Information is everything - but even though corporate officers know this they often do not pay sufficient attention to the flow of information in their organizations and the ways in which this flow of information must be tied to a well-thought-out system establishing domains of responsibility and lines of communication. The case study of Frito-Lay that we have read demonstrates the effectiveness of sophisticated use of information when it is wedded to overall sound management principles.
This case study summarizes the ways in which Michael Jordon, the former chair of Frito-Lay, responded to two important management challenges that were related to each other but also distinct. The first was that the company had found that different markets had very different appetites for snack foods, and what sold in one neighborhood of one city often did not sell nearly as well in an adjacent neighborhood. Because of the company's large size and the variety of its products information about what was selling well where and the company's relatively antiquated information systems was hard to come by. Johnson instituted a new system whereby detailed raw data was available not only to top management but to middle managers as well. This allowed managers and employees to shift from a past pattern of basing "their decisions and advocacy positions more on subjective judgments than on cold hard facts".
Jordan also decentralized authority in the company, giving regional managers greater authority and also requiring of them greater responsibility for knowing what would sell in their regions. The point of this decentralization, he summarizes, was "to make people accountable for the business." Overall, both of these goals (getting better information about the company's sales and using this information in a more effective way by providing a more effective management system) were successful under Johnson's tenure, in no small part because Johnson instituted a c...