Robert Potter, past president of Monsanto Chemical Company, said: “The division managers pay for the headquarters services from their own budgets. If they think they’re paying too much for support staff, we simply eliminate the [headquarters] job.”
The sales department isn’t the whole company, but the whole company had better be the sales department. Not everyone in a company is a marketing manager, but everyone should be in marketing management.
This point is mentioned by Hiroyuki Takeuchi about Japanese companies: “Fifty percent of Japanese companies do not have a marketing department, and ninety percent have no special section for marketing research. The reason is that everyone is considered to be a marketing specialist.”
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Companies are organized vertically, but processes are horizontal. This is the mismatch that reengineering hopes to correct by appointing cross-disciplinary teams to manage key processes.
Multidivisional companies tend to be product-oriented rather than industry- or customer-oriented. Yet the divisions may make products that go to the same industry or customer. Siemens recently developed a focus on four industries: hospitals, airports, stadiums, and university campuses.
Siemens has assigned for each industry a single senior-level manager to have authority and accountability to orchestrate interdivisional cooperation regarding each industry.
