Tony Nyumba Apindi

 Organizational Structure: Apple Incorporated Organizational Structure: Apple Incorporated In an every increasingly competitive business environment, many companies have developed ways that are suitable for it to survive and prosper in accordance with their targets. Ro make the process successful, everyone in the company needs to follow the stipulated guidelines to allow the company to attain its goals. Therefore, organizational structure are the rules that dictate how a company operates in an orderly manner to allow the company to reach its goals by properly arranging the targets and placing the people tactically, who serve as their human resource. One such organization that has excelled in this field is Apple Incorporated which has seen a lot of success in its operations despite the technological dynamism and the shifts in management practices. Thus, this essay will analyse how Apple has organized itself in its current market and how innovation has assisted in during the intense globalization. Functional Organization The late Steve Jobs was an instrumental part of the history of Apple Incorporated. He was among the founders of the company and also one of their most strategic Chief Executive Officers. The main target of the company is to make products that enrich the lives of their clients and thus provide better standards of living. Therefore, the company has been continually become innovative in its products, especially the iPhone mobile phones so that they meet the required quality within the market and suite the needs of their clients. To make their products more diverse than their competitors and ahead in the market, the company has greatly invested in getting the right leaders who have high expertise in their specific fields of study and placed in areas that are at the core of the company’s operations in important departments. This strategy therefore follows the functional structure (Ahmady, 2016). The iPhone: A Master in Disruptive Innovation This machine is the most influential and the most innovative product produced till date, making it the best selling product ever, with over 2.2 billion units sold since its inception in 2007 by Steve Jobs as of 2021 (Hilliard, 2021). The mobile phone redefined the world by allowing different products to be put in one device which include the camera, GPS devices, music player, payment tools and more. The company managed to achieve these fetes and many more over the years by choosing a specific trajectory. The first aspect is that it focuses on placing people with the highest expertise in leadership positions in those sectors. As such, specialization is at the core of the company’s operations which makes the company to have the best of the best in their sectors (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2016). The specialized individuals in those sectors play a huge role in aligning their expertise and decisions made to be correct to allow the company to meet its objectives. This process of choosing highly qualified individuals has made the company to have proper scrutiny of their products at different developmental stages since the people in the leadership positions know what they doing and can easily offer direction and correction to their subordinates (Heracleous & Papachroni, 2016). Therefore, method like these ones have enabled the company to make important features within their iPhone models that have been dynamic to the current market allowing it to stay ahead in innovation and in the market due to their features like their camera and using their operating system iOS (Podolny & Hansen, 2020). The Rule of Three: Characteristic of Leadership at Apple Incorporated Leadership is at the epicentre of all organization and it becomes increasing important for huge companies since they have many different aspects that require to be managed efficiently over time. A huge company like Apple has many sectors for which if it lacked the proper leadership, it would fail. Some of the characteristic of the leadership in the company include: High Quality Expertise The people hired at Apple are highly qualified individuals that have a proper understanding of their tasks hence they only employ experts in different sectors within the company. Some of the groups within the company include the software, hardware, sales, retail, artificial intelligence and machine learning. These different groups have different experts that are required to work together to make and sell one product. Some of the leaders that have worked in the different departments in the company have been working there for many years and have climbed up in the ranks and thus know what and how things are required so that the products live up to the expectations of the company and the clients. The idea of experts leading experts in the company has allowed the workers of the company to grow, understand and assist one another since they are located in one area making collaboration and development of technology very high (Dudovskiy, 2021) Concentration in Detail Many current organizations concentrate in making detail a major concern in decision making with Apple being one of them. According to Apple, “The leaders should know the details of their organization three levels down” (Podolny & Hansen, 2020). This situation allows the company to make very fast decisions according to the requirements and the timelines of the company. This aspect also makes the workers to feel empowered by their successful designs and end products since it builds up self-respect, professional skills and creates feelings of ownership and autonomy for the workers and encourages them to work harder in their upcoming and unfinished projects (Mcleod, 2018). Detailing aspects like the ‘squircle’ have been at the heart of the company, with it ensuring that all of its mobile phones and other electronic devices like laptops follow the required dimensions and planning by the company. A lot of detailing is concentrated and followed by the top management and is allowed to trickled down to the junior workers since such kinds of decisions are central to the organizational planning (Cook, 2018). Sourced from Apple: The squircle The leaders within the company that know the details and how to make them be in line with the requirements of the company are very important since they can easily identify and push for their subordinates to follow the requirements thus ensuring quality within the company is not compromised. Collaboration among Workers Apple has many specialists within the company numbering up to their hundred that require collaboration. The presence of the specialist teams is evidenced by the high detailing of their products. Some of the different features include, glass, chassis design, SIM card slots, software, hardware, power supply components and many more aspects that make up a single product like the iPhone. The experts available at the company are all spread out according to their expertise and work together in their individual teams to reach the requirements of the