Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

USING LEARNING INFORMATION IN OTHER HORIZONTAL DEPARTMENTS

It is a standing joke among strategy consultants that their companies basically all sell the two very same reports to all their customers on organizational strategy: one describing why the customer should start decentralizing its organization and activities and another one describing why the customer should start centralizing. The tricky part for the consultant is to remember which one was sent to the customer the last time and then send the other one this time. There is, however, some logic to this joke, since a very centralized organization tends to become bureaucratized and slow in its response to market changes. For the same reason, the next strategy aims at what we might call “release the creative potential of the organization,” and a more decentralized organization is created. Three to five years after the decentralization strategy has been implemented, people tend to find that there is not enough standardization in how the company goes to market, since business units do not communicate well with each other and there are numerous local initiatives that the company as a whole could learn from. The result of these conclusions is that the company will have to centralize and a new strategy, called “building the critical mass to become a market leader” or “making the best initiatives global,” is implemented and lasts for three to five years. It might seem like a terrible waste of resources but it also could be seen as ...