The Merger It’s been several months since you had coffee with Carl and Regina and listened to them disc

The Merger

It's been several months since you had coffee with Carl and Regina and listened to them discuss their differing approaches to marketing. Now you realize that conversation was just the first of many. Since then, Regina's company, RPZ Social Media Analytics, has acquired Carl's company, Genaflek Marketing. The new company that resulted from the acquisition is called RPZ Marketing.

As the companies merge, they need to figure out how to combine expertise, keep their old clients happy while expanding into new markets, and create an organization nimble enough to respond to changing dynamics while remaining reassuringly stable.

RPZ Marketing has brought you in as a consultant to help them with the restructuring. Where do you begin?

In the past, large organizations tended to be organized as fixed hierarchies with top-down control viewed as the best approach to build sustainable institutions. Successful companies today are more fluid, and frequent restructuring is used as a primary means to keep the company competitive and responsive to the marketplace.

In this week's activities, you'll look at the big picture of organizational structure—the system an organization uses to assign, coordinate, and control roles and responsibilities—and how information flows through a company.

• hat You Need To Know: Explore various types of organizational structures and discover how organizational structure can either support or pose obstacles to business success. Learn details about the history and focus of RPZ Marketing by watching two scenarios in the videos provided.
• Discussion: Participate in the weekly discussion activity in Yellowdig.
• Prepare: Take an analytical reading skills self-assessment and identify strategies for areas where you can improve. Set up your account with The Wall Street Journal so you can begin accessing articles.
• Prepare: Explore resources explaining the importance of academic honesty, and learn what plagiarism is and strategies to avoid it in your writing.

• Organizational Structures
  
  • Devaney, E. (2020). 9 types of organizational structure every company should consider. HubSpot. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/team-structure-diagrams
    • In this informative post, the author details nine different types of organizational structures companies may build, defining what they do, how they do it, and the roles within.
  • Quain, S. (n.d.). How does HR fulfill organizational goals and objectives? https://smallbusiness.chron.com/hr-fulfill-organizational-goals-objectives-15863.html
    • Human resources does more than hire and train employees; it is the heartbeat of the organization's goals and missions.
  • Structuring for Success and Innovation
  • Kotter, J. P. (2012). Accelerate! Harvard Business Review, 90(11), 43–58.
    • This article is the focus of your discussion this week. It points out the ways in which organizational structure can either support or pose obstacles to success. Note: The article is available full-text in the Capella University Library. Search for it by clicking the linked title and following the instructions in the library guide.
  • Pártlová, P. (2017). Indication of changes in projecting organizational structures under the new economy. Studia Commercialia Bratislavensia, 10(38), 175–187.
    • Companies need to be adaptable and flexible to thrive in the new economy. This article explores how they can handle change by creating structures that embrace innovation.
  • RPZ Scenarios
    Watch the following media pieces to catch up with Regina and Carl and their newly merged business. You'll learn details about the history and current focus of the new company and see how it is planning to move forward in the marketplace.
  • RPZ Marketing: The Background.
  • Seeing the Big Picture.
• Prepare: Expand Reading Skills and AccessAnalytical Reading Skills
  Cultivating academic reading skills is critical to success in online learning and to your success in your undergraduate program in business. While the trade press and business sections of newspapers may be readily accessible to most adult readers, scholarly research may be more difficult to understand and apply to business problems. Part of the difficulty is that scholarly research often reaches much deeper than the press, going beyond facts to seek an understanding of more complex relationships. Accessing this deeper level of understanding may initially challenge readers.
  To identify ways in which you might enhance your analytical reading skills, take the Reading Self-Assessment. The first part of this assessment addresses your own feelings and perceptions; the second part asks you to apply specific analytical skills in reading an explanatory text.
  Once you have completed the Reading Self-Assessment, use the guidance provided by the assessment to identify resources provided in the Reading Strategies guide that might be particularly useful for you.
  Accessing Articles in The Wall Street Journal
  As someone pursuing a business degree, you are probably familiar with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The WSJ, in existence since 1889, has long been one of the most recognized and reputable sources of business news and information. Capella maintains a partnership with the WSJ that gives you no-cost digital access to its daily content.
  If you have not yet done so, access The Wall Street Journal Campus page. Follow the directions there to create your WSJ account. Then go to The Wall Street Journal homepage to see what is available to you as a Capella learner. Throughout this course, you may find it useful to check in daily and read articles that pique your interest and add to your knowledge of the current business landscape.
  Later on in this course, you will be required to research the site and select a WSJ article related to a specific topic for use in a weekly discussion.
• Prepare: Academic HonestyAcademic Honesty and Plagiarism
  Academic honesty is just as critical to academic integrity and the educational process as ethics is to the integrity of the professional work you will do in business. You should approach your academic work with the same high standards you would apply in a professional setting.
  Read the following Capella resources on academic honesty and plagiarism:
  
  • University Policy 3.01.01: Academic Integrity and Honesty [PDF].
  • Why Plagiarism Happens.
  • Avoiding Plagiarism.
  • In-Text Citation.
• Write Your Discussion Post
  Instructions
  For this week's discussion, choose one of the following for your post:
  
  • Apply concepts from Kotter's 2012 "Accelerate!" article or any other articles provided in this week's readings to the RPZ scenario videos from this week:
    • RPZ Marketing: The Background.
    • Seeing the Big Picture.
    • For example:
      • How does the organization structure help RPZ be nimble?
      • How can human resources help RPZ reach their goals?
  • Find a business article that is related to the topics introduced this week, now that you've set up your account with The Wall Street Journal. Share your analysis of why it is relevant.
  • Share which of the readings this week offered information you can immediately use at school, home, or work.
  • Response Guidelines
    As you respond to your classmates, share your ideas, experiences, and anecdotal feedback regarding their posts. How have your personal experiences resonated with their ideas? What can you add to their ideas, building upon the connections you have made to the material so far? Don’t forget you can love or like their posts as well.
    Do the following when writing your post:
  • Do not create your post as a reply to this pinned post. Instead, use Yellowdig's Create option to create a new post.
  • Label your post with the hashtag for the week (#Week 2) so that others can sort posts by the week's topic.
  • If you wish, include links to credible or scholarly articles, videos, images, or other Web resources. These resources could be used to support your post or provide examples.
  • You may also choose to create a slideshow or use audio or video as your discussion post.
  • For help using Yellowdig, please see Using Yellowdig [PDF] and Grading in Yellowdig [PDF]. Or visit Yellowdig Forums, Capella's Campus support page for Yellowdig, with links for technical support.