People Operations At Mozilla Corporation - Mozilla’s Cultural And Organizational DNA - Berkeley Haas Case Study - Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task

People Operations at Mozilla Corporation: Scaling a Peer- to-Peer Global Community

In April 2013, Debbie Cohen, Vice President and Chief of People at Mozilla Corporation, sat at her cubicle space at the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, California, reflecting on her brief but busy two-year tenure at Mozilla (often called “The Mozilla Project” or simply “The Project”). She was preparing to meet with CEO Gary Kovacs to discuss the next phase of People efforts at Mozilla. She marveled at what the mission-based open source organization had achieved in just 15 years.
Mozilla had shown that valuable and competitive products could be produced as open source software by a small number of employees who were globally distributed in more than 20 countries, along with millions of global volunteers (called “contributors”) who built, tested, promoted, and supported Mozilla’s products on their own time—all together referred to as “Mozillians”.
By the end of 2011, Mozilla had revenues of $163 million, up 33 percent from $123 million in 2010. And by 2013, Mozilla had nine physical offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, London, Paris, Auckland, Beijing, Tokyo, Vancouver, and Toronto, along with several internet-related products such as Firefox (free internet browser), Firefox OS (an open operating system for mobile devices), Marketplace (a creation and distribution platform for apps), Persona (a decentralized and secure authentication system for the web), Thunderbird (a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client), and Webmaker (tools and education to help people move from using the web to making the web).

Chris Beard, Chief Marketing Officer reflected: “Mozilla started out as this one bedroom house and the opportunity and our family started growing and we just kept on adding rooms. Some things like plumbing or electrical didn’t work right and the foundation wasn’t strong enough to support a second or third story that we started to envision. Debbie came in and put in place a much stronger, solid foundation with a lot of opportunity to grow, and developed the plan on how to scale it—how to bring
people in, orient them, get them effective faster, and unlock their potential.” As Cohen prepared for her meeting with Kovacs, she reflected on her hectic two years working at such a unique and “cultish” organization. She wondered how the People function would continue to support and scale a constantly growing and changing Mozilla, while maintaining and improving the quality of Mozilla’s team and products, remaining competitive in the marketplace, and most importantly, staying true to Mozilla’s core values and mission.

The Future
By 2013, Mozilla had existed for 15 years with humble roots as a side project within Netscape. But by then, the organization had many more people, both paid and volunteer, more functions and products, with some products developed in partnership with other organizations, and an even more global organization. Mozilla was also moving from a very traditional horizontal functional organization to a very active R&D organization to support the continued growth and evolution of the web.
By that time, Cohen had transformed the People organization in a short two years in a way that honored and respected Mozilla’s rich culture and history, and in a way that guided and motivated Mozilla’s knowledge workers around the world. She felt that the organization was embarking on a reflection period of, “who are we and who do we want to be?” She added: “What I am beginning to sense from the Project is strain because we haven’t yet explicitly restructured to support each of the different product lines and ways of working. What will the structure of our Project look like in the next three to five years and how do we organize our people, both paid staff and contributors, to meet the needs of our products and our users, and to optimize how work happens to fit our business needs? And how do we scale in a meaningful and impactful way, while being true to the core mission and purpose of the Project?”

Case Discussion Questions
1. What are the critical challenges that Debbie Cohen faces as the Chief of People at Mozilla?
2. How would you describe Mozilla’s cultural and organizational DNA?
3. What are the specific value-added benefits of the various people initiatives introduced by Cohen? Evaluate the initiatives that Cohen has put into place? Which initiative is likely to have the most impact?
4. What are potential barriers to Cohen’s success?
5. What do you think the lessons are for other knowledge-based organizations?
6. In hindsight, what do you think Cohen should have done differently?
7. What should Cohen do next? Why?

Write a polished analysis that responds to the prompts below.
Part-A: Execution of Strategy at Mozilla

1. How would you describe Mozilla’s cultural and organizational DNA? What, specifically, about the way Mozilla enacts strategy and executes its business plan provides it with such depth?
2. What do you think are the lessons from Mozilla for other knowledge- based organizations, especially in terms of strategy execution and the involvement of people throughout the organization?
3. What are the critical challenges that Debbie Cohen faces as Chief of People at Mozilla, specifically in terms of strategy execution and alignment? What should she do to meet these challenges, and why?

Part-B: Getting Everyone to Participate in Strategic Thinking and Execution

1. Based both on the Mozilla case study and on your general thoughts from this course, explain how the knowledge and effective practice of cross-functional strategic thinking can help individual stakeholders (people at all levels of the organization and others outside the organization) participate more fully in organizational efforts to improve long-term performance and overall stakeholder engagement.

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