Assignment 1: Strategy Control and Design
Name: Stefania M. Nicita Student Nr: 2182734
Achmea’s strategy, control and design
This assignment concerns the Dutch firm ACHMEA. According to Achmea Annual Report 2013 (p.4) ‘Achmea is writing a new episode in its history through its ‘ Acceleration & Innovation’ programme.’ The firm offers their Dutch customers a complete range of insurance products and related financial products through the following distribution channels; banking, direct and brokerage.
I would depict the current Achmea structure with the taxonomy of unit roles proposed by Goold and Campbell (Figure 1: Taxonomy of Achmea) as follows:
Figure 1: Taxonomy of Achmea Reasoning: Throughout the Achmea annual report it is mentioned that their products are distributed through as set of channels. The channels were the…show more content… The thought behind the split is that they would create two specialized divisions. The focus of the distribution division is to improve customer centricity and the focus of the product division is to strive for cost saving. The problem in doing this is that customer centricity would be doomed to fail because Achmea would become rigid by looking at a profit and loss for each division. They would have to make sure there was cross organizational teaming rather than rigid organizational boundaries. In order to achieve the customer centricity that Achmea strives for their organizational structure has to be able to adapt to the customer’s needs and not hinder innovation and adaptation. In supporting the above statements I used the flexibility test. Core items of both the customer centric organization and the innovation and adaptation principle, lead to the flexibility test, this is a bottom-up development of strategies. This is the opposite to the situation in which they split the two specialized