Organizational Structure of the King of the Mountain Bicycles Case Study

Introduction

The Specialized Bicycle Company deals with the production of bicycles. Mike Sinyard is the company's chief executive officer. The company specializes in the production of mountain bikes with the purpose of achieving the firm's objective. The company incorporated a cultural innovation that saw it achieve a competitive advantage in the bicycle industry (Cavanaugh, 2017).

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Organizational Culture Description

There are three levels of organizational culture. They include the Artifacts, espoused values, and basic assumptions (Schein, 2015). King of the Mountain Bicycles employed the culture of espoused values. The company set conscious strategies and goals of establishing bicycle innovation to achieve a competitive advantage in the bicycle industry.

The Stories, Ceremonies, and Language in Specialized Bicycle Company

Although the company at some point challenges, Mike Sinyard maneuvered through the difficulties and the organization became the most recognized producer of the best mountain bicycles.

Effects of Organizational Culture on Specialized Bicycles

The espoused value, a specialized organizational culture at Specialized Bicycle Company, supports the organization as the incorporation of innovation values has seen the company becoming a leading producer of the best mountain bicycles in the market.

Why Mike Employed Workers From Outside at Some Point

Mike Sinyard sourced his three top executives from outside with the belief that the individuals had a better understanding of consumer's satisfaction concerning the Specialized (Sabel, 2012).

Why the Workers Failed

The workers did not consider the organization's marketing strategies of identifying the core customers. Thus, marketing the company's product to any customer saw the company experience some losses.

How Mike Sinyards Enforces and Manages Organizational Culture

Mike Sinyard enforces organizational culture through meeting consumers' demands, working towards achieving his goal and also incorporating new executives to help him run his organization.

My Take on Mike Sinyard' Challenges

If I was facing the same challenges as Mike Sinyard, I could not do anything different from what he did. Such situation arises because business entails risk-taking and with a clear objective, one stands a position in overcoming the challenges as he did (Schein, 2015).

Case Study: MCKINSEY AND GLAXO SMITHKLINE ARTICLES

Question One

The coordination between individual works and teamwork are the fundamentals of organization structure. Tachi Yamada, chief researcher at SmithKline, after the merger of Glaxo and SmithKline, was tasked with the responsibility of restructuring the company's operations and turning the slow-growing product pipeline into a long-term success to the business (Kevin, 2014). Indeed Yamada had good plans, and he knew his starting point which was to restructure the management of the organization. Yamada did what any other person would have done. He started by breaking down the whole research and design firm to units of dependent start-up test center as opposed to consolidating the organization to reduce cost (Kevin, 2014). He failed to restructure the decision making at the top. Instead, he lowered executive decision making which led to the slowdown of the company's operations, consequently conflicts with the senior management.

Ideally, Yamada had good intentions, and he was thinking like an entrepreneur, his idea of stripping product development from the line managers to lab scientist in a pharmaceutical industry would have materialized if he would have allowed communication and sharing of ideas with the top management of the organization (Aiken, 2009). Yamada failed to create a compelling change story behind his management change; he was unable to involve the employees through communication and sharing of ideas. Instead, he was running the restructuring individually. As a result, the whole changing process was met with opposition and conflicts from the R&D managers as soon as the entire process started.

Question Two

Yamada's major idea in having the organization go through this restructuring was to shift the product development authority from the line managers to lab scientist, where the product development decisions were to be handled independently at the lab levels. The idea was bad for a pharmaceutical company because the general management of the company did not have significant decision powers as far as product development is concerned. The scenario precipitated to a considerable challenge especially in the situations where the company would prefer the use a smaller companies' pipeline to using their own, particularly for financial reasons (Kevin, 2014).

Yamada's primary purpose was specialization, and shifting the product development authority and decisions from the overall managed to individual labs. He started by splitting the crucial research and design to small pieces, where every lab enhances the concentration of relevant research region such as heart illness, cancer along with its executive director (Kevin, 2014). These labs were the connection between scientific discoveries and the clinical testing. The other purpose of Yamada's restricting was the change of authority lines, where the product development decisions were made at the lab levels by the chief executive officer who is the head of the lab (Kevin, 2014). The lab chiefs had the authority to decide on what composites to initiate, which was a division point in the organization contract. Yamada purposed to increased productivity by promoting specialization. Finally, the other goal of Yamada's restructuring of the company management was in the long-term perspective. He looked at it in the long term, and he had hopes that despite the opposing and challenges his restricting process would face, he purposed to engineer long-term solutions to the company as opposed to many of the managers.

Question Three

The restructuring of the company's management by Yamada did not bear many fruits as per his expectations; this is because he failed to create a compelling story to accompany his ideas. Yamada was unable to understand that what was motivating him towards the changes as an individual could not motivate most of his employees. He ought to have created a turnaround story since the company production pipeline was not doing well, he would have come up with a story about their performance that would have helped the employees to see the need of the change from his perspective (Aiken, 2009). For instance, "Since our production pipeline and the overall production of the company has not been promising, and most of our drugs have failed to reach the second phase of approval we need to come up with different managerial strategies order to survive especially after the merger.". Through this Yamada would have understood what motivates his employees and through constant communication and consultations he would have come up with the best ways to do the restructuring.

Additionally, Yamada would have given every member of the staff especially the management team the opportunity to write their own stories to come up with the compelling turnaround story. The employees have different motivation factor which will influence their stories and expectations of the managerial changes. Good leaders spend time in communicating their change stories with the juniors to gauge their views and reaction. It is typical human nature that when they make decisions on their own, they tend to be committed to the outcomes than when rules get imposed on them (Aiken, 2009). Enabling members to participate in the creation of the turnaround story of the company would make the story and the ideas not only belong to Yamada as a person but to the whole company. Through this, a story told in ten different ways would have got out there as one with the support of the entire management team of GlaxoSmithKline.

References

Aiken, C., & Keller, S. (2009). The irrational side of change management. McKinsey Quarterly, 2(10), 100-109.

Cavanaugh, J. (2017). Organizational structure. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University.

Kevin Kelleher (2004). The Drug Pipeline Flows Again Tachi Yamada wrote up the ultimate Rx for GlaxoSmithKline: Making entrepreneurs out of 15,000 scientists.

Sabel, C. F. (2012). Work: The division of labor in industry. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press.

Schein, E. H. (2015). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.