Admit it. Sometimes the projects you're working on (school, work, or both) can get pretty boring and monotonous. Wouldn't it be nice to have a magic button you could push to get someone else to do the boring, time-consuming stuff for you? At Pfizer, such a button is a reality for a large number of employees.

As a global pharmaceutical company, Pfizer is continually looking for ways to be more efficient and effective. The company's senior director of organizational effectiveness, James Cohen, found that the "Harvard MBA staff we hired to develop strategies and innovate were instead Googling and making PowerPoint's." Indeed, internal studies conducted to find out just how much time its valuable talent was spending on menial tasks was startling. The average Pfizer employee was spending 20 percent to 40 percent of his or her time on support work (creating documents, typing notes, doing research, manipulating date, scheduling meetings) and only 60 percent to 80 percent on knowledge work (strategy, innovation, networking, collaborating, critical thinking). And the problem wasn't just at lower levels. Even the highest-level employees were affected. That's when Cohen began looking for solutions. The solution he chose turned out to be the numerous knowledge-process outsourcing the companies based in India.

Initial tests of outsourcing the supporting tasks did not go well at all. However, Cohen continued to tweak the process until everything worked. Now Pfizer employees can click the OFF (Office of The Future) button in Microsoft Outlook, and they are connected to an outsourcing company where a single worker in India receives the request and assigns it to a team. The team leader calls the employee to confirm the request. The team leader then e-mails back a cost specification for the requested work. At this point, the Pfizer employee can say yes or no. Cohen says that the benefits of OOF are unexpected. Time spent on analysis of data has been cut-sometimes in half. The financial benefits are also impressive. And Pfizer employees love it. Cohen says," It's kind of amazing. I wonder what they used to do."

1. Describe and evaluate what Pfizer is doing.

2. What structural implications-good and bad-does this approach have? (Think in terms of the six organizational design elements.)

3. Do you think this arrangement would work for other types of organizations? Why or why not?

4. What role do you think organizational structure plays in an organization's efficiency and effectiveness? Explain.