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goals and objectives, you should expect to see mission and vision being related to
the organizing, leading, and controlling aspects as well. Let’s look at these three
areas in turn.
Mission, Vision, and Organizing

Organizing is the function of management that involves developing an
organizational structure and allocating human resources to ensure the
accomplishment of objectives. The organizing facet of the P-O-L-C framework
typically includes subjects such as organization design, staffing, and organizational
culture. With regard to organizing, it is useful to think about alignment between the
mission and vision and various organizing activities. For
instance, organizational design is a formal, guided process for integrating the people,
information, and technology of an organization. It is used to match the form of the
organization as closely as possible to the purpose(s) the organization seeks to
achieve. Through the design process, organizations act to improve the probability that
the collective efforts of members will be successful.
Organization design should reflect and support the strategy—in that sense,
organizational design is a set of decision guidelines by which members will choose
appropriate actions, appropriate in terms of their support for the strategy. As you
learned in the previous section, the strategy is derived from the mission and vision
statements and from the organization’s basic values. Strategy unifies the intent of the
organization and focuses members toward actions designed to accomplish desired
outcomes. The strategy encourages actions that support the purpose and discourages
those that do not.
To organize, you must connect people with each other in meaningful and
purposeful ways. Further, you must connect people—human resources—with the
information and technology necessary for them to be successful. Organization
structure defines the formal relationships among people and specifies both their roles
and their responsibilities. Administrative systems govern the organization through
guidelines, procedures, and policies. Information and technology define the
process(es) through which members achieve outcomes. Each element must support
each of the others, and together they must support the organization’s purpose, as
reflected in its mission and vision.
For example, in 2006, Disney acquired Pixar, a firm is renowned for its
creative prowess in animated entertainment. Disney summarizes the Pixar strategy
like this: “Pixar’s [strategy] is to combine proprietary technology and world-class
creative talent to develop computer-animated feature films with memorable
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characters and heartwarming stories that appeal to audiences of all ages.” Disney
has helped Pixar achieve this strategy through an important combination of structural
design choices. First, Pixar is an independent division of Disney and is empowered to
make independent choices in all aspects of idea development. Second, Pixar gives its
“creatives”—its artists, writers, and designers—great leeway over decision making.
Third, Pixar protects its creatives’ ability to share work in progress, up and down the
hierarchy, with the aim of getting it even better. Finally, after each project, teams
conduct “postmortems” to catalog what went right and what went wrong. This way,

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