products. Therefore, the teams need to work together to achieve making the single product functional through collaboration. The members of the different teams debate each other regarding the different routes that they should use while undertaking tasks and if they reach points that require tiebreakers, their leaders will come in an assist in breaking down the issues that may follow them (Podolny & Hansen, 2020). The leaders are therefore required to be open-minded and partisan simultaneously allowing, the people to express their views and ideas regarding the issues presented to them. The development of the portrait camera in the iPhone series is one of the examples of collaboration in the company which brought together different groups in the company, all with different beliefs, methods and strategies so that they could solve the issue (Podolny & Hansen, 2020). The development of the feature brought together the camera, artificial intelligence, vice presidents of sensor software and sensor software and the senior design engineering teams were brought together to meet and discuss the solutions needed for resolving the issue. Due to the collaborative consultation, the groups were able to find a solution while still maintaining the required design and quality that is expected of the iPhone. The company uses the different teams tow work together to attain the common goal with the leaders who do not want to collaborate with others being ejected from the company since they do not adhere to the company’s values and policies. Leadership at Scale: Teaching, Delegating, Learning, Owning The company has grown over the years, with it gaining more than 120,000 employees it had in 2006 as compared to 2020. On the other hand, the number of vice presidents has only grown from fifty to ninety-six. This situation makes the managerial concerns increase since the increment will mean that there should be more scrutiny and more managers to assist in the proper management of the increase in number. The main challenge for the company is to manage the huge population and pay more detail to the sections available for the company. The main solution that the company has used to counter this situation is based on empowering the experts available in the different teams and placing a greater emphasis on collaboration amongst the teams (Podolny & Hansen, 2020). This situation has also raised the importance for the vice presidents to be more open on their knowledge to assist in proper management of their different sectors. The company has instituted a grid-based system that will make the leaders to elaborate their positions in their areas. The way the system operates will make the leaders to explain whether they are learning the new area or they are the main decision makers for the areas that they work. The grid system further requests the leaders to elaborate the expertise level that they have reached and level that they get involved in detail for the company. This method of approach simply means that the leaders chosen to represent different areas of the huge company and their departments need to be high quality experts within a particular field and they are responsible for the specific areas that they placed under. The company has also used the discretionary leadership model in managing the organization. The vice presidents together with the many directors of Apple Incorporated have been taught different educational programs with the aim of making leadership a driving force to reach the innovative goals of the company across all areas of the company and increase the scale of involvement when dealing with the operations of Apple. Additionally, for the leaders to maintain their positions, they need to know and understand all the details within that particular area to enable them to maintain their positions or they will be ejected and replaced with people who understand these positions and their duties (Interaction Design Foundation, 2019). The company has also used the discretionary leadership model in managing the organization. Conclusion There are very few companies that operate within the scale of Apple, thus making operating in this scale very rare and hard to come across. The company should strive to rearrange the different aspects of the company as they grow over time so that it can keep up with its managerial goals and together with the competition. The company has also demonstrated that it has been on the right path of aligning its decision making techniques with the required expertise. This huge size of operations of the company makes it hard for the company to make huge and significant changes to its management and leadership criteria since it faces inertia, reallocation of power and resources and shifting the individual-centred incentive programme and learning new ways to collaborate with each other. The situation is hard for companies that already experience significant external issues in regard to their operations. Therefore, the company has cultivated the expert-leading-expert mode of management within its ranks that it has cited as being easier to implement and control the management of their different aspects in the company. Additionally, it would be important for the leaders to be dynamic to change and adapt and be part of the functional organization. The results depicted by Apple have therefore showed that the rewards received can justify the risks that the company has taken in its operations. References Ahmady, G. (2016). Organizational Structure. Www.sciencedirect.com. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S-/pdf?md5=cfb0fa36a53a3e28da06ac53b79b48ff&pid=1-s2.0-S--main.pdf Cook, J. (2018, February 13). Squircles, Apple design, and curvature. Www.johndcook.com. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/02/13/squircle-curvature/ Dudovskiy, J. (2021, February 2). Apple Leadership: a brief overview - Research-Methodology. Research-Methodology. https://research-methodology.net/apple-leadership-and-apple-organizational-structure/ Heracleous, L., & Papachroni, A. (2016). (PDF) Strategic Leadership and Innovation at Apple Inc. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/-_Strategic_Leadership_and_Innovation_at_Apple_Inc Hilliard, W. (2021). At 2 billion iPhones sold, Apple continues to redefine what customers want. AppleInsider. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/22/at-2-billion-iphones-sold-apple-continues-to-redefine-what-customers-want Interaction Design Foundation. (2019, June 30). Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization. The Interaction Design Foundation; UX courses. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/apple-s-product-development-process-inside-the-world-s-greatest-design-organization Mcleod, S. (2018). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology. https://canadacollege.edu/dreamers/docs/Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs.pdf Podolny, J. M., & Hansen, M. T. (2020, November). How Apple Is Organized for Innovation. 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