibiting it from fully acknowledging the importance of its downstream lines of business, while R&D product and process policies that had been shaped by antitrust and competitive circumstances after World War II had grown dysfunctional over time, and Traditional ways of resolving labor relations problems had been undermined by new market and competitive realities. ALCOA, now convinced of the present value of corporate history, commissioned Winthrop to write not one but two books: a full-scale history and "primer for management", entitled From Monopoly to Competition; and a study of research and development at ALCOA entitled R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovation at Alcoa. Published by Cambridge University Press, both volumes are widely regarded outside ALCOA as major contributions to the scholarly literature on management and technology. Today, ALCOA continues to employ Winthrop to track the progress of new technology developments. As Phil Morton, ALCOA’s Director of Corporate Communications, puts it: "Winthrop is very valuable to us, having learned a lot about our organization. We call them periodically just to get their impressions of things that are going on here."