Quincy Newspapers, Inc. (QNI) is a family-owned media company that originated in the newspapers of Quincy, Illinois. The company's history can be traced back to 1835, when the Bounty Land Register was one of only four newspapers in all of Illinois. Over the next century, a number of mergers followed. In 1935, the Quincy Herald-Whig emerged, and it still operates under that name today. The company moved into radio in 1947 and began television broadcasts in 1953.

CEO

Blake Quinn
Manager Marketing Services

PP
CFO

Paul Lucini


Although this sounds like the hit reality TV show on ABC where a family
whose home is in ruins has the opportunity to have their entire house
redesigned, this article argues that the same idea holds true for
organizations today where design, in many ways, is also in ruins and
needs an organizational makeover.

In a fast-paced business environment, many organizations recognize
the need for a strategy that allows their firms to prosper. However, failure
will eventually result when late nineteenth and early twentieth century
structures prevail in these organizations. In his book, Organization
Theory and Design, Richard Daft says, "This structure was quite
effective and became entrenched in the business world for most of the
twentieth century. However, this type of vertical structure is not always
effective, particularly in rapidly changing environments, (87). The
solution for an organization stuck in the past, in terms
of strategy, structure, and leadership, which desires to succeed in the
future, is to adopt the approach of the learning organization.

What sets learning organizations apart from traditional organizations is
that the former's essential value is problem solving, where the latter's is
designed for efficient performance. In his book, The Age of Unreason,
Charles Handy writes, "The learning organization can mean two things,
it can mean an organization which learns and/or an organization which
encourages learning in its people, (225). These firms thrive on asking
questions, testing theories, and changing paradigms. Likewise, Richard
Daft says, "The learning organization promotes communication and
collaboration so that everyone is engaged in identifying and solving
problems. The learning organization is based on equality, open
information, little hierarchy, and a culture that encourages adaptability
and participation, (28).

The environment for companies today is anything but stable. Managers
can no longer forecast with certainty the outcome of their organizations.
This has drawn attention to chaos theory, which suggests relationships
between complex systems, including organizations, are nonlinear and
are composed of many choices that create varying effects and render
the environment unpredictable.

More often than not, when a customer enters a small business establishment, he can readily pick out the harried owner from a multitude of workers and by-standers.

Stereotypically, in a mature firm, the owner is the well dressed gentleman or finely groomed lady giving orders and commanding respect. While a firm just in the infancy stages of development (ranging from a restaurant, salon, retail store to operations providing services, and even those producing or assembling products); the owner may be the harried worker doing the job least preferred by his hired hands. Or, she is the one taking orders from everyone else.

The Flattened versus the Inverted Pyramid
The flattened pyramid of the 90s were the rave of the day whereby Fortune 500 conglomerates sought to reduce administrative overhead by re-tooling the organizational structure to weed out managers failing to contribute to the bottom or front lines.
 
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