BUS501 Real-World Connections: Episode 11, Redrawing the Org Chart

About 2 minutes. Captions are available with the CC button. Open on YouTube.

Transcript

Narrator: Real-World Connections. Episode 11: Redrawing the Org Chart

Narrator: Hearth and Harbor's five-year strategy is taking shape. Now comes the harder part: executing it.

Narrator: Adaeze has called the team together to look at one thing, the org chart.

Adaeze: Right now everything reports to me. Baking, marketing, finance, cafés and wholesale. It's basically a functional structure.

Daniel: And it's efficient. One purchasing team, one plant schedule. Costs stay low.

Priya: But functional structures are slow to change. Every department touches every new move. If the supermarket contract shifts again, we can't wait on six departments.

Tomás: So split it. A café division and a wholesale division. Each one runs its own show.

Hana: That's multi-divisional. Faster, closer to customers. But we'd pay for two marketing teams, two of everything.

Priya: Unless we centralize some services. Finance and people, shared across both divisions, the way GE did.

Tomás: Fine by me, as long as wholesale isn't waiting on a café committee.

Kofi: Can I flag something? Last spring the café lead and the plant both told me what to stock. Two bosses, two answers.

Hana: That's the unity of command problem. One person, one supervisor. A matrix would make that worse for you.

Adaeze: And the stuff that never shows up on a chart? Kofi and Daniel sorting out deliveries over coffee?

Hana: Informal linkages. They matter. Let's not redraw the chart and break them.

Adaeze: Whatever we pick will constrain our next moves. So let's choose on purpose.

Narrator: Every structure trades something away: efficiency, speed, cost or clarity.

Narrator: Given where Hearth and Harbor is heading, which structure would you draw for them, and what trade-off would you accept to get it?

Pause and apply

Sketch an org chart for Hearth and Harbor using one of the four structure types from the reading. Next to it, list one advantage and one trade-off, and say which functions you'd centralize and why.

License: CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication), except the Lucide icons (ISC License) and the background music (Motivating Mornings, Mixkit (Mixkit Stock Music Free License)), which aren't covered. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/