A clear, step-by-step approach to designing an organization in today's volatile business world.

Organization Structures: Theory and Design, Analysis and Prescription describes how to organize people to achieve a desired outcome. This is accomplished by establishing sets of rules from "real world" organization contexts. Moreover, the development of these rules within "real world" contexts means that the rules must be true, general, operational, technically sound, and easy to use. With an understanding of rules and the processes of their use, organization structures can be identified, which in turn form the basis of a theoretical framework. This book discusses, examines, and demonstrates the interrelationship of the design rules, their theoretical use within these organization structures, along with their practical implications. Throughout the book, an extended example of the Masters Brewing Corporation (MBC) is used to illustrate the conceptual material and to make the implications of the organizational analysis explicitly concrete.

While technology and geopolitical forces change the face of business today, the patterns and challenges of organizing humans to work together across organization, culture, language and time zone boundaries remain. To face these challenges, all organizations need to be agile, networked and scalable. Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how to shape organizations that will enable people to make faster and better decisions in a more complex world. By outlining the tension between the need for agility/differentiation and scale/integration, the book offers a new way to think about this debate using the models of the Tower (vertical integration) and the Square (horizontal integration). It addresses the role of the leadership team and how the organization design process can build C-suite leaders and successors. Each chapter concludes with a series of reflection questions for leaders as well as a summary of key concepts and tips. Including case studies from global organizations, Networked, Scaled, and Agile reveals how organization design can address three of the biggest business challenges organizations face today: how to build a new capability across the entire enterprise; how to make the entire organization more customer-centric; and how to allow for faster innovation.

Organization Design looks at how you need to change the ways your organization does things in order to increase productivity, performance, and profit. Providing the knowledge and method to handle the kind of recurring organisational change that all businesses face, those which do not involve transforming the entire enterprise but which necessitate significant change at the business unit, divisional, functional, facility or local levels. The problem lies in knowing what needs to change and how to change it. Taking the organisation as a designed system, it describes four major elements of organizations: the work - the basic tasks to be done by the organisation and its parts, the people - characteristics of individuals in the organization, formal organization - structures eg the organisation hierarchy, processes, and methods that are formally created to get individuals to perform tasks, informal organization - emerging arrangements including variations to the norm, processes, and relationships, commonly described as the culture or 'the way we do things round here'. The way these four elements relate, combine and interact affects productivity, performance and profit. Most books on this subject target a wide management audience rather than HR, this is specifically written for HR practitioners and line managers working together to achieve the goal. It clarifies why and how organisations need to be in a state of readiness to design or redesign and emphasises that people as well as business processes must be part of design considerations.

Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This upper-level textbook provides a practical guide to the field of organization design, grounded in academic literature. It is set apart from other books on the topic by its commitment to be relevant to Master’s students, as well as practitioners looking for evidence-based guidance. The book provides a solid theoretical background for students, defining what organization design is, exploring the history of the field, and describing established frameworks and theories. It then investigates why organizations may seek to embark on a re-design, and what a well-designed organization looks like, referencing case studies and the author’s own research. From there, it takes students through how organization design occurs, examining various models for intervention, the core steps in designing an organization, and what challenges a practitioner may face, all illustrated by stories from the field. This book includes a wide range of didactic elements for students, including learning objectives, case study examples, review questions, and further reading. It examines the impact of new ways of organizing, and draws on the author’s years of experience as a consultant to ensure that academic theory is seamlessly melded with practical application.