Which business structures are best suited to the unpredictable 21st century? How can a company, division, or department reconfigure itself with minimum disruption and maximum impact? Every executive grapples with problems of restructuring--and most need hands-on guidance to solve them. This eye-opening book shows business leaders at all levels how to examine their choices by leading them systematically through these fundamental questions: * Should we restructure to meet our strategic goals? * What are the best structural options to achieve our success? * What lateral processes are necessary to support the new structure? * How do we staff the restructured organization to optimize results? Based on Galbraith's world-renowned approach, this guide includes examples and worksheets that pilot readers through the essential steps of organizational design.
Designing Your Organization is a hands-on guide that provides managers with a set of practical tools to use when making organization design decisions. Based on Jay Galbraith’s widely used Star Model, the book covers the fundamentals of organization design and offers frameworks and tools to help leaders execute their strategy. The authors address the five specific design challenges that confront most of today’s organizations: · Designing around the customer · Organizing across borders · Making a matrix work · Solving the centralization—and decentralization dilemma · Organizing for innovation
While technology and geopolitical forces change the face of business today, the patterns and challenges of organizing humans to work together across organization, culture, language and time zone boundaries remain. To face these challenges, all organizations need to be agile, networked and scalable. Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how to shape organizations that will enable people to make faster and better decisions in a more complex world. By outlining the tension between the need for agility/differentiation and scale/integration, the book offers a new way to think about this debate using the models of the Tower (vertical integration) and the Square (horizontal integration). It addresses the role of the leadership team and how the organization design process can build C-suite leaders and successors. Each chapter concludes with a series of reflection questions for leaders as well as a summary of key concepts and tips. Including case studies from global organizations, Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how organization design can address three of the biggest business challenges organizations face today: how to build a new capability across the entire enterprise; how to make the entire organization more customer-centric; and how to allow for faster innovation.
This is a benchmark publication in the field of organization design (OD). Featured in the book are the more practical elements of implementing OD in organizations. The recent development in organization design has been sporadic; hence, this book will be an important step in creating more thoughtful research and stronger empirical analyses that take advantage of advances in estimation methods allowing for more complex causal modeling and stimulation technologies.
How organizations can use practices developed by expert designers to solve today's open, complex, dynamic, and networked problems. When organizations apply old methods of problem-solving to new kinds of problems, they may accomplish only temporary fixes or some ineffectual tinkering around the edges. Today's problems are a new breed—open, complex, dynamic, and networked—and require a radically different response. In this book, Kees Dorst describes a new, innovation-centered approach to problem-solving in organizations: frame creation. It applies “design thinking,” but it goes beyond the borrowed tricks and techniques that usually characterize that term. Frame creation focuses not on the generation of solutions but on the ability to create new approaches to the problem situation itself. The strategies Dorst presents are drawn from the unique, sophisticated, multilayered practices of top designers, and from insights that have emerged from fifty years of design research. Dorst describes the nine steps of the frame creation process and illustrates their application to real-world problems with a series of varied case studies. He maps innovative solutions that include rethinking a store layout so retail spaces encourage purchasing rather than stealing, applying the frame of a music festival to understand late-night problems of crime and congestion in a club district, and creative ways to attract young employees to a temporary staffing agency. Dorst provides tools and methods for implementing frame creation, offering not so much a how-to manual as a do-it-yourself handbook—a guide that will help practitioners develop their own approaches to problem-solving and creating innovation.
Design IT Organizations for Agility at Scale Aspiring digital businesses need overall IT agility, not just development team agility. In Agile IT Organization Design, IT management consultant and ThoughtWorks veteran Sriram Narayan shows how to infuse agility throughout your organization. Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience working with enterprise clients in IT-intensive industries, he introduces an agile approach to “Business–IT Effectiveness” that is as practical as it is valuable. The author shows how structural, political, operational, and cultural facets of organization design influence overall IT agility—and how you can promote better collaboration across diverse functions, from sales and marketing to product development, and engineering to IT operations. Through real examples, he helps you evaluate and improve organization designs that enhance autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the key ingredients for a highly motivated workforce. You’ll find “close range” coverage of team design, accountability, alignment, project finance, tooling, metrics, organizational norms, communication, and culture. For each, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where your organization stands, and clear direction for making improvements. Ready to optimize the performance of your IT organization or digital business? Here are practical solutions for the long term, and for right now. Govern for value over predictability Organize for responsiveness, not lowest cost Clarify accountability for outcomes and for decisions along the way Strengthen the alignment of autonomous teams Move beyond project teams to capability teams Break down tool-induced silos Choose financial practices that are free of harmful side effects Create and retain great teams despite today’s “talent crunch” Reform metrics to promote (not prevent) agility Evolve culture through improvements to structure, practices, and leadership—and careful, deliberate interventions
The current business environment requires that individuals, teams, and organizations are equipped to cope with an unpredictable marketplace and increasing competition. Organizations are forced to be kinetic, organic, and without boundaries if they are to remain successful. Given these environmental and marketplace demands, scholars must rethink the applicability of existing organizational theories and frameworks. In March 2001, a conference was held with the aim of developing and articulating this new model of organizations. Scholars contributed their expertise in areas, such as leadership, human resource management, negotiation and conflict, teams, entrepreneurship, organizational change, power and influence, and diversity. The contributors focused on their own area of expertise and considered how existing theories must be altered to fit a more agile, organizational form. Theoretical and empirical questions were raised, testable hypotheses were developed, and emerging themes were uncovered. The end result of the conference is this volume. It brings together the reflections of a diverse collection of organizational theorists and researchers on the implications of this new business model within their own areas of expertise. The book's goal is to inspire organizational scholars to develop a new theory and produce sound managerial advice for how to build and maintain a successful organization in a dynamic workplace. The chapters include a review of research literature with the highlights and citations that everybody working in a field must know, followed by how the research agenda is affected by the increasingly dynamic marketplace.
From issues of strategy and structure to leadership and capability development, the authors combine their research and consulting experience to offer the latest thinking and emerging practices today's most successful companies have incorporated to achieve strategic market advantage. And they outline the flatter, more flexible and dynamic designs these companies have instituted.
Writing for general managers, the authors go beyond manufacturing structural decisions to actually changing the infrastructure of a manufacturing company--the leadership and vision, the policies and practices that are vital to creating superior factories and a dynamic learning continuum.
A unique set of complementary hands-on tools for learning about and applying a deeper and practical theory for diagnosis and design. This edition has been significantly updated and rewritten to make it easier to read.