Question

A Structural Straitjacket at Wild Wear

Wild Wear makes clothing, rain gear, and sleeping bags for hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts.
The company began when Myrtle Kelly began sewing pile jackets that her husband Ray sold on
college campuses. It now employs almost five hundred people organized into traditional
divisions such as marketing, manufacturing, and research and development.
Recently it became apparent that although Wild Wear’s balance sheet appeared healthy, the
company was stagnant. Everyone seemed to work hard, and the company’s products seldom
flopped. Yet Wild Wear seemed to have developed a "me too" posture, bringing new products to
market a season or a full year after competitors.
The Kellys, who still run the company, pored over performance appraisals looking for the weak
points that might be holding the company back. But it seemed that the human resources
department had been doing its work. R&D was coming up with a respectable number of new
products, the manufacturing facility was modern and efficient, and the marketing tactics often
won praise from customers.
Baffled, the Kellys called a meeting of middle-level managers, hoping they could provide some
answers they had missed. They were shocked when they noticed that the managers were
introducing themselves as they came in and sat down. People who had been working in the same
company for years had never even met! The meeting began with this observation, and for ninety
minutes the Kellys sat back and listened to the problems their managers raised.
It became clear that in the attempt to grow from a family operation into a larger company, the
Kellys had assumed the two needed to be very different. When they started out, the two of them
handled all aspects of the business. Ray would hear from a customer that backpackers really
needed a certain product. He would pass the idea on to Myrtle and order the materials she
needed, and within a few weeks he would offer the product to the delighted customer. As the
company grew, the Kellys began to worry about their lack of formal business training and hired
professionals to run each division and set up appropriate rules and procedures.
What they had created, the middle managers informed them, was a number of very efficient,
productive divisions that might as well have been separate companies. The R&D people might
come up with a new breathable fabric for rain gear, only to find that production had just begun
making a new rainwear line out of the old fabric and that marketing was turning all its attention
to selling the big inventory of sleeping bags. Each division did the best it could with the
information it had, but that information was very incomplete. Products progressed linearly from
one division to the next, but it always seemed as though an idea that had been ahead of its time
did not yield a product until the time had passed.
To remedy the problem, the Kellys decided to call in a management consultant to create more of
a matrix structure for Wild Wear. While they were waiting for the consultant’s solutions, they

began holding weekly "horizon" meetings. The group of middle managers would get together
every Monday and discuss what they saw on their horizon. After less than a month of such
meetings, the excitement generated promised better things for Wild Wear as the managers
stretched to expand their own horizons and to help others bring their ideas to light.

Case Questions
1. What would be the ideal organizational design for a company like Wild Wear?

Answer 1

The ideal organizational design for Wild Wear is a matrix structure that encourages collaboration among different departments to overcome the silo effect and foster innovation.

Step-by-step explanation:

Ideal Organizational Design for Wild Wear

For a company like Wild Wear, the ideal organizational design would be a matrix structure. This model allows for more fluid communication and collaboration between different departments. Under a matrix structure, employees can report to more than one manager, integrating multiple dimensions such as product, functional, and geographic, hence fostering cross-functional teamwork and versatile knowledge sharing. In this setup, a product manager could work closely with marketing, manufacturing, and R&D simultaneously to accelerate innovation and time to market for new products.

Crucially, this will counteract the silo effect that has been limiting Wild Wear's growth and responsiveness. The implementation of weekly "horizon" meetings is already a step toward this more integrated system, enabling managers to share insights and align their efforts collectively. The management consultant could refine this by formalizing cross-departmental communication channels and establishing collaborative platforms for ongoing cooperation.