Case Study # 6 - A New Kind of Structure Admit it.

Sometimes the projects you are working on (school, work, or both) can be quite boring and monotonous. Wouldn't it be nice to have a magic button that you could push to make someone else do the boring and time-consuming things? At Pfizer, such a button is a reality for many employees. As a global pharmaceutical company, Pfizer continually looks for ways to be more efficient and effective. The company's chief organizational effectiveness officer, Jordan Cohen, found that "the Harvard MBA staff that we hired to strategize and innovate were instead googling and making PowerPoint slides." In fact, internal studies led to the alarming finding of how much time its talented staff wasted on trivial tasks. The average Pfizer employee spent 20 to 40 percent of their time on support work (document creation, note writing, research, data manipulation, meeting scheduling) and only 60 to 80 percent on knowledge work (strategy, innovation, networking, collaboration, critical thinking) .. And the problem was not just low-level. Even high-level employees were affected. It was then that Cohen began looking for solutions. The solution he chose turned out to be the outsourcing of knowledge process companies based in India. The initial tests to outsource the support tasks did not go well at all. However, Cohen continued to fine-tune the process until everything worked. Now Pfizer employees can click the OOF (Office of the Future) button in Microsoft Outlook, and are connected to an outsourced company, where a single worker in India receives the request and assigns it to a team. The team leader calls the employee to clarify the request. The team leader then sends an email specifying the costs of the requested work. At this point, the Pfizer employee can say yes or no. Cohen says the benefits of OOF are unexpected. The time spent analyzing information has been reduced, sometimes by half. The financial benefits are impressive too. And Pfizer employees love it. Cohen says, "It's very amazing. I wonder what they did before."

Analysis Questions

1. Describe and evaluate what Pfizer is doing.

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

3. Do you think this design would work in other types of organizations? Why?

4. What role do you think the organizational structure has in the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization? Explain your answer.