How to Make an IMPACT: Influence, inform and impress with your reports, presentations and business documents

Chapter 9. Organisation charts: How to provide greater richness and granularity to your charts

• Why most structure charts are poor

• A better way to show the structure of your organisation

• A pullout A3 page at the back for your index or your commentaries

• How to do the left-to-right chart in Excel

We tend to meet any new situation by reorganising (to create) the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

Usually attributed to Roman Consul Petronius (AD 66) but apparently made up by a British Army Officer after the Second World War

This is not a long chapter, but if you do or review organisation charts, you’ll see how to do a much better chart than the typical one in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1. 

And the better way works a ...