Finally, the third edition of my book is published.
The purpose of the book is not to advocate for a particular organizational model, but to clarify the underlying principles.
By learning these principles, I think it will be easier to evaluate the way a firm or institution is organized today, and to come up with a new model that improves its performance.
A key assumption is that the most effective organizational models are customized to the particular circumstances (strategy, work processes, etc.) of a particular organization.
So instead of starting with a solution, the book reviews systematic methods for analyzing the current situation and developing and testing alternative options.
There are many changes and improvements compared with the second edition, which was published in 2018. First of all, I have made minor edits hundreds in places to improve the clarity of the arguments and sentence flow. But there are also new elements, such as insets that describe selected topics in more detail.
Another new feature is chapter “counterpoints.” These are brief sections at the end of each chapter that question a key assumption made or present an alternative viewpoint compared to the main approach in the chapter. I just re-read a couple of them and I think they work to “raise the temperature” and stimulate critical thinking about the topics.
The last chapter – “Simplifying complex organizations” – has been completely rewritten. The aim of this chapter is to summarize the key points in the book and present a pragmatic framework for organizational simplification.
But now to the second part of the headline – why it took me so long to publish the revised version. I was asked by the publisher in 2024 whether I could update the book.
As I wrote in my previous blog post, I was confused about the impact of AI on the field. I was asking myself whether the old organizing principles would still hold in the AI era, or whether we would have to completely rewrite the textbooks.
Given this uncertainty, I didn’t know where to begin.
Gradually, I realized that the classic principles actually don’t change.
For example, I found that the basic criteria used to characterize a formal organization (i.e., hierarchy, specialization, and formalization) are equally applicable to traditional organizations, AI-enabled organizations, and even AI-native organizations.
Moreover, I found that Axiomatic Design, which is one of the key approaches in the book, is particularly well suited because it is focused on the outcomes that an organization seeks to achieve; how the organization seeks to realize the outcomes is flexible (e.g., by using human workers, an external partner, or AI agents).
So based on this realization, I started revising the book last year and handed in the final manuscript this Spring.
I hope it will stand the test of time and that it will prove useful for both scholars and practitioners in the field.
You can find the book on amazon.com and the publisher’s website.
