Exercise 5

5.1
The given Learning from Experience Case talks about how Carl Buchan took his hardware store in North Carolina and transformed it into Lowe's, a multi-billion dollar company now. Lowe's has more than 228,000 employees distributed in 20 departments which stock more than 40,000 products with annual income of more than $48 billion. Lowe's organization design has been created to handle an increasing number of customers and their desires for product diversity. To provide quality service to more than 14 million customers per week that visit its 1,650 superstores nationwide, Lowe's emphasizes on installation processes in more than 40 categories. They have also formed departments who focus on female demographic to lure in new customers and have also started focusing on more urban households. At the same time, they have joined hands with various companies to provide the customers with professional building tools which helps make the superstores a one-stop shopping center. Doing all this, Lowe's has made it clear that their store do not only sell quality products but provide necessary installation services for customer as well.

5.2
One of the major strengths of KFC's organizational design in China is that they have recognized and differentiated between adults and kids. Sam Su saw that kids, unlike adults, do not come alone to eat which meant more customers if they were the target. Hence, they created a kids section that is staffed by professional hostesses whose job is to entertain the kids and involve them in different activities; this alone attracts 400 birthday parties annually. Another strength of this organizational design was to separate their products from competitions like McDonalds and numerous local restaurants present in the city. For this, Su paid close attention to Chinese value by organizing “Lion Dance” during the opening. The standard of