1.) Analyze Aquarius with respect to the five contextual variables.

How would you describe the environment, goal, culture,

size and technology for Aquarius?

Environment: The factors that significantly influence Aquarius are both internal and external environments. For internal
environment, organization structure is a key player that destines activities and communication flow among employees. For
external factors that create fast-paced environment are customers’ needs and fast shifting in marketing. The firm clings
onto vertical and functional design in such a rapid changing environment causing delay communication and delay
response to changing environment.

Goal: Advertising firms are typically fast-paced environment; ideas and comments must be fast flowing; communication
and collaboration must be effective enough that everyone in the team get updated about the latest information at once.
However, it is also crucial that the key contact person must be the one who liaison between customer and other teams in
Aquarius in order to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. So, in my opinion, Aquarius is on the right track by considering
to redesign the organization to increase flexibility, reduce time to response to environmental changes and promote more
effective communication and collaboration among teams.

Culture: Aquarius has failed in term of communication and collaboration. Specialized teams don’t respect the existence of
the account executives. As per my understanding, they don’t see the point why they need to pass their ideas through
someone who has less knowledge and specialty; it is faster to directly discuss and share ideas with the customer, so most
of the time, they skip to collaborate with the account executives. Also, according to the sociometric index, I see that there’s
too less information sharing between the teams that should be working together for example account manager frequently
communicates with only account executives but not with other specialized teams such as tv/radio, copy, art, etc. In my
opinion, working without supervision is hard to get a solid plans, strategies and collaboration.

Size: According to the case, Aquarius is a medium size firm; however, I see that they emphasize on ‘hierarchy relationship’
more than cross-functional relationship which is considered more fit into its medium-sized and fast-paced organization. It is
fine to have hierarchy at the top of the firm, but for the functional structure starting below account vice president, operations
vice president and marketing vice president should have been redesigned to be more ‘horizontal structure’ for more
efficiency of human resource management, increasing of communication and collaboration among cross-functional
departments.

Technology: They should have implemented technology into the working process for example e-meeting, team monitoring
software to track the updated status of each project in this such rapid changing environment in order to assist them to get
the same updated information, frequent team meeting, promote fast and effective communication/collaboration.
2.) Design a new organization structure that takes into consideration the contextual variables in the case and the
information flows.

3.) Would a matrix structure be feasible for Aquarius? Why or why not? (think about the 3 conditions for the matrix
structure)

According to the textbook, Matrix structure should be implemented when the following requirements occur:
1. Pressure exists to share limited resources across product lines.
2. Environmental pressure exists for two or more critical outputs
3. The environment is complex and uncertain.

In my opinion, Matrix structure is another organizational design that will work well for Aquarius because it is obvious that
vertical structural design doesn’t make the right fit to the nature of its firm. It needs a lot of cross-functional/department
information sharing, brainstorming and working as a team with such limited human resource in this medium-sized firm. It is
impossible that the advertising firm would focus on one or two projects at a time. According to my personal experience as
an Account Executive at L’Officiel Magazine, one account executive must handle up to 5 -10 projects and numerous
subprojects at the same time – well, because of the firm needs to see skyrocket revenue. What come after ton of assigned
projects are high complexity and uncertainty. Every day the teams face with new challenges and changes such as
customers’ needs, operational issues, availability of team members, etc. So, if the organization design doesn’t support such
flexible environment, it is hard for the firm to achieve its goals.