Articles

Organization redesigns consume significant time, resources, and emotional energy. The article in the MIT Sloan Management Review provides a thoughtful and pragmatic design framework to guide executives throughout the process. It also shows how CEOs should start the process with some honest introspection about their own behavioral tendencies and vulnerabilities, and what actions they can take to prevent the redesign exercise from derailing.

Senior leaders often have to activate commendable leadership behaviors (authenticity, empathy, etc.) to resolve internal conflicts that should not have escalated to the top. The article in the California Management Review shows that the emergence and escalation of such conflicts may be due to organization design faults and ambiguities that magnify everyday tensions and frictions. By identifying and removing these faults and ambiguities, the opportunity cost of senior leaders devoting energy and time to resolving preventable conflicts would be much lower.

The debate about the role of a company’s corporate parent (aka “HQ” or “center”) is often formulated in terms of either “more parent” or “less parent”, thereby using artificial archetypes. The article in the California Management Review shows that the debate should be about getting a “better parent”. It presents a nuanced approach that recognizes the specific ways in which the corporate parent could influence the day-to-day functioning of the diverse businesses in its portfolio.

“Sustainability” has risen to the top of the executive agenda. What gets less attention, is the nitty-gritty of organizing for sustainability and assigning roles and responsibilities. The article in Strategy & Leadership offers a framework to make those design choices, starting from two considerations: the substantive focus of the company’s sustainability agenda, and the principles by which the company is organized in general.

Changing an organization’s primary dimension, i.e., making a different choice of which verticals have full P&L responsibility, is not something to get into lightly. The article in the Harvard Business Review provides answers to the two key questions executives should ask when considering a major rearrangement. First, when has the time come to change our primary dimension? Second, once we have decided to change, how fast should we go?

Incitements to “bust the silos” within organizations are quite popular. Silos (or “verticals”) indeed have undesirable side effects such as insular mindsets and turf wars. But they exist for good reasons: to aggregate expertise, assign accountability, and provide a sense of identity. The article in the Harvard Business Review explains how to preserve the strengths of the inescapable verticals while minimizing their side effects: build bridges between verticals and institute checks and balances.

An organization design is never perfect – but at some point you’ve got to decide and go for the “least bad” design. Afterwards you continually add checks and balances to make up for the imperfections, until your organization gets completely unwieldy and triggers a wholesale redesign. The article in Strategy & Leadership presents guidelines for explaining and managing this inescapable cycle, and thus preventing cynicism about “yet another organization change”.

Debates about centralization vs. decentralization are often fraught with emotion and protectiveness. On the one hand, business responsiveness calls for decentralization of decision-making to the operating units. On the other hand, concerns about business reliability, efficiency and perennity may pull the other way. The article in the Harvard Business Review presents a proven way of thinking to help rationalize that debate.

Stated values at most companies fail to have much of an impact: they don’t boost performance, they don’t set the company apart, and they don’t steer employee behavior. That is because they are defined as generic, non-negotiable points of perfection. The article in Strategy & Leadership presents a novel approach that leads to values that do reveal and reinforce the company’s distinct and desired culture.

A matrix is a tool to strengthen lateral coordination. When deployed sparingly and wisely, a matrix can improve the quality and speed of decision-making without obfuscating accountability. The article in the Harvard Business Reviewbriefly describes five guidelines for doing so. The goal is to gain enough trust in the matrix to let it do its work, sensing the matrix is there without noticing it.

By analyzing the prevalence of non-native CEOs at the largest global companies, the article in the MIT Sloan Management Review indicates what companies can do to attract diverse management talent from outside their home country. By the same token, it informs aspiring managers about the data they should gather to identify companies outside their home country offering the most promising career prospects.