Management consultants make such a nice living, I suppose, because figuring out the organizational structure that is right for a given business is really hard. It’s important to get right because there is the potential for great reward — there is a proven strong correlation between organizational and financial performance.

There are plenty of well-trod stories about companies who shake up their business organization: Meetup let its employees collectively set their own work priorities and pick their own projects.  Google famously frees up 20% of an engineer’s time so they can use that time to pursue a passion project. Pixar creates an environment where risk-taking is nurtured and their stunning creativity turns out not to be an accident or the result of a singular dominating voice.

But I haven’t heard as much talk about businesses restructuring specifically to facilitate integrated marketing communications (IMC) — and I mean real IMC, from the “everything communicates” school of IMC.

Driven by ever evolving and more complex consumer behavior, CMOs have been taking on far broader responsibilities within their businesses, but that’s perhaps only the start of the story.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to get IMC right.  We all pay IMC pretty reverent lip service — here at Naked, around the marketing industry, pundits in the trades, all the fancy awards.  We all say we want it, and we all say we do or deliver it to some degree.

But here’s the thing that’s been sticking in my head recently: Maybe quite a lot of our time and effort are wasted. Because even the best integrated marketing communications plan will fail if it falls on rocky ground.

What kinds of organizational designs are the right kind to promote great IMC?  Who is the Pixar of the IMC world — the risk-taker, the one who gets it consistently right?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m going to try and find out. If you have any thoughts or good case studies, I’d love to hear them.