ANHEUSER-BUSCH: AN ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
This is a systems analysis of the Anheuser-Busch corporation, the makers of Budweiser and other beers. This analysis calls on a variety of sources, including but not limited to the company's annual reports, various news articles and the corporate profiles available on Hoover's Online Capsule Business Reports. This paper will analyze the company's systems and subsystems.
A Systems Approach to Anheuser-Busch
Most experts follow Bertalanffy (1969) and define systems thinking as a "fifth discipline." The fifth discipline integrates four other disciplines - shared vision, personal mastery, mental models, team learning. All these disciplines are useful when planning and implementing change within a complex organization.
Systems thinking ties these disciplines together in a synergistic manner. Why should we use a systems thinking approach when analyzing one of the world's largest breweries, when everyone "knows" what it does?
The answer is that most organizations are complex and becoming more complex. Most of the problems of today's organizations do not exist in isolation; they interrelate to each other.
Anheuser-Busch's Goals and Objectives?
The organization was founded to brew and market various beers to a wide audience of beer drinkers. This goal suggests several systems that must have synergy: the brewing process, for instance, is dependent totally on the acquiring process in which the various components -- the malts, hops, barleys and so on, are brought to the brewing location.
The organizational constructs are then merged into a single framework enabling us to examine their relative effect on behavioral tactics. This allows both strategy research on organizational alliances and behavioral research on negotiations deal with similar issues.
The organization we will see tends to be compartmentalized with little cross-fertilization of ideas. ...