Leading Organization Design: How to Make Organization Design Decisions to Drive the Results You Want

Foreword

It was not long ago when "doing what comes naturally" was sufficient for designing organizations. Leaders were advised to simply hire the best people. Everyone knew that good people could make any organization work. Whether these views were valid or not, they are not going to work today. We are now in a different era.

The overly simple views of organizing have gone away along with the mass market. That mass market was served by mass production and reached through mass media. Companies sold stand-alone products—and each one was based on its unique analogue standard. When faced with complexity, these companies divided themselves into multiple divisions, each of which was a separate profit-and-loss center. They created corporate centers that ...