Rearranging the Deck Chairs

 
Advertising Age published an article recently entitled “Reorganization Doesn’t Do It for Marketers.” (I’d give you a link but Ad Age makes you pay for their articles, so you need a login.) The gist of the article is based on research done for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which indicated that close to 60% of the marketing organizations surveyed had undergone a reorganization (significant) in the last two years.

Not surprising to us, these reoganizations did not improve marketing performance and in some cases made it worse. Is this just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Marketing organizations are under tremendous pressure to produce “results.” Chief Marketing Officers are being axed at an astounding rate, and their is even talk of eliminating the position as unnecessary. (One possible problem with that is there will be no C level executive to fire when you need one to sacrafice that really doesn’t do anything anyway. While that sentiment is not necessarily ours, it is the feelings of other pundits.) So, is all this reorganization just a hope that moving the organization around will get better results?

We see two problems with this thinking: First, there is likely to be a lack of agreement on “results” since the role of marketing in most companies is undefined to begin with. And, secondly, even if that is not the problem, Deming taught us many years ago that the problem with most organizations getting the results desired is not a result of the structure of the organization or the people in it, but rather the processes they are working to support.

Every process is perfectly constructed to get the results its getting. Trying to getter better results by changing the organization is truly rearranging the deck chairs. If you want better results, you have to examine the processes you are using. Redesigning your processes to get the results you want may also require a reorganization to facilitate their effective implementation. However, first comes the process redesign, then comes the organizational design to support it. Not the other way around.

For an additional viewpoint on reorganizations, take a read of our partner, Bayard Bookman’s white paper “Let’s Reorganize, That Way We Won’t Really Have to Manage.”

Mitch