Dig into Spaghetti

After attending the lecture, I learnt about the general principles for a good organization’s structure. We learnt the definitions of centralization, decentralization, span of control, chain of command as well as matrix structures. At first, I didn’t really understand what these terms mean, and it is quite hard to understand the definitions of those words. But I started to understand more when teacher discussed with us in small class. Some of our classmates were also confused with those terms. After our teacher’s detailed explanation, we finally understand those meanings. We also discussed about what’s the best structure of an organization. We concluded that best structure is the one achieving its objectives, and having division of work means assigning the right persons for the right job. A good structure will also allow an organization to achieve its highest efficiency.

After realizing the meanings of these terms, we are asked to do a business report to apply what we learnt to real-life example. We picked Samsung to be the organization for exploration. That’s the first time to do a business report and we are not familiar with the format. We tried to study the samples of business report in different websites. Moreover, we were confused that whether Samsung is considered as a “flat” or “tall” structure.  Our teacher then guided us by asking us to compare Samsung with other similar organization such as Apple. It is also said that there’s no definite answer as long as we can explain it well.

We were also asked to conduct a case study as well. It is about an organization called Oticon. It is a typical example of spaghetti organization. It is an organization that allows their members to do their tasks with complete independence without supervision, and members do not have specific job titles. Staff could take on as many different projects as they wanted, and were expected to pick up new skills along the way. We discussed the challenges the organization is facing and the pros and cons of this type of organization.

To sum up, I learnt a lot within this week. Apart from the knowledge that I gained, I also learnt to communicate and cooperate well with my group members.We did quite well in our division of work. There are more and more group projects ahead, so it is really crucial to build up close relationship with group mates. It is really essential to have a good team spirit. Since everyone has ones strengths and weaknesses, a group work can gather up different good ideas. However, if they do not communicate well and compromise, there will be conflicts. Team work spirit is really important!!!