Starbucks Organizational Structure

http://www.theofficialboard.com/org-chart/starbucks

From the website, we can see that Starbucks has a decentralized structure for their company. The advantages of a decentralized structure are input from workforce, speed up the day-to-day decision-making, and more importantly the staff will have higher morale since the will feel more valued since they have some input into decision making. However, there is a greater chance of mistakes since decentralizing authority and responsibility will only work if the empowered person is sufficiently competent.

In the top level of hierarchy, CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz is showed. He is the person who has the highest responsibility of being in charge of all production workers and he is the person who gives command to the other levels of hierarchy that are below him. In the second level of hierarchy, there other different functional departments within the business, such as CFO, Creative, and International, etc. As one can see, the span of control is huge. The number of staff that is accountable to a the CEO is huge. Also, in the third level of hierarchy, it has listed different geographical region. This shows that Starbucks is organized by geography. This method allows Starbucks to be more aware and responsive to local cultural differences and consumer needs. Starbucks could be listed as a flat structure organizations where there are fewer levels in the hierarchy. Thus, each manager tends to have a wider span of control.

1. link to the article

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/09/_walkman_vs_ipo.html

Posted by: Kenji Hall on September 16

2. Includes a short summary of the article

This article is about Sony is trying to compete with Apple in their Walkman line. For the past few years, iPod has earned a huge profit for Apple, and now Sony added two new models to lure consumers away from Apple's iPod and other portable media players. Unlike previous Sony Walkman, these two models are very user friendly. For example, it can pull songs or video stored on a PlayStation 3 gaming console, grab videos from Blu-ray DVD recorder or save files from any portable DVD player. The company is targeting the karaoke-crazed Japanese teens and it is only be sold in Japan for now.

3. Identifies the topic(s) from our syllabus that the article covers

4.1 The Role of Marketing, 4.2 Marketing Planning, 4.3 Product, 4.4 Pricing, 4.5 Promotion, 4.5 Pace

4. Applies one business tool/theory/technique to the organization.

4.1 The Role of Marketing

Sony used to be a Product Orientation company (focus on selling products that they make, rather than making prodcuts that they can sell). However, because of the competition between Apple and Sony, they have combined Market Orientation (focus on aking products that they can sell, rather than selling products they can make) and Product Orientation together to fulfill what customers want and need.