Writing Assignment II
The following is an excerpt from an article entitled, “Mrs. Fields' Secret Ingredient”. The article, by Tom Richman, appeared in INC. Randy Fields has created something entirely new -- a shape if not the shape, of business organizations to come. It gives top management a dimension of personal control over dispersed operations that small companies otherwise find impossible to achieve. It projects a founder's vision into parts of a company that have long ago outgrown his or her ability to reach in person. In the structure that Fields is building, computers don't just speed up old administrative management processes. They alter the process. Management, in the Fields organizational paradigm, becomes less administration and more inspiration. The management hierarchy of the company feels almost flat. On paper, Mrs. Fields Cookies looks almost conventional. In action, however, because of the way information flows between levels, it feels almost flat. On paper, between Richard Lui running the Pier 39 Mrs. Fields in San Francisco and Debbi Fields herself in Park City, there are several apparently traditional layers of hierarchy: an area sales manager, a district sales manager, a regional director of operations, a vice-president of operations. In practice, though, Debbi is as handy to Lui -- and to every other store manager -- as the telephone and personal computer in the back room of his store. On a typical morning at Pier 39, Lui unlocks the store, calls up the Day Planner program on his Tandy computer, plugs in today's sales projection (based on year-earlier sales adjusted for growth), and answers a couple of questions the program puts to him. What day of the week is it? What type of day: normal day, sale day, school day, holiday, other? Say, for instance, it's Tuesday, a school day. The computer goes back to the Pier 39 store's hour-by-hour, product-by-product performance on the last three school-day Tuesdays. Based on what you did then, the Day Planner tells him, here's what you'll have to do today, hour by hour, product by product, to meet your sales projection. It tells him how many customers he'll need each hour and how much he'll have to sell them. It tells him how many batches of cookie dough he'll have to mix and when to mix them to meet the demand and to minimize leftovers. He could make these estimates himself if he wanted to take the time. The computer makes them for him. Each hour, as the day progresses, Lui keeps the computer informed of his progress. Currently he enters the numbers manually, but new cash registers that automatically feed hourly data to the computer, eliminating the manual update, are already in some stores. The computer in turn revises the hourly projections and makes suggestions. The customer count is OK, it might observe, but your average check is down. Are your crew members doing enough suggestive selling? If, on the other hand, the computer indicates that the customer count is down, that may suggest the manager will want to do some sampling -- chum for customers up and down the pier with a tray of free cookie pieces or try something else, whatever he likes, to lure people into the store. Sometimes, if sales are just slightly down, the machine's revised projections will actually exceed the original on the assumption that greater selling effort will more than compensate for the small deficit. On the other hand, the program isn't blind to reality. It recognizes a bad day and diminishes its hourly sales projections and baking estimates accordingly. Several times a week, Lui talks with Debbi. Well, he doesn't exactly talk with her, but he hears from her. He makes a daily phone call to Park City to check his computerizedPhoneMail messages, and as often as not there's something from Mrs. Fields herself. If she's upset about some problem, Lui hears her sounding upset. If it's something she's breathlessly exuberant about, which is more often the case, he gets an earful of that, too. Whether the news is good or bad, how much better to hear it from the boss herself than to get a memo in the mail next week. By the same token, if Lui has something to say to Debbi, he uses the computer. It's right there, handy. He calls up the Form-Mail program, types his message, and the next morning it's on Debbi's desk. She promises an answer, from her or her staff, within 48 hours. On the morning I spent with her, among the dozen or so messages she got was one from the crew at a Berkeley, Calif., store making their case for higher wages there and another from the manager of a store in Brookline, Mass., which has been struggling recently. We've finally gotten ourselves squared away, was the gist of the note, so please come visit. (Last year Debbi logged around 350,000 commercial air miles visiting stores.) Store managers benefit from a continuing exchange of information. Of course, Park City learns what every store is doing daily -- from sales to staffing to training to hires to repairs -- and how it uses that information we'll get to in a minute. From the store managers' perspective, however, the important thing is that the information they provide keeps coming back to them, reorganized to make it useful. The hour-by-hour sales projections and projected customer counts that managers use to pace their days reflect their own experiences. Soon, for instance, the computer will take their weekly inventory reports and sales projections and generate supply orders that managers will only have to confirm or correct -- more administrative time saved. With their little computers in the back room, store managers give, but they also receive. Some managers would have problems with a system that operates without their daily intervention. They wouldn't be comfortable, and they wouldn't stay at Mrs. Fields. Those who do stay can manage people instead of paper. If administrative bureaucracies can grow out of control, so can technology bureaucracies. A couple of principles, ruthlessly adhered to, keep both simple at Mrs. Fields. The first is that if a machine can do it, a machine should do it. "People," says Randy, "should do only that which people can do. It's demeaning for people to do what machines can do. . . . Can machines manage people? No. Machines have no feelie-touchies, none of that chemistry that flows between two people." The other rule, the one that keeps the technological monster itself in check, is that the company will have but one data base. Everything -- cookie sales, payroll records, suppliers' invoices, inventory reports, utility charges -- goes into the same data base. And whatever anybody needs to know has to come out of it. Fields believes this system will allow the small corporate staff to oversee one thousand stores the same way that they did when they had thirty stores.
For Writing Assignment II, produce an essay that addresses the following:
1) Describe three organizational problems that the Mrs. Fields’ Cookies Company faces.
2) Based on the information offered in the essay, describe the dimensions of the company and offer a figure that depicts the flow of directions and information through the organization.
3) Which of the variables that influence structure discussed in this course would appear to have the most influence on the organization?
4) The essay should be 500-750 words in length, typed (double-spaced), properly edited, and follow the writing standards listed in the syllabus for the course.
Please note that this essay is not to be an opinion piece. The essay should follow the writing standards outlined in the syllabus and APA or MLA standards should be used for all citations and in formatting the document.