Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 83

McDonald's is a classic machine bureaucracy. Members of the strategic apex make the big decisions. Managers and standardized procedures govern day‐to‐day operations. Like other machine bureaucracies, McDonald's has support staffs and a sizable technostructure that sets standards for the cooking time of French fries or the assembly of a Big Mac or quarter pounder.

For routine tasks, such as making hamburgers and manufacturing automotive parts, a machine‐like operation is efficient and effective. A key challenge is how to motivate and satisfy workers in the operating core. People quickly tire of repetitive work and standardized procedures. Yet offering too much creativity and personal challenge in, say, a McDonald's outlet could undermine consistency and uniformity—two keys to the company's success.

Like other machine bureaucracies, McDonald's deals constantly with tension between local managers and headquarters. Local concerns and tastes weigh heavily on decisions of middle managers. Top executives, aided by analysts armed with massive data, rely more on generic and abstract information. Their decisions are influenced by company‐wide concerns. As a result, a solution from the top may not always match the needs of individual units. Faced with declining sales and market share, McDonald's introduced a new food preparation system in 1998 under the marketing banner “Made for you.” CEO Jack Greenberg was convinced the cook‐to‐order system would produce the fresher, tastier burgers needed to get the company back on the fast track. However, franchisees soon complained that the new system led to long lines and frustrated customers. Unfazed by the criticism, Greenberg invited a couple of skeptical financial analysts to flip burgers at a McDonald's outlet in New Jersey so they could see firsthand that the concerns were unfounded. The experiment backfired. The analysts agreed with local managers that the system was too slow and decided to pass on the stock (Stires, 2002). The board replaced Greenberg at the end of 2002.