The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.

The historian, Alfred Chandler, substantiated his 'Structure follows Strategy' thesis based on four case studies of American conglomerates that dominated their industry from the 1920's onward. Chandler described how the chemical company Du Pont, the automobile manufacturer General Motors, the energy company Standard Oil of New Jersey and the retailer Sears Roebuck managed a growth and diversification strategy by adopting the revolutionary multi-division form. The M-Form is a corporate federation of semi-independent product or geographic groups plus a headquarters that oversees the corporate strategy and coordinates interdependencies. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (NYSE: DD) was founded in July 1802 as a gun powder mill by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont on Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware. ... General Motors Corporation, also known as GM or The General, an American multinational conglomerate corporation, is the worlds largest auto company by annual production volume for 2006, and the second largest by sales volume as of the first half of 2007, behind Toyota Motor Corporation. ... Exxon Mobil Corporation or ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), headquartered in Irving, Texas, is an oil producer and distributor formed on November 30, 1999, by the merger of Exxon and Mobil. ... Sears, Roebuck and Company (NYSE: S) was founded in Chicago, Illinois as a catalog merchandiser in 1886 by Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck. ...

Although the organisational M-form was implemented differently by each of the organisations, Chandler showed that the need to restructure arose from a strategic shift driven by new technologies and market changes. The M-form emerged and co-evolved with the development of the transportation and communication industries thereby creating the opportunity to manage across time and space.

He described corporate strategy as the determination of long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and associated allocation of resources required to achieve goals; he defined structure as the design of the organisation through which strategy is administered. Changes in an organisation's strategy led to new administrative problems which, in turn, required a new or refashioned structure for the successful implementation of the new strategy. Competitive Strategy is often used in place of Corporate Strategy and vice versa. ...

Chandler's thesis argued that new organisational forms are no more than a derivative of strategy as he defined it.

References

"Structure follows Strategy" ProvenModels

"Business history department" Harvard Business School