Research based advice for designing more effective organizations
I once worked with a medium-sized oil services firm (i.e., a supplier to oil companies) that seemed to have an “unbalanced” organization structure. The official organization chart looked something like this: …but in reality, one business unit … [Continue reading]
A key challenge in organization design is grouping – finding out which roles to organize in the same team or department. Or, at higher levels of the organization, deciding which teams or departments to group together in the same business unit or … [Continue reading]
This blog is primarily about the organization of business firms, but let me start at another “level of analysis” this time: The organization of societies. As all of you, I have been watching with horror the brutal and senseless war in Ukraine. I have … [Continue reading]
Jay Galbraith (1939 – 2014) was a leading scholar and consultant in the field of organization design. In several of his books, he mentioned the possibility of implementing a “mirror image organizational structure.” He argued that a mirror image … [Continue reading]
Internal complexity seems to increase gradually over time in most organizations. Earlier this year, a study was published in the prestiguous journal Nature that looks at the underlying causes of this tendency. The authors conclude that there is a … [Continue reading]