A Responsive Organization
...chased the Saint Louis Bread Company. At the time, the Saint Louis Bread Company consisted of 19 company-owned and 1 franchised bakery-café primarily located in the Saint Louis, Missouri area. In August 1998, the Company entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement to sell the Au Bon Pain Division to ABP Corporation. The sale was effective on May 16, 1999. At that time, the Company changed its name to Panera Bread Company. The Company's bakery-cafes are principally located in suburban, strip mall and regional mall locations. Its business is currently operating in 30 states (St Louis Bread Co changes to Panera Bread Co, 1999). Big Apple Bagel and the Panera Bread Co are two companies in a very similar business with two very distinctly different types of organizational structures as well as corporate cultures. Big Apple bagel has really focused on maintaining a flat corporate structure as they have aggressively expanded their franchisee business as their CEO explained that the flat boundary less Structure is much more inviting to potential franchisee’s that appears to make up a majority of the business focus at this point. Big Apple Bagels depends on the ability to continue to innovate new products and stores that are adapted much more quickly in the organic culture. This combined with the typical “Open Door Policy between the franchiser and the franchisee in addition to the end retail customer. This type of horizontal corporate structure is more customer core focused in all processes such as communications, advertising, quality control, accounting, etc (everyone’s hands get put in the pot). Quite to the contrary of vertical structure. These organic cultures usually offer employees lots of empowerment and span of control allowing more freethinking and individual ability to challenge processes and procedures this culture is generally found in newer companies with younger employees. In contrast to Big Apple Bagels is the Panera Bread company which as did Big Apple start off in a very flat or horizontal organization but as store grew and corporations bought other corporations that have public stockholders it became obvious that a more vertical structure would be required to manage and operate the number of just company owned locations. The much more vertical structure with speciali...