Refer to the case scenario illustrated below:
Visit the official company website of Southwest Airlines
Step 1: Refer to attachment one
Step 2: Research the structure, systems, people, and culture at Southwest Airlines.
-Structure
What is the organization's structure? How decentralized or centralized is it?
What are the lines of authority and communication?
What are the roles of teams, committees, and task forces?
-Systems
How are budgets set?
How is planning done?
What measures are used to evaluate performance?
-People
What are the skills, experience, and knowledge of the firm's employees?
What is their depth and quality?
What are their attitudes about the company and their jobs?
-Culture
What are the company's values and are they widely shared and accepted by employees?
What are the key norms of behavior?
What are some significant symbols?
What is the dominant management style?
How is conflict resolved?
You will not be able to get answers to every single question, but you will need to answer at least one or two for each component.
Step 3: Describe Southwests organizational design, key strategic control systems, primary human resources concerns, and cultural factors, the effect they have had on the implementation of Southwest Airlines strategy.
Step 4: In a 4-5 page paper, critically evaluate the fit â?" or the lack of fit â?" between the company's mission, strategy, and organizational components critical to implementation. Do these components complement the strategy? Why or why not?
Step 5: Consider the Case as a formal business report that you are developing for the Board of Directors and CEO as Southwest Airline's company consultant. This is a professional document. Follow the format below:
Executive summary: a synopsis of the main points, conclusions and recommendations made in the longer report.
Introduction: State the main purpose of the paper (thesis statement), what you hope to accomplish, and how you will go about doing it.
Main Body: The "meat" of the paper. Emphasize analysis, not just description. Delineate separate topics or sections with headings.
Conclusion: Summarize your paper in the light of your thesis statement.
This paper will look at strategy implementation and give a list of places where you can find important information for the four different components. The four components are structure, people, culture and systems.
Structure:
The best place I have found for structure is the company website. There are several questions asked when looking into structure, and a majority of them can be found at this site. I have looked at the corporate governance page for a look at the organization’s structure and how decentralized it is. The website can give some information about lines of authority and communication, but you can get more when you go further into the company website and look into individual stores. The annual report will give good information from the head of the company as well as some information about certain groups that are tasked to look at specific aspects of the company.
Another place to start is Yahoo finance, they provide individual tabs with information like the profile, key statistics and components. It also gives links to SEC filings which will have various reports, one of which I found helpful was the change in directors or principal officers. All of this information is helpful when looking at the structure of the company.
Systems:
When it comes to systems, the best place to look is the annual report for the company. This document gives all the information you need to look at how budgets are set, what information is used to get planning done, and what measures are used to evaluate performance.
System information can also be found at yahoo finance. For some of the information this website is easier than digging through a large document like the annual report because it has all the important info in a single location that is easy to find. It even has the financials broken into individual tabs with income statements, balance sheets and cash flow. The key statistics tab will also give you information on revenue, and then break it down into key statistics related to the company stock.
People:
The people of the company are what make the company run. A large amount of information on the people of the company can be found at the company website. This goes into the positions of the company, and some of the requirements to work in that area of the company. You can also get information about how long employees usually stay with the company, which will tell you about the knowledge base as well. In some cases they will even talk about the training program for new employees, and what standards are expected to be met.
The better business bureau is a good place to look for information about the depth and quality of the people that work there. You can get an overall company rating broken down into areas that include the people of the company. There are also numerous search engines you can go to where you can find information about how people who work for the company feel about their job and the overall company.
Culture:
The corporate website is the key place to find information regarding the culture of the company. The company’s values will be one of the first things you should find in the mission and vision statements of the company that we looked at in the first module. You will have to do some research to find out if they are widely shared and accepted by the employees. The better business bureau is a good place to see if they are accepted by the employees because you can see the rating of the company in different areas and see if the grades match the company values. The corporate website will also discuss the normal operations and standards, and may even look at the management style of the heads of the company.
If you are looking for significant symbols and trademarks of the company you should go to the US patent office. This will give information on the specific items and symbols that make the company unique.
If you are looking for information on how conflict is resolved I don’t think there is a specific site you can look at, I think the best place to start would be a search engine like Google. There you can find articles and information about the company, and if you are looking at a specific incident you can probably get information on how the problem was resolved.
Overall the corporate website is going to be the best place to look when searching for information about organizational components of strategy implementation. This website will also direct you to financial documents where you can find other important information.