All the details are below, will also attach other details with marking criteria and evaluation and what needs to achieve relevant grades
Answer must be related and have to link with external reading within given articles and Books
Article
Toppling Bureaucracy
Source: Adapted from Andrew Hill, Financial Times, 15 April 2016, p. 9.
Funding Circle inhabits an outwardly traditional office in the staid heart of the City of London.
But inside its headquarters – home since September – it boasts many of the trappings of ambitious young technology companies: an in-house cafe, a purple-baized pool table that matches the corporate colour scheme, a pitch-and-putt set and a variety of funky breakout areas for spontaneous meetings.
The peer-to-peer lender, which is only six years old but now employs 570 staff, 280 outside the UK, has something else in common with all innovative, fast-growing enterprises: a preoccupation with bureaucracy.
• you get bigger, you get all these critical matters,” says Andrew Mullinger, 33-year-old co-founder. It is not enough to “think smart” and “make it happen”, as the motivational messages on the office walls exhort. As Funding Circle grows, he admits, so does structure and hierarchy.
With them comes the threat that, left unchecked, an overdose of bureaucracy could stifle innovation and silence initiative.
• forestall bureaucracy, companies are developing models of “self-organisation” or “self-management” on a larger scale than previously attempted.
Zappos, the shoe retailer owned by Amazon, is converting to Holacracy, a flatter system that does away with titles – though staff departures and tension have generated much bad publicity during the painful transition.
Haier, the Chinese white goods company, laid off 10,000 middle managers in 2013 and 2014. It is transforming itself into an active shareholder overseeing a network of micro-enterprises that compete with each other for central resources.
Guy Sochovsky, chief financial officer of NewVoiceMedia, a UK-based cloud services company that has grown from 30 to 350 employees in four years, says: “Process and bureaucracy aren’t nice words and never desirable, but having processes and structures and clarity is an enabling tool rather than a tool of constraint.” Even companies that start with freewheeling ambitions to be different need “guard rails”, which is how Kaiser Permanente, the US healthcare group, described the non-negotiable rules it used to manage its rollout of a new and complicated health record system between 2004 and 2010.
Without such rails, companies can stray badly. Earlier this year, for example, Zenefits, a health insurance brokerage based in California, attracted adverse publicity and regulatory attention for its lax culture. “The fact is that many of our internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance have been inadequate,” its chief executive said in a memo after his predecessor resigned.
As companies grow, however, the founders have to delegate duties to managers, from heads of product or marketing, to fully fledged chief operating officers. Another cause of administrative red tape is complexity. Bob Sutton, another Stanford professor and co-author of Scaling Up Excellence, points out “how slow the best tech companies [such as Facebook] are to go to multiple locations”.
He says their early caution about geographical expansion may help explain their success.
Almost as soon as a company opens one or more satellite operations, it is on the road to “matrix” management, in which employees may have to respond to more than one boss – a regional president, say, and a divisional head.
Such structures can usefully encourage communication between discrete divisions. But they can also multiply the number of fiefdoms and pockets of bureaucracy. Regulation – as banks in particular have discovered since the financial crisis – inevitably adds layers of new staff, charged with implementing rules, even as revenue-producing jobs are cut.
To avoid this fate, Prof Sutton suggests that as companies get larger they should divide into smaller units that are easier to manage and motivate.
Running projects over shorter cycles also keeps the build-up of bureaucracy to a minimum. The approach is familiar to those who use so-called Agile software development methods and larger companies are experimenting with giving smaller teams more independence.
The Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy, which includes Microsoft and Riot Games, the online gaming group, was set up in 2015 to share unconventional approaches to reducing red tape and management friction. For instance, Ericsson has divided 2,300 enterprise software engineers, coordinated from Ireland, into more than 100 small autonomous teams, developing products in three-week “sprints”.
Isaac Getz, co-author of Freedom, Inc., whose philosophy for “liberated” companies to grant more autonomy to workers is being adopted by groups such as France’s Decathlon and Michelin, says it may be more expensive to run smaller units. But, he adds: “What you get is agility, creativity, innovation, engagement and customer satisfaction.”
Over corporate history, the pendulum has tended to swing between centralised bureaucracies and more loosely controlled networks. The challenge is preventing processes ossifying into bureaucracy over time.
Changing Structure/Question
Please read the above article and answering this 3 question
Read the attached article on “Toppling Bureaucracy” and, using the relevant literature, answer the following questions:
1. What are the main reasons why an organisations would wish to move from a bureaucratic structure to one based on “self-organisation” or “self-management” and what problems might it encounter? (400 words/30 marks)
2. Which approach to change would be most appropriate for such an undertaking and why? (700 words/35 marks)
3. What are the implications for an organisation’s culture and how might these be addressed? (500 words/35 marks)
Note:
Your answers will:
• Have a clear and logical structure (Have a clear Structure of Essay – does it have a beginning, middle and end that follow in a logical and sequential order?
• Contain conclusions which critically evaluate the assignment questions.
• Provide answers based on material that has been covered in the module.
• Cite the relevant literature. The assignment should access, cite and use at least 6 relevant academic sources identified by the student, in addition to the sources identified in the module outline.
Format of the assessment:
Present your argument in the form of a scholarly essay. This requires a more substantive presentation of your findings and argument with
• a clear beginning\introduction – setting the context of this assessment, briefly introducing the key concepts/issues that you will be exploring/addressing and layout of the essay etc. (you can have 200 words for this part)
• a middle – setting the case and presentation of your discussion around the three questions as raised in the change assessment, try and use those questions as key headings/sections to organise your discussion making sure that you provide a critical discussion on each question (stick to the words limits for each part as written above in the assignment details for Question 1 (400 words/30 marks) Question 2 (700 words/35 marks) Question 3 (500 words/35 mars)
• and end – concluding with the key points (you can have 200 words for this part,)
• references – evidence of your information sources (you can have headings like Ref listed on the course outline and Additional references (Minimum 6 additional references are required as shown in the assignment guidelines). Please cite all your ideas throughout the essay to show engagement with the literature and its application to the case study article. All references listed in the reference list should also be cited in the main essay.
