A Reorg Won’t Save You, But Strategy Might
Most marketing leaders may be all too familiar with the feeling of the team seeming scattered. There’s a tangible sense that something better may be on the horizon. Enough people get on board with this concept, and quickly, a new vision starts to take hold.
Someone, maybe you, starts quietly sketching a new org chart. It might feel like your best bet, putting the wheels in motion. And it gives the impression that something decisive is happening. But it almost never addresses the true problem.
When Structure Supports An Outdated Vision
This week, Meta began notifying roughly 8,000 employees that they are being laid off, accounting for about 10% of its global workforce. The restructuring frames around funding its AI ambitions. Meanwhile, the company lifted its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to as high as $145 billion.
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On the surface, it reads as bold strategic clarity. But look closer and the same pattern emerges where a structure being reshaped in service of a bet, rather than a strategy that was defined first.
Meta's employee satisfaction rating has dropped 25% from its peak in mid-2024, with a 39% drop in culture scores. This was a signal that the organization may not be conditioned to absorb the change it’s being asked to. As one researcher shares, , "a workforce that doesn't feel safe can potentially not enable the change that is desired."
While this news is recent, restructuring a capable workforce is nothing new.
This instinct led Shar VanBoskirk, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, to Iterable's Activate Summit to convey another approach. With over a dozen marketing leaders in the room, the working lunch felt more like a strategy reckoning than a session.
VanBoskirk made an argument that I haven’t heard anywhere else. Organizational structure is not an HR activity, but instead a strategy activity. And leaders who confuse the two are spending real organizational capital on the wrong intervention.
Structure is how a company situates staff and responsibilities to accomplish its business purpose. If you haven't defined the purpose, the structure is just noise.
— Shar VanBoskirk, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester
She opened with Motorola. For years, Motorola wasn't just a phone company. It defined what a mobile device could be, with the Razr sitting at the peak of consumer desire in the early 2000s. But as smartphones started reshaping what people expected from a device, Motorola's leadership stayed anchored to their identity as a hardware company that made beautiful, thin phones.
They structured around protecting that identity rather than reading the shift happening outside it. Engineering priorities, product decisions, go-to-market motions, all organized inward. They stayed close to what they'd always been, rather than outward, toward what the market was becoming. By the time they responded, Apple and then Google had already written the new definition of what a phone could be.
VanBoskirk uses this not as a cautionary tale about technology adoption, but as a structural one. Motorola's failure wasn't that they missed a product category. It was that their organization was built to reinforce a strategic assumption that had stopped being true. Then, of course, structure outlived the strategy.
1. Structure Must Follow Strategy
Alfred Chandler, the business historian who spent a career examining corporate performance, found consistently that organizations restructuring before doing the strategic work tend to replay the same dysfunction in a new configuration. Strategy is harder. Figuring out what you're trying to become is harder than changing reporting lines. That difficulty is exactly why leaders reach for the org chart first.
2. There Is No Ideal Org Structure
This is the one that tends to disappoint. Bad structures survive because the people inside them have chemistry, shared purpose, and enough clarity to muscle through. Strong structures fail because the people inside them don't trust each other, don't understand the goal, or are measured in ways that undermine collaboration. Which means the search for the perfect org chart is, largely, a distraction.
3. Structure Should Support Enterprise Transformation, Not Just Team Efficiency
A restructure optimized only for your department, without accounting for cross-functional relationships and broader strategic objectives solves a narrow problem. Her example here was Best Buy. When its incoming CEO made customer experience the organizing principle of the entire business, it wasn't just a marketing initiative. It changed physical store footprints, associate incentive structures, client tools, and team compositions. This was all in service of one strategic bet on differentiation through CX. It worked because it was total, not partial.
4. Process and Metrics Can Break Even a Well-Designed Structure
She described a marketing team that shifted to agile ways of working. They deliberately changed their success metric from campaign performance to collaboration behaviors. As a result, they saw how frequently teams were interfacing across functions, and noted how many feedback cycles happened before launch. Campaign performance improved downstream. The structure created the conditions, but the metrics reinforced them. And, lastly, the process made it real.
What’s Not Working May Be your Biggest Clue
When VanBoskirk finds marketing organizations that are genuinely high-performing, they tend to share four qualities. She calls them aligned, defined, fluid, and fast.
Aligned means the structure was built intentionally to serve the company's vision. And this definition means everyone knows their role and how it connects to the larger goal. Being fluid means the organization can move when circumstances change. This allows people have been conditioned to operate outside their usual lanes without it feeling like a crisis.
Fast means obstacles to customer value have been deliberately removed, not quietly accumulated over years of process layering.
The goal isn't to get comfortable. It's to get comfortable being uncomfortable. That's what lets the whole organization move when something unexpected happens.
For marketing leaders specifically, this means doing the harder, less visible work before reaching for the restructure lever. Start by naming what the organization exists to accomplish. Lead with the customer problem, the market position, and the behaviors required to win.
From here, structure follows. And, metrics need to be designed to reinforce the right things that will propel the business forward.
When AI enters the equation, the same logic applies. The impulse to hire AI leads, spin up transformation teams, and redirect resources toward AI-native workflows is understandable given the pace of change. But capability without organizational readiness is just expensive tooling.
Meta is redirecting 7,000 employees into newly created AI-focused teams while simultaneously cutting 8,000 others. Whether that pivot produces results will depend far less on the tools those teams inherit. Instead, it'll rely on whether those teams understand the problem they're being organized to solve.
The last point pulled me back into the broader conversation at Activate. The morning keynote made a clear case that AI-powered marketing is a present-tense reality. There's a demand for real-time personalization drawing from live inventory data. Customers want journeys that can adapt in the moment, and mobile conversations that don't require app downloads.
The capability curve is steep and accelerating. A fast-moving technology inside a slow, rigid structure doesn't create an advantage. Instead, it'll add pressure to an organization that isn't built to absorb it.
The Questions Worth Examining With Your Team
What VanBoskirk gave the room wasn't an answer. There is no right structure, she said more than once, and she meant it. What she offered instead was a cleaner way to think, with a set of questions to stress-test whatever your current configuration is.
- Is your structure following a defined strategy, or preceding one you haven't landed yet?
- Do the people inside it know specifically what their role is and how it connects to the whole?
- Can the organization flex when it needs to, or does it require a formal restructure every time priorities shift?
- Are your metrics reinforcing the behaviors your structure was designed to create?
- Or, are you rewarding the old ways of working inside a new reporting hierarchy?
These are not easy questions. They are harder, and slower, than redesigning an org chart.
Most leaders already sense when a restructure is the wrong answer. They feel it in the room when the new chart goes up and nobody looks relieved.
Right now, the pace of change is creating constant pressure to act visibly and quickly. So the discipline to do the strategic work before the structural work may be the most valuable thing a marketing leader can build. It all depends on where you're willing to place your bets.
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