A. Starbucks Corporation sells coffee and related products to consumers. It encour ages all employees to suggest new ideas (using a one-page form) and promises a quick response from the senior executive team. The person suggesting a given idea is always invited to be a full-time member of the launching team.
Leaders are critically important for any team to achieve success. Starbucks
assembles teams headed by leaders with applicable marketing expertise. Starbucks hires two kinds of people: (1) integrators who are marketers with broad skills and who are capable of carrying out major responsibilities in coordinating the delivery of products and services to the market, and (2) specialists with unique capabilities and expertise for launching projects. All of them need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and be able to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment. For the "Store of the Future" project, the leader was hired from the outside. Another outsider was hired to spearhead Starbuck's "Lunch Service Concept" project.
Organizational flexibility is a hallmark of new-style companies. When in house packaging and sales-channel management skills were deemed lacking, Starbucks elected to team up with another company, Dreyer .., Grand Ice Cream, to launch a new ice cream product. Within four months, its coffee ice cream product became the top-selling brand in the industry. "Frappuccino," a cold coffee drink, was also marketed jointly with PepsiCo, Inc., in 1994. Within one year, its revenue accounted for 11 percent of the total sales of Starbucks in 1995.
Starbucks uses a lrigh-level steering committee for making rapid decisions
based on two criteria: (1) the effect on company's revenue growth (the new ideas must have the potential of producing a minimum revenue of about $4 million per year) and (2) the impact on the complexity of the company's retail stores required for implementation.
B. First USA is a financial services company. It reconfigures its structure dynamically and makes routine organizational changes. Once new market opportunities worth pursuing are identified, the company determines what specialized skills are required and puts a suitable "dream team" together. The company maintains a pool of managers having special skills that enable them to launch new credit card products. Other people are added from internal resource pools or by hiring from the outside. Within a recent three-year period (1995-1998), First USA issued five times as many credit cards as another well-known financial company organized in traditional ways.
C. Dell™, sells computers and other technology products directly to consumers and businesses alike. It focuses on identifying and capturing market opportunities. Managers are encouraged to turn the needs of customers into products and ser vices as quickly as possible. Business units are smaller in size, and more people are empowered to assume the profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. Successful managers are rewarded accordingly.
D. Minnesota Mining and Minerals (officially known as 3M) is a major industrial company in the United States. It markets a diversified set of products. It is known to organize its employees to create new ideas by allowing them each to spend up