Brand Course for International Students
If an organizational chart (a visual drawing of an organization’s structure) isn’t available, an organization’s choice of structural design often can be determined by reading descriptions of what it does. Find one company on the Web. Describe in a short paragraph what organizational structural design each is using and how you came to that conclusion.
Student’s Analysis 1
Take Google Inc. for example
Company Overview
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world's largest search engine -- an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.
Google Management
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has expanded to more than 4,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry.
Management Team
Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer 董事长兼首席执行官
Larry Page, Co-Founder & President, Products 创始人兼产品总裁
Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology 创始人兼技术总裁
George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer 首席财务官
Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development 全球销售及业务拓展部高级副总裁
Alan Eustace, Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
Jeff Huber, Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering 工程部副总裁
Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management 产品管理部副总裁
Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management 产品管理部副总裁
David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development 公司发展部副总裁
Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations 业务运营部副总裁
Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales 广告销售部副总裁
Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations 全球在线销售和运营副总裁
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations 亚太和拉丁美洲地区运营副总裁
Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations 欧洲运营副总裁
Norio Murakami, Vice President and General Manager, Google Japan Google日本副总裁兼总经理
Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist 副总裁兼首席互联网顾问
Analyzing Organizational Structure
The common sense for organizations to design an organizational structure is to allow employees to efficiently and effectively do their work. Google, obviously, is such an instance. Established in 1998, Google is a new small organization with a total number of 4,000 employees worldwide compared to titanic corporations like GE, GC and so on. However, its organizational structure design is no less fashionable than such large companies. To reach the mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, Google has its own style of organizing.
Exhibit above shows evidently two of the five common forms of departmentalization that Google has used, functional departmentalization and geographical departmentalization.
As for functional departmentalization, Google divides its jobs into products, technology, finance, global sales and business development, engineering, product management, corporate development, business operations, advertising sales, global online sales and operations. And for geographical departmentalization, it groups jobs on the basis of geography as Asia-Pacific and Latin America, European and Japan.
This may seem to be a simple organizational structure, but something, in fact, does not reflect from the exhibit directly yet is special in Google, strategy. Being the world's leading search technology company, Google regards innovation as the most important dimension of its strategy. An organization’s structure is influenced by the organization’s strategies. Structure should follow strategy. As a result, Google's simple organizational structure does provide innovators with the flexibilities and free-flowing information of the organic structure, for Google’s goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they're at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok.
Moreover, Google’s organization is, to some extent, a team-based structure. Because in Google, the entire organization is made up of work teams that perform the organization’s work. Every president or vice president is a team leader of his or her team. In the team, employee empowerment is crucial because there is no line of managerial authority from top to bottom. Rather, employee teams are free to design work in the way they think is the best and also hold responsible for all work activity and performance in their respective areas.
We can conclude that Google’s organization combines most of the five forms of departmentalization and forms a special structure that has characteristics both of functional structure and team-based structure.
Suggestion
Facing the increasing dynamic and complex environments, Google should find creative ways to organize work to make its organization more responsive to the needs of customers, employees, and other organizational constituents. Through the analysis, we want to suggest that Google adopt the learning organization for the reasons as follows.
Firstly, in a learning organization, employees are practicing knowledge management by continually acquiring and sharing new knowledge, and willing to apply that knowledge in making decisions or performing their work. For this, Google has naturally advantage in that it has the most expert specialists who are world famous in their respective areas.
Secondly, in a learning organization, members can share information and collaborate on work activities through the entire organization---across different functional specialties and even at environment, employees are free to work together and collaborate in doing their work or resolving issues. "The perfect search engine", as Google co-founder Larry Page put, Google can never fail to do so.
Thirdly, a learning organization’s culture is one in which everyone agrees on a shared vision and everyone recognizes the inherent interrelationships among the organization’s processes, activities, functions, and external environment. There is a strong sense of community, caring for each other, and trust. In a learning organization, employees feel free to openly communicate, share, experiment, and learn without fear of criticism or punishment. Actually, such a culture is what Google’s top managers are engaging in creating. For instance, at the Googleplex headquarters almost everyone eats in the Google café (known as "Charlie's Place"), sitting at whatever table has an opening and enjoying conversations with Googlers from all different departments. Topics range from the trivial to the technical, and whether the discussion is about computer games, encryption or ad serving software, it's not surprising to hear someone say, "That's a product I helped develop before I came to Google."
Hopefully, Google will soon become a learning organization.
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Student’s Analysis 2
Our team takes Gree Electric Appliance, Inc. for example.
Introduction to Gree
Gree Electric Appliance, Inc, Of Zhuhai, founded in 1991, is the corporation with the biggest manufacture scope and the most powerful technique strength among the big size specialized air conditioner Corporations in China.
Top Management
Its management team is efficiency and effectiveness; all decisions made by directorate are advisable and can be carried out without delay. The most of specification of air conditioner and the complete of series is the No.1 among the industry in China. It’s mostly due to its well-designed organizational structure.
From the day listed in Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 1996, Gree has always behaving outstanding achievement, and constantly adjusts its structure to the development of company.
Organizational structure chart
Organizational Structure Analyzing
As to structure, The Gree mainly uses the form of Functional Departmentalization. Engineering Manager, Manufacturing Manager, Human Resources Manager, Purchasing Manager are under the leadership of the president.
Generally, large organizations combine most or all forms of departmentalization, which are crossed. Gree isn’t an exception. Other forms of departmentalization such as Product Departmentalization, Geographical Departmentalization and Customer Departmentalization are used more or less.
In production, it is divided into several parts, such as compressor, pattern, pipeline and so on. Five workshops assort with each other and form pipelining.
And it invests huge capital in other parts of the country to build factories, even expand abroad to increase its sale.
Gree’s span of control is large, wide spans of control are consistent with managers’ efforts to reduce costs, speed up decision making, increase flexibility, get closed to customers and empower employees.
Suggestions
As competition becoming drastic, Gree should improve its organizational structure in order to let the company operate efficiency.
First, it has to deal with the relationship between centralization and decentralization, mechanistic and organic. Second, it has better got close to boundaryless organization and learning organization. Meanwhile, Gree is becoming an international company, so we think it should develop diversity. Because there is no transnational company that does not develop diversity for adapting the drastic competitive environment.
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